Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comparison of methods for evaluating schools with respect to growth of students in subpopulations in three-level models

ABSTRACT Although there is recognition that there may be differential outcomes for groups of students within schools, examination of outcomes for subgroups presents challenges to researchers and policymakers. It complicates analytic procedures, particularly when the number of students per school in the subgroup is small. We explored five alternatives for applying a three-level multilevel growth modeling framework to examine school-level achievement for a select subgroup of students (students with disabilities) using a large longitudinal database tracking reading achievement. The alternatives vary in terms of use of subgroup only or all student data, use of student-level predictors, and method of linking student or school-level outcomes to school effectiveness indices. Correlations from . 57 to . 99 among alternatives suggest the choice of how to derive school-level outcomes for a subgroup has consequences for inferences about the school’s effectiveness with the subgroup. Researchers’ assumptions and data available should guide the selection of an approach.
A highly directive array of nature‐inspired based patch antennas

A Ku‐band satellite application‐based printed planar array is conferred in this article. The proposed array's sole radiator design is inspired by the essence and based on a nature‐inspired flower. The solitary element offers enormous directivity and insignificant cross‐polarization (x‐pol.) level in the half‐power beam‐width (HPBW) portion of the main beam's path. Networks within the array are built to have low loss and fast bandwidth response times for the corporate feed network. The sole antenna has a very high gain and a substantial impedance bandwidth of 11.52 dBi and 528 MHz, respectively, and resonates at 17.96 GHz. The array produces 16.83 dBi gain and 764 MHz impedance bandwidth at the resonant frequency of 17.97 GHz. In the direction of the primary beam's propagation, the prototyped array delivered −42 dB of measured x‐pol. level. For evaluating the prototypes' electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), the derived correction factors (CF) are 42.54 and 39.56 dB/m, respectively. In addition, the proposed prototypes have good radiation efficiency of 92% and 90%, respectively. The measured result of the prototype is quite comparable to that of its modeled equivalent.
Tracking of physical activity and sedentary behavior of adolescents in different domains

This study aimed to verify the tracking of physical activity and sedentary behavior in different domains during adolescence. This longitudinal study involved 265 subjects (boys: 52.8%) with an initial mean age of 13.9 (± 1.2) years. Physical activity and sedentary behavior were verified using a questionnaire. The achievement of ≥ 150 min. week-1 of moderate-to-vigorous intensity sport and/or physical exercise for ≥ 1 month was adopted as sufficiently active. The data were collected on 2 occasions, with an average interval of 3 years. The description of the results used the relative frequency and Binary Logistic Regression was used to estimate the crude and adjusted odds ratios (95% confidence intervals). Current physical activity (adjusted odds ratios = 3.05; 95% confidence intervals: 1.77 - 5.26) and sedentary behavior (adjusted odds ratios = 1.81; 95% confidence intervals: 1.03 - 3.19) appear to be significantly influenced by previous behavior, except for light-intensity physical activity. Only 12.8% of the participants remained sufficiently active for sport and/or physical exercise. Practice for at least one month of sport and/or physical exercise at baseline was a predictor of practice in the follow-up, both considering participation for at least one month (adjusted odds ratios = 2.81; 95% confidence intervals: 1.37 - 5.79) and for four months (adjusted odds ratios = 2.47; 95% confidence intervals: 1.17 - 5.24) in the follow-up. Being sufficiently active at baseline increased the chance of being sufficiently active in the follow-up during adolescence. Interventions providing sufficient sport and/or physical exercise could positively influence the chances of practice in the future. For light-intensity physical activity interventions, strategies targeting adherence seem especially relevant
Direct Absorption and Photoacoustic Spectroscopy for Gas Sensing and Analysis: A Critical Review

Optical spectroscopy has a broad scientific basis in chemistry, physics, and material science, with diverse applications in medicine, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and environmental monitoring. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometers and tunable laser spectrometers (TLS) are key devices for measuring optical spectra. Superior performance in terms of sensitivity, selectivity, accuracy, and resolution is required for applications in gas sensing. This review deals with gas measurement based on either direct optical absorption spectroscopy or photoacoustic spectroscopy. Both approaches are applicable to FTIR spectroscopy or TLS. In photoacoustic spectroscopy, cantilever‐based photoacoustic spectroscopy is focused due its high performance. A literature survey is conducted revealing the recent technological advances. Theoretical fundamental detection limits are derived for TLS and FTIR, considering both direct absorption and photoacoustic spectroscopies. A theoretical comparison reveals which technology performs better. The minimum normalized absorption coefficient and normalized noise equivalent absorption coefficient appear as key parameters for this comparison. For TLS‐based systems, direct absorption spectroscopy is found to be the best for lower laser power and longer path length. For FTIR‐based systems, direct absorption is found to be the best for low temperature sources, higher spectrometer throughput, faster mirror velocity, and longer gas cells.
Childcare, labor supply, and business development Experimental Evidence from Uganda

G2LM|LIC Working Paper No. 67 | June 2022 Childcare, Labor Supply, and Business Development: Experimental Evidence from Uganda* In a field experiment in Uganda, mothers of young children are randomly offered a childcare subsidy, an equivalent cash grant, both or nothing. Childcare leads to a 44 percent increase in household income, which is at least as large as the impact of the cash grant and driven by an increase in mothers’ business revenues and fathers’ wage earnings. The childcare subsidy also improves child development while the cash grant does not. Overall, our findings demonstrate that childcare subsidies can be an effective policy to simultaneously promote child development and reduce poverty in a low-income context. JEL Classification: I25, I38, J13, J22
Defined by Monoclonal Antibodies Blood Plasma: Complex Formation with IgM An Alternative Form of IL-18 in Human

Monoclonal Abs 21 and 132 were raised against human functionally inactive rIL-18, and plasma IL-18 levels were determined by the sandwich ELISA established with these mAbs. Plasma IL-18, designated type 2, was detected by this ELISA, and the levels found were not consistent with those obtained with the commercially available kit for determination of functionally active IL-18 (type 1). Type 1 was detected in all volunteers, whereas type 2 was detected in ; 30% of healthy subjects, and the levels of type 2 in their blood plasma were high (25–100 ng/ml) compared with those of type 1 (0.05–0.3 ng/ml). We puriﬁed IL-18 type 2 from blood plasma of volunteers with high IL-18 type 2 concentrations, and its M r was determined to be 800 kDa by SDS-PAGE and molecular sieve HPLC. The puriﬁed 800-kDa protein, either caspase-1-treated or untreated, expressed no or marginal IL-18 function in terms of potentiation of NK-mediated cytolysis and IFN- g induction, and it barely bound IL-18R-positive cells. N-terminal amino acid analysis indicated that the puriﬁed protein was IgM containing a minimal amount of IL-18 proform and its fragment. Again, the puriﬁed IgM from IL-18 type2-positive volunteers exhibited cross-reaction with mAb 21 against IL-18. This band was not detected with 125-2H, an mAb against functionally active IL-18. Hence, human IgM carries functionally inactive IL-18 forming a disulﬁde-bridged complex, and this IL-18 moiety is from 10- to 100-fold higher than the conventional type 1 IL-18 in blood circulation in ; 30% normal subjects.
Research on Structure from Motion for Omni-directional Images Based on Modification Combined with Moving Objects

Structure from Motion (SfM) is a visual based method which can recover the camera poses as well as sparse 3D structure from a set of corresponding unstructured images. It has been widely researched in conventional perspective image and fish-eye image cases for applications such as augmented reality (AR), automotive, video stabilization, scene roaming, etc. At present, with the appearance of Ricoh Theta, which is a portable omni-directional (OD) camera covering Field of View (FoV) of 360 degrees, more and more people tend to share and upload OD images to social networks. We can expect to see the fast growth of overwhelming amount of OD vision data in the future. Because of the large FoV and increasing amounts of OD images, it is worth researching on SfM with OD images. However, the projection models of conventional perspective image and fish-eye image are different with OD image, which leads to widely researched SfM pipeline not suitable anymore. Additionally, equi-rectangular (EQR) image, as the most common OD format we could search on the Internet, is associated with non-uniform distortion which makes the matched keypoints not reliable by conventional feature detection/matching algorithms. In this work, we propose a modified SfM system for OD images with preprocessing steps to address the problem of non-distortion. On the other hand, the performance of SfM would suffer from the moving obstacles (such as pedestrians and vehicles) existing on used images since these pixels would bother the feature correspondences as well as motion estimation. Thus, we further combine the proposed SfM with moving objects elimination based on Mask R-CNN, which is a state-of-the-art deep Convolutional Neural Network base model for object detection. The results show that the proposed SfM system could work well for OD images to recover a sparse 3D structure as well as ego-motion between corresponding images. Besides, by combining moving objects elimination, we can accelerate the process of RANSAC which resulting in more accurate motion parameters. of this research. Also, we explore the related works including their limitations and challenges to introduce the problem statement of this thesis. After that, the important contributions of our works are explained.
Piezoelectric Property of Electrospun PVDF Nanofibers as Linking Tips of Artificial-Hair-Cell Structures in Cochlea

The death of hair cells and damage of natural tip links is one of the main causes of hearing-loss disability, and the development of an advanced artificial hearing aid holds the key to assisting those suffering from hearing loss. This study demonstrates the potential of using electrospun polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) fibers to serve as the artificial tip links, for long-term hearing-aid-device development based on their piezoelectric properties. We have shown that the electrospun PVDF-fiber web, consisting of fibers ranging from 30–220 nm in diameter with high β-phase content, possesses the high piezoresponse of 170 mV. Analyses based on combined characterization methods including SEM, TEM, XRD, FTIR, Raman, DSC, XPS, PFM and piezoelectricity have confirmed that an optimized value of 15 wt. % PVDF could act as an effective candidate for a tip-link connector in a vibration-frequency prototype. Based on this easily reproducible electrospinning technique and the multifunctionalities of the resulting PVDF fibers, this fundamental study may shed light on the bio-inspired design of artificial, self-powered, high performance, hair-cell-like sensors in cochlea to tackle the hearing loss issue.
Apparent Unsettled Value of the Recently Measured Muon Magnetic Moment

In this paper, we point out that the anomalous value of the muon magnetic moment recently measured at FERMILAB appears to be unsettled due to the experimentally unresolved behavior of the mean life of muons with speed caused by non-local internal e ﬀ ects as well as the irreversibility of the muon decay.
Discharge and flow coefficient analysis in internal combustion engine using computational fluid dynamics simulation

Intake system is one of the crucial sub-systems in engine which can inflict significant effect on the air-fuel mixing, combustion, fuel consumption, as well as exhaust gases formation. There are many parameters that will influence engine performances. Good engine breathing is required to get better air flow rate to the engine. One of the methods includes the improvement of intake system by modifying the intake port design. This paper presents the application of Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis on two engines with different intake port shapes. Dimensionless parameters like discharge coefficient and flow coefficient are used to quantify the changes in intake flow at different valve lifts variation. Results show that when valve lift increases, this inflicted the increase in discharge coefficient because of greater mass flow rate of induction air. Both flow and discharge coefficient is dependent on valve lift. Flow analysis proved the relationship by computing the increase of flow coefficient as valve opening increase. The computed analysis shows that different intake port shapes does bring significant effect on discharge coefficient and flow coefficient.
Attack Forecast and Prediction

Cyber-security has emerged as one of the most pressing issues for society with actors trying to use offensive capabilities and those who try to leverage on defensive capabilities to secure their assets or knowledge. However, in cyber-space attackers oftentimes have a significant first mover advantage leading to a dynamic cat and mouse game with defenders. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) on past attacks bears potentials that can be used by means of predictive analytics to minimize the attackers first mover advantage. Yet, attack prediction is not an established means and automation levels are low. Within this work, we present Attack Forecast and Prediction ( 𝐴𝐹𝑃 ) which is based on MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK). 𝐴𝐹𝑃 consists of three modules representing different analytical procedures which are clustering, time series analysis, and genetic algorithms. 𝐴𝐹𝑃 identifies trends in the usage of attack techniques and crafts forecasts and predictions on future malware and the attack techniques used. We rely on time sorting to generate subgraphs of MITRE ATT&CK and evaluate the accuracy of predictions generated by 𝐴𝐹𝑃 based on these. Results of an experiment performed on the basis of 493 different malware, validate the utility of using 𝐴𝐹𝑃 for attack prediction. 𝐴𝐹𝑃 reaches for each module an F-score which is higher than an extrapolation of observed probabilities (baseline) with an F-score of up to 0.83 for a single module. It can hence be considered an effective means for predicting future attack patterns and help security professionals with preparing for future attacks.
Online Monitoring of Ecoenvironmental Pollution Data in Internet Environment

In view of the problems of poor air quality and serious soil pollution in the current ecological environment, an online monitoring of ecological environment pollution data in the Internet environment is proposed. The concentration of pollution sources that may appear in the atmospheric environment is analyzed through the analysis coefficient of ecological environment pollutants, and the specific grade data corresponding to the air quality index is determined. Observation and mapping are carried out for the area to be monitored, and then, the monitoring points are determined, the monitoring equipment is arranged, and the soil profile of the area is sampled in the monitoring area. The self-organizing neural network model is used to conduct spatial cluster analysis on the pollution of ecological environment pollution areas, evaluate the sensitivity of soil pollution, and build a land ecological pollution monitoring information model. Based on the Internet of Things technology and the comprehensive use of GPS, sensors, and other technologies and equipment, the framework of monitoring technology is constructed, and the online monitoring of ecological environment pollution data is completed. The experimental results show that the proposed method has high data accuracy in different locations and different seasons, which is consistent with the actual situation; because of the maturity of the Internet of Things technology, compared with the literature method, the method in this paper can provide a cost-effective data foundation, which is more cost-effective, and save time and energy.
Allergic diseases in children and adolescents in Germany. Results of the cross-sectional KiGGS Wave 2 study and trends

Allergic diseases are among the most common health issues children and adolescents face. Allergic reactions occur when the immune system becomes allergically sensitised and are detected by measuring levels of specific immunoglobulin E antibodies (IgE antibodies) in the blood. This article discusses the prevalences of bronchial asthma, hay fever, atopic dermatitis and allergic contact dermatitis for 0- to 17-year-olds, as well as the prevalence of allergic sensitisation to a mix of frequent inhalant allergens (SX1) among 3- to 17-year-olds based on data from the second wave of the German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Children and Adolescents (KiGGS Wave 2, 2014-2017). 12-month prevalence trends between KiGGS Wave 2 and the KiGGS baseline study (2003-2006) are shown according to gender and age group. There were no significant changes in the 12-month prevalence of hay fever (8.8%) atopic dermatitis (7.0%) and bronchial asthma (3.5%) compared to the KiGGS baseline study, which indicates a stabilisation at a high level. More than one in six children (16.1%) currently suffer from at least one of these three diseases. 37.1% of 3- to 17-year-olds are sensitised to the multiple allergen mix SX1. Similar to the development of disease prevalence, SX1 sensitisation too has remained stable at a high level over the course of the past ten years.
A Deep Learning-Based User Selection Scheme for Cooperative NOMA System with Imperfect CSI

This paper studies the user selection problem for a cooperative nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system consisting of a base station, a far user, and N near users. The selected near user receives its own message and assists the far user by relaying the far user’s message. Firstly, we propose a user selection strategy to maximize the selected near user’s data rate while satisfying the quality-of-service (QoS) requirement of the far user. Considering that the channel state information (CSI) of users in actual communication is usually imperfect, we then analyze the outage probability of the NOMA system based on the user selection strategy under imperfect CSI and obtain a closed-form expression. The theoretical analysis shows that the diversity order of the NOMA system under imperfect CSI is 0, which means the multiuser diversity order disappears. In order to improve the impact of imperfect CSI on system performance, we use the deep learning method to identify and classify channels of imperfect CSI and improve the accuracy of CSI. The simulation results show that the theoretical analysis of outage performance is consistent with the numerical results. Compared with the strategy without the deep learning method, the proposed deep learning-based user selection scheme significantly improves the system performance. Furthermore, we verify that our scheme recovers the diversity gain.
Allergic Encephalomyelitis Colocalization of Both Cells in Experimental Cells Cocultured with Astrocytes and Signaling Pathways in the Activation of Mast

Mast cells in the CNS participate in the pathophysiology of chronic neurodegenerative inﬂammatory diseases. This study aimed to investigate the signaling pathway of mast cells activated in an environment cocultured with astrocytes and to explore the role of their colocalization in brain of experimental allergic encephalomyelitis. Human mast cell line-1 cells and human U87 glioblastoma cell lines (U87) or mouse bone marrow-derived mast cells and mouse cerebral cortices-derived astrocytes were cocultured. Intracellular Ca 2+ was measured by confocal microscopy; histamine by ﬂuorometric analyzer; leukotrienes by ELISA; small GTPases, protein kinase Cs, MAPK, c- kit , CD40, and CD40L by Western blot; NF- k B and AP-1 by EMSA; cytokines by RT-PCR; and colocalization of mast cells and astrocytes in brain by immunohistochemistry. Mast cells cocultured with astrocytes showed time-dependent increases in intracellular Ca 2+ levels, release of histamine and leukotrienes, and cytokine production. Mast cells or astrocytes showed enhanced surface expression of CD40L and CD40, respectively, during coculture. Mast cells cocultured with astrocytes induced small GTPases (Rac1/2, cdc42 ), protein kinase Cs, MAPK, NF- k B, and AP-1 activities. These changes were blocked by anti-CD40 Ab pretreatment or CD40 small interfering RNA. Mast cells increased in the thalamus of experimental allergic encephalomyelitis model, particularly colocalized with astrocytes in the thalamic border region of the habenula. In conclusion, the data suggest that activation of mast cells cocultured with astrocytes induces release of mediators by small GTPases/Ca 2+ inﬂux through CD40–CD40L interactions to participate in the pathophysiology
Walking and Cycling International Literature Review : Final Report

This report presents the findings from an extensive literature review aiming to help professionals and researchers in the State of Victoria understand barriers to walking and cycling as well as infrastructure and policy supports for non-motorized transportation. The research team located almost 500 articles, papers, and reports assessing walking and cycling infrastructure, policies, programs, and models. We reviewed over 300 of them—those judged to be most relevant to the questions raised by the Walking and Cycling Branch of the Department of Infrastructure and rigorous in terms of their analysis and ability to draw robust conclusions.
Statistical Analysis of Power System Sensitivity Under Random Penetration of Photovoltaic Generation

In this paper, we aim to analyze the characteristics of feeder voltage variation in power systems due to random allocation of solar photovoltaic systems from a data‐driven approach, search the dangerous photovoltaic system allocation patterns along a specific power system. We conducted the investigation on benchmark radial distribution circuits with a random integration of certain amount of photovoltaic systems. Severe voltage deviation occurs along the tail part of each circuit line, and the connecting nodes between feeder and lateral circuit lines tend to be vulnerable to the integration of photovoltaic systems. Different allocation patterns of photovoltaic systems resulted in a data set of voltage variation in the distribution system, k‐Medoids clustering algorithm was proposed in this study to partition this data set into several clusters, which would contribute to the search of photovoltaic system allocation patterns with similar voltage deviation response.