Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
When Accountability Knocks, Will Anyone Answer?

Pressure for increased school accountability is a distinctive hallmark of the present period of educational reform. Accountability, as presently defined in state and local educational policy, includes four major ideas: the school is the basic unit for the delivery of education and hence the primary place where teachers and administrators are held to account; schools are primarily accountable for student performance, generally defined as measured achievement on tests in basic academic subjects; school-site student performance is evaluated against externally-set standards that define acceptable levels of student achievement as mandated by states or localities; and evaluation of school performance is typically accompanied by a system of rewards, penalties, and intervention strategies targeted at rewarding successful schools and remediating or closing lowperforming schools (Ladd, 1996). These accountability policies are typically directed toward individual schools or teachers, and increasingly, students, as in Texas, New York, Virginia, and Florida where exit exams or proficiency requirements are central to educational reform policies. Coupled with these new accountability systems, states and localities often are pursuing policies such as charter schools and choice programs that move schools outside the existing bureaucratic structure and are intended to sharpen the focus on academic quality and student performance. Growing political and fiscal pressure on schools lies behind this conception of accountability. The political pressure stems from the increasing visibility of school performance as a policy issue at the state and local levels and the increasing capacity of states and localities to measure and monitor student achievement. The fiscal pressure derives from heightened awareness of accountability present in the literature on school reform, but to leave the definitions as open as possible. This study is focused primarily on schools and how they construct their own conceptions of accountability. We chose this focus for conceptual and practical reasons. First, we are interested in understanding how teachers, administrators, students, and parents think about and behave toward accountability issues in schools, apart from how they respond to new external accountability systems. Schools function, in part, as accountability systems in their own right, and these systems are worth understanding in and of themselves. Second, we are interested in learning, from the variations we observe among schools, about the range of responses that schools of various types formulate to the problem of accountability. To the degree that schools vary in their responses to the accountability problem, we learn something about how conceptions of accountability are formed and how they change in the daily life of schools. Third, we are ultimately interested in joining our research on school-level accountability with research on external accountability systems to understand the sources of school-site variation in response to state and local accountability structures.
A robust method for face recognition and face emotion detection system using support vector machines

This research presents framework for real time face recognition and face emotion detection system based on facial features and their actions. The key elements of Face are considered for prediction of face emotions and the user. The variations in each facial feature are used to determine the different emotions of face. Machine learning algorithms are used for recognition and classification of different classes of face emotions by training of different set of images. In this context, by implementing herein algorithms would contribute in several areas of identification, psychological researches and many real world problems. The proposed algorithm is implemented using open source computer vision (OpenCV) and Machine learning with python.
The Child in the Physical Environment: The Development of Spatial Knowledge and Cognition

Part 1 Processes of environmental cognition: environmental cognition - a conceptual and methodological review routes, directions and action planning. Part 2 The development of environmental cognition - from body-image onwards: the location of objects and self in space the child in geographical space investigating the child's cognitive map the role of direct experience of the environment in the development of cognitive representations maps and their use - symbolic sources of information about the environment the child's image of distant places - media, maps and formal geography expand the area known. Part 3 Applications of environmental cognition research: the child with special needs and the physical environment designing for the child's needs geographical and environmental education.
Network-Assisted Raft Consensus Algorithm

Consensus is a fundamental problem in distributed computing. In this poster, we ask the following question: can we partially offload the execution of a consensus algorithm to the network to improve its performance? We argue for an affirmative answer by proposing a network-assisted implementation of the Raft consensus algorithm. Our approach reduces consensus latency, is failure-aware, and does not sacrifice correctness or scalability. In order to enable Raft-aware forwarding and quick response, we use P4-based programmable switches and offload partial Raft functionality to the switch. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach and performance improvements it offers via a prototype implementation.
The Conceptualization of Anorexia: The Pro-Ana Perspective

This qualitative content analysis examined mission statements of pro-anorexia websites to gain a better understanding of how these individuals conceptualize the function of self-starvation. The results indicated that there is substantial diversity within this online community. Specifically, some pro-anorexia authors defined anorexia as an illness and disease from which recovery is not possible, while others suggested that anorexia is a lifestyle and chosen way of life. Clinical implications are discussed, including assessment and treatment considerations.
Bayesian Inference on Network Traffic Using Link Count Data

Abstract We study Bayesian models and methods for analysing network traffic counts in problems of inference about the traffic intensity between directed pairs of origins and destinations in networks. This is a class of problems very recently discussed by Vardi in a 1996 JASA article and is of interest in both communication and transportation network studies. The current article develops the theoretical framework of variants of the origin-destination flow problem and introduces Bayesian approaches to analysis and inference. In the first, the so-called fixed routing problem, traffic or messages pass between nodes in a network, with each message originating at a specific source node, and ultimately moving through the network to a predetermined destination node. All nodes are candidate origin and destination points. The framework assumes no travel time complications, considering only the number of messages passing between pairs of nodes in a specified time interval. The route count, or route flow, problem is .
Tests of Mean-Variance Spanning

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of tests for mean-variance spanning. Under the regression framework of Huberman and Kandel (1987), we provide geometric interpretations not only for the popular likelihood ratio test, but also for two new spanning tests based on the Wald and Lagrange multiplier principles. Under normality assumption, we present the exact distributions of the three tests, analyze their power comprehensively. We find that the power is most driven by the difference of the global minimum-variance portfolios of the two minimum-variance frontiers, and it does not always align well with the economic significance. As an alternative, we provide a step-down test to allow better assessment of the power. Under general distributional assumptions, we provide a new spanning test based on the generalized method of moments (GMM), and evaluate its performance along with other GMM tests by simulation.
A commentary for furthering cultural sensitivity within research in geriatric psychiatry.

T he United States is one of the few nations where people of color are a “minority. ” This circumstance is changing rapidly to where people of color will eventually become the majority in this Nation. Accordingly, we do not refer to people of color as minorities in this editorial. Dr. David Satcher’s (US 16th Surgeon General) Mental Health: Culture, Race, Ethnicity Report highlighted the dearth of available scientific information on people of color. This deficiency in US scientific literature is due to researchers’ selective inattention, precluding including diversity in their samples. This special issue of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry seeks to correct this national deficit by placing focus on research regarding people of color’s geriatric concerns. Considering the stark health disparities between whites and people of color, the publication of this issue is essentially ancillary in the path toward equality and global health. Another obstacle in the inclusion of people of color in scientific research is the lack of trust toward the field. Historically, people of color have been exploited and subsequently ignored (i.e., the research did not go to benefit them). These atrocities often resulted in deaths (e.g., the Tuskegee Syphilis study) and additional ills and pains. These historic occurrences have resulted in the construction of institutional review boards (IRB) made to ensure the ethics of research. Thus, the importance of their approval is definably relevant to research with people of color. The collection of articles in this issue all report on research
Understanding and Reducing College Student Departure (review)

firms; the Swiss Lemanic project, leading to the coordination and profiling of three, separately governed and financed university-level institutions in the Lake Geneva region (Universities of Geneva and Lausanne, and the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Lausanne); Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s offering of programs within Australia’s Technical and Further Education (TAFE) system alongside RMIT university degree courses; and the ambitious vision of “Network Norway,” giving students and institutions access to educational resources throughout the country. Prescriptions for reforms in university administration, governance, funding, and policy appear in many chapters, accompanied by firstperson accounts of experiences with initiatives at the University of Michigan, among which are efforts to advance Michigan’s “diversity and excellence” strategy, including elements of admissions practices at the heart of the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action. The prescriptions aim to sustain—indeed, encourage— greater staff initiatives in their primary activities of teaching and research. On this point, Duderstadt and Womack observe that “the most vibrant universities will be those whose faculties are deeply engaged in the economics of education” (p. 125). The authors refer here specifically to securing external resources, but the faculties’ engagement in the “economics of education” might be expected to extend further—to an awareness of the costs (including opportunity costs) of each teaching and research activity and of benefits from potential complementarities of activities within and across academic units. Duderstadt and Womack argue that current policies leave too much to the market (including tax and funding policies that enable private colleges to use wealth to compete for students and faculty) and so weaken the advancement of the public purposes of higher education. Here, however, the authors miss the opportunity to take a more expansive view of public policy options. The challenge is not how to rebalance policies to shore up the public research university. Rather an “invigorated” policy approach should encompass all universities, other tertiary-level institutions, funders, and education providers at all levels, public and private. Contours of such an approach can be seen in policies implemented or under review in such countries as France, Finland and the United Kingdom as well as in the United States In short, Duderstadt and Womack offer a vision for the public university, concrete recommendations on what should change, and advice informed by experience on how to make those changes. From a policy perspective, however, their admonitions are not perhaps as forward-looking as the rest of the book. Nevertheless, the volume will be useful reading for those who work in, seek to influence, or undertake research on the university of today—in view of what may lie “beyond the crossroads. ”
Mechanism Governing Human Kappa-Opioid Receptor Expression under Desferrioxamine-Induced Hypoxic Mimic Condition in Neuronal NMB Cells

Cellular adaptation to hypoxia is a protective mechanism for neurons and relevant to cancer. Treatment with desferrioxamine (DFO) to induce hypoxia reduced the viability of human neuronal NMB cells. Surviving/attached cells exhibited profound increases of expression of the human kappa-opioid receptor (hKOR) and hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α). The functional relationship between hKOR and HIF-1α was investigated using RT-PCR, Western blot, luciferase reporter, mutagenesis, siRNA and receptor-ligand binding assays. In surviving neurons, DFO increased HIF-1α expression and its amount in the nucleus. DFO also dramatically increased hKOR expression. Two (designated as HIFC and D) out of four potential HIF response elements of the hKOR gene (HIFA–D) synergistically mediated the DFO response. Mutation of both elements completely abolished the DFO-induced effect. The CD11 plasmid (containing HIFC and D with an 11 bp spacing) produced greater augmentation than that of the CD17 plasmid (HIFC and D with a 17 bp-spacing), suggesting that a proper topological interaction of these elements synergistically enhanced the promoter activity. HIF-1α siRNA knocked down the increase of endogenous HIF-1α messages and diminished the DFO-induced increase of hKOR expression. Increased hKOR expression resulted in the up-regulation of hKOR protein. In conclusion, the adaptation of neuronal hKOR under hypoxia was governed by HIF-1, revealing a new mechanism of hKOR regulation.
Software Testing by Active Learning for Commercial Games

As software systems have become larger, exhaustive testing has become increasingly onerous. This has rendered statistical software testing and machine learning techniques increasingly attractive. Drawing from both of these, we present an active learning framework for blackbox software testing. The active learning approach samples input/output pairs from a blackbox and learns a model of the system’s behaviour. This model is then used to select new inputs for sampling. This framework has been developed in the context of commercial video games, complex virtual worlds with highdimensional state spaces, too large for exhaustive testing. Beyond its correctness, developers need to evaluate the gameplay of a game, properties such as difculty . We use the learned model not only to guide sampling but also to summarize the game’s behaviour for the developer to evaluate. We present results from our semi-automated gameplay analysis by machine learning (SAGA-ML) tool applied to Electronics Arts’ FIFA Soccer game.
Polymorphism of alcohol-metabolizing genes affects drinking behavior and alcoholic liver disease in Japanese men.

Alcohol is known to be mainly metabolized in the liver by alcohol dehydrogenase 2 (ADH2) and aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2), and cytochrome P-450IIEI. The purpose of this study was to clarify the role of polymorphism of these ethanol-metabolizing enzymes in drinking behavior and the progression of alcoholic liver disease among Japanese men. Polymorphism of the ADH2, ALDH2, and P-45IIEI genes were determined by polymerase chain reaction, followed by restriction fragment-length polymorphism analysis in 189 normal Japanese men and 26 male patients with alcoholic liver disease. Drinking behavior was estimated by self-assessment according to DSM-III-R criteria. Facial flushing was reported in 91 subjects heterozygous for ALDH2*1/*2 and in two subjects homozygous for ALDH2*2/*2, but was not found in 96 subjects homozygous for ALDH2*1/*1. In contrast, polymorphism of ADH2 and P-450IIEI did not differ between flushers and nonflushers. Although the flushers only drank a small amount of alcohol (< 20 g of ethanol/day), the nonflushers were divided into a group of moderate drinkers (20 to 80 g/day; n = 54) and a group of heavy drinkers (> 80 g/day; n = 42). A high preponderance of heterozygosity for the ADH2*1/*2 genes (20/42; 60%) and a high frequency of the ADH2*1 allele were found in heavy drinkers, compared with moderate drinkers. However, cytochrome P-45IIEI gene polymorphism was similar among the moderate and heavy drinkers. Not only a high frequency of the ALDH2*1 and ADH2*1 alleles, but also a high frequency of the P-450IIEI c2 allele was found in the patients with alcoholic liver disease. From these results, the drinking behavior of Japanese men is strongly influenced by the ALDH2*1 allele, and the level of alcohol intake is affected by the ADH2*1 allele, but not by cytochrome P-45IIEI. However, progression to alcoholic liver disease among heavy drinkers may be affected by the cytochrome P-450IIEI c2 allele.
Phase I pharmacokinetic study of the vascular endothelial growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor vatalanib (PTK787) plus imatinib and hydroxyurea for malignant glioma

This study determined the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) and dose‐limiting toxicities (DLT) of the oral vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR) inhibitor, vatalanib, when administered with imatinib and hydroxyurea on a continuous daily schedule among recurrent malignant glioma patients.
Melody spotting in raw audio recordings using Variable Duration Hidden Markov Models

This paper presents a melody spotting system based on Variable Duration Hidden Markov Models (VDHMM's), capable of locating monophonic melodies in a database of raw audio recordings. The raw audio recordings may either contain a single instrument performing in solo mode, or an ensemble of instruments where one of the instruments has a leading role. The melody to be spotted is treated as a pattern and is first converted into a sequence of note durations and music intervals. Based on this representation, a VDHMM is constructed. For each raw audio recording in the database, a sequence of note durations and music intervals is extracted by means of a multipitch tracking algorithm. These sequences are subsequently fed as input to the VDHMM that models the melody to be located. The VDHMM employs an enhanced Viterbi algorithm, previously introduced by the authors, in order to account for pitch tracking errors and performance improvisations of the instrument players. It then suffices to post-process the best-state sequence generated by the enhanced Viterbi algorithm in order to locate occurrences of the melody in question. Our method has been successfully tested with a variety of cello recordings in the context of Western Classical music, as well as with Greek traditional multi-instrument recordings where clarinet has a leading role.
Endnote Web tutorial for BJCVS/RBCCV

At present, many useful tools for reference management are available for use. They can be either off-line softwares or accessible Websites to all users in the internet. Their target is to facilitate the production of scientific text. But, to accomplish that, the featured bibliographic style should be effectively inserted, and the program has to be free. Here in this tutorial, we present Endnote Web®, a bibliographic reference management program comprising these two requirements: it contains the Brazilian Journal of Cardiovascular Surgery reference format and its use is free for charge after sign-in in IP registered terminal in Web of Science®.
Joint Fingerprinting and Encryption for JPEG Images Sharing in Mobile Social Network

The advent of mobile social network and smartphone has made social multimedia sharing in social network easier and more efficient. However, it can also cause serious security and privacy problems, secure social multimedia sharing and traitor tracing issues have become critical and urgent. In this paper, we propose a joint fingerprinting and encryption (JFE) scheme based on Game of Life (GL) and singular value decomposition (SVD) with the purpose of protecting JPEG images sharing in mobile social networks. Firstly, the fingerprint code is produced using social network analysis. After that, a fast inter- transformation from block DCTs to DWT is employed. Then, fingerprints are embedded into the LL, HL and LH subbands. At last, GL and SVD are used to for confusion and diffusion respectively. The proposed method, to the best of our knowledge, is the first JFE method using GL and SVD in the JPEG compressed domain for security and privacy in JPEG images sharing. The use of fingerprinting along with encryption can provide a double-layer of protection to JPEG images sharing in social network. Theory analysis and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed JFE scheme. Most importantly, the performance of inter-transformation between block DCT and one-level DWT has a profound effect on lowering computational cost in our proposed JFE scheme. In the end, our JFE method can secure JPEG images sharing in social networks and meet the real-time requirement.
Key transcriptional regulators of the vasoprotective effects of shear stress

Summary Atherosclerotic plaque rupture and subsequent thrombosis is the main cause of sudden coronary death. Remarkably, atherosclerosis only develops in certain predisposed areas of the vasculature. Endothelial cells in these predisposed areas experience low or oscillatory shear stress, which activates the proinflammatory and procoagulant transcription factors activator protein 1 (AP-1) and nuclear factor B (NFB), thus inducing a proinflammatory, procoagulant surface. In contrast, healthy endothelial cells that are exposed to prolonged high laminar shear stress, express antiinflammatory and anticoagulant genes. The key shear stress-induced transcription factors that govern the expression of these genes are Krüppel-like factor 2 (KLF2) and nuclear factor erythroid 2-like 2 (Nrf2). Together KLF2 and Nrf2 govern ~70% of the shear stress-elicited gene sets. Nrf2 potently induces anti-inflammatory/antioxidant enzymes, while KLF2 induces anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant proteins, most specifically endothelial Nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) and thrombomodulin (TM). KLF2 also inhibits proinflammatory and antifibrinolytic genes through inhibition of the proinflammatory transcription factors AP-1 and NFB. The widespread beneficial effects of the key transcription factors KLF2 and Nrf2 on endothelial phenotype, holds the promise that their targeted modulation might lead to a new class of cardiovascular drugs.