Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Affective Communications on Students' Perceptions and Performance in an Online University Course

Instructor's support via communications is an essential component in online contexts. This study focuses on instructors' affective communications and their impact on students' perceptions of the course, their instructor, teacher communications and performance in English academic reading courses. 35 students participated in the study: 17 (control group) received instructional communications, 18 (experimental group) received additional affective comments. Students completed a questionnaire which focused on their perceptions of the course, their teacher and the teacher communications. T-tests were performed to see if significant differences occurred between the two groups. Final exam scores were compared. Results showed that students in the experimental group were significantly more positive in their perceptions of feedback effectiveness and encouragement. They also performed better. Despite the small scale of the study, the results suggest that affective communications foster positive attitudes towards instruction in online courses.
Behavior of fluorine and chlorine in Spanish coal fired power plants with pulverized coal boilers and fluidized bed boiler

Abstract Behavior and contents of fluorine and chlorine in coal feedstock, combustion wastes (slag and fly ash) and emissions were studied in five conventional coal fired power plants and in a fluidized bed coal power plant. The halide levels found in the used coal were quite low. Mass balances and emission factors were calculated. The volatility of these elements makes the gaseous emission the main target between the residues. The influence of combustion parameters is not clearly established. Several analytical techniques (ion selective electrodes, capillary electrophoresis and ion chromatography) are employed to determinate the halide concentration in the different samples taken in the power plants studied (coal, slag, fly ash and flue gases).
Array-based comparative genomic hybridisation identifies high frequency of cryptic chromosomal rearrangements in patients with syndromic autism spectrum disorders

Background: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) refer to a broader group of neurobiological conditions, pervasive developmental disorders. They are characterised by a symptomatic triad associated with qualitative changes in social interactions, defect in communication abilities, and repetitive and stereotyped interests and activities. ASD is prevalent in 1 to 3 per 1000 people. Despite several arguments for a strong genetic contribution, the molecular basis of a most cases remains unexplained. About 5% of patients with autism have a chromosome abnormality visible with cytogenetic methods. The most frequent are 15q11–q13 duplication, 2q37 and 22q13.3 deletions. Many other chromosomal imbalances have been described. However, most of them remain undetectable using routine karyotype analysis, thus impeding diagnosis and genetic counselling. Methods and results: 29 patients presenting with syndromic ASD were investigated using a DNA microarray constructed from large insert clones spaced at approximately 1 Mb intervals across the genome. Eight clinically relevant rearrangements were identified in 8 (27.5%) patients: six deletions and two duplications. Altered segments ranged in size from 1.4 to 16 Mb (2–19 clones). No recurrent abnormality was identified. Conclusion: These results clearly show that array comparative genomic hybridisation should be considered to be an essential aspect of the genetic analysis of patients with syndromic ASD. Moreover, besides their importance for diagnosis and genetic counselling, they may allow the delineation of new contiguous gene syndromes associated with ASD. Finally, the detailed molecular analysis of the rearranged regions may pave the way for the identification of new ASD genes.
Selective growth of high purity single-walled carbon nanotubes network from alcohol

This study presents a novel selective growth method to pattern the high purity and single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) network by alcohol catalytic chemical vapor deposition (ACCVD). A hydrophilic surface with a contact angle of 44.22deg or even lower can disperse the Co-Mo catalysts easily and uniformly. Therefore, the SWNTs networks can be only formed and grown on the surface of SiO2 layer after a highly hydrophilic surface treatment. This novel method can be applied in the process of SWNTs electronics devices such as nanosensors or transistors. Finally, a SWNTs networks field effect transistor was also fabricated and demonstrated.
Aggressive management of dengue shock syndrome may decrease mortality rate: A suggested protocol*

Objectives: Dengue shock syndrome is a leading cause of mortality among Indian children. In January 2000, we instituted a protocol for aggressive management of children with dengue shock syndrome. The objective of this study was to compare outcomes (duration of ventilation, pediatric intensive care unit stay, incidence of acute respiratory distress syndrome, and intensive care unit and hospital mortality) before and after the protocol. Design: Retrospective chart review. Setting: Pediatric intensive care unit at a tertiary teaching hospital. Patients: One hundred and fourteen patients admitted between July 1997 and December 1999 received standard therapy recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) and were designated as the WHO guidelines group (W), whereas 96 patients admitted between January 2000 and December 2001 were treated by our protocol and designated as the protocol group (P). Interventions: None. Measurements and Main Results: The patients in each group were equally matched in terms of age, Pediatric Risk of Mortality, and number with dengue hemorrhage fever grade IV, although the platelet counts were higher in the W group compared with the P group (geometric mean 42.2, confidence interval 36.9, 48.4 vs. geometric mean 36.7, confidence interval 33.3, 40.5, p < .05). Patients in the W group received less fluids in the first hour compared with the P group (median and interquartile range 20 mL/kg, 15 and 20 vs. 30 mL/kg, 20 and 60). Fluid was actively removed less often in the W group than the P group (6 of 111 vs. 45 of 96, p < .05). There was no difference in the need for ventilation or incidence of acute respiratory distress syndrome between groups, although among dengue hemorrhage fever grade IV patients, the number requiring ventilation (17 of 30 vs. 20 of 23, p < .05) and the incidence of acute respiratory distress syndrome (9 of 30 vs. 17 of 23, p < .05) were significantly greater in the W group compared with the P group. The duration of ventilation (1.5 ± 1.7 vs. 4.2 ± 2.9 days, p < .05) and length of intensive care unit stay (3.0 ± 2.8 vs. 3.4 ± 2.9 days, p < .05) were significantly less in the W group. The pediatric intensive care unit mortality (16.6% vs. 6.3%, p < .05) was significantly higher in the W group than in the P group. Conclusions: Patients with dengue shock syndrome are at high risk of mortality due to refractory shock and multiple organ failure. Survival was better for patients in the P group. Aggressive shock management and possibly the use of judicious fluid removal may decrease mortality rates in the severest forms of dengue shock syndrome.
The child witch syndrome: Satanic child abuse of today and child witch trials of yesterday

Abstract If history repeats itself there are special reasons to pay attention to those phenomena that tend to return in new disguises. The seventeenth-century child witch trials among the Basques and in northern Sweden seem to be such a phenomenon. During the last 15 years the western world has experienced these trials in a new and refined disguise. A number of parents and employees of nursery schools have been tried for abusing children in organized Satanic rituals. A comparison of the historical and modern child witch syndromes shows the following parallels: association with moral panic; breakdown of solidarity; a saturation point; the argument that the crime is of such a secret kind that it cannot be exposed without slackening legal procedures; witch signs and witch tests; absence of physical evidence; brainwashing; moral pressure during interrogation of witnesses; unconscious influencing of the witnesses; contamination of evidence; irregularities in the interrogation procedures; consistency of confess.
Differential regulation of neurogenesis in two neurogenic regions of APPswe/PS1dE9 transgenic mice

Neurogenesis occurs in two neurogenic regions of the adult mammalian brain: the subgranular zone and the subventricular zone. We have recently demonstrated that the number of bromodeoxyuridine-positive and doublecortin-positive cells is decreased in the subgranular zone of amyloid precursor protein with a Swedish mutation and presenilin-1 with a deletion of exon 9 transgenic mice, an animal model of Alzheimer's disease. In this study, we characterized neurogenesis in the subventricular zone of amyloid precursor protein with a Swedish mutation and presenilin-1 with a deletion of exon 9 transgenic mice at 9 months of age and compared it with neurogenesis in the subgranular zone. In the subventricular zone, the number of proliferating cell nuclear antigen-positive and bromodeoxyuridine-positive cells were normal. In the subgranular zone, the number of proliferating cell nuclear antigen-positive cells was normal; however, the number of bromodeoxyuridine-positive cells was significantly decreased. These results suggest that neurogenesis, probably reflecting the survival of neural progenitor cells, differs between the subgranular zone and the subventricular zone.
Preservice Teacher Attitudes Toward Giftedness

Attitudes influence the teaching–learning process. The purpose of this study was to determine the attitudes of undergraduate-elementary education majors at a small, rural south-central U.S. university toward gifted students. Gagné's and Nadeau's (Gagné, 1991) opinions about the gifted and their education was used. The respondents held attitudes toward gifted children, which were contradictory and unsupportive of practices that would provide support, such as being resistant to objectives, ability grouping, and acceleration. Respondents need to acquire knowledge about within-class acceleration and differentiation strategies. Without such knowledge, their ability to formulate sound cognitive beliefs about gifted learners is hindered, and classroom interaction between teachers and gifted children is impacted.
Capacity Maximizing Power Allocation for Interfering Wireless Links: A Distributed Approach

Recent results show that sum-rate maximizing multicell power allocation promises significant gains in interference- limited data networks. Finding practical, i.e. distributed, versions of this global optimization problem however remains a challenging task. In this work, we establish a general framework for the distributed power allocation problem for N mutually interfering links enabling us to derive a fully distributed power allocation algorithm. Although a gain for N = 2 is observed, a performance gap is still observed compared to a centralized algorithm. As a way to fill that gap, we propose minimal information (in this case 1 bit) message passing between interfering links to improve performance. Numerical results show these algorithms to exploit a substantial amount of the capacity gain offered by centralized optimization.
Diagnostic and therapeutic considerations in patients with hypogammaglobulinemia after rituximab therapy

Purpose of review There are no established guidelines for evaluating and treating hypogammaglobulinemia in patients with rheumatic disease who receive B-cell depleting agents. The purpose of this article is to review findings in the work-up and treatment of common variable immunodeficiency (CVID) that can guide our evaluation of patients with autoimmune disease who develop hypogammaglobulinemia after rituximab/B-cell depleting therapy. Recent findings Infection rates are higher in rheumatic disease patients who develop hypogammaglobulinemia than those who do not. However, not all patients who develop hypogammaglobulinemia are at increased risk of developing infection after B-cell depleting therapy. Recent consensus statements have helped refine the diagnosis of impaired immune responses in patients with CVID, and can provide guidance for the diagnostic work-up and therapeutic decision making for patients with secondary drug induced hypogammaglobulinemia. Summary Based on findings in studies of CVID, assessment of vaccine response in patients with hypogammglogulinemia after rituximab therapy in the setting of recurrent infections can help predict propensity for infection and thus guide decision making with regards to intravenous immunoglobulin supplementation and retreatment with rituximab.
Evaluation of a Speech Cuer: From Motion Capture to a Concatenative Text-to-cued Speech System

We present here our efforts for characterizing the 3D movements of the right hand and the face of a French female during the production of manual cued speech. We analyzed the 3D trajectories of 50 hand and 63 facial (cid:3)eshpoints during the production of 238 utterances carefully designed for covering all possible diphones of the French language. Linear and non linear statistical models of the hand and face deformations and postures have been developed using both separate and joint corpora. We implement a concatenative audiovisual text-to-cued speech synthesis system.
Ponencia: Validez y confiabilidad del Eating Attitudes Test en Costa Rica Paper Presentation: Validity and Reliability of the Eating Attitudes Test in

The paper reports evidence of validity and reliability of the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-40) in Costa Rica. In Study 1, the EAT-40 was adapted to Costa Rican lexicon and applied to 594 adolescent. A Cronbachs alpha of . 87 was obtained, the risk of developing eating disorders (ED) was higher in women (18.6%) than men (7.4%), and this risk correlated with the identification with television models (r = .725) and with the dissatisfaction with physical appearance (r = .562). In Study 2, scores of women with ED (n = 19) and without it (n = 533) were compared. Good discrimination properties were obtained from the cut points of 30 (sensitivity 63.2%, specificity 85.8%) and 20 (sensitivity 73.7%, specificity 71.8%). In Study 3 the EAT-40 was applied to a national sample of adolescents of both sexes (n = 4285). The prevalence of risk was 6.2%, being higher in women (9.4%) than in men (2.3%) and the best predictors of risk in women were psychosomatic symptoms (β = .275) and the level of satisfaction with the body image (β = -.159).
FSCAV: fast seam carving for size adaptation of videos

The presentation of multimedia data and especially of high resolution videos on small mobile devices is still a great challenge today. Both cropping of borders and scaling of frames may result in the removal of essential content of videos or lost details due to the reduced size of the visual content. Another major problem emerges if the aspect ratio of the original video and the display of the mobile device differ. User evaluations indicate that changing the aspect ratio may reduce the visual quality of videos significantly. In this paper, we present the new FSCAV algorithm (Fast Seam Carving for Size Adaptation of Videos) to adapt the size of videos to the limited display resolution and different aspect ratios of handheld mobile devices. The general idea of the seam carving algorithm for still images is to remove seams in images so that the essential content is preserved. We extended this technique which works very well for images to create videos without jitter or visible artifacts. A major feature of our FSCAV algorithm is the low computational complexity which enables an efficient adaptation of videos to small screens. Nevertheless, severe distortions are clearly visible in some shots of the adapted videos. We present a new heuristic to identify shots with such a low visual quality. If the quality drops below a threshold, a different adaptation technique is used for this shot (e.g., scaling or cropping). User evaluations confirm a very high visual quality of our approach.
Early identification and intervention in the prevention of musculoskeletal pain.

BACKGROUND A large number of people suffer from upper extremity disorders, but a few apparently consume the majority of the resources. Early interventions are badly needed to prevent the development of persistent disability. Since psychological factors are central in the development of a chronic problem these might be utilized in this endeavor. METHODS A series of studies are described where a screening procedure based on psychological risk factors was employed to help identify people at risk for developing long-term work disability. The utility of a cognitive-behavioral group intervention that focuses on coping strategies as prevention was assessed in three randomized-controlled studies where participants had low, medium, and high risk, respectively. RESULTS The study with low risk showed no significant difference between the groups, while the studies with medium- and high-risk populations demonstrated significantly lower work disability than control groups receiving treatment as usual. CONCLUSIONS It appears to be feasible to identify patients with high levels of risk and to subsequently lower the risk for work disability by administering a cognitive-behavioral intervention focusing on psychological aspects of the pain problem.
Reconocedor de Palabras con el uso de Regresión Lineal y Coeficiente Muestral

This paper presents the use of the technique of the sample correlation coefficient as a method of recognition of isolated words uttered by one speaker, trying to combat the problem of response and algorithmic complexity in the process in an embedded system, this method are proposed instead of others algorithms with more complex algorithm structure. The implementation of the technique consists in characterize the speech signal using Linear Prediction Coefficients (LPC) to obtaining a characteristic vector that will be processed by the technique of the sample correlation coefficient R for the speech recognition against the sample and get a result. With this proposed method worked with the pronunciation of words
Constructing videocases to help novices learn to facilitate discussions in science and English: how does subject matter matter?

Learning to conduct interactive classroom discussions is a high priority for becoming an effective teacher, and most teachers view conducting productive classroom discussions as a complex undertaking. Because the dynamics of facilitating classroom discussions are multifaceted and hard to analyze in real time, there is a growing interest in how video allows preservice teachers to examine records of their practice to promote further growth. What prospective teachers actually take away from analysis of video, however, needs further exploration. In this study, we explored five preservice student teachers’ beliefs about conducting discussions and probed the potential of videocase construction for supporting teacher learning by investigating the following question: ‘To what extent and how does making a videocase help preservice teachers investigate their facilitation of a subject‐specific discussion? ’ Results revealed that by constructing and talking about their videocases, all five preservice teachers gained insights about how they lead discussions. Studying video excerpts and articulating what they saw in them provided a context for looking more closely at their own roles and student roles within their discussion. They also recognized the complexities of leading discussions and acknowledged particular areas that need improvement. The teachers used the metaphorical language of ‘guiding’ their students down a pathway when they talked about leading classroom discussions. There were similarities and differences among teachers’ conceptions of good discussions in English and science, and their notions of ‘guiding’ were related to their subject matter goals. The study suggests, however, several areas that may require further attention in preservice teachers’ preparation in leading discussions. Although the teachers expressed views of discussion that aligned broadly with disciplinary views in English or science, their language lacked specificity in what it means to develop varied interpretations of texts in English or consensus based on argument and evidence in science. More specific video analysis focused on subject matter goals and corresponding conversational elements may help preservice teachers develop more nuanced, sophisticated views of how particular types of social interaction have the potential to help their students reach specific subject matter goals. We conclude that investigation is needed on larger numbers of preservice teachers’ videocase construction processes, and further inquiry is needed into how working with video analysis affects their actual performance in future discussion facilitation.
Internet Privacy Information Propagation Model

With the rapid growth of information and communication technology (ICT), the violation of information privacy has increased in recent years. The privacy concerns now re-emerge right because people perceives a threat from new ICT that are equipped with enhanced capabilities for surveillance, storage, retrieval, and diffusion of personal information. With the trend in the prevalence and the easy use of ICT, it is of necessary to pay much attention to the issue how the ICT can threaten the privacy of individuals on the Internet. While the Email and P2P tools are the most popular ICT, this paper aims at understanding their respectively dissemination patterns in spreading of personal private information. To this purpose, this paper using dynamic model technique to simulate the pattern of sensitive or personal private information propagating situation. In this study, an Email propagation model and a Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model are proposed to simulate the propagation patterns of Email and P2P network respectively. Knowing their dissemination patterns would be helpful for system designers, ICT manager, corporate IT personnel, educators, policy makers, and legislators to incorporate consciousness of social and ethical information issues into the protection of information privacy.
ALTERED CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMA IN THE INTENSIVE CARE UNIT

Impaired consciousness is a common neurologic problem in the intensive care unit (ICU). Neurologists are commonly consulted for “altered mental status,” often after sedation has been discontinued, after cardiopulmonary resuscitation and failure to awaken, and in patients with multisystem trauma to address the extent of traumatic brain injury and assist in management. With the emergence of transplantation ICUs, neurologic complications have surfaced with many involving altered awareness. The assessment of impaired consciousness or coma is a complex undertaking. Obviously, there are multiple factors in play, but simply denoting the cause of impaired consciousness as multifactorial would be counterproductive and, most likely, inaccurate. Some patterns, however, are apparent. First, prolonged accumulation of sedative agents in patients with impaired renal or hepatic function is common, and allowance of time for these agents to metabolize would lead to improvement. Second, hypoxic/ischemic injury to the brain is probably more likely than commonly appreciated. In the ICU, the circumstances for episodic hypoxemia and shock are commonly present, and therefore, the brain is at risk. Third, the clinical spectrum of the neurologic aspect of critical illness has become better defined. In many circumstances, with a plethora of potential causes of coma, it is possible to localize the lesion and diagnose the cause of coma. The more frequent use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology has increased, providing not only important diagnostic findings, but also prognostic pointers. This chapter provides the essentials of neurologic examination and places it into the context of the different ICUs.