Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changing Perspectives on Teaching‐learning Processes in the Post‐Plowden Era

Abstract Progress occurs in a field when existing theories are found wanting and alternatives developed to replace them. On this basis research on teaching‐learning processes in classroom settings has progressed considerably over the last two decades. During this period three theoretical perspectives have informed the research effort, each of which varies in its assumptions about the nature of teaching and learning, methods and data. These perspectives are characterised by studies which have focussed on teaching styles, opportunity to learn and classroom tasks. The theoretical and empirical underpinnings of each approach are considered in order to assess the extent to which our understandings and explanations of classroom processes, and their effect on pupil outcomes, have been enhanced; and to provide an appropriate context from which to consider the utility of the model of teaching prescribed in the Plowden Report.
Power Concedes Nothing Without A Demand

Review of Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of the Black Schools in the South by David S. Cecelski. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
Structural and Information Theoretic Approaches to Image Quality Assessment

Digital images and video are prolific in the world today owing to the ease of acquiring, processing, storing and transmitting them. Several common image processing operations such as compression, dithering and printing affect the quality of the image. Advances in sensor and networking technologies, from the internet to wireless networks, has led to a surge of interest in image communication systems. Again, the communication channel tends to distort the image signal passing through it and the quality of the image needs to be closely monitored to meet requirements at the end receiver. The integrity of the image also needs to be preserved, irrespective of the specific display system that is used by the viewer. In this chapter, we describe state of the art objective quality metrics to assess the quality of digital images.
Multi-focus Image Fusion Algorithms Research Based on Curvelet Transform

Due to the limited depth-of-focus of optical lenses, it is often difficult to get an image that contains all relevant objects in focus. Multi-focus image fusion algorithms can solve this problem effectively. Based on the analysis of the most widely used multi-focus image fusion algorithms, a new curvelet transform based multi-focus image fusion algorithm is proposed in this paper. According to the different frequency areas decomposed by Curvelet transform, the selection rules of the low frequency coefficients and the high frequency coefficients are discussed respectively. Low frequency coefficients and the high frequency coefficients are fused with NGMS (Neighborhood Gradient Maximum Selectivity) and LREMS (Local Region Energy Maximum Selectivity) separately in this paper. It is shown that the multi-focus image fusions by the proposed algorithm can obtain the same scene in focus image fusion, and have protruding advantage over other algorithms on subjective evaluation and objective evaluation.
Utilizing hemodynamic delay and dispersion to detect fMRI signal change without auditory interference: The behavior interleaved gradients technique

A major problem associated with the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is the attendant gradient noise, which causes undesirable auditory system stimulation. A method is presented here that delays data acquisition to a period immediately after task completion, utilizing the physiological delay and dispersion between neuronal activity and its resulting hemodynamic lag. Subjects performed finger movements with the gradients off, followed by a rest period with the gradients on. This resulted in task‐related signals comparable to those obtained with concurrent task performance and image data acquisition. This behavior interleaved gradients technique may be particularly useful for the studies involving auditory stimulation or overt verbal responses. Magn Reson Med 41:13‐20, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Control Method Experimental Research of Micro Chamber Air Pressure via a Novel Electromagnetic Microvalve

This work presents the control method of micro chamber air pressure via a novel electromagnetic microvalve for pneumatic control of microfluidic chips to improve controling precision. The control method of Bang-Bang, k (Proportional control) plus PWM (Pulse Width Modulation), and composite control method are developed to control the micro chamber air pressure. Both advantages and disadvantages of three control methods are compared and analyzed. Experimental results demonstrate that with the composite control method, the control performance can be greatly improved, and pressure fluctuation can be largely reduced. Our control method can effectively improve the steady-state accuracy and greatly reduce the pressure fluctuations for pneumatic microfluidic chips.
Phenomenological Pedagogy in Higher Education of Mental Health Workers

This article describes the use of phenomenological pedagogy in the higher education of mental health workers. The mental health field is an immensely complex professional field. To create access, the conventional education of mental health professionals compartmentalizes the field according to traditional professional boundaries. Personal–professional expertise and user preference are thereby lost. Such personal experience is privileged in a pedagogy based on Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method. Students learn systematically to describe a mental health phenomenon of their interest and reflect on this using each other’s professional insights as well as relevant research literature. Phenomenological description and reflection are repeated several times in the curriculum. Kegan’s subject–object theory of adult development explains how this repetition may support transformation of insight in rather than an accumulation of information about mental health work. The complexity of the mental health field thus emerges as a source of knowledge to exploit rather than merely a rugged landscape to navigate.
LSTM, GRU, Highway and a Bit of Attention: An Empirical Overview for Language Modeling in Speech Recognition

Popularized by the long short-term memory (LSTM), multiplicative gates have become a standard means to design artiﬁcial neural networks with intentionally organized information ﬂow. Notable examples of such architectures include gated recurrent units (GRU) and highway networks. In this work, we ﬁrst focus on the evaluation of each of the classical gated architectures for language modeling for large vocabulary speech recognition. Namely, we evaluate the highway network, lateral network, LSTM and GRU. Furthermore, the motivation underlying the highway network also applies to LSTM and GRU. An extension speciﬁc to the LSTM has been recently proposed with an additional highway connection between the memory cells of adjacent LSTM layers. In contrast, we investigate an approach which can be used with both LSTM and GRU: a highway network in which the LSTM or GRU is used as the transformation function. We found that the highway connections enable both standalone feedforward and recurrent neural language models to beneﬁt better from the deep structure and provide a slight improvement of recognition accuracy after interpolation with count models. To complete the overview, we include our initial investigations on the use of the attention mechanism for learning word triggers.
Pericarditis - clinical features and management.

BACKGROUND Pericarditis is an important diagnosis to consider in a patient presenting with chest pain. It is diagnosed in 5% of patients presenting to hospital emergency departments with chest pain in the absence of a myocardial infarction. OBJECTIVE This article describes the common features and management of pericarditis in the general practice setting. DISCUSSION Characteristic clinical findings in pericarditis include pleuritic chest pain and a pericardial friction rub on auscultation of the left lower sternal border. Electrocardiography may reveal diffuse PR depressions and diffuse ST segment elevations with upward concavity. The most common aetiologies of pericarditis are idiopathic and viral, and the most common treatment for these is nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs and colchicine. The complications of pericarditis include effusion, tamponade and myopericarditis. Pericardial effusion may present as a globular heart shadow on chest X-ray. The presence of effusion, constriction or tamponade can be confirmed on echocardiography. Tamponade is potentially life threatening and is diagnosed by the clinical findings of decreased blood pressure, elevated jugular venous pressure, muffled heart sounds on auscultation and pulsus paradoxus.
Self-reported attitude towards speeding and its possible consequences in five different road contexts

Driving above the permitted speed limit is a common violation on the roads of Great Britain. Moreover, speeding is associated with negative consequences in the form of damage, injury and fatal road traffic accidents. The aim of this study was to assess, by means of self-report, the prevalence of this social problem across five different contexts: a residential road, a busy shopping street, a dual carriageway, a winding country road, and a motorway. The extent to which speeding was perceived to be associated with negative consequences was also assessed. Results suggest that most drivers make judgements about the type of road on which they are driving and the degree of speeding that is acceptable, and that their intentions to speed vary accordingly. Some drivers reported a consistent intention to speed, however, and these people were characterized by greater general deviance on the road (e.g. high violation score), rather than by a stronger tendency to underestimate the negative consequences. In general, however, younger people and those with less regard for negative consequences reported stronger intentions to speed. These results are discussed with reference to strategies for addressing the problem of speeding. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Adding Modalities to VE Training Systems Enhances Spatial Knowledge Acquisition

An empirical study was completed to investigate the effects of audition on spatial knowledge acquisition and workload within a virtual training environment. Four levels of audio were investigated including no audio, non-spatialized audio, and two forms of spatialized audio. While all training conditions led to significant decreases in workload, mental demand associated with knowledge of relative locations of dangerous areas was significantly less when trained with sound cues. The results also indicated that training with generalized spatial audio enhanced concentration. Results from this study outline the benefits of training with metaphoric audio cues to enhance spatial awareness. Future research will empirically examine effects of metaphoric haptic cues.
Validation of the four‐factor Team Climate Inventory in Greece

Purpose – Innovation among team members has long been an area of interest to social scientists, and particularly to industrial/organizational psychologists. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factor structure of the Team Climate Inventory (TCI), a multidimensional team‐level measure of team‐working style, in Greece.Design/methodology/approach – The TCI was translated into Greek and administered to a total of 52 work teams (n=236 individuals) in clerical and shop floor working positions employed in a variety of jobs in the public and private sector.Findings – An item analysis indicated that all original TCI items, except one, should be retained in the Greek version of the TCI. Further analyses yielded high internal consistency both for the full scale and for the four dimensions, and also acceptable discriminant validity among the four scales. An exploratory factor analysis was also successful in extracting the four original factors, accounting for 55.67 percent of the total variance.Research limit.
Future Memory Technology and Ferroelectric Memory as an Ultimate Memory Solution

Silicon industries have notched up notable achievements of computer-related technology over the past two decades, leading to rapid progression in information technology (IT). As a result of such a great improvement in IT applications, it is now not unusual to find mobile applications such as personal digital assistants, mobile phones with digital cameras, smart phones, smart pads able to access the Internet and hand-held personal computers. These mobile applications currently require an array of single-functioned conventional memories as they are not sufficient individually in functionality, but must combine their separate functions. For example, dynamic random access memory (DRAM) is capable of processing massive amounts of data speedily (e.g., main memory in personal computers and servers). DRAM is highly scalable (several gigabit are commonly accessible), but requires lots of power consumption even in stand-by mode (~10-3 Ampere) because of the necessity of refreshing cycles in its operation. By contrast, static random access memory (SRAM) saves power1 because its stand-by current is a few micro-Amperes. The demerit of SRAM is not readily to make it high density. This is due to the fact that its unit memory element consists of four complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistors along with two conventional transistors. SRAM’s cost-benefit ratio is too high because the 6 components need much more area per unit bit memory. Data retention of both DRAM and SRAM is volatile in bit-storing nature when power goes off. In contrast to these two memories, flash memory is non-volatile. However, operation voltage during either write or erase on flash memory is too high to use the raw voltage-level of power input, Vcc (the term of Vcc comes from collector to collector voltage in a bipolar transistor). Thus during the write or erase operation, internal dummy operation (so called “charge pump”) are used to pump up the input power Vcc to 5 times more than Vcc level; this is crucial in flash memory devices due to imbalance of read and write energy. The reason why the memory needs to boost the write/erase voltage up to such a high level is that hot carriers, e.g., high energy electrons, are forced to be injected through tunnel oxide to a floating gate of the transistor structure. As a result, there are two kinds of performance restrictions for use of IT applications. Writing speed of flash memory is not fast enough of an order of several milliseconds. That
Fwrite: An Approach to Optimize Write Performance of ZFS on Linux

ZFS file system has been widely used as it provides a file system interface and a block device interface. ZFS ignores the workload features of sequential writes. Writes to a block device with an unaligned I/O pattern will cause inefficient "read-modify-write" operations. In this paper, we propose an approach, called Fwrite, to optimize write performance of ZFS on Linux. This approach merges sequential write requests into fewer and larger I/O requests, which reduces the number of reads performed by "read-modify-write" operations. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach improves the original ZFS on Linux by 41.1-65.5% in sequential writes.
Who’s at Risk in School and What’s Race Got to Do With It?

is at risk in school, and what does race have to do with it? In responding to the first part of this question, researchers have relied extensively on quantitative analyses. Historically, such studies have either calculated the "likelihood" of poor educational outcomes (e.g., dropping out of high school and/or course failure) for different demographic categories or documented the underperformance of one demographic category compared to another on a host of academic measures, including grade point average (GPA), high school completion, and, most often, performance on standardized achievement tests. In empirical analyses of this kind, race has often been reduced to a variable, and study after study has demonstrated its reliable and robust correlation with indices of educational achievement and attainment (e.g., Baker, 2001; Fryer & Levitt, 2006; Hedges & Nowell, 1999; Jones, 1988-1989; J. Lee, 2002; Patterson, Kupersmidt, & Vaden, 1990; for a detailed discussion regarding the use of race as a variable, also see O'Connor, Lewis, & Mueller, 2007). Within the discourse of risk, findings from these analyses have been interpreted as "evidence" that particular racial groups are more susceptible to negative or maladaptive educational outcomes than others. Conclusions drawn from these findings also suggest that we can "predict" the chances for academic failure or underachievement based on one's racial group membership (see Natriello, McDill, & Pallas, 1990). Studies of the extent to which race correlates with educational outcomes and elucidates achievement gaps predate the discourse on risk (which was founded in epidemiological studies). However, the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) shepherded the notion of risk and
Sleep-Route: Assured Sensing with Aggressively Sleeping Nodes

In data gathering wireless sensor network applications, data correlation among the sensor nodes have been utilized to extend network lifetimes. It has been shown that the data correlation also exists between nodes that are far away, contrary to the assumption that correlation decreases as a function of distance. Therefore, it is possible to group the nodes based on the correlation among their data regardless of their location. Given that data from one active node per group is sufficient to reconstruct the sensed data for the remaining sensor nodes, most of the nodes can be kept in low-power sleep mode. However, only few active nodes will usually create a disconnected network, and hence failing the purpose of the deployment. In this paper we formalize this problem, referred to as Sleep-route, of selecting the minimum number of connected active nodes that are sufficient to predict the sensed data for remaining sleeping nodes with high accuracy. We prove that the problem is NP-hard. Thus, we develop a greedy algorithm, Sleep-route heuristic that provides near-optimal solutions. Using Contiki-based simulations, we show that our scheme can extend network lifetime up to 42% as compared to the state-of-the-art solutions.
A Binaural Neuromorphic Auditory Sensor for FPGA: A Spike Signal Processing Approach

This paper presents a new architecture, design flow, and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation analysis of a neuromorphic binaural auditory sensor, designed completely in the spike domain. Unlike digital cochleae that decompose audio signals using classical digital signal processing techniques, the model presented in this paper processes information directly encoded as spikes using pulse frequency modulation and provides a set of frequency-decomposed audio information using an address-event representation interface. In this case, a systematic approach to design led to a generic process for building, tuning, and implementing audio frequency decomposers with different features, facilitating synthesis with custom features. This allows researchers to implement their own parameterized neuromorphic auditory systems in a low-cost FPGA in order to study the audio processing and learning activity that takes place in the brain. In this paper, we present a 64-channel binaural neuromorphic auditory system implemented in a Virtex-5 FPGA using a commercial development board. The system was excited with a diverse set of audio signals in order to analyze its response and characterize its features. The neuromorphic auditory system response times and frequencies are reported. The experimental results of the proposed system implementation with 64-channel stereo are: a frequency range between 9.6 Hz and 14.6 kHz (adjustable), a maximum output event rate of 2.19 Mevents/s, a power consumption of 29.7 mW, the slices requirements of 11141, and a system clock frequency of 27 MHz.
Optimisation of reinforcement learning algorithm applied to dynamic network

Mobile ad-hoc network represent a class of dynamic networks where nodes are non-stationary and the topology is changing rapidly. The routing algorithms for these types of networks play an important role. Traditional routing algorithms do not perform optimally under congestion and high-speed situations. Reinforcement learning-based routing algorithm SAMPLE holds a lot of potential to these types of problems but performs worse as compared to AODV and DSR under the Random Waypoint Mobility Model. To overcome the bottleneck of SAMPLE in terms of performance in a pure ad-hoc environment and enable its optimal performance under dynamic scenarios, we propose a mobility model to characterise group mobility under real city like scenario. The proposed model will be tested for its performance using suitable mobility metrics, verified statistically and then applied to a reinforcement learning algorithm SAMPLE to study its impact.
Error Resilient SPIHT Coded Grayscale Image transmission over MIMO System

In this paper, we propose Error Resilient SPIHT coded MIMO system to address the issue of image transmission and reception over noisy Rayleigh Fading channel. Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) is chosen as the compression algorithm since it offers the lossless compression and excellent rate distortion in noiseless environment. SPIHT encoded data is modulated in the manner that it will provide Unequal Error Protection (UEP) to achieve error resilience. In proposed method, SPIHT encoded data is divided into the low priority stream (LP) and the high priority stream (HP) to achieve UEP and as a result it yields high PSNR value. These streams are modulated using MQAM modulation scheme and transmitted over Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system to achieve better diversity. The adaptive value of M is determined by the proposed algorithm. Simulation results depicts that PSNR of received images are better as compared to that reported by Fowdur et al. [12].
The Patient’s Diagnosis: Explanatory Models of Mental Illness

The purpose of the study was to develop a grounded theory about individuals’ perception of the situation of being a psychiatric patient. Thirty-five inpatients (19 males, 16 females), ages 18 to 68, in two psychiatric units of an urban, public facility were interviewed on a biweekly basis from admission to discharge. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method, and the data indicated that participants used the basic social process of managing self-worth to deal with the stigmatizing social predicament of being a mental patient. Events occurring before admission that shaped their responses were substance abuse, medication noncompliance, and the lack of social capital, which led to norm violations and subsequent hospitalization. Six attribution categories emerged: problem, disease, crisis, punishment, ordination, and violation. Findings support the need for professionals to improve their practice by acknowledging the effects of patients’ subjective assessments on their response to hospitalization and by placing more emphasis on assisting patients to deal with the stigmatizing effects of a psychiatric diagnosis.