Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals

This article explores three alternative goals for American education that have been at the root of educational conflicts over the years: democratic equality (schools should focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for social positions). These goals represent, respectively, the educational perspective of the citizen, the taxpayer, and the consumer. Whereas the first two look on education as a public good, the third sees it as a private good. Historical conflict over these competing visions of education has resulted in a contradictory structure for the educational system that has sharply impaired its effectiveness. More important still has been the growing domination of the social mobility goal, which has reshaped education into a commodity for the purposes of status attainment and has elevated the pursuit of credentials over the acquisition of knowledge.
Optimization of a MW Halbach PMSG for wind turbine applications

Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generators (PMSGs) are increasingly considered for large, direct-drive MW level wind energy conversion systems. High-efficiency, high-power density, low maintenance, and high reliability are some cited benefits of PMSGs making them attractive for onshore and offshore wind systems. However, as the PMSG's power level increases so would its weight and size. This research attempted to reduce the size and weight of PMSGs by using Halbach magnetic array instead of a conventional array. An analytical model of a MW Halbach array PMSG has been developed. This Halbach PMSG was optimized using a five-input particle swarm optimization algorithm. The resultant optimized Halbach PMSG is more compact and lightweight when compared to the conventional PMSGs of similar power ratings. Performance of the optimized design was verified with finite element analysis.
Connectionist considerations : ACT-RN

Over the last century, cognitive psychology has produced enormous amounts of data on all aspects of human behavior. The challenge of cognitive science in the next century is to provide a coherent, integrated and systematic scientific explanation of these phenomena. The question is which form this explanation will take. Computational modelling has become an increasingly popular tool in a wide range of sciences, from mathematics and physics to economics and the social sciences. By combining the virtue of precision, lacking in many verbal theories, with the ability to deal with almost limitless complexity, overcoming a limitation of mathematical theories, computational modelling provides the most promising approach to a unified theory of cognition.
Mechanisms for generating and compensating for the smallest possible saccades

Microsaccades are small eye movements that occur during gaze fixation. Although taking place only when we attempt to stabilize gaze position, microsaccades can be understood by relating them to the larger voluntary saccades, which abruptly shift gaze position. Starting from this approach to microsaccade analysis, I show how it can lead to significant insight about the generation and functional role of these eye movements. Like larger saccades, microsaccades are now known to be generated by brainstem structures involved not only in compiling motor commands for eye movements, but also in identifying and selecting salient target locations in the visual environment. In addition, these small eye movements both influence and are influenced by sensory and cognitive processes in various areas of the brain, and in a manner that is similar to the interactions between larger saccades and sensory or cognitive processes. By approaching the study of microsaccades from the perspective of what has been learned about their larger counterparts, we are now in a position to make greater strides in our understanding of the function of the smallest possible saccadic eye movements.
Architecture for complex network measures of brain connectivity

Cognitive and motor disorders are growing socio-economic concerns where drug treatments although being the first line of action, are not always effective in restoring cognitive and motor functionality. Research has shown that functional brain connectivity, signifying information exchange among different brain regions, is correlated with efficient execution of cognitive and motor tasks. Hence, to analyze the connectivity parameters in real-time for automated disease prognosis and control, an optimized accelerator/hardware design is required which can be integrated within the sensing device. Here we have designed and implemented an optimized hardware architecture of the graph theoretic parameters (computed concurrently) for the clinically significant functional connectivity measure (Phase Lag Index) of human brain network. To the best of our knowledge, this is a first study on the implementation of the complex network topology parameters of brain connectivity measure which has been synthesized at 25 Mhz, using STMicroelectronics 130-nm technology library and having a dynamic power consumption of 10 nW, making it amenable for real-time high speed operations.
Microelectrode Studies of Normal Organization and Plasticity of Human Somatosensory Thalamus

Summary Microelectrode studies of single units in the human thalamus during stereotactic surgery offer a unique opportunity to study the organization and plasticity of the sensory thalamus. In this review the authors present results using single-unit microelectrode recording in the mapping of human sensory thalamus in a variety of patients. First they outline the overall organization of the human sensory thalamus, including both somatosensory and pain pathways. They also show that the sensory maps for receptive and projection fields can be altered during pathologic states such as amputation and spinal transection. Additionally, the sensory maps show plasticity during states with abnormal patterns of motor activity, like dystonia. Lastly, they discuss the processing of painful and emotionally laden sensory experiences through the thalamus. The physiologic results of thalamic pain processing are discussed in relation to the sensory–limbic model of pain. The studies reviewed demonstrate the spectrum of stimulus processing and plasticity of both painful and nonpainful signals by the human thalamus.
Acquisition of regional pitch patterns in L2

Most speakers in today’s societies are bilingual or multilingual and linguistic research has shown that the grammatical systems of two or more languages interact in speech production and perception [11,13]. The confrontation of two or more competing phonological systems and their phonetic realization leads to what we generally understand as a “foreign accent”. The interference appears on the segmental and the prosodic level. Research in second language acquisition has previously focused on segmental features while research on prosody and its important role in language learning is rather scare. This present paper examines the intonation of Belfast English produced by native speakers and two groups of German second language learners of English. Acoustic prosodic characteristics responsible for the perception of a foreign accent are identified as deviations in the nuclear pitch patterns. Using production data the study aims to examine the occurrence of regional marked intonation patterns in different speaking styles. The study provides (1) evidence that specific regional intonation patterns are acquired in a naturalistic setting, (2) that these patterns are transferred into different speaking styles in second language production whereas regionally marked intonation patterns vary according to the formality of the speaking style in native language production.
Longitudinal influence of musculo‐skeletal injuries and extra physical education on physical fitness in schoolchildren

The aims of this study were to investigate if (A) injuries and (B) increased physical education (PE) influenced the development of physical fitness in schoolchildren. Simultaneously, to investigate if a possible PE effect was modified by sport participation outside school hours. This was a longitudinal controlled school‐based study. Six schools with 270 min of PE (extra PE) and four schools with 90 min of PE were followed up for 2.5 years. In total, 1054 children were included for analysis (normal PE = 443, extra PE = 611). Development in fitness was analyzed using composite z‐scores from six fitness tests measured four times. Information of injury and sport was derived from weekly automated mobile phone text messages surveying the presence of musculo‐skeletal pain and organized sport participation. Injury and extra PE both influenced the development of physical fitness. Injury decreased development of physical fitness with −1.01 composite z‐score units (95% CI: −1.57; −0.45). Extra PE increased physical fitness development with 0.80 (95% CI: 0.49; 1.10) composite z‐score units. The influence of injury was not dependent on extra PE. No modifying effect was found by mean weekly sport participation outside school hours. In conclusion, extra PE had a positive effect, whereas injuries had a negative effect on physical fitness development in schoolchildren.
Efficient Distributed Join Processing on Modern Hardware

The ever increasing volume of data in scientific as well as commercial information systems calls for scalable databases. Distributed database systems can satisfy this demand as they are scalable to higher performance requirements simply by adding more compute nodes. However, they require efficient ways to query distributed relations to achieve overall high performance. This thesis describes three efficient distributed algorithms for joining two large distributed relations. Each algorithm is designed for a specific network topology. Our most efficient design – the distributed Radix Join – achieves a throughput of 80 million tuples per second on a cluster, consisting of 16 standard desktop computers. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of each algorithm is provided and it is shown that the performance of distributed join algorithms on today’s commodity hardware is bound by the underlying network bandwidth.
Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR) for ASR Severity Based Adaptation to Help Dysarthric Speakers

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for dysarthric speakers is one of the most challenging research areas. The lack of corpus for dysarthric speakers makes it even more difficult. The speaker adaptation (SA) is an alternative solution to overcome the lack of dysarthric speech and enhance the performance of ASR. This paper introduces the Severity-based adaptation, using small amount of speech data, in which data from all participants in a given severity type will use for adaptation of that type. The adaptation is performed for two types of acoustic models, which are the Controlled Acoustic Model (CAM) developed using rich phonetic corpus, and Dysarthric Acoustic Model (DAM) that includes speech collected from dysarthric speakers suffering from variety level of severity. This paper compares two adaptation techniques for building ASR systems for dysarthric speakers, which are Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (MLLR) and Constrained Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (CMLLR). The result shows that the Word Recognition Accuracy (WRA) for the CAM outperformed DAM for both the Speaker Independent (SI) and Speaker Adaptation (SA). On the other hand, it was found that MLLR is outperformed the CMLLR for both Controlled Speaker Adaptation (CSA) and Dysarthric Speaker Adaptation (DSA). Keywords-Component, Automatic Speech Recognition, Dysarthric Speakers, Severity Adaptation, Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression, Constrained Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression.
Logarithm Discrete Cosine Transform Domain and Discrimination Power Analysis for Illumination Invariant Face Recognition

With the technological advances and the evolution of biometric systems, old security methods have became obsolete, increasing attention on researches related to face recognition systems. There are several factors like aging, the use of glasses, hats, makeup and others that make this task nontrivial. This paper proposes a human face recognition system that deals with illumination variation problems in the logarithm Discrete Cosine Transform domain and also improves the classification performance by adaptive feature selection using the the Discrimination Power Analysis (DPA). Experimental results on the Yale B database and CMU PIE database show that our proposed approach improves the performance for the face images with large illumination variations. We also made some experiments with other four databases with different expressions, frontal and profile views and images with cluttered background: the Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) database, the AT&T database, the UMIST database; and Georgia Tech face database. The experimental results show that the proposed recognition system give superior results compared to recently published literatures.
Information Technology Use by Providers of Person-Oriented Services: Actual Usage and Acceptance Issues in Health Care

In order to develop service design methods for IT-enabled person-oriented services, it has to be analyzed to what extent IT is in use today, as well as which acceptance issues of implementing new IT-based innovations play a vital role. In this paper, we focus on service providers in health care since they face significant challenges due to the demographic shift, including cost increases, uneven quality standards and limited resources to provide the ageing population with adequate services. The objective of this study is to explore how and to which extent IT is used in business practice as of today, as well as to present retentions and opinions upheld especially by service providers, providing a more profound understanding of IT and technology acceptance, paving the road for systematic development of IT-enabled person-oriented services.
Ultrasonic attenuation and backscattering in polycrystalline materials with nonspherical grains

An ultrasonic wave propagating through a microscopically inhomogeneous medium, such as polycrystalline materials, is subject to scattering at the grain boundaries as well as other inhomogenities. The fraction of energy removed from the incident wave is responsible for important phenomenon like attenuation, dispersion, and background "noise" associated with a given ultrasonic inspection system. Quantitative knowledge of attenuation, phase velocity, and scattered wave field are extremely important for a reliable nondestructive evaluation of such materials. Expected propagation characteristics of ultrasonic waves in randomly oriented equiaxed grains are fairly well understood. But when the grains are elongated and/or preferentially oriented, the wave propagation constants exhibit anisotropic behavior. The present paper sheds more light on the effect of grain shape on the attenuation and dispersion of ultrasonic waves in polycrystals. Specifically, theoretical results are presented showing the effects of different grain aspect ratios. It is observed that for the same effective grain volume, grain elongation has smaller effect on attenuation. Although considerable attention has been given to the understanding of mean propagation characteristics of an ultrasonic beam, until recently, there have been relatively little efforts devoted towards rigorous treatments of backscattered signals from the material microstructure. In this paper, we also attempt to include some degree of multiple scattering in the calculation of the backscattered signals by developing a formalism that relates mean wave propagation characteristics to the noise.
Haplotype analysis of the IGF2‐INS‐TH gene cluster in Parkinson's disease

Idiopathic Parkinson's disease is a common movement disorder characterized by a loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra. Its pathogenesis is postulated to involve complex interactions between genetic susceptibility and environmental exposures. The IGF2‐INS‐TH gene cluster on the telomeric end of human chromosome 11 is a gene rich region expressing several proteins important for dopamine neuron homeostasis. We used a haplotyping approach to determine whether common genetic variation in the IGF2‐INS‐TH cluster influences the risk of idiopathic Parkinson's disease in a Caucasian case–control group recruited from Brisbane, Australia. Three tagging polymorphisms, the SNPs, rs680 and rs689 and the microsatellite, HUMTH01, were genotyped in 215 cases and 215 age‐ and gender‐matched controls. Eight common haplotypes accounted for 91% of the genetic variation in our control group and one haplotype, IGF2‐INS‐TH*6, was significantly under‐represented among the cases with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (OR = 0.42, 95% CI = 0.25–0.72, P‐value = 0.001). Analysis of the individual polymorphisms showed that the IGF2‐rs680 alternate ‘A’ allele accounted for the majority of the protective effect. Our findings suggest that common genetic variants in the IGF2‐INS‐TH cluster modify susceptibility to idiopathic Parkinson's disease. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Not Just an Empty Cavity: the Inter-Rhabdomeral Space in the Jamaican Cavefly Neoditomyia farri (Diptera, Mycetophilidae)

Abstract Contrary to most other Diptera, the inter-rhabdomeral spaces of the retina of the Jamaican cavefly Neoditomya farri are filled neither by extracellular matrix nor dense cytoplasmic material. Instead, a foamy organization of loose vacuoles, measuring approximately 0.7 μm in diameter, appears to keep the rhabdomeres of retinula cells 7 and 8 in place. The vacuoles are bounded by membranes and traces of actin, determined immunocytochemically, are present. The origin of the vacuoles is unclear, but evidence in support of a retinula cell rather than cone cell origin is advanced.
Identification of novel natural inhibitor for NorM – a multidrug and toxic compound extrusion transporter – an insilico molecular modeling and simulation studies

The emergence of bacterial multidrug resistance is an increasing problem in treatment of infectious diseases. An important cause for the multidrug resistance of bacteria is the expression of multidrug efflux transporters. The multidrug and toxic compound extrusion (MATE) transporters are most recently recognized as unique efflux system for extrusion of antimicrobials and therapeutic drugs due to energy stored in either Na+ or H+ electrochemical gradient. In the present study, high throughput virtual screening of natural compound collections against NorM – a MATE transporter from Neisseria gonorrhea (NorM-NG) has been carried out followed by flexible docking. The molecular simulation in membrane environment has been performed for understanding the stability and binding energetic of top lead compounds. Results identified a compound from the Indian medicinal plant “Terminalia chebula” which has good binding free energy compared to substrates (rhodamine 6 g, ethidium) and more favorable interactions with the central cavity forming active site residues. The compound has restricted movement in TM7, TM8, and TM1, thus blocking the disruption of Na+ – coordination along with equilibrium state bias towards occlude state of NorM transporter. Thus, this compound blocks the effluxing pathway of antimicrobial drugs and provides as a natural bioactive lead inhibitor against NorM transporter in drug-resistant gonorrhea.
A Novel Phosphatidylinositol-5-phosphate 4-Kinase (Phosphatidylinositol-phosphate Kinase IIγ) Is Phosphorylated in the Endoplasmic Reticulum in Response to Mitogenic Signals*

Here, we identify a novel rat phosphatidylinositol-5-phosphate 4-kinase, phosphatidylinositol-phosphate kinase IIγ (PIPKIIγ). PIPKIIγ comprises 420 amino acids with a molecular mass of 47,048 Da, showing greater homology to the type IIα and IIβ isoforms (61.1 and 63.7% amino acid identities, respectively) of phosphatidylinositol-phosphate kinase than to the type I isoforms. It is predominantly expressed in kidney, with low expression in almost all other tissues. PIPKIIγ was found to have phosphatidylinositol-5-phosphate 4-kinase activity as demonstrated in other type II kinases such as PIPKIIα. The PIPKIIγ that is present endogenously in rat fibroblasts, PC12 cells, and rat whole brain lysate or that is exogenously overexpressed in COS-7 cells shows a doublet migrating pattern on SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Alkaline phosphatase treatment and metabolic labeling in [32P]orthophosphate experiments revealed that PIPKIIγ is phosphorylated in vivo, resulting in a shift in its electrophoretic mobility. Phosphorylation is induced by treatment of mitogens such as serum and epidermal growth factor. Immunostaining experiments and subcellular fractionation revealed that PIPKIIγ localizes dominantly in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Phosphorylation also occurs in the ER. Thus, PIPKIIγ may have an important role in the synthesis of phosphatidylinositol bisphosphate in the ER.
Adopting cloud computing to optimize spatial web portals for better performance to support Digital Earth and other global geospatial initiatives

A spatial web portal (SWP) provides a web-based gateway to discover, access, manage, and integrate worldwide geospatial resources through the Internet and has the access characteristics of regional to global interest and spiking. Although various technologies have been adopted to improve SWP performance, enabling high-speed resource access for global users to better support Digital Earth remains challenging because of the computing and communication intensities in the SWP operation and the dynamic distribution of end users. This paper proposes a cloud-enabled framework for high-speed SWP access by leveraging elastic resource pooling, dynamic workload balancing, and global deployment. Experimental results demonstrate that the new SWP framework outperforms the traditional computing infrastructure and better supports users of a global system such as Digital Earth. Reported methodologies and framework can be adopted to support operational geospatial systems, such as monitoring national geographic state and spanning across regional and global geographic extent.
A Reference Ontology based Approach for Service Oriented Ontology Management

To establish effective information exchange among applications in a distributed B2B environment, the business participants are not only required to share their functions or service interfaces, but in many cases, they also need to exchange their data models. Ontology, as a popular semantic form of knowledge representation, can be used to represent data models, thus allowing applications to locate and integrate these models in a more intelligent way. In this paper, we introduce a reference ontology based approach for service oriented ontology management. Specifically, STAR, a domain specific reference ontology, is built and used for the experiments in a real life case. Furthermore, in order to validate and evaluate our approach and implementation, a prototype system is developed to provide ontology deploying, browsing and mapping operations on a service-oriented mechanism. Our experiments have provided promising results, which are consistent with our original ideas of managing ontologies and optimizing ontology mappings to facilitate data interoperability in a distributed environment.
Goal Commitment to Finding a Partner and Satisfaction with Life among Female Singles

In this cross-sectional study among 1502 female singles between the ages of 18 and 50, commitment to the goal of finding a partner was negatively related to satisfaction with life. In line with our expectations, this relationship was fully mediated by ruminating about being and remaining single. The relationship between rumination and lower satisfaction with life was stronger in the older age groups. The findings support the notion that rumination is an important mechanism through which goal commitment may negatively influence well-being, and that reducing one’s level of commitment to the pursuit of stage-specific life goals may be beneficial when reaching a new developmental stage.