Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Wisconsin Assets and Incomes Studies Archive

It is a commonplace that the inability to conduct controlled experiments (amongst other things) makes the social sciences more difficult fields of scientific inquiry than the physical and even the medico-biological fields. It has only relatively recently become recognized that this can be overcome, using modern statistical analysis, provided that a sufficient number of significant variables is available for analysis. As yet it is almost exclusively the professional social scientist (who wishes to analyze such data) who recognizes the implications of these statements, while those in a position to provide these data are largely ignorant or unconcerned about these implications. If it can be said that the survey is the social scientist’s test tube, then surely the vast bodies of data recording human behavior that exist in the files and administrative records of governmental and business organi-
Exploring the Effectiveness of Self-Regulated Learning in Massive Open Online Courses on Non-Native English Speakers

Massive Open Online Courses MOOCs are expanding the scope of online distance learning in the creation of a cross-country global learning environment. For learners worldwide, MOOCs offer a wealth of online learning resources. However, such a diversified environment makes the learning process complicated and challenging. To achieve their objectives, learners need to adapt regulation strategies based on different situations in the process, which is called self-regulated learning. Previous research findings emphasize that self-efficacy is one of the key factors that influences self-regulated learning. Currently MOOCs are primarily offered in English, but many students are non-native English speakers. For these learners, English serves as a cross-language and cross-cultural communication medium, and English self-efficacy is a defining element affecting this language application. To further examine the impact of English self-efficacy on self-regulated learning, this study uses non-native English learners in MOOCs as test subjects. It is evident that there is a positive and significant correlation between non-English learners' self-efficacy and self-regulated learning in MOOCs; the higher the English self-efficacy, the better use of self-regulated learning strategies. This study aims to offer some insight into self-regulated learning strategies of non-native English speakers taking MOOCs, so relevant instructors can subsequently provide more suitable and effective learning methods.
Analysis of sectoral shaped ultra-wideband microstrip antennas

Analysis of ultra-wideband antenna for Sectoral shaped microstrip patch for angle increasing from 90° to 330°, for realized bandwidth and gain is presented. To optimize the individual patches, center or offset feed microstrip line is used. A bandwidth of around 15 GHz is obtained, in Sectoral patches with angle increasing from 90° to 180°, whereas for Sectoral patches with angles increasing from 210° to 270°, more than 16 GHz of bandwidth is obtained. Also for Sectoral angles more than 270° (300° and 330°), bandwidth of nearly 16 GHz is realized. The peak gain in ultra wide-band design increases with increase in Sectoral angle with maximum gain of more than 4 dBi is obtained in 300° and 330° Sectoral patches.
Popularizing Nanoscience: The Public Rhetoric of Nanotechnology, 1986–1999

This study examines the representations of nanoscale science and technology in written popular media from 1986 to 1999. Nanoscale science is an emergent field that examines the principles of matter at a molecular level. This article presents the representations through which nanoscale science and technology was initially introduced to the public. Written popular media influences the ways stakeholder groups perceive, support, and fund science and technology. From 1986 to 1999 this field was introduced to the general public through articles in newspapers, magazines, and other general interest publications. During this period, nanoscale science and technology had a fragmented public image as proponents of various representations of the field competed for legitimacy. The study demonstrates that the emergence of nanoscience and technology in the popular media occurred as a competitive and transitional social–rhetorical process in which the new emerged within existing and established understandings of science but was mediated by biographical and other social accounts of the research.
Higher Education Research in Asia: a Publication and Co-Publication Analysis

This study explores higher education research in Asia. Drawing on scientometrics, the mapping of science and social network analysis, this paper examines the publications of 38 specialised journals on higher education over the past three decades. The findings indicate a growing number of higher education research publications but the proportion of Asian publications in relation to the total world publications in higher education research remains stationary. The higher education research community in Asia is heavily concentrated in a few countries and universities, resting on a relatively small number of core scholars who publish research in the international specialised higher education journals. In response to increasing challenges in Asian higher education systems, the paper suggests that the higher education research community in Asia needs to be expanded and include more regional and international collaborations
Randomized controlled trial of the Resilience and Coping Intervention (RCI) with undergraduate university students

ABSTRACT Objective: The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate the Resilience and Coping Intervention (RCI) with college students. Participants: College students (aged 18–23) from a large Midwest US university who volunteered for a randomized controlled trial during the 2015 spring semester. Methods: College students were randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 64) or a control (n = 65) group. Intervention participants received three 45-minute RCI sessions over subsequent weeks. All participants completed pre- and post-intervention assessments at the beginning of Week 1 and end of Week 3. Student resilience, coping, hope, stress, depression, and anxiety were assessed. Results. RCI participants reported significantly more hope and less stress and depression from Week 1 to Week 3 compared with control participants. Results for resilience also approached statistical significance. Effect sizes were small to moderate. Conclusions: This study found preliminary evidence that RCI is an effective resilience intervention for use with college students.
Towards Understanding Erasing-based Interactions: Adding Erasing Capabilities to Anoto Pens

Anoto pens are a powerful technology for capturing contents written on paper. However, current pens do not support eras-ing contents. We show how to easily construct refills for Anoto pens that allow users to erase handwritten traces. Moreover, we discuss how to design software solutions that incorporate paper-based erasing as a first-order command.
Multiple Agents With Emotional Behaviour in The Blocks World

Ag eneral architecture for the computer implementation of a theory of emotions is presented. The model is based mainly on a cognitive orientated theory proposed by Frijda 1986 where emotions are described as the manifestations of a concern satisfaction system. The model applies the theory to multiple agents in a blocks world environment where actions may or may not be emotional. Related work is also discussed.
Residual Belief Propagation: Informed Scheduling for Asynchronous Message Passing

Inference for probabilistic graphical models is still very much a practical challenge in large domains. The commonly used and effective belief propagation (BP) algorithm and its generalizations often do not converge when applied to hard, real-life inference tasks. While it is widely recognized that the scheduling of messages in these algorithms may have significant consequences, this issue remains largely unexplored. In this work, we address the question of how to schedule messages for asynchronous propagation so that a fixed point is reached faster and more often. We first show that any reasonable asynchronous BP converges to a unique fixed point under conditions similar to those that guarantee convergence of synchronous BP. In addition, we show that the convergence rate of a simple round-robin schedule is at least as good as that of synchronous propagation. We then propose residual belief propagation (RBP), a novel, easy-to-implement, asynchronous propagation algorithm that schedules messages in an informed way, that pushes down a bound on the distance from the fixed point. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of RBP over state-of-the-art methods for a variety of challenging synthetic and real-life problems: RBP converges significantly more often than other methods; and it significantly reduces running time until convergence, even when other methods converge.
Immediate effects of breath holding maneuvers onto composition of exhaled breath

Rapid concentration changes due to physiological or pathophysiological effects rather than appearance of unique disease biomarkers are important for clinical application of breath research. Simple maneuvers such as breath holding may significantly affect breath biomarker concentrations. In this study, exhaled volatile organic compound (VOC) concentrations were assessed in real time before and after different breath holding maneuvers. Continuous breath-resolved measurements (PTR-ToF-MS-8000) were performed in 31 healthy human subjects in a side-stream sampling mode. After 1 min of tidal breathing participants held their breath for 10, 20, 40, 60 s and as long as possible. Afterwards they continued to breathe normally for another minute. VOC profiles could be monitored in real time by assigning online PTR-ToF-MS data to alveolar or inspired phases of breath. Sudden and profound changes of exhaled VOC concentrations were recorded after different breath holding maneuvers. VOC concentrations returned to base line levels 10–20 s after breath holding. Breath holding induced concentration changes depended on physico-chemical properties of the substances. When substance concentrations were normalized onto end-tidal CO2 content, variation of acetone concentrations decreased, whereas variations of isoprene concentrations were not affected. As the effects of breathing patterns on exhaled substance concentrations depend on individual substance properties, sampling procedures have to be validated for each compound by means of appropriate real-time analysis. Normalization of exhaled concentrations onto exhaled CO2 is only valid for substances having similar physico-chemical properties as CO2.
FRES-CAR: An Adaptive Cache Replacement Policy

Caching Web objects has become a common practice towards improving content delivery and users' servicing. A Web caching framework is characterized by its cache replacement policy, which identifies the objects (i.e. the elements on a Web page, which include text, graphics, and scripts) to be replaced in a cache upon a request arrival. In this paper, we present a cache replacement algorithm (so-called FRES-CAR), which identifies the objects that should be evicted by considering together three important criteria: object's frequency, recency and size. Experimentation under synthetic workloads has shown that FRES-CAR achieves higher hit rates when compared with the most popular and existing algorithms
User influence on the mean effective gain for data mode operation of mobile handsets

The current paper presents statistics on the mean effective gain (MEG) for mobile handsets. The results are based on a large measurement campaign in an urban environment where the propagation channel from two different base stations to seven different handsets were measured in two bands (776 MHz and 2300 MHz). The handsets were of different types (bar, clamshell, smartphone), all had two antennas and were used in data (browsing) mode. All handsets were measured with twelve different users with both one-hand and two-hand grips. The body loss, the mean difference between the MEG in free space and with a user, was found to be up to about 15 dB with typical values below 6 dB. Further results are given in terms of mean values, standard deviations, and analyses for differences due to antenna location and user grip style. Finally, the body loss distribution is modeled and used for estimation of confidence intervals.
The practical heart of markets

Opening paragraph: By addressing the ‘practical heart’ of markets, my aim in this article is to explore the way markets carry on despite the peculiar, mathematically limited and opportunistically versatile, character of human calculation. The abstract theorems of economics may be unreal to practical ‘men’ but the curious thing is they calculate still. In any social world there are vast unknowns compensated by routine, practice and habit, but also by faith, piety and fundamentalisms of all sorts, including religious, market and even liberal secular (see Block, 2010; Thompson, 2006). Viewed from a pragmatist perspective, knowledge is always partial, always shifting and always social. An admission of deficits, of course, is not the same as an admission of complete ignorance. While critics from Thorstein Veblen (1898) through J.K. Galbraith (1954/1975; 1958) to Mark Granovetter (1985) and the 2001 Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, have lined up to dismiss even the possibility of the perfect information stipulated in neoclassical models of exchange, no-one is claiming that markets run on nothing. So if it’s not perfect information what is driving market calculation? Michel Callon’s influential solution was to propose that the sociological impulse to add a ‘little more soul’ to the economic agent be resisted in favour of research into how ‘framed, formatted and equipped with prostheses’ human beings nevertheless calculate (1998, p51).
¡ ectiveness of a Dialectical Behaviour Therapy Program for Incarcerated Female Juvenile O ¡ enders

Background: Female offenders incarcerated in Washington State have demonstrated higher rates of mental health needs than boys. Linehan’s (1993a, b) Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) is an effective treatment for adult women with Borderline Personality Disorder. DBT utilises a combination of skills training, problem solving, and validation to enable patients to reduce self-destructive, impulsive and aggressive behaviours. The prevalence of similar emotional problems among female juvenile offenders suggests that DBT may be an effective strategy for this population. The State of Washington Governor’s Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee sponsored a collaborative project conducted by a research team from the University of Washington and the staff at the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration’s Echo Glen Children’s Center to evaluate the effectiveness of a DBT intervention. Method: Pre-post intervention records were compared for female offenders from a mental health and a general population unit where DBT was implemented. Youth on a third unit served as a comparison group. Youth behaviour problems, staff punitive responses were compared before and after the intervention period. Results: Youth behaviour problems and use of punitive responses by staff decreased compared to the year prior on one cottage (unit) while no behaviour or staff changes were noted on another. Conclusions: The evaluation demonstrated the efficacy of providing DBT to female offenders in a residential setting and yielded mixed results on behaviour change during the study period that may relate to quality of training and prior youth behaviour problems.
Understanding Communication Network Cohesiveness during Organizational Crisis: Effects of Clique and Transitivity

Various terms such as organizational mortality, organizational death, bankruptcy, decline, retrenchment and failure have been used in the literature to characterize different forms and facets of organizational crisis. Communication network studies have typically focused on nodes (individuals or organizations), relationships between those nodes, and subsequent affects of these relationships upon the network as a whole. Email networks in contemporary organizations are fairly representative of the underlying communications networks. We show that changes in communication networks and its associated group cohesiveness have implications for studying organizational crisis. In this paper, we analyze the changing communication network structure at Enron Corporation during the period of its crisis (2000-2001). Our goal was to understand how communication patterns and structure were affected by organizational crisis. Drawing on communication network crisis and group cohesiveness theory, we tested several propositions using the Enron email corpus: (1) Number of cliques increases, and (2) Communication network becomes increasingly transitive as organizations experience crisis. The results of the tests and their implications are discussed in this paper.
Exploring Transcription Patterns in Arabidopsis thaliana

Recent work has shown that bidirectional genes (i.e., genes located on opposite strands of DNA, whose transcriptions start sites are not more than 1000bp apart) are often coexpressed and have similar biological functions [5]. Identification of such genes can be useful in the process of constructing gene regulatory networks. Furthermore, analysis of the intergenic regions corresponding to bidirectional genes can help identify regulatory elements, such as transcription factor binding sites. Wang et al. [6] have identified 2471 bidirectional gene pairs in Arabidopsis thaliana and found that the corresponding intergenic regions are rich in regulatory elements that are essential for the initiation of transcription. Identifying such elements is especially important, as simply searching for known transcription factor binding sites [1, 2] in the promoter of a gene can result in many hits that are not necessarily important for transcription initiation. Encouraged by the findings about the presence of essential regulatory elements in the intergenic regions corresponding to the bidirectional genes, in this work, we explore a motif-based machine learning approach to identify intergenic regulatory elements. More precisely, we consider the problem of predicting the transcription pattern for pairs of consecutive genes in Arabidopsis thaliana using motifs from AthaMap3 [1] and PLACE4 [2], with the goal of identifying the predictive motifs, as those motifs are presumably regulatory motifs that are essential for transcription initiation.
Proposal for a loophole-free test of nonlocal realism with electron spins of donors

The deep-rooted concept of ``realism''\char22{}a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation, may have been shaken to some extent by a recent surprising advance in experimental test of a broad class of nonlocal hidden-variable (NLHV) theories [S. Gr\"oblacher, T. Paterek, R. Kaltenbaek, \ifmmode \check{C}\else \v{C}\fi{}. Brukner, M. \ifmmode \dot{Z}\else \. {Z}\fi{}ukowski, M. Aspelmeyer, and A. Zeilinger, Nature (London) 446, 871 (2007)], though there exists a detection loophole. In this paper a feasible propose for a loophole-free test of non-local realism is discussed based on the independent readout of two electron spins of donors $^{31}\text{P}$ in semiconductors in different cavities entangled through a 4.4 dB bright squeezed coherent light and a postselection based on homodyne measurement. The electron spins are read out by using optically induced spin to charge transduction detected by radio-frequency single electron transistor.
Continuous local anesthetic wound infusion to improve postoperative outcome: back to the periphery?

Editor’s Note: The peer-review process is a foundation of scientific scholarship and publication. The goals are to (1) identify manuscripts acceptable for publication and (2) provide feedback to authors and improve manuscript quality and clarity, whether accepted by ANESTHESIOLOGY or for future research and submission. The editorial below describes the remarkable success of this process in an article in the current issue. In their original manuscript, Struys et al. did not measure plasma drug concentrations, but rather estimated them from the target-controlled infusion and assumed they were correct. Such assumptions may be hazardous and in this case directly affected the potential validity of the conclusions. A reviewer asked the authors to perform another experiment in which propofol concentrations were measured; this was necessary to validate conclusions based on simulated data. This was not an insubstantial undertaking, requiring additional institutional review board application and review, investigator effort, subject recruitment and study, plasma and data analysis, and resources with which to accomplish the effort. The result was a richer data set and more robust conclusions. Moreover, the investigators then discussed their new data with the reviewer (who had identified himself in his review); this discussion yielded further data analysis and even more important conclusions. Peer review is not perfect, but an internal review of this process in ANESTHESIOLOGY indicates that constructive interactions between authors and reviewers result in improved articles, at least as judged by their likelihood of being cited. Although there is no substitute for scientific analysis of the peer review process, we nonetheless provide an illustrative anecdote and celebrate its success.
Predicting job loss in those off sick.

BACKGROUND Evidence shows incapacity benefit claimants (those off sick >26 weeks) are at greatest risk of long-term job loss. AIM To develop a screening tool to select those at risk of job loss, defined as failure to return to work among those off sick. The screening tool was for use in the Job Retention and Rehabilitation Pilot of the Department for Work and Pensions. METHODS A literature review identified risks for long-term incapacity and job loss as multifactorial. Potential predictors for return to work were then assembled into a set of questions and tested by a prospective study in general practice surgeries and a retrospective study of occupational health records of local authority employees referred for sickness absence management, using univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis. RESULTS Univariate logistic regression analysis of the retrospective study produced odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals for each question (where P <or= 0.05) and a C-index was then constructed for their predictive power. Five questions holding the greatest predictive power were subjected to multivariate analysis and in the final model had a high C-index of 0.90 (0.5 = no predictive power, 1.0 = perfect prediction). They formed the screening tool. The questions cover self-assessment of ability to return to work after current sick leave, of ability to do current job in 6 months' time, sick leave in past year, current age and whether awaiting a consultation or treatment. CONCLUSION A screening tool identifying those most at risk of job loss has been produced.