Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
STEM Education: A New Journey

While research on teaching and learning about complex systems has achieved solid grounding in the learning sciences, few educational studies have focused on articulating design features for classroom implementation that can serve a modular purpose for building curricular and instructional experiences. Furthermore, despite the fact that several studies describe important roles for teachers in constructing successful classroom learning experiences, only a few of them examine how teachers’ instructional practices, knowledge, and beliefs influence student learning outcomes and the extent to which teachers are interested and willing to teach through complex systems approaches. Furthermore, we do not know what supports teachers themselves say that they need to teach about complex systems in their classrooms. In this study, we present a curriculum and instruction framework that outlines how teaching and learning about complex systems in high school science classroom contexts can be done. We articulate the features of the framework and provide examples of how the framework is translated into practice. We follow with evidence from an exploratory study conducted with 10 teachers and over 300 students aimed at understanding change in teachers’ instructional practices; the extent to which students learned from the activities; what teachers’ perceptions were in terms of utility and usability; and what other supports teachers needed.
An Examination of Louisiana's State Governance Structure in Higher Education and Its Impact on Public State-Funded College and University System Board Members' Voting Behavior: A Case Study

This dissertation identifies and analyzes factors of influence shaping the voting behavior of public state-funded university system board members in the State of Louisiana. The study focuses on university board members voting decisions in budget & finance, academic & student affairs and personnel agenda item issues at their respective board meetings. Eleven (11) factors of influence were from drawn from previous literature on legislative voting behavior. In this study, the factors are referred to as Board member colleagues, Board chairperson, Committee member chairpersons, University constituents (i.e. administrators, faculty, staff, students and parents), Fiscal impact to the University, Governor, Legislature, Media & Research (i.e. personal reading through the internet, books, newsletters, etc.), Non-university community (i.e. Community and/or Business & Industry), Re-appointment to the board, and the System President. The method utilized for this case study was in-depth individual interviews, direct observations, along with surveys to identify the most salient factors of influence on the voting behavior of university board members. A purposeful sampling of twenty-eight (28) surveys and sixteen (16) individual interviews with university board members were conducted in the spring and summer of 2014. Twenty-eight questions were designed from the survey to elicit spontaneous responses from university board members. Findings indicated that fiscal impact on the university, the role of the systems president, the board and committee chairperson and university constituents were considered high factors of influence on the voting behavior of public state-funded university board member voting behavior in the state of Louisiana.
Regulation of Glutamine and Glutamate Metabolism by GlnR and GlnA in Streptococcus pneumoniae*

Several genes involved in nitrogen metabolism are known to contribute to the virulence of pathogenic bacteria. Here, we studied the function of the nitrogen regulatory protein GlnR in the Gram-positive human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae. We demonstrate that GlnR mediates transcriptional repression of genes involved in glutamine synthesis and uptake (glnA and glnPQ), glutamate synthesis (gdhA), and the gene encoding the pentose phosphate pathway enzyme Zwf, which forms an operon with glnPQ. Moreover, the expression of gdhA is also repressed by the pleiotropic regulator CodY. The GlnR-dependent regulation occurs through a conserved operator sequence and is responsive to the concentration of glutamate, glutamine, and ammonium in the growth medium. By means of in vitro binding studies and transcriptional analyses, we show that the regulatory function of GlnR is dependent on GlnA. Mutants of glnA and glnP displayed significantly reduced adhesion to Detroit 562 human pharyngeal epithelial cells, suggesting a role for these genes in the colonization of the host by S. pneumoniae. Thus, our results provide a thorough insight into the regulation of glutamine and glutamate metabolism of S. pneumoniae mediated by both GlnR and GlnA.
Demographic and Health Related Data of Users of a Mobile Application to Support Drug Adherence is Associated with Usage Duration and Intensity

Purpose A wealth of mobile applications are designed to support users in their drug intake. When developing software for patients, it is important to understand the differences between individuals who have, who will or who might never adopt mobile interventions. This study analyzes demographic and health-related factors associated with real-life “longer usage” and the “usage-intensity per day” of the mobile application “Medication Plan”. Methods Between 2010-2012, the mobile application “Medication Plan” could be downloaded free of charge from the Apple-App-Store. It was aimed at supporting the regular and correct intake of medication. Demographic and health-related data were collected via an online questionnaire. This study analyzed captured data. Results App-related activities of 1799 users (1708 complete data sets) were recorded. 69% (1183/1708) applied “Medication Plan” for more than a day. 74% were male (872/1183), the median age 45 years. Variance analysis showed a significant effect of the users´ age with respect to duration of usage (p = 0.025). While the mean duration of use was only 23.3 days for users younger than 21 years, for older users, there was a substantial increase over all age cohorts up to users of 60 years and above (103.9 days). Sex and educational status had no effect. “Daily usage intensity” was directly associated with an increasing number of prescribed medications and increased from an average of 1.87 uses per day and 1 drug per day to on average 3.71 uses per day for users stating to be taking more than 7 different drugs a day (p<0.001). Demographic predictors (sex, age and educational attainment) did not affect usage intensity. Conclusion Users aged 60+ as well as those with complicated therapeutic drug regimens relied on the service we provided for more than three months on average. Mobile applications may be a promising approach to support the treatment of patients with chronic conditions.
Spectrally-Efficient 400-Gb/s Single Carrier Transport Over 7 200 km

Since the advent of wavelength division multiplexed optical systems, increasing the bit rate per optical carrier has proved to be the most effective method to drive the overall cost of optical systems down. However, multicarrier approaches have gained momentum for 400-Gb/s transport to cope with bandwidth limitations of optoelectronic components. In this paper, single carrier modulated 400-Gb/s transport over transatlantic distances is demonstrated for the first time. Using high-speed digital-to-analog converters, we successfully generated a 64 GBaud dual-polarization signal modulated using 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation. Thanks to Nyquist pulse shaping, our channels are closely packed with 66.7 and 75 GHz channel spacing, resulting on 6 and 5.33-bit/s/Hz of spectral efficiencies, respectively. Transceiver design is based on an optimization procedure of inter-symbol interference mitigation and forward error correction overhead. A spatially-coupled low density parity check code with decoder-aware degree optimization is used to reduce the gap to capacity. We validated our transceiver design by transporting five channels over 6600 and 7200-km with 6 and 5.33-bit/s/Hz of spectral efficiency, respectively. We analyze as well the performance gain provided by non-linear mitigation using filtered digital back-propagation algorithm.
Handling polarity shift for opinion mining

Opinion mining or sentiment analysis is the study of people's opinion, sentiments, attitudes and emotions expressed in written language. It is one of the most active research programs in natural language processing and text mining. Though sentiment analysis has been a trending research program in the community of natural language processing, the Bag Of Words based machine learning approach is state-of-the-art for this task. However, BOW model does not focus much on polarity shift which may create a different overall impact. Polarity shift handling is one of the major problems in performing sentimental analysis of any text or sentence. Earlier work has been done on handling the polarity shifts focused on detecting polarity shift with limited scope. Some works also included training of the classifier either by reversing of the original reviews or extracting the features based on patterns. This study aims to handle polarity shift. Sentiment classification will be performed in 2 major steps i.e. Tokenization and Polarity shift handling. A model is proposed to handle explicit negation with a larger scope. Unlike traditional negation modifiers, our aim is to negate the related terms even if it does not immediately follow negation modifier. Apart from modification and polarity shift handling, other tasks for sentimental classification of tokenization are performed in a traditional way. Proposed model is evaluated on Kaggle's “Bag of Words meets Bag of Popcorn” which is a balanced dataset consisting of 25000 positive and negative reviews in total. For the proposed model, partial data-set have been used. 10-fold cross validation technique is used for evaluation of proposed model. Proposed model is compared and analysed with the existing state-of-the-art model such as PSDEE.
Research on momentum and contrarian strategies of related industries in the bull and bear markets

Momentum and contrarian effects are financial anomalies and have been found on firm level. Recently, Menzly and Ozbas (2010) study momentum on cross-industry level. The paper tests momentum and contrarian strategies of related industries in the bull and bear markets based on data of Chinese stock market. First, we construct returns of supplier and customer of industries by using the Input-Output accounts and the Chinese stock data from 2000 to 2009. Second, the paper defines the bull and bear markets in two ways. Finally, we test momentum and contrarian effects of related industries in the bull and bear markets with different market definition. We find that momentum and contrarian effects are consistent in different market states. The portfolio sorted by customer industries mainly exhibits momentum effects and the portfolio sorted by supplier industries exhibits contrarian effects.
Time Series Analysis of Volatility in the Petroleum Pricing Markets: The Persistence, Asymmetry and Jumps in the Returns Series

The petroleum energy market is becoming more volatile owing to recent fluctuations in oil price, which in the long run affects the pricing and volatility persistence levels of other petroleum products. Apart from the symmetry and asymmetry that are known with volatility series, jumps have recently been identified, while the symmetric and asymmetric models failed in predicting the jump components in the financial series. The historical prices of crude oil and its distilled constituents possess occasional jumps as a result of global political or economic constraints. We applied both fractional persistence and volatility modelling frameworks in studying the volatility persistence in crude oil and petroleum products prices. We chose among symmetric, asymmetric and jumps volatility models. Results indicated that prices of crude oil and gasoline were less persistent when compared with volatility series of other petroleum products. The newly proposed jump volatility model variants outperformed other existing volatility models in predicting the volatility in the prices of crude oil, heating oil and diesel. The exception was the Asymmetric Power ARCH (APARCH) model, which emerged best in predicting the prices of gasoline, kerosene and propane prices; but GAS variants were still ranked second and third competing models in predicting the volatility in gasoline and kerosene prices. Using wrongly specified model for predicting the volatility in petroleum pricing can misinform oil markets, thereby generating intense conditional oil market volatility that is capable of distorting the price of oil and macroeconomic stability of the entire globe.
Antisocial Behavior and Victimization Over 2-Year Follow-Up in Subgroups of Childhood Arrestees

Not only are childhood onset offenders at high risk of becoming serious persistent offenders, they are also at high risk of becoming victimized themselves. Furthermore, studies in the general population suggest that a combined perpetrator–victim group can be distinguished from a perpetrator-only and a victim-only group on individual and family risk factors. The current study investigated the co-occurrence of offending and victimization among first-time arrestees and the 2-year predictive value of previously found clusters of dynamic risk factors of offending. Childhood first-time arrestees (N = 308; Mage = 10.3, SD = 1.45) were clustered into three groups based on dynamic risk factors of offending in the individual, peer, school, and family domains: a pervasive high, an externalizing intermediate, and a low problem group. Police records and self-report data on re-offending and victimization of these children were collected over a 2-year follow-up period. Compared with the low problem group, the prevalence of re-offending was higher in both the externalizing intermediate group and the pervasive high group. The pervasive high group was most likely to display co-occurring future antisocial behavior and victimization. These findings emphasize that attention should be paid to victimization in addition to future antisocial behavior, especially if additional internalizing and family problems are present. Furthermore, the differences in re-offending and victimization between subgroups of childhood onset offenders stress the need for specific interventions tailored to the risk profile of a child.
A re-examination of Libor rigging: a time-varying cointegration perspective

Using a time-varying cointegration framework, this paper examines the alleged manipulation of the London interbank offered rate (Libor) during the 2007–2009 financial crisis. Bank quotes are found to be poor indicators of their financing costs in the crisis period. The aberration in the estimated values of the cointegrating and error correction parameters governing the long-run equilibrium relationship between bank quotes and the final Libor suggests banks were submitting lower quotes. Further analysis which controls for an individual bank’s credit risk, market wide credit and liquidity risks, and a common market factor, demonstrate possible evidence of Libor rigging during the crisis period.
Some challenges for regional science research

Regional scientists have long faced challenges in developing the interdisciplinary field where their focus is on the spatial context of social, economic and environmental phenomena, and dealing with spatial data presents considerable methodological challenges. This article discusses the evolution of Regional Science, the critiques it has received and the challenges it has confronted. It addresses specifically some contemporary challenges that relate to methodological issues, such as: how to measure and model endogenous regional growth performance; the limitations of using de jure regions rather than functional regions as the spatial framework in regional analysis; the need to making greater use of unit record data and integrating those data into generalised spatial frameworks; and making use of the opportunities offered by «big data» in urban and regional analysis.
Poinsettia's wild ancestor in the Mexican dry tropics: Historical, genetic, and environmental evidence.

PREMISE OF THE STUDY The poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) is the world's most economically important potted plant, but despite its preeminence it is not clear which wild populations are ancestral to the varieties cultivated around the world. Tradition holds that the U.S. envoy to Mexico J. R. Poinsett collected the progenitors of the over 300 varieties in global cultivation on an 1828 excursion to northern Guerrero State, Mexico. It is unknown whether the contemporary cultivars are descended from plants from Guerrero or whether germplasm from other parts of poinsettia's 2000 km long distribution entered into cultivation during the nearly 200 yr of subsequent poinsettia horticulture. METHODS To identify the wild populations that likely gave rise to the cultivars and test this historical account, we sequenced plastid and nuclear DNA regions and modeled poinsettia's potential distribution. KEY RESULTS The combination of nuclear and plastid haplotypes characterizing cultivars was found only in northern Guerrero. Distribution modeling indicated that suitable habitat conditions for wild poinsettias are present in this area, consistent with their likely wild status. CONCLUSIONS Our data pinpoint the area of northern Guerrero as the cultivated poinsettia's probable ancestral region, congruent with the traditional account attributing the original collections to Poinsett. Abundant genetic variation likely offers raw material for improving the many shortcomings of cultivars, including vulnerability to cold, stem breakage, and pathogens such as Pythium and Phytophthora. However, genetic differences between populations make conservation of all of poinsettia's diversity difficult.
Risk-Coping Measures against Health Shocks during the Process of Penetration of Health Insurance in Vietnam

Does the recent introduction of public health insurance influence households' risk-coping measures in developing countries? This study investigates risk-coping measures for health shocks using a Living Standard Measurement Survey in Vietnam where universal health coverage is aimed to be achieved. The estimated results suggest that precautionary savings are the main form of assets in poor households. Health insurance seems to be used by people in poor health, which indicates that the problem of adverse selection exits. Importantly, get well gifts in the form of money play a significant role in helping households cope with health shocks. A traditional informal insurance system still exists in close Vietnamese communities.
GaN-Based LEDs With Hot/Cold Factor Improved by the Electron Blocking Layer

The authors report the study of “thermal droop” for GaN-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) using a single AlGaN layer with various thicknesses as the electron blocking layer (EBL). It was found that the effect of bandgap narrowing at elevated temperatures on the drop of LED output power should be negligibly smaller. It was also found that the inserted EBL could significantly reduce “thermal droop” due to the effective suppression of electron overflow at elevated temperatures. Furthermore, it was found that we could drastically reduce the output power decrease by about 42% with a properly designed EBL.
Cardiometabolic risk factors in people with psychotic disorders: The second Australian national survey of psychosis

Objective: To determine the prevalence of cardiometabolic risk factors in Australian adults with a psychotic disorder. Method: Data were collected during the interview phase of the second Australian survey of psychosis, a population-based survey of Australians aged 18 to 64 years with a psychotic disorder. Body mass index, waist circumference and blood pressure were measured. Participants were asked about diagnoses of relevant medical conditions, medications, smoking and physical activity. Fasting blood samples were analysed for glucose, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, total cholesterol and triglycerides. The prevalence of metabolic syndrome was determined using the harmonized criteria developed by the International Diabetes Federation and other bodies. Results: A total of 1087 men (60%) and 738 women (40%) participated. Their mean age was 38.36 (SD 11.16) years; 773 (42%) were aged 18–34 years and 1052 (58%) 35–64 years. Three-quarters were overweight or obese and 82% had abdominal obesity. Almost half were hypertensive. Two-thirds were current smokers and 81% had a lifetime history of smoking. Levels of physical activity were very low. About 30% reported a diagnosis of hypertension or high cholesterol, 20% knew they had diabetes or high blood sugar and 18% had cardiovascular disease. Half of those with self-reported hypertension were taking antihypertensive drugs, and about 40% with hypercholesterolemia or hyperglycaemia were receiving medication for these conditions. Seventy per cent (N = 1286) of participants provided fasting blood samples. Abnormal levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides were each found in almost half of participants and almost one-third had elevated fasting glucose. More than half of participants (54.8%) met criteria for metabolic syndrome. Conclusions: Australians living with psychosis have high rates of cardiometabolic risk factors. There are a number of obvious targets for prevention and treatment, including obesity (especially in women), smoking (more prevalent in men), hypertension, hyperlipidaemia and sedentary lifestyle.
Acoustically Evoked Immediate Early Gene Expression in the Pallium of Female Túngara Frogs

In anurans, much is known about the role of the auditory midbrain in processing conspecific calls, but comparatively little is known about the role of the pallium. To address this deficiency, we investigated the induction of the immediate early gene egr-1 by natural mate chorus in the medial, dorsal, lateral, and ventral pallium of female túngara frogs. We found strong acoustically evoked egr-1 expression in the dorsal medial pallium (p < 0.01) and ventral pallium (p = 0.02), with a weaker effect in the lateral pallium (p = 0.05). In the ventral pallium, acoustically induced egr-1 expression was stronger in the anterior portion. Measures of movement and olfactory activity could not explain a significant portion of acoustically evoked pallial egr-1 expression. In contrast, egr-1 expression in the auditory midbrain covaried with egr-1 expression in the dorsal medial pallium and ventral pallium, suggesting that their activity was coupled with auditory activity. Taken together, these results suggest that the acoustically evoked egr-1 expression in the dorsal medial pallium and ventral pallium were a direct result of auditory stimulation. Furthermore, although both anatomical and electrophysiological evidence demonstrate that multiple modalities overlap in the frog pallium, our results show that a multimodal stimulus is not required to activate pallial neurons. Although the functional role of the frog pallium is not known, our results demonstrate that species-specific sounds activate spatially segregated and anatomically distinct areas of the frog pallium, inviting further investigation into the role of the frog pallium in acoustic communication.