Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Differentiated Instruction and Enrichment Pedagogy on Reading Achievement in Five Elementary Schools

This experimental study examined the effect of a differentiated, enriched reading program on students’ oral reading fluency and comprehension using the schoolwide enrichment model–reading (SEM-R). Treatment and control conditions were randomly assigned to 63 teachers and 1,192 second through fifth grade students across five elementary schools. Using multilevel modeling, significant differences favoring the SEM-R were found in reading fluency in two schools (Cohen’s d effect sizes of .33 and .10) and in reading comprehension in the high-poverty urban school (Cohen’s d = .27), with no achievement differences in the remaining schools. These results demonstrate that an enrichment reading approach, with differentiated instruction and less whole group instruction, was as effective as or more effective than a traditional whole group basal approach.
Anonymity in group support systems research: new conceptualization and measure

By reducing inhibition, enhancing participation, and by increasing the number of ideas generated, anonymity is expected to improve communication and decision making and to enhance group performance. However, empirical evidence is inconclusive and provides a rather confusing understanding of the real effects of anonymity in group support systems (GSS). This paper addresses the state of empirical findings by examining the impacts of anonymity on groups through a new conceptualization of anonymity. In particular, this paper draws on the literature in social psychology and argues that anonymity has been too narrowly conceptualized as non-identification of participants, when in fact its most important dimension is subjective and perceptual. Measures of the new concept are presented and preliminary tests are conducted. This paper also argues that a better understanding of the effects of anonymity could be achieved by broadening the scope of research to include other situational factors such as attentional and accountability cues. A contingency approach for studying the effects of anonymity is presented.
Amantadine in the Treatment of Pathological Gambling: A Case Report

Despite almost a decade of intense research, effective treatment strategies for Pathological Gambling (PG) remain very challenging. This paper details a case report suggesting that the treatment of PG may benefit from the use of the non-specific glutamate blocker amantadine. The drug was well-tolerated and effective, leading to a 43–64% reduction in severity of gambling symptoms (as measured with G-SAS). Our result is discussed in the context of the glutamatergic hypothesis of addiction and in light of previous observations on the potential impact of glutamatergic agents in the treatment of PG. The role of the dopaminergic system, and its interaction with the glutamatergic system, is also explored. Further studies are required to define the true benefits of amantadine for the treatment of PG.
Perspective shadow maps

Shadow maps are probably the most widely used means for the generation of shadows, despite their well known aliasing problems. In this paper we introduce perspective shadow maps, which are generated in normalized device coordinate space, i.e., after perspective transformation. This results in important reduction of shadow map aliasing with almost no overhead. We correctly treat light source transformations and show how to include all objects which cast shadows in the transformed space. Perspective shadow maps can directly replace standard shadow maps for interactive hardware accelerated rendering as well as in high-quality, offline renderers.
Synchronisation of Biological Clock Signals - Capturing Coupled Repressilators from a Control Systems Perspective

Exploration of chronobiological systems emerges as a growi ng research field within bioinformatics focusing on various applications in medicine, agriculture, and mate ri l sciences. From a systems biological perspective, the question arises whether biological control systems for regulation of oscillative signals and their technical counterparts utilise similar mechanisms. If so, modelling approaches and parameterisation adopted from building blocks can help to identify general components for clock synchronisation. Phase-locked loops could be an interesting candidate in this context. Both, biology and en gineering, can benefit from a unified view. In a first experimental study, we analyse a model of coupled repressil ators. We demonstrate its ability to synchronise clock signals in a monofrequential manner. Several oscilla tors initially deviate in phase difference and frequency with respect to explicit reaction and diffusion rate s. Accordingly, the duration of the synchronisation process depends on dedicated reaction and diffusion parame ters whose settings still lack to be sufficiently captured by comprehensive tools like the Kuramoto approach .
The prevalence of and risk factors for diabetes mellitus and impaired glucose tolerance among Tibetans in China: a cross-sectional study

The prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) and impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) has increased worldwide, although their prevalence and determinants among Tibetans are currently unknown. We thus aimed to explore the prevalence of and risk factors for DM and IGT among Tibetans in China. In 2011, 1659 Tibetan adults (aged ≥ 18 years) from Changdu, China, were recruited to this cross-sectional study. They completed a questionnaire and underwent physical examinations and laboratory testing to assess risk factors for DM and IGT. The age-standardized prevalence of DM and IGT among Tibetans was 6.2% and 19.7%, respectively. A higher annual family income, alcohol consumption, and higher fasting plasma glucose (FPG) level were risk factors for DM, with odds ratio (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) of 3.48 (1.43–8.48; P = 0.006) for those with family incomes of > 1600 USD/year, 3.06 (1.31–7.17; P = 0.010) for alcohol consumption, and 13.99 (7.76–25.22; P < 0.001) for FPG level. However, altitude was found to be negatively associated with the risk of DM; compared to individuals living at < 3500 meters, the risk of DM decreased by 65% for those living at 3500–3999 meters (P = 0.034) and by 89% for those living at ≥ 4000 meters (P = 0.015). Age, FPG levels, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels were significantly associated with IGT among Tibetans aged ≥ 18 years. These findings suggest that the prevalence of DM in Tibetans may continue to increase in future decades following rapid economic development, and it is crucial to address the management of conventional risk factors for reducing the disease burden of DM among Tibetans.
Time Devours Things: How Impulsivity and Time Affect Temporal Decisions in Pathological Gamblers

Impulsivity is associated with several psychiatric disorders in which the loss of control of a specific behavior determines the syndrome itself. One particularly interesting population characterized by reported high impulsivity and problematic decision-making are those diagnosed with pathological gambling. However the association between impulsivity and decision making in pathological gambling has been only partially confirmed until now. We tested 23 normal controls and 23 diagnosed pathological gamblers in an intertemporal choice task, as well as other personality trait measurements. Results showed that gamblers scored higher on impulsivity questionnaires, and selected a higher percentage of impatient choices (higher percentage of smaller, sooner rewards), when compared to normal controls. Moreover, gamblers were faster in terms of reaction times at selecting the smaller, sooner options and discounted rewards more rapidly over time. Importantly, regression analyses clarified that self-reported measures of impulsivity played a significant role in biasing decisions towards small but more rapidly available rewards. In the present study we found evidence for impulsivity in personality traits and decisions in pathological gamblers relative to controls. We conclude by speculating on the need to incorporate impulsivity and decision biases in the conceptualization of pathological gambling for a better understanding and treatment of this pathology.
Koppitz Emotional Indicators in the Human-Figure Drawings of Children With Learning Problems

Human-figure drawings of 316 public school pupils, half of whom were referred for counseling services, were analyzed using the Koppitz system of indicators of emotionality. Subjects in the study were considered to be either learning disabled, educationally handicapped, behavior disordered, or ineligible for special education services on the basis of their most recent psychological evaluation. The results demonstrated that the counseling-referred children's drawings contained a higher number of many of the Koppitz emotional indicators than did the drawings of nonreferred children. However, school psychologists were not able to distinguish the drawings of counseling-referred pupils from those of the nonreferred using clinical inspection. The results of a discriminant function analysis suggested that the learning-disabled students could be distinguished from the other groups on the basis of the type of emotional indicator present in their protocols. A factor analysis of the data produced one easily interpretable factor comprised of emotional indicators for missing body parts within the drawings.
Topic - Review of Cloud Computing in Fault Tolerant Environment With Efficient Energy Consumption

In this research paper, the exhaustive study has been done on fault tolerance in cloud, fault tolerance's types, limitations are introduced. Further, if fault tolerance is implemented then how much dependable it would be for the real time applications. When multiple instances of an application are running on several machines and one of the machine goes down, there is a need to implement an autonomic fault tolerance technique that can handle such types of faults. The Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) is a measure of statistical dispersion and is more robust estimator of scale than the sample variance or standard deviation, as it behaves better with distributions without a mean or variance and being more resilient to outliers in a data set than the standard deviation.There were various tools like Hadoop, Azzure, HAproxy etc via which fault tolerance can be applied. Scheduling is one of the very important components which can be used to detect performance on the cloud.
Hybrid beamforming with finite-resolution phase shifters for large-scale MIMO systems

In large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, high cost and high power consumption of RF chains typically prohibit the use of traditional baseband beamforming which requires one distinct radio-frequency (RF) chain per antenna. One possible architecture to reduce the number of RF chains is hybrid beamforming in which the overall beamformer consists of a concatenation of an analog RF beamformer implemented using phase shifters (PSs) and a low-dimensional baseband digital beamformer. However, conventional hybrid beamforming designs require high-resolution PSs, which are expensive. In this paper, we consider transceiver design for maximizing the spectral efficiency of a large-scale MIMO system with hybrid beamforming architecture where only finite-resolution PSs are available at both ends. We propose a heuristic transceiver design for the critical case where the number of RF chains is equal to the number of data streams. We show that the proposed hybrid beamforming design can achieve a rate close to that of optimal exhaustive search. We also suggest how to generalize the algorithm for the setting where the number of RF chains exceeds the number of data streams. We show that the generalized algorithm can use the extra RF chains to significantly improve the system performance in the case of low-resolution PSs.
Adaptive Probabilistic Proactive Routing for Dense MANETs

Conventional proactive routing protocols, due to their inherent nature based on shortest paths, select longer links which are amenable to rapid breakages as nodes move around. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive probabilistic approach to handle routing information in dense mobile ad hoc networks in a way to improve the proactive routing pertinence as a function of network dynamics. We first propose a new proactive routing framework based on probabilistic decisions and a generic model to compute the existence probabilities of nodes and links. Then, we present a distributed algorithm to collect the cartography of the network. This cartography is used to instantiate the existence probabilities. Conducted simulations show that our proposal yields substantially better routing validity. Nonetheless, it amounts to much longer routes. We proposed then a bounding technique to adapt and overcome this side effect and defined two probabilistic proactive routing variants. Conducted simulations show that our proposed bounded probabilistic proactive routing schemes outperform conventional routing protocols and yield up to 66 percent increase in throughput.
The effect of power-law degrees on the navigability of small worlds: [extended abstract]

We analyze decentralized routing in small-world networks that combine a wide variation in node degrees with a notion of spatial embedding. Specifically, we consider a variation of Kleinberg's augmented-lattice model (STOC 2000), where the number of long-range contacts for each node is drawn from a power-law distribution. This model is motivated by the experimental observation that many "real-world" networks have power-law degrees. In such networks, the exponent α of the power law is typically between 2 and 3. We prove that, in our model, for this range of values, 2 < α < 3, the expected number of steps of greedy routing from any source to any target is O(logα-1 n) steps. This bound is tight in a strong sense. Indeed, we prove that the expected number of steps of greedy routing for a uniformly-random pair of source-target nodes is Ω(logα-1 n) steps. We also show that for α < 2 or α ≥ 3, greedy routing performs in Θ(log2 n) xexpected steps, and for α = 2, Θ(log1+ε n) expected steps are required, where 1/3 ≤ ε ≤ 1/2. To the best of our knowledge, these results are the first to formally quantify the effect of the power-law degree distribution on the navigability of small worlds. Moreover, they show that this effect is significant. In particular, as α approaches 2 from above, the expected number of steps of greedy routing in the augmented lattice with power-law degrees approaches the square-root of the expected number of steps of greedy routing in the augmented lattice with fixed degrees, although both networks have the same average degree.
Ascorbic acid assays of individual neurons and neuronal tissues using capillary electrophoresis with laser-induced fluorescence detection.

Ascorbic acid is an important cellular metabolite involved in many biochemical pathways. A method to quantitate ascorbic acid and dehydroascorbic acid in individual neurons and neuronal tissues is described with detection limits of 320 pM (430 zmol). The method uses microvial sampling, derivatization with 4,5-dimethyl-1,2-phenylenediamine, capillary electrophoresis separation, and laser-induced fluorescence detection and quantifies the ascorbic acid and dehydroascorbic acid levels with less than a 15-min total analysis time including sample preparation and derivatization. Ascorbic acid and dehydroascorbic acid levels are measured using functionally characterized and identified neurons of Aplysia californica, Pleurobranchaea californica, and Lymnaea stagnalis -three well-recognized models in cellular and system neuroscience. Multiple assays of a particular identified neuron (e.g., metacerebral cells from Aplysia) show a high level of reproducibility, while endogenous intracellular concentrations of ascorbate are neuron-specific. Ascorbic acid concentrations in the neurons studied range from 0.19 to 6.2 mM for Aplysia and 0.12 to 0.22 mM for Lymnaea. In contrast, concentrations of ascorbic acid observed in heterogeneous tissues such as ganglia (with connective tissues, glia, blood vessels, neuropile, and areas with intercellular spaces), 4-190 microM, are significantly lower than the single-cell values.
Physical meaning of the natural orbitals: Analysis of exactly solvable models

We investigate the suitability of natural orbitals as a basis for describing many-body excitations. We analyze to which extent the natural orbitals describe both bound as well as ionized excited states and show that depending on the specifics of the excited state the ground-state natural orbitals may yield a good approximation. We show that the success of reduced density-matrix functional theory in describing molecular dissociation lies in the flexibility provided by fractional occupation numbers while the role of the natural orbitals is minor.
A computational small-signal modeling technique for switch mode power converter

A computationally efficient method for obtaining the small-signal model of a switch mode power converter operating in the continuous conduction mode is presented. To apply this proposed technique, the only analytical work involved is the derivation of the two switched circuits of a given switch mode power converter in state-space representation form, and the developed computer simulation program provides a good approximated small-signal model in the form of open-loop Bode plots. The proposed modeling technique is applied to the buck converter and the derived model is compared with the small-signal model obtained using the statespace averaging technique. To further verify the validity of the proposed modeling technique, a 24W buck converter was built to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling technique.
The impact of pain-related fear on neural pathways of pain modulation in chronic low back pain

Introduction: Pain-related fear plays a substantial role in chronic low back pain (LBP) by amplifying the experienced disability. Related dysfunctional emotions and cognitions may also affect sensory aspects of pain through a modulatory pathway in which the periaqueductal gray (PAG) and the amygdala play key roles. Objectives: We therefore hypothesized a differential amygdala-PAG functional connectivity (FC) in patients with chronic LBP that is modulated by the degree of pain-related fear. Methods: We used data of a previously reported fMRI study where 20 chronic LBP patients (7 females, mean age = 39.35) and 20 healthy controls (12 females, mean age = 32.10) were asked to observe video clips showing potentially harmful and neutral activities for the back. Pain-related fear was assessed using the Tampa Scale of kinesiophobia (TSK) and Fear Avoidance Beliefs questionnaires (FABQ). Generalized psychophysiological interactions were used to reveal task-based FC. Results: Compared to controls, patients exhibited a significant decrease in amygdala-PAG-FC (P = 0.022) during observation of harmful activities, but not of neutral activities. Furthermore, amygdala-PAG-FC correlated negatively with Tampa Scale of kinesiophobia scores in patients (R2 = 0.28, P = 0.01) but not with Fear Avoidance Beliefs questionnaires scores. Discussion: Our findings might indicate a maladaptive psychobiological interaction in chronic LBP patients characterized by a disrupted amygdala-PAG-FC that is modulated by the degree of pain-related fear. These results shed new light on brain mechanisms underlying psychological factors that may have pronociceptive effects in chronic LBP.
Analysis of DTI-Derived Tensor Metrics in Differential Diagnosis between Low-grade and High-grade Gliomas

Purpose: It is critical and difficult to accurately discriminate between high- and low-grade gliomas preoperatively. This study aimed to ascertain the role of several scalar measures in distinguishing high-grade from low-grade gliomas, especially the axial diffusivity (AD), radial diffusivity (RD), planar tensor (Cp), spherical tensor (Cs), and linear tensor (Cl) derived from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Materials and Methods: Fifty-three patients with pathologically confirmed brain gliomas (21 low-grade and 32 high-grade) were included. Contrast-enhanced T1-weighted images and DTI were performed in all patients. The AD, RD, Cp, Cs, and Cl values in the tumor zone, peritumoral edema zone, white matter (WM) adjacent to edema and contralateral normal-appearing white matter (NAWM) were calculated. The DTI parameters and tumor grades were statistically analyzed, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was also performed. Results: The DTI metrics in the affected hemisphere showed significant differences from those in the NAWM, except for the AD values in the tumor zone and the RD values in WM adjacent to edema in the low-grade groups, as well as the Cp values in WM adjacent to edema in the high-grade groups. AD in the tumor zone as well as Cs and Cl in WM adjacent to edema revealed significant differences between the low- and high-grade gliomas. The areas under the curve (Az) of all three metrics were greater than 0.5 in distinguishing low-grade from high-grade gliomas by ROC curve analysis, and the best DTI metric was Cs in WM adjacent to edema (Az: 0.692). Conclusion: AD in the tumor zone as well as Cs and Cl in WM adjacent to edema will provide additional information to better classify gliomas and can be used as non-invasive reliable biomarkers in glioma grading.
Spilled Oil Tracking Autonomous Buoy

We are developing Spilled Oil Tracking Autonomous Buoy System (SOTABS), which is composed of a land base and several spilled oil tracking autonomous buoys (SOTAB), to detect and track spilled oil autonomously, sending real time data around them to the land base. This paper firstly deals with steady sailing performance of SOTAB-II with a sailboat shape for tracking spilled oil on the sea surface by controlling the rudder angle, and the area and direction of the sail, and then sea trials using a model of SOTAB-II with a cylindrical buoy shape to obtain its fundamental characteristics on motion.
Magical coronations of graphs

A( p,q )g raphG is called edge-magic if there exists a bijective function f : V (G) ∪ E(G) →{ 1, 2,. ,p+ q} such that f (u )+ f (v )+ f (uv )i s constant for any edge uv of G . M oreover,G is said to be super edgemagic if f (V (G)) = {1, 2,. ,p}. Every super edge-magic (p,q )g raph is harmonious, sequential and felicitous whenever it is a tree or satisfies q ≥ p. In this paper, we prove that the n-crown, a cycle with n pendant edges attached at each vertex, is super edge-magic for any positive integer n, and thus extend what was known about the harmoniousness, sequentialness and felicitousness of such graphs. We also present three results on attaching pendant edges to the vertices of certain super edge-magic graphs to obtain more super edge-magic graphs.
Diffusion in Social Networks

We consider processes in which norms of behavior are transmetted through social of geographic networks.Agents adopt behaviors based on a combination of their inherent payoff and their local popularity (the number of neighbors who have adopted them) subject to some random error. Extending work of Blume (1993,1995), Ellison (1993), and Morris (1997), we characterize the long-run dynamics of such processes in terms of the geometry of the network, but without placing a priori restriction on the network structure.
Index of Productive Syntax

ABSTRACT A new method for evaluating the grammatical complexity of preschool natural language corpora is introduced. In the Index of Productive Syntax, occurrences of 56 syntactic and morphological forms are counted, yielding a total score and subscores for noun phrases, verb phrases, questions/negations, and sentence structures. Development of the index and analyses of its reliability and age-sensitivity when applied to language samples of 2- to 4-year-olds are described. Some advantages and limitations of the index as a research and clinical instrument are also discussed.