Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
School Motivation in Secondary Schools

This study focuses on the school motivation of LGB (lesbian, gay, and bisexual) students in Flanders, the northern part of Belgium, a fairly LGB-friendly country. The authors hypothesize that LGB students in Flemish secondary schools are less motivated for school than heterosexual students because they experience less sense of school belonging and more discrimination. In addition, the authors investigate minority-specific factors that could influence the school motivation of LGB students. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses are performed on data from 1,745 secondary school students. The impact of minority stressors on the school motivation of LGB students is examined with hierarchical multiple regression analyses on data from 162 LGB students. Both analyses show that lesbian girls are less motivated to perform in school, but sense of belonging, perceived discrimination, and minority stressors do not explain this finding. Alternative explanations for these results and implications for further research are discussed.
Political Advertising Believability and Information Source Value during Elections

Abstract This study focuses on issues related to political advertising and electoral behavior through an examination of political advertising believability, the perceived value of information sources utilized and available in election campaigns, voter involvement, confidence, and emotion. The study was undertaken in a recent state election in Australia. Data were gathered from a sample of registered voters and analyzed using partial least squares. The results indicate that the negative campaign run by the opposition was believed as much as the positive campaign run by the incumbent government. Also, voter involvement, satisfaction, and emotion affected the believability of the positive campaign, but only involvement and satisfaction affected the negative campaign. The findings also indicate that non-paid media (television, newspapers) were valued more as sources of information by voters than were political advertising and the Internet.
The competitive environment of pay per view

A field test was used to assess the efficacy of pay per view (PPV) and how PPV compared to pay cable programming and videocassette recorder (VCR) rentals. Owners of VCRs perceived PPV differently than did nonowners of VCRs. Differences were observed along the dimensions of convenience, ease of operation, control, and perceived value. PPV perceptions did not vary by those currently subscribing to pay cable.
A Novel Peptide ELISA for Universal Detection of Antibodies to Human H5N1 Influenza Viruses

Background Active serologic surveillance of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus in humans and poultry is critical to control this disease. However, the need for a robust, sensitive and specific serologic test for the rapid detection of antibodies to H5N1 viruses has not been met. Methodology/Principal Findings Previously, we reported a universal epitope (CNTKCQTP) in H5 hemagglutinin (HA) that is 100% conserved in H5N1 human isolates and 96.9% in avian isolates. Here, we describe a peptide ELISA to detect antibodies to H5N1 virus by using synthetic peptide that comprises the amino acid sequence of this highly conserved and antigenic epitope as the capture antigen. The sensitivity and specificity of the peptide ELISA were evaluated using experimental chicken antisera to H5N1 viruses from divergent clades and other subtype influenza viruses, as well as human serum samples from patients infected with H5N1 or seasonal influenza viruses. The peptide ELISA results were compared with hemagglutinin inhibition (HI), and immunofluorescence assay and immunodot blot that utilize recombinant HA1 as the capture antigen. The peptide ELISA detected antibodies to H5N1 in immunized animals or convalescent human sera whereas some degree of cross-reactivity was observed in HI, immunofluorescence assay and immunodot blot. Antibodies to other influenza subtypes tested negative in the peptide-ELISA. Conclusion/Significance The peptide-ELISA based on the highly conserved and antigenic H5 epitope (CNTKCQTP) provides sensitive and highly specific detection of antibodies to H5N1 influenza viruses. This study highlighted the use of synthetic peptide as a capture antigen in rapid detection of antibodies to H5N1 in human and animal sera that is robust, simple and cost effective and is particularly beneficial for developing countries and rural areas.
Waveband Switching for Dynamic Traffic Demands in Multigranular Optical Networks

Waveband switching (WBS) in conjunction with multigranular optical cross-connect (MG-OXC) architectures can reduce the cost and complexity of OXCs. In this paper, we study the performance of different MG-OXC architectures under dynamic traffic. In the case with online incremental traffic, we compare two MG-OXC architectures in terms of the blocking probability of new lightpath requests and study the impact of port counts and traffic loads. We develop an online integer linear programming model (On-ILP), which minimizes the number of used ports and the request blocking probability, given a fixed number of wavelengths and MG-OXC architecture. The On-ILP optimizes the routing of new lightpaths so as to maximize lightpath grouping and reduce the port count given that existing traffic cannot be rearranged. We also propose a new efficient heuristic algorithm, called maximum overlap ratio (MOR) to satisfy incremental traffic and compare it with the On-ILP, first-fit, and random-fit algorithms. Our results and analysis indicate that using WBS with MG-OXCs can reduce the size (and, hence, the cost) of switching fabrics compared to using ordinary OXCs. Based on the results and observations in the incremental traffic case, we further study the performance of a particular MG-OXC architecture under fully dynamic or fluctuating traffic. Our simulations show that the proposed heuristic algorithm waveband assignment with path graph, which groups wavelengths to bands and uses wavelength converters efficiently under fluctuating traffic, significantly outperforms other heuristic algorithms.
Leaders in Context: Postpositivist Approaches to Understanding Educational Leadership

Leadership is one social scientific field that has escaped the ubiquitous "paradigm wars. " Leadership theorists have always attached great, perhaps exaggerated, significance to the agency of leaders. Traditional research methodologies (e.g., questionnaire surveys) normally associated with positivist approaches remain theorists' predominant modes of inquiry. Such methods, however, pay insufficient attention to the role played by institutional contexts in the definition and structuring of human agency. Two alternative methodologies that acknowledge the importance of context in the social construction of leaders and leadership systems are ethnography and biography. Each provides a better way for dealing with followers' implicit theories than mainstream conceptions of leadership. This article outlines the purposes of both modes of inquiry, discusses the problems and possibilities inherent in each, and provides illustrative examples of their advantages for theory building.
Privacy-Preserving Self-Helped Medical Diagnosis Scheme Based on Secure Two-Party Computation in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the continuing growth of wireless sensor networks in pervasive medical care, people pay more and more attention to privacy in medical monitoring, diagnosis, treatment, and patient care. On one hand, we expect the public health institutions to provide us with better service. On the other hand, we would not like to leak our personal health information to them. In order to balance this contradiction, in this paper we design a privacy-preserving self-helped medical diagnosis scheme based on secure two-party computation in wireless sensor networks so that patients can privately diagnose themselves by inputting a health card into a self-helped medical diagnosis ATM to obtain a diagnostic report just like drawing money from a bank ATM without revealing patients' health information and doctors' diagnostic skill. It makes secure self-helped disease diagnosis feasible and greatly benefits patients as well as relieving the heavy pressure of public health institutions.
Microtechnologies for studying the role of mechanics in axon growth and guidance

The guidance of axons to their proper targets is not only a crucial event in neurodevelopment, but also a potential therapeutic target for neural repair. Axon guidance is mediated by various chemo- and haptotactic cues, as well as the mechanical interactions between the cytoskeleton and the extracellular matrix (ECM). Axonal growth cones, dynamic ends of growing axons, convert external stimuli to biochemical signals, which, in turn, are translated into behavior, e.g., turning or retraction, via cytoskeleton–matrix linkages. Despite the inherent mechanical nature of the problem, the role of mechanics in axon guidance is poorly understood. Recent years has witnessed the application of a range of microtechnologies in neurobiology, from microfluidic circuits to single molecule force spectroscopy. In this mini-review, we describe microtechnologies geared towards dissecting the mechanical aspects of axon guidance, divided into three categories: controlling the growth cone microenvironment, stimulating growth cones with externally applied forces, and measuring forces exerted by the growth cones. A particular emphasis is given to those studies that combine multiple techniques, as dictated by the complexity of the problem.
Effective Product Ranking Method based on Opinion Mining

As internet is spreading out its bound, the demand of online transaction is also getting considerably increased. Now everyone wants fast and direct to home service without tacking any efforts. Online shopping is a way of effective transaction between money and goods which is done by end user without spending a large time span. Every product on online shopping website is associated with reviews which represents quality of that particular product. Every time the consumers are purchasing the product online by reading the product review. But reading all these reviews before buying product, consumes more time. Hence there is need of some systematic analysis of product reviews which helps to the consumer to find effective product among millions of the products. Here we have proposed a novel approach to rank the product efficiently by mining the genuine reviews of the product. But major problem arises when there is assignment of fake review given by anonymous user. So this system will provide methodology which will allow only those users to give review who have purchased product from that website. Other users are not allowed to give review. This will reduce the wrong reviewing of product and customer will get reliable product.
Psychometric Analysis of the Family Empowerment Scale

The Family Empowerment Scale (FES), a 34-item rating scale, was developed to measure empowerment in families with children who have emotional, behavioral, or mental disorders. This study investigated the psychometric characteristics of the FES in a sample of 228 families whose children had serious emotional disturbance or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The families rated each item on a 5-point Likert-type rating scale, and the ratings were subjected to a number of psychometric analyses. The results of factor analyses, with varimax rotation, provided a conceptually meaningful four-factor solution. Congruence between the four factors derived in this study and the corresponding factors in the original FES psychometric analysis was high, with congruence coefficients ranging between . 88 and . 98. Obtained internal consistency estimates of reliability ranged from . 78 to . 89 for the four subscales, and the split-half estimate of reliability for the FES was . 93. The results indicate that the FES has robust psychometric properties and may be useful in assessing the empowerment status of families whose children are handicapped.
Sensitivity to Grammatical and Sociophonetic Variability in Perception

Department of Linguistics, University of Ca nterbury, New Zealand; katiedrager@gmail.com Sociolinguistic ethnographies provide insights into how individuals manipulate both linguistic and non-linguistic variants to construct their identities, and they allow examination of social categories beyond those traditionally employed (Eckert, 1989). Recent research using experimental methodologies has shown that social and phonetic information are linked in the mind; social information attributed to a speaker can be influenced by altering which phonetic variants perceivers are exposed to, even when differences between the variants are extremely subtle (Campbell-Kibler, 2006). In addition to socially-conditioned variation, there is evidence that phonetic realizations in production vary depending on the grammatical function of a word (Plug, 2005; Hay & Bresnan, 2006), yet it is not known whether listeners can actively exploit this phonetic variation in speech perception. This paper reports on two perception experiments conducted to determine whether perceivers’ sensitivity to fine phonetic detail can assist in extraction of both grammatical and social meaning from the signal. During a year-long ethnographic study conducted at an all girls’ high school in New Zealand, I observed a binary division among the girls depending on where they ate lunch: in the common room (CR) or not (NCR). Acoustic phonetic analysis was conducted on the girls’ tokens of the word
Self-Handicapping in the Classroom: The Effects of Claimed Self-Handicaps on Responses to Academic Failure

The hypothesis that self-handicapping is in the service of self-esteem protection was examined in a naturalistic setting. College students were assessed for individual differences in self-handicapping and attributional style at the beginning of the term. Prior to the first exam they had an opportunity to claim handicaps that might hamper their performance on the exam. After receiving feedback that they had performed poorly on the exam, all students completed measures of mood, self-esteem, and performance attributions. Support for the hypothesis was found for men but not for women. Level of self-handicapping interacted with sex of subject such that high self handicapping among men predicted claimed handicapping prior to the exam and more external attributions for poor performance and higher self-esteem following feedback. Among women, the relations between self-handicapping tendencies and claimed handicaps and performance attributions were weaker than for men. In addition, unlike men's, women's post feedba.
Comparison of manual and automated leukocyte counts for determination of the absolute neutrophil count: application to a pediatric oncology clinic.

BACKGROUND Determination of the absolute neutrophil count (ANC) is a critical test prior to initiation of chemotherapy and is a standard component of cancer therapy protocols. Automated determination of this parameter potentially shortens the turnaround time necessary between specimen phlebotomy and chemotherapy infusion in an outpatient setting. However, there are certain factors that can lead to spuriously elevated or lowered ANCs, possibly leading to inappropriate dosage. We therefore compared ANC results in a series of samples in which both automated and manual results were available. PROCEDURE Sets of 111 specimens, tested over a 1-month period, had matched automated and manual ANC results available for initial retrospective analysis. An additional set of 35 specimens with ANCs of <1.5 x 10(9)/L were subsequently analyzed in a similar fashion. Automated ANC results were obtained with a Cell-Dyn 3500 (Abbott Diagnostics, Santa Clara, CA, USA) automated hematology analyzer, and manual ANC results were obtained using 100 cell differentials performed by 1 of 13 medical technologists. Results were tabulated and analyzed using standard linear regression and scatter plot analyses. RESULTS Of the initial 111 specimens, automated ANC values ranged from 0.16-14.2 x 10(9)/L (median=2.6 x 10(9)/L), as compared with 0.24-13.9 x 10(9)/L (median 3.0 x 10(9)/L) for manual ANC values (R(2) = 0.99; SE=0.49). Differences between the ANC values ranged from -55 to +33% (SD=14%) of the manual value. Of the second set of 35 specimens, regression analysis yielded an R(2) value of 0.92, with a SE of 0.11. Both data sets yielded acceptable degrees of variation on scatter plot analyses. CONCLUSIONS Automated ANC values appear adequate for determining suitability for chemotherapy and lessen the turnaround time between specimen phlebotomy and result verification.
Rain-Use-Efficiency: What it Tells us about the Conflicting Sahel Greening and Sahelian Paradox

Abstract: Rain Use Efficiency (RUE), defined as Aboveground Net Primary Production (ANPP) divided by rainfall, is increasingly used to diagnose land degradation. Yet, the outcome of RUE monitoring has been much debated since opposite results were found about land degradation in the Sahel region. The debate is fueled by methodological issues, especially when using satellite remote sensing data to estimate ANPP, and by differences in the ecological interpretation. An alternative method which solves part of these issues relies on the residuals of ANPP regressed against rainfall (―ANPP residuals‖). In this paper, we use long-term field observations of herbaceous vegetation mass collected in the Gourma region in Mali together with remote sensing data (GIMMS-3g Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) to estimate ANPP, RUE, and the ANPP residuals, over the period 1984–2010. The residuals as well as RUE do not reveal any trend over time over the Gourma region, implying that vegetation is resilient over that period, when data are aggregated at the Gourma scale. We find no conflict between field-derived and satellite-derived results in terms of trends. The nature (linearity) of the ANPP/rainfall relationship is investigated and is found to have no impact on the RUE and residuals interpretation. However, at odds with a stable RUE, an increased run-off coefficient has
Promoter exchange between ompF and ompC, genes for osmoregulated major outer membrane proteins of Escherichia coli K-12

Expression of the ompF and ompC genes coding for major outer membrane proteins OmpF and OmpC is regulated in opposite directions by medium osmolarity. Chimera genes were constructed by a reciprocal exchange of the promoter-signal sequence region between the two genes. The chimera gene construction was designed so that the proteins synthesized by these genes were essentially the same as the OmpC and OmpF proteins. Studies with the chimera genes demonstrated that the osmoregulation of the OmpF-OmpC synthesis was promoter dependent. They also showed that cells grew normally even when the osmoregulation took place in opposite directions. The effects of the ompR2 and envZ mutations, which suppress ompC and ompF expression, respectively, also became reversed. The reduced expression was still subject to the promoter-controlled osmoregulation. Based on these observations, the mechanism of regulation of the ompF-ompC gene expression and its physiological importance are discussed.
Toxic action of etoposide on mouse peritoneal macrophages and its modulation by interleukin 3

In the present work, we have studied the toxic action of etoposide on mouse peritoneal macrophages. First, we have determined the induction of DNA fragmentation by this antitumour compound. To study the possible influence of interleukin 3 on the effects of etoposide on mouse macrophages, we studied intracellular protein phosphorylation induced by interleukin 3. After incubation of the cells in the presence of interleukin 3, increased phosphorylation levels of proteins of estimated molecular weights of around 29 000, 34 000, 50 000 and 61 000 daltons were observed. We have also investigated a possible influence of interleukin 3 on DNA degradation induced by etoposide. The changes of Bax levels induced by etoposide that we have observed seemed to be modulated by this cytokine. From these results, a possible role of interleukin 3 can be suggested in the attenuation of some toxic effects produced by etoposide in mouse peritoneal macrophages. Thus, a therapeutic application of interleukin 3 on antitumour treatments in cells from the mononuclear phagocytic system might be proposed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Sorafenib in progressive castrate-resistant prostate cancer. Can we talk about a new therapeutic option?

Castrate-resistant prostate cancer represents a significant clinical challenge. Currently, the standard treatment for patients with castrate-resistant prostate cancer is chemotherapy, after which patients only receive symptomatic treatment. The available results of phase II clinical trials of sorafenib in patients with hormone-refractory prostate cancer indicate that, despite a relatively short progression-free survival, the treatment may be associated with good outcomes in terms of overall survival and maintenance of a good quality of life. The study presents the authors’ critical opinions and observations about the usefulness of sorafenib in patients with prostate cancer.
An analytical method for centroid computing and its application in wireless localization

This paper presents an analytical method for one to compute the centroid of the overlapping area of two intersecting circles with arbitrary orientation. We also extend the solution to estimate the centroid of the overlapping area of three intersecting circles. Furthermore, based on the analytical solution of centroid computing, we propose a cell-based localization technique, namely Centroid Based Location (CBL) for wireless sensor networks. CBL works by finding the centroid of intersection of any two circles. In particular, we study the effect of power level mismatch among anchors. Simulation results show that CBL can significantly improve the accuracy while reducing the transmission power of anchors.
Optimizing the Ant Clustering Model Based on K-Means Algorithm

Ant clustering is one of effective clustering methods. Compares to other clustering methods, ant clustering algorithm has one outstanding advantage and one disadvantage. The advantage is that the total numbers of cluster is generated automatically ,and the disadvantage is that its cluster result is random and its result is influenced by the input data and the parameters, which leads low quality of its cluster result. In this paper, we propose an improved ant clustering algorithm based on K-Means, which optimizes the rules of ant clustering algorithm¿In our system, we also decide the proper values of parameters Pdel and Iter by training the training datasets before we cluster. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has a good performance.