Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Differential Access to High School Counseling, Postsecondary Destinations, and STEM Careers

Background/Context Policy makers, school district officials, teachers and parents have embraced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects as a way to promote a stronger pipeline to college and career STEM. In so doing, these varied groups seek to raise job prospects for next-generation workers, increase opportunities for low-income and minority students, and enhance U.S. competitiveness in a global economy. Purpose/Objective In this article we explore the ways in which the work of counseling departments in two different school environments shape students’ STEM participation in high school, with important potential consequences for college and career STEM. High school counselors operate at a critical access point to high-level science and math coursework in high school and STEM postsecondary majors and programs after high school. A fuller understanding of the role that school counselors play in improving math and science outcomes and strengthening pathways to STEM is increasingly important, particularly given the push for STEM careers in new global economic context. Research Design In this article we delve deeply into the day-to-day workings of the high school counseling office in two schools that serve markedly different populations of students. Utilizing data gathered through full ethnographic investigation over a 1-year period, we focus on the ways in which the work of counselors collectively constrain and /or enhance short and long-term STEM-linked outcomes for varying populations. We address two interrelated research questions: (1) In what ways and to what extent does the work of counseling departments in two different school environments shape students’ STEM participation in high school? (2) In what ways and to what extent does the work of the counseling departments differ in schools that serve markedly different populations of students in terms of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status? Conclusions/Recommendations Our data reveal stark differences between students’ high school STEM participation at the two schools. Evidence also points to differences in the work and role of school counselors in aiding students to access STEM in college and career. However, in spite of the fact that one school offers a far more robust pipeline to STEM than does the other, in neither case do the schools take concrete steps to maximize access to STEM in college or career for their top math and science students who express strong inclination in this direction. Although it is arguably the case that a number of factors contribute to STEM college and career outcomes, data highlight the differential yet simultaneously central role of high school counselors in the pipeline to STEM.
Agroecosystem approach to soil and crop management research

Research techniques that have greatly advanced agronomic science in the 20th century, and have enhanced our knowledge of cause and effect, have been accompanied by reductionism. As a result, much valuable research has been accomplished, but less synthesis of results has occurred that provides answers to landscape-level research questions. We propose that a systems approach to the study of soil and crop management problems is a useful technique that tests our present research knowledge in a way that answers practical agricultural problems and simultaneously identifies gaps in basic research knowledge. We have used a problem common to the Great Plains to demonstrate the systems approach: minimizing the soil-and environment-degrading practice of summer fallowing and simultaneously increasing farm profitability. Although much is known about summer fallow at specific locations, less is known about extrapolating this knowledge across soil and climatic gradients. We show that intensified crop sequences under no-till techniques can replace summer fallow in many environments, and increase the productivity per unit of water received. Simultaneous reductions in the damaging factors of summer fallowing, in particular soil erosion and organic matter losses, also have occurred. We are researching the problem at a landscape level without losing the ability to detect causae and effect, and are able to simultaneously conduct basic research on soil nutrient cycling and water budgets. The approach also is being used effectively as an adult educational tool, thereby facilitating the transfer of technology from the researcher to the producer. M ODERN AGRONOMIC RESEARCH had its beginnings in the 19th century on a nonreplicated, system basis. Combinations of crop rotation, liming, man-uring, and inorganic fertilizers were experimental treatments planned to answer farmer questions of the time. Experiments at Rothamsted, England, initiated by the gentleman farmer-agronomist Lawes, compared farmyard manure with several combinations of inorganic fertilizers in large, nonreplicated plots (Ro-thamsted Experimental Station, 1984). The Morrow Plots in Illinois and Sanborn Field in Missouri are examples of the same approach in the USA. Treatments in these experiments are particular management systems. Two primary deficiencies existed in this approach: (i) the inability to distinguish between biological variability and real differences due to treatments; and (ii) the inability to determine why and how the observed responses were obtained. The advent of modern bio-metrics by Fisher (1925) opened new avenues of study for agronomists. Awareness of biological variability and methods to quantify variability were developed. Factorial treatment arrangements and analysis of variance …
Cerebrolysin administration reduces oxidative stress-induced apoptosis in limphocytes from healthy individuals

Cerebrolysin is the only drug available for clinical use containing active fragments of some important neurotrophic factors obtained from purified porcine brain proteins, which has long been used for the treatment of dementia and stroke sequels. Cerebrolysin has growth factor‐like activities and promotes neuronal survival and sprouting, however, its molecular mechanism still needs to be determined. It has been shown that Cerebrolysin may interact with proteolytic pathways linked to apoptosis. Administration of Cerebrolysin significantly reduces the number of apoptotic neurons after glutamate exposure. Furthermore, it has been reported that Cerebrolysin inhibits free radicals formation and lipid peroxidation. In vitro we evaluated the protective effects of Cerebrolysin towards spontaneous and induced apoptotic death in cells from healthy individuals. Peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBLs) from 10 individuals were used as cell model; 2‐deoxy‐D‐ribose (dRib), a highly reducing sugar, was used as paradigm pro‐apoptotic stimulus. Apoptosis was analysed using flow cytometry and fluorescence microscopy. Our results showed that Cerebrolysin significantly reduced the number of apoptotic PBLs after dRib treatment, although it had no significative effects on cells cultured in standard conditions. Our work showed a protective effect of Cerebrolysin on oxidative stress‐induced apoptosis and suggested that PBLs can be used as an easy obtainable and handy cell model to verify Cerebrolysin effects in neurodegenerative pathologies.
Biological functionalization of dental implants with fibronectin: a scanning electron microscopic study.

OBJECTIVES Early stages of peri-implant bone formation play an essential role in the osseointegration and long-term success of dental implants. Biological implant surface coatings are an emerging technology to enhance the attachment of the implant to the surrounding bone and stimulate bone regeneration. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of coating the implant surface with fibronectin on osseointegration. MATERIAL AND METHODS The experiment was conducted on a total of twelve New Zealand white mature male rabbits, weight between 2.5-4 kg. Twenty four pure titanium implants were used in this study. Each rabbits received two implants, one implant in each tibia; the implant in the right limb was coated with fibronectin (experimental group), whilst on the contralateral side the implants were placed without coating (control group). Six rabbits were sacrificed for Scanning Electron Microscopic evaluation after 4 and 8 week healing periods. RESULTS The results of the present study demonstrating the mean gap distance between the bone and implant was greater in the control group compared to fibronection group at both observation periods however, the difference between these two groups was not statistically significant. CONCLUSION Thus, it could be suggested that the biological functionalization of dental implants with fibronectin, may influence the integration or biocompatibility and bonding of the implant to the surrounding bone.
Region-based video content indexing and retrieval

In this paper we propose to compare two region-based approaches to content-based video indexing and retrieval. Namely a comparison of a system using the Earth Mover’s Distance and a system using the Latent Semantic Indexing is provided. Region-based methods allow to keep the local information in a way that reflects the human perception of the content. Thus, they are very attractive to design efficient Content Based Video Retrieval systems. We presented a region based approach using Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) in previous work. And now we compare performances of our system with a method using the Earth Mover’s Distance that have the property to keep the original features describing regions. This paper shows that LSA performs better on the task of object retrieval despite the quantification process implied.
Efficacy of supplementary vitamin D on improvement of glycemic parameters in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus; a randomized double blind clinical trial

Introduction: Studies have revealed the association between vitamin D deficiency and changes in blood glucose and insulin levels as well as sensitivity of the target tissues to insulin. Objective: In this study, we examined the effect of adding vitamin D (cholecalciferol ; 50,000 units) to therapeutic regimen of T2DM patients compared to placebo on regulating the blood glucose and glycemic parameters. Patients and Methods: This study was a double blind clinical trial conducted on 60 type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients. Exclusion criteria were taking calcium, vitamin D supplements or any drugs effecting calcium and vitamin D metabolism in the past 6 months. Serum 25-Hydroxy vitamin D [25(OH)D] level was measured with ELISA method. Patients were administered weekly vitamin D supplementation (50000 units) for 12 weeks. Results: There was no significant relation between HbA1c and 25(OH)D level prior the study (p> 0.05). After intervention, 25(OH)D level in interventional group was significantly higher compared to that of control group. HbA1c in male interventional group was significantly less than that of control group (p= 0.0068). Conclusion: Weekly vitamin D supplementation had beneficial effect on glycemic parameters in male type 2 diabetic patients.
A Self-similar Solution for the Propagation of a Relativistic Shock in an Exponential Atmosphere

We derive a fully relativistic, self-similar solution to describe the propagation of a shock along an exponentially decreasing atmosphere, in the limit of a very large Lorentz factor. We solve the problem in planar symmetry and compute the acceleration of the shock in terms of the density gradient crossed during its evolution. We apply our solution to the acceleration of shocks within the atmosphere of a hypernova and show that velocities consistent with the requirements of gamma-ray burst models can be achieved with exponential atmospheres spanning a wide density range.
For better or worse: The effect of levodopa on speech in Parkinson's disease

While the beneficial effect of levodopa on traditional motor control tasks have been well documented over the decades, its effect on speech motor control has rarely been objectively examined and the existing literature remains inconclusive. This paper aims to examine the effect of levodopa on speech in patients with Parkinson's disease. It was hypothesized that levodopa would improve preparatory motor set related activity and alleviate hypophonia. Patients fasted and abstained from levodopa overnight. Motor examination and speech testing was performed the following day, pre‐levodopa during their “off” state, then at hourly intervals post‐medication to obtain the best “on” state. All speech stimuli showed a consistent tendency for increased loudness and faster rate during the “on” state, but this was accompanied by a greater extent of intensity decay. Pitch and articulation remained unchanged. Levodopa effectively upscaled the overall gain setting of vocal amplitude and tempo, similar to its well‐known effect on limb movement. However, unlike limb movement, this effect on the final acoustic product of speech may or may not be advantageous, depending on the existing speech profile of individual patients. © 2007 Movement Disorder Society
PowerScaling : An Elastic Power Management Solution in Virtualized Data Center

At present, large-scale data centers are typically over-provisioned in order to handle peak load requirements. The resulting low utilization of resources contribute to a huge amounts of power consumption in data centers. The effects of high power consumption manifest in a high operational cost in data centers and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, the management solutions for large-scale data centers must be designed to effectively take power consumption into account. In this work, we present the data center management dimensions that can be used to control servers in an energy-efficient manner. The identified dimensions integrate software solution that make use of virtualization capabilities to dynamically configure resources of a service and hardware solution that changes the configuration of physical resources to achieve high power efficiency. The proposed system consists of a controller that combines feedback and feedforward information to determine a configuration that minimize power consumption while meeting the performance target. The controller can also be configured to accomplish power minimization in a stable manner, without causing large oscillations in the resource allocations. Our experimental evaluation based on the Sysbench benchmark combined with workload traces from production systems shows that our approach achieves the lowest energy consumption among the compared three approaches while meeting the performance target.
Total mass biases in X-ray galaxy clusters

Context. The exploitation of clusters of galaxies as cosmological probes relies on accurate measurements of their total gravitating mass. X-ray observations provide a powerful means of probing the total mass distribution in galaxy clusters, but might be affected by observational biases and rely on simplistic assumptions originating from our limited understanding of the intracluster medium physics. Aims. This paper is aimed at elucidating the reliability of X-ray total mass estimates in clusters of galaxies by properly disentangling various biases of both observational and physical origin. Methods. We use N-body/SPH simulation of a large sample of ∼100 galaxy clusters and investigate total mass biases by comparing the mass reconstructed adopting an observational-like approach with the true mass in the simulations. X-ray surface brightness and temperature profiles extracted from the simulations are fitted with different models and adopting different radial fitting ranges in order to investigate modeling and extrapolation biases. Different theoretical definitions of gas temperature are used to investigate the effect of spectroscopic temperatures and a power ratio analysis of the surface brightness maps allows us to assess the dependence of the mass bias on cluster dynamical state. Moreover, we perform a study on the reliability of hydrostatic and hydrodynamical equilibrium mass estimates using the full three-dimensional information in the simulation. Results. A model with a low degree of sophistication such as the polytropic β-model can introduce, in comparison with a more adequate model, an additional mass underestimate of the order of ∼10% at r500 and ∼15% at r200. Underestimates due to extrapolation alone are at most of the order of ∼10% on average, but can be as large as ∼50% for individual objects. Masses are on average biased lower for disturbed clusters than for relaxed ones and the scatter of the bias rapidly increases with increasingly disturbed dynamical state. The bias originating from spectroscopic temperatures alone is of the order of 10% at all radii for the whole numerical sample, but strongly depends on both dynamical state and cluster mass. From the full three dimensional information in the simulations we find that the hydrostatic equilibrium assumption yields masses underestimated by ∼10–15% and that masses computed by means of the hydrodynamical estimator are unbiased. Finally, we show that there is excellent agreement between our findings, results from similar analyses based on both Eulerian and Lagrangian simulations, and recent observational work based on the comparison between X-ray and gravitational lensing mass estimates.
Towards More Flexible Development of Z Specifications

Formal specifications of software systems need to evolve in many ways during system development. Not only are changes required to refine the specification towards an implementation, they are also required in response to changes in requirements, or to incorporate different aspects of the system, e.g., fault tolerance or timing, initially ignored in order to simplify reasoning. This paper presents an approach for evolving Z specifications by the step-wise application of a number of simple rules. These rules not only document the specification's evolution, but also make precise how safety properties of the system evolve with the specification. Hence, reasoning about these properties performed on the original specification need not be repeated on the new specification.
A Pivot-Based Distributed Pseudo Facial Image Retrieval in Manifold Spaces: An Efficiency Study

The research of cognitive science indicates that manifold-learning-based facial image retrieval is based on human perception, which can accurately capture the intrinsic similarity of two facial images. The paper proposes a pivot-based Distributed Pseudo Similarity Retrieval method called DPSR in manifold spaces with the aid of a adjacency distance list (ADL). Specifically, we first construct a two dimensional array, called ADL which records the pair-wise distance between any two facial images with a constraint in the database. Then, the distances are indexed by a B+-tree. Finally, a DPSR process in high-dimensional manifold spaces is transformed into range search over the B+-tree in the single-dimensional space at a filtering level. Extensive experimental studies show that the DPSR outperforms the conventional sequential scan in manifold spaces by a large margin, especially for the large high-dimensional datasets.
Reticulated Origin of Domesticated Emmer Wheat Supports a Dynamic Model for the Emergence of Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent

We used supernetworks with datasets of nuclear gene sequences and novel markers detecting retrotransposon insertions in ribosomal DNA loci to reassess the evolutionary relationships among tetraploid wheats. We show that domesticated emmer has a reticulated genetic ancestry, sharing phylogenetic signals with wild populations from all parts of the wild range. The extent of the genetic reticulation cannot be explained by post-domestication gene flow between cultivated emmer and wild plants, and the phylogenetic relationships among tetraploid wheats are incompatible with simple linear descent of the domesticates from a single wild population. A more parsimonious explanation of the data is that domesticated emmer originates from a hybridized population of different wild lineages. The observed diversity and reticulation patterns indicate that wild emmer evolved in the southern Levant, and that the wild emmer populations in south-eastern Turkey and the Zagros Mountains are relatively recent reticulate descendants of a subset of the Levantine wild populations. Based on our results we propose a new model for the emergence of domesticated emmer. During a pre-domestication period, diverse wild populations were collected from a large area west of the Euphrates and cultivated in mixed stands. Within these cultivated stands, hybridization gave rise to lineages displaying reticulated genealogical relationships with their ancestral populations. Gradual movement of early farmers out of the Levant introduced the pre-domesticated reticulated lineages to the northern and eastern parts of the Fertile Crescent, giving rise to the local wild populations but also facilitating fixation of domestication traits. Our model is consistent with the protracted and dispersed transition to agriculture indicated by the archaeobotanical evidence, and also with previous genetic data affiliating domesticated emmer with the wild populations in southeast Turkey. Unlike other protracted models, we assume that humans played an intuitive role throughout the process.
Exploring the natural discriminative information of sparse representation for feature extraction

Sparse representation has been extensively studied in the signal processing community, which shows that one target sample can be accurately recovered by a sparse linear combination of the overall data. Such discovery has soon been applied to the pattern recognition task and, more recently, given rise to two new feature extraction methods, namely sparsity preserving projections (SPP) and global sparse representation projections (GSRP). However, both methods utilized the sparse representation by simply preserving it in the embedded space, but none of them investigates its natural discriminative information and therefore may have limited classifying power for the recognition task. In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction method by exploring the discriminative information naturally embodied in the sparse representation. Based on the idea that one target sample shall ideally be more accurately reproduced by the intra-class data associated with the sparse coefficients than by the inter-class data, we seek a linearly transformed space where the reconstructive errors of samples caused by intra-class data are minimized and the reconstructive errors caused by inter-class data are simultaneously maximized. We name the proposed method sparse representation-based discriminative information exploring transform (DIET) and experiments on two face databases, i.e., Yale and ORL validate the effectiveness of DIET, as compared with several representative linear feature extraction methods.
Lead-through robot teaching

This paper presents a lead-through method and device for industrial robots and more particularly the design and calibration of a portable lead-through teaching device. Most industrial robots are programmed by a teach-and-playback approach. In some applications, maneuvering robots using the joystick or keypad on the teach pendant along the desired path is not easy or intuitive. To solve this problem, lead-through teaching methodologies have been developed by researchers from both academia and industries for more efficient and intuitive teaching of discrete point or continuous-path robot programs. We developed a portable lead-through teaching device, which is designed to be calibrated by moving the device to predetermined reference poses.