Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Multilevel Model of the Social Distribution of High School Achievement.

The study reported here identified some characteristics of secondary schools that encourage a high level of achievement and promote an equitable distribution of achievement across the diverse social class, racial/ethnic, and academic backgrounds of students. The data consisted of a subsample of 10,187 students in 160 high schools from High School and Beyond. Hierarchical linear modeling techniques were used to investigate the effect of the normative environment and academic organization of high schools on four social distribution parameters related to mathematics achievement. High average achievement is related to school social composition and to the school's academic emphasis. Although a smaller gap between the achievement of minority and white students is associated with an orderly school climate, less differentiation by social class and academic background are associated with smaller school size, less variability in course taking in mathematics, and a fair and effective disciplinary climate.
Nigel Lawson's tent: Discourse analysis, attribution theory and the social psychology of fact

The general aim of this paper is to show some of the limitations of the attribution theory approach to ordinary reasoning when compared to a discourse analytic alternative. Three central shortcomings with attribution theory are documented, each stemming from the method of presenting subjects with factual vignettes from which they are required to draw inferences: (a) its asocial and unexplicated notion of information; (b) its realist view of linguistic description; (c) its constrained account of participants' activity. These paws are illustrated in practice through a discourse analytic study of the management of factual versions in a political dispute (over a controversial briefing between a British politician, Nigel Lawson, and a group of journalists). Specifically, it focuses on ‘consensus information’, examining the way notions of consensus are used when warranting and undermining versions. Two features of consensus accounts are examined: (a) consensus across a group of observers of an event; (b) corroboration between independent individuals. In each case, the rhetorical organization of factual accounts is documented by analysing both the way the consensus is constructed and the way it is undermined or discounted. The analysis explores how the ‘facts of the matter’, rather than existing as criteria for the resolution of disputation, were themselves part and parcel of the disputation itself: In attribution theory terms, the clear distinction between ‘consensus information’ and the attributions which flow from it becomes unworkable. It is suggested that the analysis provides an exemplar for a discourse orientated social psychology of fact.
Word Meaning Inducing via Character Ontology: A Survey on the Semantic Prediction of Chinese Two-Character Words

This paper presents a semantic class prediction model of Chinese twocharacter compound words based on a character ontology, which is set to be a feasible conceptual knowledge resource grounded in Chinese characters. The experiment we conduct yields satisfactory results which turn out to be that the task of semantic prediction of two-character words could be greatly facilitated using Chinese characters as a knowledge resource.
What Kind of Social Science Does the CGIAR, and the World, Need?

Following the great recession of military colonialism after the middle of the 20th century, there was much optimism about the potential for modern technology transfer to transform traditionally based agriculture in the newly independent countries of the Third World, with the green revolution the most salient example. The CGIAR Centers in Mexico (CIMMYT) and the Philippines (IRRI) spearheaded the green revolution, and the Centers have continued to play a prominent and influential role in agricultural research and development in the South, out of proportion with the relatively small size of their programs. The persistence of hunger and the continuing degradation of the natural resource base for agricultural production dampened the early enthusiasm. It eventually led to the conclusion in most industrial nations and international agricultural development organizations, including the CGIAR, that social and cultural factors, not only technical factors, are important determinants of the outcome of technology transfer and the future of Third World agriculture. The CGIAR appears to continue to accept social science as important, as in its 2000 “New Vision” publication: “The CGIAR’s enhanced mandate and strategic focus on poverty reduction will entail an increased role of socioeconomic research within the CGIAR Centers” (quoted in Cernea 2005:73). However, Cernea has documented an increased institutional and intellectual marginalization of social science in the CGIAR in recent years, which he sees as “dysfunctional to the system’s operations and performance” because of “the strategic relevance of social research to CGIAR’s overall research for food security and poverty reduction” (Cernea 2005:73). If the people making policy in the CGIAR system really believed such statements, then they would be irrational to reduce social science at the Centers. Assuming rationality, we have to ask why they don’t believe their own statements, and what they think should be the role of social science in agricultural development.
Fast Generation of Multiresolution Surfaces from Contours

Surface reconstruction from contours is an important problem especially in medical applications. Other uses include reconstruction from topographic data, or isosurface generation in general. The drawback of existing reconstruction algorithms from contours is, that they are relatively complicated and often have numerical problems. Furthermore, algorithms to generate multiresolution surface models do not exploit the special situation having contours. In this paper we describe a new robust and fast reconstruction algorithm from contours that delivers a multiresolution surface with controlled distance from the original contours. Supporting selective refinement in areas of interest, this multiresolution model can be handled interactively without giving up accuracy.
Probabilistic Graphical Model for the Web

Abstract—The world wide web network is a network with a complex topology, the main properties of which are the distribution of degrees in power law, A low clustering coefficient and a weak average distance. Modeling the web as a graph allows locating the information in little time and consequently offering a help in the construction of the research engine. Here, we present a model based on the already existing probabilistic graphs with all the aforesaid characteristics. This work will consist in studying the web in order to know its structuring thus it will enable us to modelize it more easily and propose a possible algorithm for its exploration.
Using the social robot probo as a social story telling agent for children with ASD

This paper aims to study the role of the social robot Probo in providing assistance to a therapist for robot assisted therapy (RAT) with autistic children. Children with autism have difficulties with social interaction and several studies indicate that they show preference toward interaction with objects, such as computers and robots, rather than with humans. In 1991, Carol Gray developed Social Stories, an intervention tool aimed to increase children’s social skills. Social stories are short scenarios written or tailored for autistic individuals to help them understand and behave appropriately in social situations. This study shows that, in specific situations, the social performance of autistic children improves when using the robot Probo, as a medium for social story telling, than when a human reader tells the stories. The robot tells Social Stories to teach ASD children how to react in situations like saying “hello”, saying “thank you” and “sharing toys”. The robot has the capability of expressing emotions and attention via its facial expressions and its gaze. The paper discusses the use of Probo as an added-value therapeutic tool for social story telling and presents the first experimental results. Keywords: social robot; ASD children; social story; robot assisted therapy
Measuring Privacy Concern and the Right to Be Forgotten

The ‘right to be forgotten’ (RTBF) is an emerging concept that refers to an individual’s ability to have data collected about themselves permanently deleted or “destroyed”—the final stage of the information life cycle. However, we do not yet understand where RTBF fits into existing theory and models of privacy concerns. This is due, at least in part, to the lack of validated instruments to assess RTBF. Therefore, following the methodology detailed by MacKenzie et al. [1], this paper develops scales to measure individuals’ concerns about the RTBF. We validate the scale and show that the RTBF represents a separate dimension of privacy concerns that is not reflected in existing privacy concerns instruments.
Early Stopping for Ensemble Kalman-Bucy Inversion

Bayesian linear inverse problems aim to recover an unknown signal from noisy observations, incorporating prior knowledge. This paper analyses a data dependent method to choose the scale parameter of a Gaussian prior. The method we study arises from early stopping methods, which have been successfully applied to a range of problems for statistical inverse problems in the frequentist setting. These results are extended to the Bayesian setting. We study the use of a discrepancy based stopping rule in the setting of random noise. Our proposed stopping rule results in optimal rates under certain conditions on the prior covariance operator. We furthermore derive for which class of signals this method is adaptive. It is also shown that the associated posterior contracts at the optimal rate and provides a conservative measure of uncertainty. We implement the proposed stopping rule using the continuous-time ensemble Kalman--Bucy filter (EnKBF). The fictitious time parameter replaces the scale parameter, and the ensemble size is appropriately adjusted in order to not lose statistical optimality of the computed estimator. The EnKBF, then, gives a continuous process from the prior distribution to the posterior which is terminated using the proposed stopping rule.
Impact of renal aging on drug therapy

Abstract Elderly patients (age ≥ 65 years old) use up to 30% of all commonly prescribed medication, and they suffer more their adverse effects than the general population. In order to minimize this risk, physicians should avoid polypharmacy, dangerous pharmacological interactions and take into account pharmacodynamic and senile pharmacokinetic changes before prescribing any medication to the elderly. The present review article originally describes how renal physiology changes secondary to aging such as dysautonomia, glomerular filtration rate reduction, tubular back-filtration, sodium, calcium and magnesium loss, potassium retention, altered dilution-concentration capability, tubular frailty, genetics, internal milieu and body composition are senile changes that when combined predispose elderly people to suffer from pharmacological adverse effects. Knowledge of these physiological modifications associated with aging and their impact on the pharmacology of particular drugs may help to optimize drug use and to avoid complications in this age group.
Compositionality as an Empirical Problem

3 Some empirical questions about natural language compositionality 9 3.1 The core of Frege’s Principle: semantics as homomorphism . 10 3.2 Is the ’homomorphism’ model the right starting point? 11 3.3 Kinds of non-homomorphic semantic rules . 12 3.4 Rule-to-Rule input with delayed effects . 12 3.5 Type-shifting . 13 3.6 Imposing a uniform category-to-meaning mapping . 14 3.7 ‘Curry-Howard’ semantics, “radical lexicalism” and Type-Logical Syntax . 16
Mobilising for pure prestige? Challenging Federal census ethnic categories in the USA (1850–1940)

The US census is characterised, among other features, by the importance it gives, to this day, to race. There is an ongoing debate on the use of racial categories to underpin affirmative action policies, but their presence in the census is little discussed. This tends either to mask the functions of racial and ethnic categories in the pre-civil rights era or to lead to consideration of such categories as a mere residue of historical discrimination. Yet it would be unfortunate to write a history of such census categories that reduces them to these two functions: to identify, first, groups of non-European origin and then ‘new immigrants’ subject to official discrimination, and later their supposed descendents in order to include them within the scope of compensatory policies. Such an approach would elide the more complex and still largely neglected history of the social construction of ethnic and racial categories. This article examines several cases in which groups mobilised to demand that government agencies should take account of their existence in a different way, in a context where no material advantage was at stake. In so doing, it historicises the statistical categories of race and ethnicity, which cannot be understood solely by reference to their current usage.
Uneven development of the sustainable city: shifting capital in Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon, is renowned as a paradigmatic “sustainable city. ” Yet, despite popular conceptions of the city as a progressive ecotopia and the accolades of planners seeking to emulate its innovations, Portland’s sustainability successes are inequitably distributed. Drawing on census data, popular media, newspaper archives, city planning documents, and secondary source histories, we attempt to elucidate the structural origins of Portland’s “uneven development,” exploring how and why the urban core of this paragon of sustainability has become more White and affluent while its outer eastside has become more diverse and poor. We explain how a “sustainability fix”—in this case, green investment in the city’s core—ultimately contributed to the demarcation of racialized poverty along 82nd Avenue, a major north–south arterial marking the boundary of East Portland. Our account of structural processes taking place at multiple scales contributes to a growing body of literature on eco-gentrification and displacement and inner-ring suburban change while empirically demonstrating how Portland’s advances in sustainability have come at the cost of East Portland’s devaluation. Our “30,000 foot” perspective reveals systemic patterns that might then guide more fine-grained analyses of particular political-socio-cultural processes, while providing cautionary insights into current efforts to extend the city’s sustainability initiatives using the same green development model.
Biochemical Characterization of the Tobacco 42-kD Protein Kinase Activated by Osmotic Stress1[w]

In tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), hyperosmotic stress induces rapid activation of a 42-kD protein kinase, referred to as Nicotiana tabacum osmotic stress-activated protein kinase (NtOSAK). cDNA encoding the kinase was cloned and, based on the predicted amino acid sequence, the enzyme was assigned to the SNF1-related protein kinase type 2 (SnRK2) family. The identity of the enzyme was confirmed by immunoprecipitation of the active kinase from tobacco cells subjected to osmotic stress using antibodies raised against a peptide corresponding to the C-terminal sequence of the kinase predicted from the cloned cDNA. A detailed biochemical characterization of NtOSAK purified from stressed tobacco cells was performed. Our results show that NtOSAK is a calcium-independent Ser/Thr protein kinase. The sequence of putative phosphorylation sites recognized by NtOSAK, predicted by the computer program PREDIKIN, resembled the substrate consensus sequence defined for animal and yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) AMPK/SNF1 kinases. Our experimental data confirmed these results, as various targets for AMPK/SNF1 kinases were also efficiently phosphorylated by NtOSAK. A range of protein kinase inhibitors was tested as potential modulators of NtOSAK, but only staurosporine, a rather nonspecific protein kinase inhibitor, was found to abolish the enzyme activity. In phosphorylation reactions, NtOSAK exhibited a preference for Mg2+ over Mn2+ ions and an inability to use GTP instead of ATP as a phosphate donor. The enzyme activity was not modulated by 5′-AMP. To our knowledge, these results represent the first detailed biochemical characterization of a kinase of the SnRK2 family.
MATTopo: Topology-preserving Medial Axis Transform with Restricted Power Diagram

We present a novel volumetric RPD (restricted power diagram) based framework for approximating the medial axes of 3D CAD shapes adaptively, while preserving topological equivalence, medial features, and geometric convergence. To solve the topology preservation problem, we propose a volumetric RPD based strategy, which discretizes the input volume into sub-regions given a set of medial spheres. With this intermediate structure, we convert the homotopy equivalence between the generated medial mesh and the input 3D shape into a localized problem between each primitive of the medial mesh (vertex, edge, face) and its dual restricted elements (power cell, power face, power edge), by checking their connected components and Euler characteristics. We further proposed a fractional Euler characteristic strategy for efficient GPU-based computation of Euler characteristic for each restricted element on the fly while computing the volumetric RPD. Compared with existing voxel-based or sampling-based methods, our method is the first that can adaptively and directly revise the medial mesh without modifying the dependent structure globally, such as voxel size or sampling density. Compared with the feature preservation method MATFP, our method offers geometrically comparable results with fewer number of spheres, while more robustly captures the topology of the input shape.
Review: management of Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most frequent neurological diseases. Despite the modern imaging and nuclear techniques which help to diagnose it in a very early stage and lead to a better discrimination of similar diseases, PD has remained a clinical diagnosis. The increasing number of available treatment options makes the disease management often complicated even when the presence of PD seems undoubted. In addition, nonmotor symptoms and side effects of some therapies constitute some pitfalls already in the preclinical state or at the beginnings of the disease, especially with the progressive effect on patients. Therefore, this review aimed to summarize study results and depict recommended medical treatments for the most common motor and nonmotor symptoms in PD. Additionally, emerging new therapeutic options such as continuous pump therapies, eg, with apomorphine or parenteral levodopa, or the implantation of electrodes for deep brain stimulation were also considered.
Inquiry and Accountability in Professional Development Schools

To provide a deeper understanding of issues related to collaborative reconstruction and simultaneous renewal, the author provides a historical perspective of professional development schools (PDSs) and an overview of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education PDS standards and assessment process, with a focus on inquiry and accountability within PDSs. A series of vignettes provides examples of inquiry and accountability across diverse PDS settings. Issues surrounding assessment and quality assurance and the challenges to collaborative inquiry are illustrated through the vignettes. This discussion of PDSs, inquiry, and accountability is placed within the context of accountability as mandated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation (2001). The author makes a contrast between PDSs that hold themselves accountable for the growth of all educators and students through their engagement in assessment and collaborative inquiry to transform teaching and learning practices and the NCLB mandates that resulted in a more narrowly defined and less complex realization of accountability.
Antiplatelet therapy in acute coronary syndromes

Introduction: Coronary thrombosis is a frequent cause of death and myocardial infarction most often explained by superimposition of a platelet-rich thrombus on existing coronary artery disease. Therefore, antiplatelet drugs are essential in the treatment and secondary prevention of acute coronary syndromes (ACS) and during percutaneous coronary intervention. Several novel antiplatelet drugs are now available. Areas covered: For several years, aspirin and clopidogrel remained the cornerstone of treatment for ACS. However, prasugrel and ticagrelor have a more consistent, faster-acting and more potent antiplatelet effect than clopidogrel, which translates into improved clinical outcomes, although at the expense of an increased bleeding risk. Importantly, some patients experience cardiovascular events despite current antiplatelet treatment, because platelet activation may occur via pathways not inhibited by these agents. Therefore, improved antiplatelet strategies are warranted. Expert opinion: Despite undisputable benefits of current antiplatelet strategies, a considerable number of patients continue to experience adverse thrombotic events, although clinical outcomes have been improved with new oral P2Y12 antagonists. New drugs have been developed, including intravenous P2Y12 antagonists and oral antagonist targeting the protease-activated receptor-1 platelet activation pathway stimulated by thrombin. This review provides an overview of current and novel antiplatelet strategies and also discusses unmet needs related to antiplatelet therapy for ACS.
Evaluation of a simple and effective music information retrieval method

We developed, and then evaluated, a music information retrieval (MIR) system based upon the intervals found within the melodies of a collection of 9354 folksongs. The songs were converted to an interval-only representation of monophonic melodies and then fragmented t into length-n subsections called n-grams. The length of these n-grams and the degree to which we precisely represent the intervals are variables analyzed in this paper. We constructed a collection of “musical word” databases using the text-based, SMART information retrieval system. A group of simulated queries, some of which contained simulated errors, was run against these databases. The results were evaluated using the normalized precision and normalized recall measures. Our concept of “musical words” shows great merit thus implying that useful MIR systems can be constructed simply and efficiently using pre-existing text-based information retrieval software. Second, this study is a formal and comprehensive evaluation of a MIR system using rigorous statistical analyses to determine retrieval effectiveness.
School failure in early adolescence and status attainment in middle adulthood: A longitudinal study

Guided by a life-course perspective and using a longitudinal panel data set collected at three developmental stages (early adolescence, young adulthood, and middle adulthood), structural equation analyses specify how early school failure influences status attainment at midlife. The results demonstrate that years of education completed in early adulthood is not the only mediating pathway. Lower levels of mental health and higher rates of deviant behaviors in early adulthood are additional mediating processes. A modest residual direct effect of school failure in adolescence on status attainment at midlife is interpretable in terms of inherited or acquired cognitive abilities and motivational dispositions manifested in early adolescence