Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Individualized Instruction in Foreign Languages at the College Level: A Survey of Programs in the United States

A one-page, two-sided questionnaire (see Appendix) was mailed in September 1986, to 1772 foreign language department chairpersons of four-year colleges and universities within the United States. Names and addresses were taken from the September, 1985, Directory of the Modern Language Association of America. The mailing included a personally signed cover letter and a postage-free return envelope. Although most of the 766 surveys completed were returned by the requested 15 October deadline, questionnaires continued to arrive as late as March, yielding an overall return rate of fortythree percent. Responses were tabulated and frequencies obtained using the data-based software program Dataease and a Zenith 158 personal computer with a converted IBM hard disk drive.
Resistance to Cancer Treatment: The Role of Somatic Genetic Events and the Challenges for Targeted Therapies

Therapeutic resistance remains a major cause of cancer-related deaths. Resistance can occur from the outset of treatment or as an acquired phenomenon after an initial clinical response. Therapeutic resistance is an almost universal phenomenon in the treatment of metastatic cancers. The advent of molecularly targeted treatments brought greater efficacy in patients whose tumors express a particular target or molecular signature. However, resistance remains a predictable challenge. This article provides an overview of somatic genomic events that confer resistance to cancer therapies. Some examples, including BCR–Abl, EML4–ALK, and the androgen receptor, contain mutations in the target itself, which hamper binding and inhibitory functions of therapeutic agents. There are also examples of somatic genetic changes in other genes or pathways that result in resistance by circumventing the inhibitor, as in resistance to trastuzumab and BRAF inhibitors. Yet other examples results in activation of cytoprotective genes. The fact that all of these mechanisms of resistance are due to somatic changes in the tumor’s genome makes targeting them selectively a feasible goal. To identify and validate these changes, it is important to obtain biopsies of clinically resistant tumors. A rational consequence of this evolving knowledge is the growing appreciation that combinations of inhibitors will be needed to anticipate and overcome therapeutic resistance.
A simplified model of jet power from active galactic nuclei

Aims. A simplified model of jet power from active galactic nuclei is proposed in which the relationship between jet power and disk luminosity is discussed by combining disk accretion with two mechanisms of extracting energy magnetically from a black hole accretion disk, i.e., the Blandford-Payne (BP) and the Blandford-Znajek (BZ) processes. Methods. By including the BP process into the conservation laws of mass, angular momentum and energy, we derive the expressions of the BP power and disk luminosity, and the jet power is regarded as the sum of the BZ and BP powers. Results. We find that the disk radiation flux and luminosity decrease because a fraction of the accretion energy is channelled into the outflow/jet in the BP process. It is found that the dominant cooling mode of the accretion disk is determined mainly by how the poloidal magnetic field decreases with the cylindrical radius of the jet. By using the parameter space we found, which consists of the black hole spin and the self-similar index of the configuration of the poloidal magnetic field frozen in the disk, we were able to compare the relative importance of the following quantities related to the jet production: (1) the BP power versus the disk luminosity, (2) the BP power versus the BZ power, and (3) the jet power versus the disk luminosity. In addition, we fit the jet power and broad-line region luminosity of 11 flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) and 17 steep-spectrum radio quasars (SSRQs) based on our model.
Effectiveness of the immunomodulatory extract of Kalanchoe pinnata against murine visceral leishmaniasis

SUMMARY Previously, we described the protective action of the immunomodulatory extract of Kalanchoe pinnata (Kp) in murine and human cutaneous leishmaniasis. In the present study, we investigated the effectiveness of Kp against visceral leishmaniasis, using the BALB/c mouse model of infection with Leishmania chagasi. Mice receiving oral daily doses of Kp (400 mg/kg) for 30 days displayed significantly reduced hepatic and splenic parasite burden, when compared with untreated animals. Protectiveness was accompanied by a reduction in parasite-specific IgG serum levels, and impaired capacity of spleen cells to produce IL-4, but not IFN-γ and nitric oxide upon antigen recall in vitro. The reference drug Pentostam (72 mg/kg) given by the intra-peritoneal route on alternate days produced an anti-leishmanial effect similar to oral Kp. Our findings show that the oral efficacy of Kp, seen previously in murine cutaneous leishmaniasis, extends also to visceral leishmaniasis caused by L. chagasi, a difficult to treat and lethal disease of man.
Joint optimization of recurrent networks exploiting source auto-regression for source separation

In music interferences condition, source separation is very dif-ﬁcult. In this paper, we propose a novel recurrent network exploiting the auto-regressions of speech and music interference for source separation. An auto-regression can capture the short-term temporal dependencies in data to help the source separation. For the separation, we independently separate the magnitude spectra of speech and interference from the mixture spectra by including an extra masking layer in the recurrent network. Compared to directly evaluating the ideal mask, the extra masking layer relaxes the assumption of independence between speech and interference which is more suitable for the real-world environments. Using the separated spectra of speech and interference, we further explore a discriminative training objec-tive and joint optimization framework for the proposed network, which incorporates the correlations and spectral dependencies of speech and interference into the separation. Systematic experiments show that the proposed model is competitive with the state-of-the-art method in singing-voice separations.
Book Review: Paradigm Debates in Accounting

In summary, although I cannot address the complexity of their approaches in this short space, one can see important developments among these diverse works that spur additional organizational theorizing. There is growing, explicit attention to the idea that globalizing and organizing are mutually constitutive. These books represent nuanced views of organizational transformation that illuminate partial changes, barriers, and contradictions that invite further investigation. These works caution against dichotomizing organizations as bureaucratic or networked, national or transnational, ‘new’ or ‘old’. Comparisons of macro-, microand mid-level views of these tensions help us to understand the interrelation of policies, structures, and individual experiences. Also, the books add complexity to globalization debates as they address both threats and opportunities to agency resulting from new relationships of local, national and transnational organizing. Debates and disagreements across these works in terms of their orientation toward confl ict or consensus, material or cultural explanations, are useful as they encourage us to seek comparisons against a still wider array of experiences of globalization.
Organizational Web Sites: Web Site Content and Style as Determinants of Organizational Attraction

Organizational web sites have become a primary source of information for job seekers. To date, no research has attempted to determine which aspects of organizational web sites most influence job-seeker attraction to an organization. The current paper reports the results of two studies that examined how perceptions of organizational web site content (compensation, organizational culture, and training opportunities) and style (aesthetics and usability) influence organizational attraction. The present findings demonstrate that both the content and style of organizational web sites are important precursors of organizational attraction. These findings are discussed both in terms of their practical implications for designing effective recruitment web sites and their implications for future empirical work on organizational recruitment activities.
Pooled analysis of safety data from pediatric Phase II RTS,S/AS malaria candidate vaccine trials

Prior to progression to Clinical Development Phase III, GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals performed a pooled analysis of phase two safety data following administration of 8860 doses of RTS,S/AS to 2981 children under 5 years old. RTS,S/AS was associated with increased rates of non-serious URTI, rash and diaper dermatitis graded mild or moderate. There was no significant increased rate of overall or single SAEs. Two episodes of simple febrile seizure were estimated to be related to vaccination. Significant decreased relative risks of death, any SAE, any SAE excluding malaria and pneumonia were observed. The results suggest a favourable risk-benefit balance which is to be confirmed in the ongoing Phase III trials.
SSW Library: An SIMD Smith-Waterman C/C++ Library for Use in Genomic Applications

Background The Smith-Waterman algorithm, which produces the optimal pairwise alignment between two sequences, is frequently used as a key component of fast heuristic read mapping and variation detection tools for next-generation sequencing data. Though various fast Smith-Waterman implementations are developed, they are either designed as monolithic protein database searching tools, which do not return detailed alignment, or are embedded into other tools. These issues make reusing these efficient Smith-Waterman implementations impractical. Results To facilitate easy integration of the fast Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data Smith-Waterman algorithm into third-party software, we wrote a C/C++ library, which extends Farrar’s Striped Smith-Waterman (SSW) to return alignment information in addition to the optimal Smith-Waterman score. In this library we developed a new method to generate the full optimal alignment results and a suboptimal score in linear space at little cost of efficiency. This improvement makes the fast Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data Smith-Waterman become really useful in genomic applications. SSW is available both as a C/C++ software library, as well as a stand-alone alignment tool at: https://github.com/mengyao/Complete-Striped-Smith-Waterman-Library. Conclusions The SSW library has been used in the primary read mapping tool MOSAIK, the split-read mapping program SCISSORS, the MEI detector TANGRAM, and the read-overlap graph generation program RZMBLR. The speeds of the mentioned software are improved significantly by replacing their ordinary Smith-Waterman or banded Smith-Waterman module with the SSW Library.
Learning through projects: identifying opportunities for individual professional learning and development

This article is based on findings from the evaluation of a project established to enhance learning and teaching in higher education. This project took place within the University of Hertfordshire School of Education in England through the Change Academy for Blended Learning Enhancement (CABLE) project, the university version of the UK Higher Education Academy and Joint Information Systems Committee Pathfinder programme. The purpose of the project within the school was to increase the support for students’ reading at master’s degree level. The evaluation approach for the project was based on RUFDATA, which provides a framework for evaluation activity. Stakeholders’ reflections on the process and outcomes of the project included the contribution it had made to teaching and learning, and the opportunities it had provided for personal and professional learning and development. The CABLE project is one example of the many funded projects that are a common feature in higher education settings; all potentially of value for individual, team and organisational learning. In this article, the findings from the evaluation are used to suggest some questions that might be asked in future projects to prospectively and proactively identify opportunities for individual professional learning and development.
Disparities in dialysis allocation: An audit from the new South Africa

End Stage Kidney Disease (ESKD) is a public health problem with an enormous economic burden. In resource limited settings management of ESKD is often rationed. Racial and socio-economic inequalities in selecting candidates have been previously documented in South Africa. New guidelines for dialysis developed in the Western Cape have focused on prioritizing treatment. With this in mind we aimed at exploring whether the new guidelines would improve inequalities previously documented. A retrospective study of patients presented to the selection committee was conducted at Groote Schuur Hospital. A total of 564 ESKD patients presented between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2012 were assessed. Half of the patients came from low socioeconomic areas, and presentation was late with either overt uremia (n = 181, 44·4%) or fluid overload (n = 179, 43·9%). More than half (53·9%) of the patients were not selected for the program. Predictors of non-acceptance onto the program included age above 50 years (OR 0·3, p = 0·001), unemployment (OR 0·3, p<0·001), substance abuse (OR 0·2, p<0·001), diabetes (OR 0·4, p = 0·016) and a poor psychosocial assessment (OR 0·13, p<0·001). Race, gender and marital status were not predictors. The use of new guidelines has not led to an increase in inequalities. In view of the advanced nature of presentation greater efforts need to be made to prevent early kidney disease, to allocate more resources to renal replacement therapy in view of the loss of young and potentially productive life.
Non-rigid contour flow detection with static cameras for path planning applications

In this paper, a new approach for non rigid obstacle detection and tracking is proposed. Traditionally, this task is performed for each obstacle as a rigid body without considering the local movements of its parts. The presented method combines foreground segmentation techniques for static cameras with nonrigid point set registration algorithms with the objective of having information about the local movements of pedestrians. This information will be used by an electrical unmanned vehicle that will be working inside a closed bioclimatic urbanization in order to perform a more intelligent path planning. This paper has been focused on pedestrian detection, but as no model is used, it can be applied to any type of obstacle. At the end of the paper, results of some tests about the different evaluated algorithms are shown, as well as the final results of all parts of the method working together.
Transductive Distributional Correspondence Indexing for Cross-Domain Topic Classification

Obtaining high-quality annotated data for training a classifier for a new domain is often costly. Domain Adaptation (DA) aims at leveraging the annotated data available from a different but related source domain in order to deploy a classification model for the target domain of interest, thus alleviating the aforementioned costs. To that aim, the learning model is typically given access to a set of unlabelled documents collected from the target domain. These documents might consist of a representative sample of the target distribution, and they could thus be used to infer a general classification model for the domain (inductive inference). Alternatively, these documents could be the entire set of documents to be classified; this happens when there is only one set of documents we are interested in classifying (transductive inference). Many of the DA methods proposed so far have focused on transductive classification by topic, i.e., the task of assigning class labels to a specific set of documents based on the topics they are about. In this work, we report on new experiments we have conducted in transductive classification by topic using Distributional Correspondence Indexing method, a DA method we have recently developed that delivered state-of-the-art results in inductive classification by sentiment. The results we have obtained on three popular datasets show DCI to be competitive with the state of the art also in this scenario, and to be superior to all compared methods in many cases.
Information processing at work: On energy-aware algorithm design

It is common experience to upgrade firmware of mobile devices and obtain longer battery life, living proof of how software affects power consumption of a device. Despite this empirical observation, there is a lack for models and methodologies correlating computations with power consumption. In this paper we propose a methodology for conducting measures which result independent of the underlying system running the algorithm/software to be tested. Early experimental results are presented and discussed, showing that this methodology is robust and can be used in many settings. We thus adopt it to study the impact of computation and pattern of memory accesses onto the energy-profile of an algorithm when executed on different processors and architectures, thus achieving some surprising insights on green algorithm design.
HyperAudio: location-awareness + adaptivity

The HyperAudio system aims at better supporting a user while visiting a museum by combining location awareness and information adaptation. This mixing of information delivery and physical space proposes new challenges for an effective human-computer-environment interaction. The HyperAudio solution interprets the visitor's behavior (i.e. physical and interactive) to create on the fly object presentations on the basis of the user model, the physical context and the history of interaction.
English in its social contexts : essays in historical sociolinguistics

This is a collection of contributed essays on the social history of the English language. It will be the second volume in the Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics series, edited by Edward Finegan. Linguists are increasingly aware that external social contact can be as significant as internal grammatical structure in instigating and determining the direction of changes within a language's syntax, phonology, and lexicon. Despite this fact, however, existing textbooks on the history of English give scant attention to this sociolinguistic perspective. The present work is designed to serve as a much needed supplement to such texts. The essays in the volume, written by recognized authorities in their fields, address each of the traditional periods of English. Topics covered include: the social status and uses of English, the relations between English and co-existent languages, the relations between varieties of spoken and written language, language as a political and socio-economic instrument, and attitudes towards varieties of English. The book should attract supplementary use in courses in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics as well as in the history of the English language.
5‐HT3 receptors

Following the discovery, in the 1950s, of 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) by Page, and identification of its chemical structure by Rapport, much research was undertaken to gain an understand of the many actions of 5-HT in the human body. This effort was led largely by Gaddum in Edinburgh and Rocha e Silva in Brazil. During the latter part of the same decade, several observations led eventually to Gaddum and Picarelli's now classical publication describing the existence of two receptor types for 5-HT in the guinea-pig isolated ileum preparation (1). By the start of the 1960s, 5-HT research had declined significantly. However, thirty years later, history repeated itself, and during the 1980s, interest in 5-HT receptor classification and the roles of 5-HT was revived. This review is concerned primarily with the pharmacology, structure, and functional roles of the 5-HT3 receptor. The renewed interest in this receptor type must date back to Fozards research at the University of Manchester on the rabbit isolated heart preparation in which he identified a tachycardic response to 5-HT which was equivalent to Gaddum and Picarelli's ' M receptor response in the ileum since it could be antagonized by cocaine. The real advance came when Fozard showed that metoclopramide also antagonized these actions of 5-HT in the heart. Although both metoclopramide and cocaine have several other pharmacological actions, they provided the starting point for several independent teams to identify much more selective and potent antagonists, such as MDL 72222 (2) and ICS 205-930 (3). These compounds and several others more recently synthesized, such as BRL 43694 (granisetron) and zacopride, share a common aromatic nucleus attached to a 'tropane' heterocyclic group (similar to cocaine) via a side chain containing a carboxyl group. From a different starting point, GR38032 (ondansetron) (4) was first synthesized in 1983 and was the only selective 5-HT3 antagonist having a basic heterocyclic nitrogen which was not incorporated into a 'tropane' nucleus. It was the discovery of these selective antagonists which gave such impetus to the research in this field; without them, the characterization of 5HT3 receptors would not have been possible. Many actions attributable to the 5-HT3 receptor have been described in both the peripheral and central nervous systems, and already clinical trials are showing the potential utility of 5-HT3 receptor antagonists in a number of disorders of the gastrointestinal tract and central nervous system.
Congruent phylogeographical patterns of eight tree species in Atlantic Central Africa provide insights into the past dynamics of forest cover

Cycles of Quaternary climatic change are assumed to be major drivers of African rainforest dynamics and evolution. However, most hypotheses on past vegetation dynamics relied on palaeobotanical records, an approach lacking spatial resolution, and on current patterns of species diversity and endemism, an approach confounding history and environmental determinism. In this context, a comparative phylogeographical study of rainforest species represents a complementary approach because Pleistocene climatic fluctuations may have left interpretable signatures in the patterns of genetic diversity within species. Using 1274 plastid DNA sequences from eight tree species (Afrostyrax kamerunensis, A. lepidophyllus, Erythrophleum suaveolens, Greenwayodendron suaveolens, Milicia excelsa, Santiria trimera, Scorodophloeus zenkeri and Symphonia globulifera) sampled in 50 populations of Atlantic Central Africa (ACA), we averaged divergence across species to produce the first map of the region synthesizing genetic distinctiveness and standardized divergence within and among localities. Significant congruence in divergence was detected mostly among five of the eight species and was stronger in the northern ACA. This pattern is compatible with a scenario of past forest fragmentation and recolonization whereby forests from eastern Cameroon and northeastern Gabon would have been more affected by past climatic change than those of western Cameroon (where one or more refugia would have occurred). By contrast, southern ACA (Gabon) displayed low congruence among species that may reflect less drastic past forest fragmentation or a more complex history of vegetation changes. Finally, we also highlight the potential impact of current environmental barriers on spatial genetic structures.