Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Digital technology for elementary English language learning (ELL) students

English language learners (ELL) are students who are learning English not as their first, but as second or even third language. A lot of the time these students do not speak English at home because they use their first language as the primary home language. These students may only get the opportunity to learn to speak English in school. In early elementary, kindergarten through Grade three, the primary focus is to develop language and literacy skills which will prepare the students for further educational learning. The old saying is that; first you learn to read and then you read to learn. In this study, I questioned how technology can be used to engage the early elementary ELL students to develop language and literacy skills. I conducted an anonymous survey and an email interview to gather my data. I found my results were inconclusive for determining which technologies would benefit the ELL elementary teacher in helping to develop language and literacy skills. There are many valuable technologies available; however, further research will be necessary to draw any distinct conclusions.
Ultrathin Metal/Amorphous-Silicon/Metal Diode for Bipolar RRAM Selector Applications

We propose a novel metal/silicon/metal (MSM) selector using ultrathin undoped amorphous silicon (a-Si) for resistive-RAM selector application. The new selector behaves as a bidirectional diode, showing a high current drive (~2.2 MA/cm)2, high selectivity (~240 for 1/2 bias), fast switching speed , and excellent endurance ( at target drive current). The doping-free a-Si structure alleviates the dopant-induced variability concerns for ultrascaled devices and eliminates the need for a dopant-activation anneal. Circuit simulations show feasibility of 1-Mb array, with over 25% read margin and 70% write margin, when using the new MSM structure as a selector for a HfO2-based resistive switching memory element.
Locality Aware Fair Scheduling for Hammr

Hammr is a distributed execution engine for data parallel applications modeled after Dryad. In this report, we present a locality aware fair scheduler for Hammr. We have developed functionality to support hierarchical scheduling, preemption and weighed users and a minimum flow based algorithm to maximize task preference. For evaluation, we’ve run Hammr on Hadoop Distributed File System on Amazon EC2 Cloud with five instances.
Banking Regulation and Prompt Corrective Action

We explore the rationale for regulatory rules that prohibit banks from developing some of their natural activities when their capital level is low, as epitomized by the US Prompt Corrective Action (PCA). This paper is built on two insights. First, in a moral hazard setting, capital requirement regulation may force banks to hold a large fraction of safe assets which, in turn, may lower their incentives to monitor risky assets. Second, agency problems may be more severe in certain asset classes than in others. Taken together, these two ideas explain why, surprisingly, capital regulation, which may cope with risk and adverse selection, is unable to address issues related to moral hazard. Hence, instead of forcing banks to hold a large fraction of safe assets, prohibiting some types of investment and allowing ample scope of investment on others may be the only way to preserve incentives and guarantee funding. In particular, providing incentives to monitor investments in the most opaque asset classes may prove to be excessively costly in terms of the required capital and thus inefficient. We show that the optimal capital regulation consists of a rule that a) allows well capitalized banks to freely invest any amount in any risky asset, b) prohibits banks with intermediate levels of capital to invest in the most opaque risky assets, and c) prohibits undercapitalized banks to invest in any risky asset.
Effect of High Glucose Concentration on the Synthesis of Monocyte Chemoattractant Protein-1 in Human Peritoneal Mesothelial Cells: Involvement of Protein Kinase C

Human peritoneal mesothelial cells (HMC) contribute to the activation and control of inflammatory processes in the peritoneum by their potential to produce various inflammatory mediators. The present study was designed to assess the effect of glucose, the osmotic active compound in most commercially available peritoneal dialysis fluids, on the synthesis of the C-C chemokine monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) in cultured HMC. The MCP-1 concentration in the cell supernatants was determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and the MCP-1 mRNA expression was examined using Northern blot analysis. Incubation of HMC with glucose (30–120 mM) resulted in a time- and concentration-dependent increase in MCP-1 protein secretion and mRNA expression. After 24 h the MCP-1 synthesis was increased from 2.8 ± 0.46 to 4.2 ± 0.32 ng/105 cells (n = 5, p < 0.05) in HMC treated with 60 mM glucose. In contrast, osmotic control media containing either the metabolically inert monosaccharide mannitol or NaCl did not influence MCP-1 production. The stimulating effect of high glucose on MCP-1 expression in HMC was mimicked by activation of protein kinase C (PKC) with the phorbol ester PMA (20 nM). Coincubation of the cells with glucose and the specific PKC inhibitor Ro 31–8220 completely blunted glucose-mediated MCP-1 expression. In summary, our results indicate that glucose induces MCP-1 synthesis by a PKC-dependent pathway. Since osmotic control media did not increase MCP-1 release, it is suggested that the effect of glucose is mainly related to metabolism and not to hyperosmolarity. These data may in part explain elevated steady-state levels of MCP-1 found in the dialysis effluent of continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis patients.
Attenuation of Activity in an Endogenous Analgesia Circuit by Ongoing Pain in the Rat

Analgesic efficacy varies depending on the pain syndrome being treated. One reason for this may be a differential effect of individual pain syndromes on the function of the endogenous pain control circuits at which these drugs act to produce analgesia. To test this hypothesis, we examined the effects of diverse (i.e., ongoing inflammatory, neuropathic, or chronic widespread) pain syndromes on analgesia induced by activation of an opioid-mediated, noxious stimulus-induced endogenous pain control circuit. This circuit was activated by subdermal capsaicin injection at a site remote from the site of nociceptive testing. Analgesia was not affected by carrageenan-induced inflammatory pain or the early phase of oxaliplatin neuropathy (a complication of cancer chemotherapy). However, the duration of analgesia was markedly shorter in the late phase of oxaliplatin neuropathy and in alcoholic neuropathy. A model of fibromyalgia syndrome produced by chronic unpredictable stress and proinflammatory cytokines also shortened analgesia duration, but so did the same stress alone. Therefore, since chronic pain can activate neuroendocrine stress axes, we tested whether they are involved in the attenuation of analgesic duration induced by these pain syndromes. Rats in which the sympathoadrenal axis was ablated by adrenal medullectomy showed normal duration pain-induced analgesia in groups with either late-phase oxaliplatin neuropathy, alcoholic neuropathy, or exposure to sound stress. These results support the suggestion that pain syndromes can modulate activity in endogenous pain control circuits and that this effect is sympathoadrenal dependent.
Pomeranchuk cooling of SU(2N) ultracold fermions in optical lattices.

We investigate the thermodynamic properties of a half-filled SU(2N) Hubbard model in the two-dimensional square lattice by the method of the determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulation, which is free of the fermion "sign problem. " The large number of hyperfine-spin components enhances spin fluctuations, which facilitates the Pomeranchuk cooling to temperatures comparable to the superexchange energy scale in the case of SU(6). Various physical quantities including entropy, charge fluctuations, and spin correlations are calculated.
Visual responses of ganglion cells of a New‐World primate, the capuchin monkey, Cebus apella

1 The genetic basis of colour vision in New‐World primates differs from that in humans and other Old‐World primates. Most New‐World primate species show a polymorphism; all males are dichromats and most females trichromats. 2 In the retina of Old‐World primates such as the macaque, the physiological correlates of trichromacy are well established. Comparison of the retinae in New‐ and Old‐World species may help constrain hypotheses as to the evolution of colour vision and the pathways associated with it. 3 Ganglion cell behaviour was recorded from trichromatic and dichromatic members of a New‐World species (the capuchin monkey, Cebus apella) and compared with macaque data. Despite some differences in quantitative detail (such as a temporal response extended to higher frequencies), results from trichromatic animals strongly resembled those from the macaque. 4 In particular, cells of the parvocellular (PC) pathway showed characteristic frequency‐dependent changes in responsivity to luminance and chromatic modulation, cells of the magnocellular (MC) pathway showed frequency‐doubled responses to chromatic modulation, and the surround of MC cells received a chromatic input revealed on changing the phase of heterochromatically modulated lights. 5 Ganglion cells of dichromats were colour‐blind versions of those of trichromats. 6 This strong physiological homology is consistent with a common origin of trichromacy in New‐ and Old‐World monkeys; in the New‐World primate the presence of two pigments in the middle‐to‐long wavelength range permits full expression of the retinal mechanisms of trichromatic vision.
E-Learning Usability Measurement-Using Technology Acceptance Model and Usability Test

With the convenience of wireless network and Web page browsing, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) merging with E-learning has become a new trend for mobile learning. However, the existing E-learning interface is designed for personal computer not a customized interface for portable device. In this study, we recruited 30 management college students for using PDA on campus with pre-specified E-learning tasks. While the participants performed a task, the clicks on web page linkage and eye browsing track were recorded for measuring the performance. At the end of test, the participants were required to fill out a Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) questionnaire for measuring the degree of acceptance level. The study finding shows that the participant’s different experience of using PDA will result in an inconsistency between the belief of technology acceptance and the performance of task execution. The reason can be explained by tester’s different recognition toward a general purpose task and a specific task measurement scope. The existing researches seldom studied on the measurement of usability test and TAM with a specific task execution. As a result, future research may continue to explore and validate the relationship between the belief of technology acceptance and the attributes of usability. Moreover, the list of usability problems of PDA operation, browser operation, and E-learning interface will be valuable reference for practitioner while developing a system interface.
Max-min Online Allocations with a Reordering Buffer

We consider online scheduling so as to maximize the minimum load, using a reordering buffer which can store some of the jobs before they are assigned irrevocably to machines. For m identical machines, we show an upper bound of Hm-1 + 1 for a buffer of size m - 1. A competitive ratio below Hm is not possible with any finite buffer size, and it requires a buffer of size Ω(m) to get a ratio of O(logm). For uniformly related machines, we show that a buffer of size m+1 is sufficient to get an approximation ratio of m, which is best possible for any finite sized buffer. Finally, for the restricted assignment model, we show lower bounds identical to those of uniformly related machines, but using different constructions. In addition, we design an algorithm of approximation ratio O(m) which uses a finite sized buffer. We give tight bounds for two machines in all the three models. These results sharply contrast to the (previously known) results which can be achieved without the usage of a reordering buffer, where it is not possible to get a ratio below an approximation ratio of m already for identical machines, and it is impossible to obtain an algorithm of finite approximation ratio in the other two models, even for m = 2. Our results strengthen the previous conclusion that a reordering buffer is a powerful tool and it allows a significant decrease in the competitive ratio of online algorithms for scheduling problems. Another interesting aspect of our results is that our algorithm for identical machines imitates the behavior of the greedy algorithm on (a specific set of) related machines, whereas our algorithm for related machines completely ignores the speeds until the end, and then only uses the relative order of the speeds.
Ontology learning by using text clustering techniques: Method for structuring taxonomies

: Finding an appropriate structure that represents the information contained in texts is not a trivial task. There are diﬀerent structures for modeling the knowledge, such as: ontologies, taxonomies, thesaurus, and semantic networks. Ontologies are especially useful because they support the exchange and sharing of information. An important task in ontology learning is to obtain a set of representative terms to model a domain and organize them as taxonomy. For getting the representative terms on a speciﬁc domain, the linguistic analysis on text is essential. The identiﬁcation of hypernymy/hyponymy relations between terms is imperative for building a taxonomy. This document introduces a novel mechanism to obtain representative terms and to ﬁnd hypernymy relations between them within a knowledge domain. The basis of this idea is the use of a triple term structure < subject > verb < object > as representation model. This approach uses a set of linguistic patterns to get representative terms and combines WordNet synsets and context information for building a query set. This query set is sent to a web search engine in order to retrieve the most representative hypernym for each term. An implementation of the approach has been applied to two types of content inputs, a document corpus and a set of short texts (tweets), both of them showing promising results. This report of activities corresponds to the second year of doctoral studies.
Pulsation at the tip of the first giant branch?

The first results of our ongoing near-infrared (NIR) survey of the variable red giants in the Large Magellanic Cloud, using the Infrared Survey Facility (IRSF) and the SIRIUS infrared camera, are presented. Many very red stars were detected and we found that most of them are variables. In the observed colour‐magnitude diagram (J −K, K ) and the stellar K magnitude distribution, the tip of the first giant branch (TRGB), where helium burning in the core starts, is clearly seen. Apart from the genuine AGB variables, we found many variable stars at luminosities around the TRGB. From this result, we infer that a substantial fraction of them are RGB variables.
Finding Diverse, High-Value Representatives on a Surface of Answers

In many applications, the system needs to selectively present a small subset of answers to users. The set of all possible answers can be seen as an elevation surface over a domain, where the elevation measures the quality of each answer, and the dimensions of the domain correspond to attributes of the answers with which similarity between answers can be measured. This paper considers the problem of finding a diverse set of k high-quality representatives for such a surface. We show that existing methods for diversified top-k and weighted clustering problems are inadequate for this problem. We propose k-DHR as a better formulation for the problem. We show that k-DHR has a submodular and monotone objective function, and we develop efficient algorithms for solving k-DHR with provable guarantees. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the usefulness of the results produced by k-DHR for applications in computational lead-finding and fact-checking, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithms.
Influence of estrogen depletion and salt loading on renal angiotensinogen expression in the mRen(2).Lewis strain.

The mRen(2). Lewis (mRen2) strain is an ANG II-dependent model of hypertension expressing marked sex differences in blood pressure and tissue injury that also exhibits estrogen and salt sensitivity. Because estrogen and salt influence angiotensinogen (AGT), circulating and renal expression of the protein were assessed in the mRen2 using a sensitive and specific ELISA. Hemizygous female and male mRen2 were placed on normal (1% NaCl, NS)- or high (8% NaCl, HS)-salt diets from 5 to 15 wk of age while a separate NS cohort was ovariectomized (OVX). The OVX mRen2 exhibited higher blood pressure (184 +/- 6 vs. 149 +/- 5 mmHg, n = 6), a 16-fold increase in urinary AGT (uAGT) (0.2 +/- 0.02 vs. 0.01 +/- 0.01 microg x kg(-1) x day(-1), P < 0.01), but no change in proteinuria (PROT). Excretion of AGT was correlated with blood pressure and PROT in the female groups. The HS diet led to higher blood pressure (224 +/- 8 mmHg), a 180-fold increase in uAGT (1.8 +/- 0.2 microg x kg(-1) x day(-1)), and increased PROT (98 +/- 9 vs. 7 +/- 1 mg x kg(-1) x day(-1)). Compared with females, NS males expressed higher excretion of uAGT (3.0 +/- 0.4 microg x kg(-1) x day(-1)) and PROT (32 +/- 5 mg x kg(-1) x day(-1)); both were increased eightfold with HS (uAGT: 23 +/- 3 microg x kg(-1) x day(-1); PROT: 285 +/- 28 mg x kg(-1) x day(-1)) without a change in blood pressure. Although uAGT was markedly higher in the OVX and HS groups, neither renal cortical AGT mRNA or protein expression was increased. Moreover, AGT release in cortical slices was similar for the NS and HS females. We conclude that the increase in uAGT with estrogen depletion or HS likely may be a biomarker for glomerular damage reflecting filtration of the circulating protein in the mRen2.
Association Pattern Mining for Product Specification Integration

As there are more and more online stores and shopping sites available on the Web, integration of product and shopping information provided by different sources has become more and more important, and attract attention of recent research in information integration. One of the fundamental problems is to integrate specifications for products of the same type from difference vendors so that they are described in a homogeneous and uniform way. Observe that specifications for products of the same type from different vendors can look quite different. Integration of them is a tedious and error-prone task. In this paper, we formulate product specification integration as the problem of text categorization, and propose an association pattern mining approach that can automatically generate pattern rules for each attribute. Association patterns are mined from n-grams generated from product specifications. However, mining of association patterns from n-grams can be very time inefficient as any substrings of a frequent string is also frequent. We propose substring pruning strategies that are specific to text data to improve the running time. Experiment shows that our approach is very time-efficient, and achieves classification accuracy higher than 0.95 for data sets collected for digital cameras, notebook PCs, and LCDs.
生涯諮商介入策略對國中學生認知複雜度與生涯自我效能的影響The effects of career intervention strategies for improving cognitive complexity and career self-efficacy of junior-high students

本研究的主要目的在於檢驗生涯諮商介入策略能否促進國中學生生涯建構的改變，以及增進生涯決定自我效能。 受試者之生涯建構系統為低分化、低統整與高衝突者，共計實驗組與控制組各18人（男女各半），接受包括（1）意義增強諮商之生涯方格；（2）職業組合卡；（3）電腦輔助職業輔導系統；（4）平衡單等四種認知訊息處理方案之生涯諮商介入策略。 研究結果發現，受試者的統整性與分化性並未如預期的提高，衝突性並未如預期的降低。 在分化性的部分，同屬實驗組的男、女國中生在分化性後測上有顯著差異，男學生的分化性高於女學生。 在生涯自我效能部分，本研究發現實驗組的生涯自我效能在三週後的追蹤評量分數高於控制組；在性別差異與實驗處理的交互作用方面的差異則不顯著。 關鍵詞 國中學生、生涯建構系統、認知訊息處理模式、生涯諮商、生涯自我效能 This was a third-year project in a three-year research program. In order to develop effective career intervention strategies using cognitive approach for junior high school students, this research was designed to: (1) develop a repertory grid technique for assessing the career construct system of junior high school students（first year）；(2) investigate the relationship between the career construct system and career maturity（second year）；and (3) develop career counseling strategies based on cognitive information processing approach for under developed students in terms of cognitive complexity (low career integration and career differentiation )（third year）. The present study tested the assumptions that career intervention based on cognitive information processing would affect career complexity and career self-efficacy. Thirty-six participants, who were pretested for levels of cognitive differentiation, integration, conflict and career self-efficacy, participated in either the experimental group or the control group. Participants in experimental group completed four counselor-administered one-to-one career interventions including (1) meaning-enhancement for Repertory grid, (2) Card sort, (3) Computer-assisted vocation information system, and (4) balance sheet. Post-test and 3-week follow-up assessments indicated that, participants did not significantly change their levels of cognitive differentiation, integration and conflict over time across groups. However, male participants increased their levels of differentiation significantly than that of female participants in the experimental group. In addition, participants in the experimental group increased in levels of career self-efficacy over three weeks follow-up. These effects were not qualified by significant interactions by sex, which suggested no differential impact of sex on career self-efficacy. Results are discussed in relation to the literature on cognitive complexity, cognitive development, career self-efficacy and cognitive information processing. Key Words junior high school students, career construct system, cognitive information processing model, career counseling, career self-efficacy
Understanding the growth of ESL paragraph writing skills and its relationships with linguistic features

This study sought to examine the development of paragraph writing skills of 116 English as a second language university students over the course of 12 weeks and the relationship between the linguistic features of students’ written texts as measured by Coh-Metrix – a computational system for estimating textual features such as cohesion and coherence – and the scores assigned by human raters. The raters’ reliability was investigated using many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM); the growth of students’ paragraph writing skills was explored using a factor-of-curves latent growth model (LGM); and the relationships between changes in linguistic features and writing scores across time were examined by path modelling. MFRM analysis indicates that despite several misfits, students’ and raters’ performances and scale’s functionality conformed to the expectations of MFRM, thus providing evidence of psychometric validity for the assessments. LGM shows that students’ paragraph writing skills develop steadily during the course. The Coh-Metrix indices have more predictive power before and after the course than during it, suggesting that Coh-Metrix may struggle to discriminate between some ability levels. Whether a Coh-Metrix index gains or loses predictive power over time is argued to be partly a function of whether raters maintain or lose sensitivity to the linguistic feature measured by that index in their own assessment as the course progresses.