Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How students reason about visualizations from large professionally collected data sets: A study of students approaching the threshold of data proficiency

ABSTRACT This study identifies a population of students who have an intermediate amount of relevant content knowledge and skill for working with data, and characterizes their approach to interpreting a challenging data-based visualization. Thirty-three undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory environmental science course reasoned about salinity data as shown in map and vertical profiles from the Mediterranean while thinking aloud and being eye-tracked. Students reasoned about 2D and 3D interpretations in the context of two hypothesis arrays (a suite of potential interpretations about a set of data). Findings suggest the students have some effective strategies in reading data: They look at cartographic elements, correctly identify the image as a salinity map, and draw inferences from the data. Common looking strategies include scanning along the salinity gradient, comparing areas of interest, and aligning the color bar with the map. Individual differences emerge in the interpretation of the data, with no interpretations being fully aligned with the scientifically normative explanation. Post hoc analyses identify reasoning tasks and spontaneous behaviors related to a construct we refer to as “data expertise,” which is intended to capture the degree of conceptual sophistication and resourcefulness in reasoning about data. A data expertise scale was developed, with scores ranging from zero (weak) to six (strong) that were normally distributed. Our findings suggest that appropriately coordinating data with a model, comparing and contrasting across data representations from different times or places, and extracting 3D structure from 2D representations are associated with data expertise.
Relationship between teacher characteristics and school performance in public secondary schools in Nyamasheke and Nyarugenge District, Rwanda

In school system, the teacher is the key input as he/she is the one to create a conducive atmosphere for learning by preparing the learning content, preparing classroom environment, ordering materials, using a variety of methods to deliver learning, and he/she also assesses the level of learners, manages time and students, and should be a good role model. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine whether and to the extent to which relationship exists between teacher characteristics and school performance in public secondary schools in Nyamasheke and Nyarugenge districts. Specifically, the study sought to describe teacher characteristics, determine the extent to which teacher characteristics correlate with school performance, and find out the strategies adopted to enhance school performance in public secondary schools located in the two districts. This study was guided by Education Production Function theory and it adopted a correlation research design. The target population involved 70 head teachers and 2 district education officers. 21 head teachers and 2 district education officers were surveyed. Stratified sampling, simple random sampling and purposive sampling techniques were used to select this sample and questionnaires, document review schedule, and interview schedule were used to collect data. It was found that only 61.15% of teachers have a bachelor’s degree, among them only 63.81% have undergone a pedagogical course, and only 56.05% have an experience of more than three years. It was further found that among the teacher characteristics, teacher qualification, professional training and experience highly correlate with school mean performance and as the coefficient of determination for each varies between 0.41 and 0.63. It was therefore recommended that the government and all other stakeholders should allocate more resources to train more teachers and retain experienced ones and provide more in-service training to enhance teachers’ professionalism.
Feasibility of Training Clinical Officers in Point-of-Care Ultrasound for Pediatric Respiratory Diseases in Aweil, South Sudan

Abstract. Lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs) are the leading cause of deaths in children < 5 years old worldwide, particularly affecting low-resource settings such as Aweil, South Sudan. In these settings, diagnosis can be difficult because of either lack of access to radiography or clinical algorithms that overtreat children with antibiotics who only have viral LRTIs. Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) has been applied to LRTIs, but not by nonphysician clinicians, and with limited data from low-resource settings. Our goal was to examine the feasibility of training the mid-level provider cadre clinical officers (COs) in a Médecins Sans Frontières project in South Sudan to perform a POCUS algorithm to differentiate among causes of LRTI. Six COs underwent POCUS training, and each subsequently performed 60 lung POCUS studies on hospitalized pediatric patients < 5 years old with criteria for pneumonia. Two blinded experts, with a tiebreaker expert adjudicating discordant results, served as a reference standard to calculate test performance characteristics, assessed image quality and CO interpretation. The COs performed 360 studies. Reviewers rated 99.1% of the images acceptable and 86.0% CO interpretations appropriate. The inter-rater agreement (κ) between COs and experts for lung consolidation with air bronchograms was 0.73 (0.63–0.82) and for viral LRTI/bronchiolitis was 0.81 (0.74–0.87). It is feasible to train COs in South Sudan to use a POCUS algorithm to diagnose pneumonia and other pulmonary diseases in children < 5 years old.
A Textual Analysis of Post-reading Writings in Light of the Alignment Effect and Its Implications on Teaching Writing to EFL Learners

As is suggested by the Alignment Effect, EFL writings are featured by remarkable textual qualities when they are finished after close-reading of model texts. With textual analyzers, this research collects data of lexical complexity, syntactic complexity and textual coherence of 126 pieces of post-reading writings by EFL. After the analysis, the research finds simple words dominate while complex content words rarely occur. Content verbs, adjectives, and adverbials show much less diversity than nouns. The EFL writers produce full and long sentences which are mainly compound and simple, but need improvements in composing imbedded dependent clauses and complex noun phrases. Due to connectives abuse and loose semantics, sentences within paragraphs are poorly connected, while paragraphs run smooth from one to another. The textual features of post-reading writings yield some pedagogical references to the teaching of writing to EFL learners.
Toll‐like receptor 3 agonist poly I:C reinforces the potency of cytotoxic chemotherapy via the TLR3‐UNC93B1‐IFN‐β signaling axis in paclitaxel‐resistant colon cancer

Type I interferon (IFN) signaling in neoplastic cells has a chemo‐sensitizing effect in cancer therapy. Toll‐like receptor 3 (TLR3) activation promotes IFN‐β production, which induces apoptosis and impairs proliferation in some cancer cells. Herein, we tested whether the TLR3 agonist polyinosinic: polycytidylic acid (poly I:C) can improve chemotherapeutic efficacy in paclitaxel (PTX) resistant cell lines. Human colon cancer cell lines HCT116, SW620, HCT‐8 (sensitive to PTX), and HCT‐8/PTX (resistant to PTX) were treated with poly I:C and the cell viability was measured. Results showed that poly I:C specifically impaired the cell viability of HCT‐8/PTX by simultaneously promoting cell apoptosis and inhibiting cell proliferation. In addition, when TLR3 was overexpressed in HCT‐8/PTX cells, we found that TLR3 contributed to the production of IFN‐β that reduced cell viability, and poly I:C preferentially activated the TLR3‐UNC93B1 signaling pathway to mediate this effect. Moreover, cotreatment of poly I:C and PTX acted synergistically to induce cell apoptosis of HCT‐8/PTX via upregulating the expression of TLR3 and its molecular chaperone UNC93B1, assisting in the secretion of IFN‐β. Notably, a combination of poly I:C and PTX synergistically inhibited the PTX‐resistant tumor growth in vivo without side effects. In conclusion, our studies demonstrate that poly I:C reinforces the potency of cytotoxic chemotherapeutics in PTX‐resistant cell line through the TLR3‐UNC93B1‐IFN‐β signaling pathway, which supplies a novel mechanism of poly I:C for the chemotherapy sensitizing effect in a PTX‐resistant tumor.
Video-Based Person Re-Identification by an End-To-End Learning Architecture with Hybrid Deep Appearance-Temporal Feature

Video-based person re-identification is an important task with the challenges of lighting variation, low-resolution images, background clutter, occlusion, and human appearance similarity in the multi-camera visual sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a video-based person re-identification method called the end-to-end learning architecture with hybrid deep appearance-temporal feature. It can learn the appearance features of pivotal frames, the temporal features, and the independent distance metric of different features. This architecture consists of two-stream deep feature structure and two Siamese networks. For the first-stream structure, we propose the Two-branch Appearance Feature (TAF) sub-structure to obtain the appearance information of persons, and used one of the two Siamese networks to learn the similarity of appearance features of a pairwise person. To utilize the temporal information, we designed the second-stream structure that consisting of the Optical flow Temporal Feature (OTF) sub-structure and another Siamese network, to learn the person’s temporal features and the distances of pairwise features. In addition, we select the pivotal frames of video as inputs to the Inception-V3 network on the Two-branch Appearance Feature sub-structure, and employ the salience-learning fusion layer to fuse the learned global and local appearance features. Extensive experimental results on the PRID2011, iLIDS-VID, and Motion Analysis and Re-identification Set (MARS) datasets showed that the respective proposed architectures reached 79%, 59% and 72% at Rank-1 and had advantages over state-of-the-art algorithms. Meanwhile, it also improved the feature representation ability of persons.
E-VPMS 1.0: Enhanced Vehicle Parking Monitoring System

Due to lack of vehicle parking slot in front of Block Q, Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (FKEE), UTHM, the enhanced vehicle parking monitoring system (E-VPMS 1.0) is developed to identify parking slots available in the parking area as well as to detect double parking problem. Once this system is implemented, time consume for searching available parking slots as well as double parking problem that may cause unwanted accident can be reduced. In the development of E-VPMS 1.0 system, whole system are designed and developed in three different phases; which are video processing phase, login and registration phase, and webview development phase. In video processing phase, video sources are processed through few video processing function. In login and registration phase, series of webpage function have been created that accessible in both smartphone and laptop. While, in webview development phase, webview function have been developed and through this function, content of E-VPMS 1.0 system can be displayed directly via web browser for both smartphone and laptop. Through E-VPMS 1.0, availability parking slots can be checked by registered user through input recorded video before entering the specific parking area. Other than that, performance analysis in terms of numbers of registered user and parking slot availability at different situations such as during peak event or normal event can be managed and controlled by admin through visualisation data method.
Appropriateness of Ticagrelor Use at Initiation: A Population-Based Cohort Study.

PURPOSE Ticagrelor is recommended following an acute coronary syndrome if used appropriately. Its use has not yet been well described in the context of ambulatory clinical practice. The objective of this study was to assess the proportion of ticagrelor new users who initiated this medication appropriately and explore associated factors. METHODS A retrospective population-based inception cohort study was conducted using Quebec administrative databases. The study population included all Quebec residents aged ≥18 years who had a first ticagrelor prescription claim between 1 January, 2012, and 31 March, 2015, and had been continuously eligible in the Quebec public drug plan during the 365 days preceding the first ticagrelor claim. The initial ticagrelor prescription was considered appropriate if:1) it met the indication for use criterion, 2) the prescribed daily dose was 90 mg twice a day, and 3) there was a concomitant use of acetylsalicylic acid (ASA) 80-81 mg daily. Factors potentially associated with the ticagrelor appropriateness of use were included in a logistic log-binomial regression model. RESULTS A total of 7,073 patients were included in the study, 6,013 (85.0%) had an appropriate indication, 6,895 (97.5%) were prescribed ticagrelor 90 mg twice a day, and 6,385 (90.3%) had a concomitant prescription of ASA. A total of 5,371 (75.9%) patients were prescribed ticagrelor in accordance with all criteria. Twelve factors were associated with prescription appropriateness. CONCLUSIONS A large majority of patients initiated ticagrelor appropriately. Further improvement in appropriateness may come at targeting indication for use.
Genetic variations of MMP 9 gene and intracerebral hemorrhage outcome : A cohort study in Chinese Han population

a Department of Neurology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610041, China b Department of Neurology, Nanjing First Hospital, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210006, China c The George Institute for Global Health, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2050, Australia d Department of Neurology, The Third People's Hospital of Mianyang, Luzhou Medical College, Mianyang 621000, China
Post-Operative Pain: Mechanisms and Management

Background: Proper postoperative pain management, which can be advanced using a multimodal approach, results in pain relief with minimal side effects. Newer recovery protocols, along with minimally invasive surgeries add to the better management of post-operative complication. Many factors play a role in failure of proper postoperative pain management, which mainly include insufficient education, fear of complications associated with analgesic drugs, poor pain assessment and inadequate staffing. Methodology: we conducted this review using a comprehensive search of MEDLINE, PubMed, and EMBASE fromJanuary 1987 toMarch 2017. The following search terms were used: post-operative pain mechanism, post-operative pain management, non-opioid pain management Aim of the work: In this study we aimed to understand the mechanism and the management of post-operative pain, along with shining some light upon the recent advances. Conclusion: Various combinations and modalities of pain management exist, and their use depends largely on the case, the patients, and their perception of pain. Enhanced recovery protocols have significantly improved perioperative and postoperative pain management, making the decrease in opioids need a priority.
The Implementation of VIS based Performance Assessment Model in Volley Ball Learning

The aim of this research was to test Volleyball information system (VIS) based performance assessment model in assessing students’ performances in volleyball learning. The research method used was quasi experiment with interrupted times-series design. The participants of this prior research were 12 students of Senior High School in Bandung, with the sampling technique used was cluster random. The research instrument used was observation form adapted and modified from Volleyball Information System (VIS) and FIVB year 2005 measuring 4 play skills (serve, receive, set and spike). One-way ANOVA on time-lapse measurement was used as the analysis technique. The result indicated the application of performance assessment using modified VIS method at the beginning phase gave significant influence. It was indicated by the existence of improvement of volley ball learning result at every meeting, and it was emphasized by the result of statistical test F = 9.82 and p_value = 0.00 (0.00 < 0.005). The conclusion of this prior research was the application of VIS mode based performance assessment could be used during teaching and learning process and it gave contribution on the improvement of volleyball learning result.
A Combined Read-Aloud Think-Aloud Strategy Improves Student Learning Experiences in College-Level Biology Courses.

Reading aloud (RA) is a learning strategy commonly used to help younger students develop language comprehension skills and in adult literacy and language courses to help students master the pronunciation of words, grammar, and intonation. However, we know of no studies to date that investigate the possible benefits of RA at the college or university level. We propose that “reading aloud” (RA) immediately followed by “thinking aloud” (TA) during class can help college students enhance their reading abilities and cultivate their analytical thinking skills. This study explores the impact of a “read aloud–think aloud” (RA-TA) strategy in collegelevel biology courses. Students in 3 sections of 2 courses were asked about their experiences with RA via an end-of-semester survey. When pooled (N = 34 students), responses to all 5 survey questions significantly supported RA-TA. The responses to 4 survey questions very significantly supported the use of RA-TA: Students read the text more, understood it better, found the instructor’s help useful, and in general learned to read difficult texts with greater comprehension. Results suggest that a RA-TA approach has the potential to greatly enhance student learning at the college level and provides a promising area for future research.
Supported self-management for people with type 2 diabetes: a meta-review of quantitative systematic reviews

Objectives Self-management support aims to give people with chronic disease confidence to actively manage their disease, in partnership with their healthcare provider. A meta-review can inform policy-makers and healthcare managers about the effectiveness of self-management support strategies for people with type 2 diabetes, and which interventions work best and for whom. Design A meta-review of systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) was performed adapting Cochrane methodology. Setting and participants Eight databases were searched for systematic reviews of RCTs from January 1993 to October 2016, with a pre-publication update in April 2017. Forward citation was performed on included reviews in Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Proceedings. We extracted data and assessed quality with the Revised-Assessment of Multiple Systematic Reviews (R-AMSTAR). Primary and secondary outcome measures Glycaemic control as measured by glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) was the primary outcome. Body mass Index, lipid profiles, blood pressure and quality of life scoring were secondary outcomes. Meta-analyses reporting HbA1c were summarised in meta-forest plots; other outcomes were synthesised narratively. Results 41 systematic reviews incorporating data from 459 unique RCTs in diverse socio-economic and ethnic communities across 33 countries were included. R-AMSTAR quality score ranged from 20 to 42 (maximum 44). Apart from one outlier, the majority of reviews found an HbA1c improvement between 0.2% and 0.6% (2.2–6.5 mmol/mol) at 6 months post-intervention, but attenuated at 12 and 24 months. Impact on secondary outcomes was inconsistent and generally non-significant. Diverse self-management support strategies were employed; no single approach appeared optimally effective (or ineffective). Effective programmes tended to be multi-component and provide adequate contact time (>10 hours). Technology-facilitated self-management support showed a similar impact as traditional approaches (HbA1c MD −0.21% to −0.6%). Conclusions Self-management interventions using a range of approaches improve short-term glycaemic control in people with type 2 diabetes including culturally diverse populations. These findings can inform researchers, policy-makers and healthcare professionals re-evaluating the provision of self-management support in routine care. Further research should consider implementation and sustainability.
THE EFFECTS OF P-O ETHICAL FIT, EXPECTED PAY AND CORPORATE IMAGE ON JOB CHOICE DECISION

Our research extends the current recruiting relevant studies by identifying how intrinsic (person-organization ethical fit, P-O ethical fit) and extrinsic factors (pay level and perceived corporate image) influence job choice decision solely and interactively. A 2×2 between-subjects experimental design was conducted with 210 graduating students in Taiwan, and written scenarios were used to simulate a job choice setting. These scenario cases are related to hotels which focus on environmentally relative corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. The results show a significant difference in job offer acceptance rates among job seekers with diverse P-O ethical fit and the effect of P-O ethical fit on perceived corporate image was partially supported. The following discussion and suggestion will be made to provide ideas for recruiting management and it will also contribute to academic research.
Preliminary impact of DegreePlus: An institutional program to provide transferable skill development through extracurricular activities

DegreePlus is a recently developed program at Western Carolina University (WCU) that aims to develop transferable skills, including professionalism, cultural responsiveness, leadership and teamwork, in students via their participation in extracurricular activities. A mixed-methods study that included focus groups and a survey was used to identify the preliminary impacts of the program. Researchers found that students view the program as a supportive initiative to help them prepare for their future and meet their career goals. Students also perceive that they are learning the targeted skills and are able to apply them to a limited extent. Finally, students view the program as a means of connecting to their university community. We anticipate that student participation in this program may assist with other institutional goals, such as retention and student success, as many of the impacts from the program align with principles that support these objectives.