Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parental Involvement in Children's Education: Why Does it Make a Difference?

We assert that the most important questions concerning parental involvement in children's education address why parents choose to become involved and why their involvement, once underway, often positively influences educational outcomes. We present a model suggesting that parents become involved primarily because (a) they develop a personal construction of the parental role that includes participation in their children's education, (b) they have developed a positive sense of efficacy for helping their children succeed in school, and (c) they perceive opportunities or demands for involvement from children and the school. Parents then choose specific forms of involvement in response to the specific domains of skill and knowledge they possess, the total demands on their time and energy, and specific requests for involvement from children and the school. The model suggests that parental involvement then influences children's developmental and educational outcomes through such mechanisms as modeling, reinforcement, and instruction, as mediated by the parent's use of developmentally appropriate activities and the fit between parental activities and the school's expectations. The major educational outcomes of the involvement process are children's development of skills and knowledge, as well as a personal sense of efficacy for succeeding in school. Major implications of the model for research and practice are discussed.
Musical Applications of Real-Time Corpus-Based concatenative synthesis

Corpus-based concatenative synthesis (CBCS) builds on a large database of segmented and descriptor-analysed sounds that are selected and played according to proximity to a target position in the descriptor space. This can be seen as a content-based extension to granular synthesis providing direct access to specific sound characteristics in real-time. The aim of the article is to show how CBCS supports---or actually inspires---new musical ideas by exploring the corpus interactively or via a written target score. We will show this with 4 musical examples of pieces that explore the concepts made possible by CBCS of live corpus recording, navigation in 3D in a metaphor of a score, interaction and corpus cross-synthesis, and harmonic selection tighly integrated with an orchestra score.
Artificial life techniques for reporting cell planning in mobile computing

Location management is a very important and complex problem in today's mobile computing environments. There is a need to develop algorithms that could capture this complexity yet can be easily implemented and used to solve a wide range of location management scenarios. Artificial life techniques have been used to solve a wide range of complex problems in recent times. The power of these techniques stems from their capability in searching large search spaces, which arise in many combinatorial optimization problems, very efficiently. This paper compares several well-known artificial life techniques to gauge their suitability for solving location management problems. Due to their popularity and robustness, a genetic algorithm (GA), tabu search (TS), and ant colony algorithm (ACA) are used to solve the reporting cells planning problem. In the reporting cell location management scheme, some cells in the network are designated as reporting cells; mobile terminals update their positions (location update) upon entering one of these reporting cells. To create such a planner, a GA, TS, as well as several different AC algorithms are implemented. The effectiveness of each algorithm is shown for a number of test problems.
The Myth about IT Security

S eeing an institution’s name in the headlines for a security breach may be among a CIO’s— and a president’s—worst nightmares. Whether the breached data involves social security numbers, credit card accounts, clinical records, or research, this is bad news. Federal agencies that provide research funding may lose confidence in data integrity, putting millions of dollars in grants at risk. Legislators may seek additional oversight. Beyond image, institutions face issues of liability and business continuity. Considering that colleges and universities manage some of the world’s largest networks and collections of computers, the risk and the importance of the issue should not be underestimated.1 Information security cannot be the responsibility of only the CIO—or even a chief security officer (CSO). Part of the reason is its importance. Institutions rely on information for academic, research, and outreach programs and for support services. Information security ensures the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of information, services, networks, and computer systems. These systems and networks must be available on a timely basis. Their information must be protected from unauthorized use or disclosure as well as from unapproved, unanticipated, or unintentional modification. Security incidents include inappropriate access, alteration of data, virus infiltrations, and denial-of-service attacks. Contrary to common belief, the greatest risks may be internal, rather than external. Incidents may be precipitated by disgruntled or dishonest employees. Hackers are found on campus as well as
Resource Allocation for Independent Real-Time Tasks in Heterogeneous Systems for Energy Minimization

In recent years, power management and power reduction have become critical issues in portable systems that are designed for real-time use. In this paper, we study the problem of statically allocating a set of independent real-time tasks to a system consisting of heterogeneous processing elements, each enabled with discrete Dynamic Voltage Scaling. The goal is to minimize the overall energy dissipation of the system without violating the real-time requirements of the tasks. The problem is first formulated as an extended Generalized Assignment Problem. A linearization heuristic (LR-heuristic) is then extended to solve the problem. An analysis of the upper bound on the number of tasks that the heuristic may fail to allocate is also presented. Our experiments show that when the average utilization of the system is high, the LR-heuristic achieves 15% off the optimal energy dissipation for small size problems, while the performance of a classic greedy heuristic is around 90% off the optimal. A relative performance improvement of up-to 40% over the classic greedy heuristic is also observed for large size problems. Finally, an analytical performance comparison between the LR-heuristic and the greedy heuristic is presented.
CS 264 : Beyond Worst-Case Analysis Lecture # 19 : Self-Improving Algorithms ∗

The last several lectures discussed several interpolations between worst-case analysis and average-case analysis designed to identify robust algorithms in the face of strong impossibility results for worst-case guarantees. This lecture gives another analysis framework that blends aspects of worstand average-case analysis. In today’s model of self-improving algorithms, an adversary picks an input distribution, and then nature picks a sequence of i.i. d. samples from this distribution. This model is relatively close to traditional average-case analysis, but with the twist that the algorithm has to learn the input distribution (or a sufficient summary of it) from samples. It is not hard to think of real-world applications where there is enough data to learn over time an accurate distribution of future inputs (e.g., click-throughs on a major Internet platform). The model and results are by Ailon, Chazelle, Comandar, and Liu [1].
Response to Section III: What's Needed Now

I once asked a member of the New York State Board of Regents if the board would partner with a college and a school to advance the professional development school (PDS) model as an innovative reform measure for improving education in the state. He answered, “Linda, the board does not partner with institutions in such matters but rather leverages to effect change. ” His response caused me to pause and reflect more deeply on the status of PDS partnerships between schools and universities in the current political and economic climate. Those of us involved in the PDS effort have arrived at a time in our brief history when PDS partnerships can break the status quo and become contemporary laboratories of innovation for ushering in change and a new era of PK–12 education integrated with teacher education. In this chapter, I appreciate the opportunity to comment on the chapter essays, “Self-Assessment, Program Evaluation, and Renewal” by Bernard Badiali (2011), and “Action Research as Primary Vehicle for Inquiry in the Professional Development School” by Jeanne Tunks (2011). Each author has effectively provided us with potent reviews and information to direct our future research in and on PDS partnerships as transformative entities. My approach to writing this chapter is to comment first on the two essays and then provide readers with my personal history intertwined with my own perspective and recommendations for the future. My history and past experiences with action research in school–university partnership settings and with schools as self-renewing institutions have dramatically shaped my perspective on PDS as leverage for education change,
A planar UWB antenna with signal rejection capability in the 4-6 GHz band

The design of a compact planar antenna featuring ultra wideband performance and simultaneous signal rejection in the 4-6 GHz band, assigned for IEEE802.11a and HIPERLAN/2, is presented. The design is demonstrated assuming RT6010LM substrate with a relative dielectric constant of 10.2 and thickness of 0.64 mm. The presented results show that the designed antenna of 27 mm /spl times/ 20 mm dimensions has a bandwidth from 2.7 GHz to more than 10 GHz excluding the rejection band. The antenna features near omnidirectional characteristics and good radiation efficiency.
Pathophysiology of Hypertension New paradigms in inflammatory signaling in vascular endothelial cells

Xiao L, Liu Y, Wang N. New paradigms in inflammatory signaling in vascular endothelial cells. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol 306: H317–H325, 2014. First published November 27, 2013; doi:10.1152/ajpheart.00182. 2013. —Inflammation is a basic cellular process in innate and adaptive immunity. Vascular endothelial cells play an important role in the initiation, amplification, and resolution of the inflammatory response. Deregulated inflammatory response is implicated in a variety of cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. Recent studies have made significant progresses in the understanding of the complex molecular pathways that mediate the proand anti-inflammatory signaling in endothelial cells (ECs). Specifically, a number of macromolecular complexes termed as signalosomes have been identified to integrate the proinflammatory signaling from the membrane receptors to key transcription factors such as nuclear factorB (NFB). Inflammasomes are associated with the pattern-recognition receptors such as Toll-like receptors (TLRs), nucleotide-binding oligomerization-domain (NOD)-like receptors (NLRs) to mediate innate immunity responses. Emerging evidence has also revealed that noncoding microRNAs constitute a new class of intraand intercellular signaling molecules to modulate inflammation in ECs. Thus this article will briefly summarize these new mechanisms with a special emphasis in the context of cardiovascular diseases.
A Review on Lattice Defects in Graphene: Types, Generation, Effects and Regulation

Graphene, having a perfect two-dimensional crystal structure, has many excellent features such as a high specific surface area, and extraordinary electrical, thermal and mechanical properties. However, during the production process, lattice defects will inevitably be produced. Therefore, the performance of graphene with various defects is much lower than its theoretical value. We summarize the major advances of research into graphene defects in engineering in this paper. Firstly, the main types and causes of defects in graphene are introduced. Secondly, the influence of different defects in graphene on the chemical, electronic, magnetic and mechanical properties is discussed. Also, the control methods of graphene defects are reviewed. Finally, we propose the future challenges and prospects for the study of the defects of graphene and other nano-carbon materials.
Scaling Automated Theory Exploration

We investigate the theory exploration (TE) paradigm for computer-assisted Mathematics and identify limitations and improvements for current approaches. Unlike the theorem-proving paradigm, which requires user-provided conjectures, TE performs an open-ended search for theorems satisfying given criteria. We see promise in TE for identifying new abstractions and connections in libraries of software and proofs, but realising this potential requires more scalable algorithms than presently used.
Deriving the Vehicle Speeds from a Mobile Telecommunications Network

Vehicle speeds are often measured by intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) by utilizing sensors or software solutions. Our previous work proposed the Lin-Chang-Huangfu (LCH) scheme to compute the cell residence times by the standard counter values in mobile telecommunications switches. In this paper, we use mathematical and statistical developments to investigate the accuracy of the LCH scheme by deriving the bias of the cell residence times computed in this scheme. Then, we extend the LCH scheme with some filtering and compensation techniques for vehicle speed estimation and validate our approach with vehicle detector (VD) measurements at National Highway 3, Longtan Township, Taoyuan County, Taiwan. Our study indicates that the LCH scheme is an effective approach to vehicle speed estimation.
SEXUAL FUNCTION AND UROLOGIC DISEASE IN THE ELDERLY MALE

The study included 157 men whose ages ranged from 60 through 74 years. Fifty-five per cent were potent. With the increase of age from 60 to 74 the incidence of impotence increased from 28 per cent to 61 per cent (Table 1). (In all tables the number of men involved in calculating percentages is indicated within the parentheses). The incidence of impotence in our series was similar to that in the study by Finkle et al. (2) of 101 clinic patients. They found potency in 65 per cent of patients aged 55 to 69 and in 34 per cent of those aged 70 and over (2). Kinsey et al. (3) found a slightly lower incidence of impotence, namely, 5 per cent at age 60, 27 per cent at age 70, and 55 per cent at age 75; however, Iiinsey’s definition of impotence is not clear. In general, the incidence of impotence seems to rise sharply after the late 60’s. Among the potent men, the average frequency of coitus per year was 20.7, and no decline in sexual activity with advancing years was evident. Among the impotent men, the average age at the time of the last coitus was 61.8 years. Progressively older impotent men remembered that event as occurring at a progressively older age; evidently, with time, memory is charitable (Table 2). All men were questioned regarding the presence of urologic symptoms (nocturia, dysuria, or hesitancy) or a past history of urologic disease (kidney, bladder, prostate, or testicular disturbances or operation). The incidence of urologic symptoms was identical for the impotent and potent groups-66 per cent (Tahle 3). The incidence of urologic disease in the past was also similar for both
A broader view of family caregiving: effects of caregiving and caregiver conditions on depressive symptoms, health, work, and social isolation.

OBJECTIVES Informal caregivers provide the majority of long-term care. This study examined six health and psychosocial outcomes of caregiving, in the context of multiple characteristics of the caregiving situation, in a representative, statewide sample. METHODS Data came from 4,041 respondents to the 2007 Connecticut Long-Term Care Needs Assessment. Analyses investigated whether caregiving negatively affects depressive symptoms, health, missing work, and social isolation. Logistic regressions tested the independent effects of caregiver characteristics and conditions of the caregiving situation on these health and psychosocial outcomes. RESULTS Caregivers rate their health better than noncaregivers and do not report more depressive symptoms or social isolation. Living with the care receiver, inadequate income, and care receivers' unmet need for community-based long-term care services relate to multiple negative outcomes. Care receiver memory problems and caregiver/care receiver relationship do not relate to health or psychosocial outcomes when these other factors are considered. DISCUSSION Caregiving per se does not lead to symptoms of depression, poor health, or social isolation. Many caregivers do need supports in training and education, respite, and physical and mental health care. Such programs should provide outreach to caregivers facing specific stressful conditions, as not all caregivers experience negative consequences.
A Mueller matrix model of Haidinger's brushes

Stokes vectors and Mueller matrices are used to model the polarisation properties (birefringence, dichroism and depolarisation) of any optical system, in particular the human eye. An explanation of the form and behaviour of the entoptic phenomenon of Haidinger's brushes is derived that complements and expands upon a previous study. The relationship between the appearance of Haidinger's brushes and intrinsic ocular retardation is quantified and the model allows prediction of the effect of any retarder of any orientation placed between a source of polarised light and the eye. The simple relationship of minimum contrast of Haidinger's brushes to the cosine of total retardation is derived.
Distributed Source Seeking via a Circular Formation of Agents Under Communication Constraints

This paper addresses the source-seeking problem in which a group of autonomous vehicles must locate and follow the source of some signal based on measurements of the signal strength at different positions. Based on the observation that the gradient of the signal strength can be approximated by a circular formation of agents via a simple weighted average of the signal measured by each agent, we propose a combination of a cooperative control law to stabilize the agents to a circular formation and a distributed consensus-based source-seeking algorithm, which is guaranteed to steer the circular formation toward the vicinity of the source location. In particular, the proposed algorithm is provided with two tunable parameters that allow for a tradeoff between speed of convergence, noise filtering, and formation stability. The benefit of using consensus-based algorithms resides in a more realist discrete time control of the agents and in asynchronous communication resilient to delays, which is particularly relevant for underwater applications. The analytic results are complemented with numerical simulations.
Specific Phosphorylation of p120-Catenin Regulatory Domain Differently Modulates Its Binding to RhoA

ABSTRACT p120-catenin is an adherens junction-associated protein that controls E-cadherin function and stability. p120-catenin also binds intracellular proteins, such as the small GTPase RhoA. In this paper, we identify the p120-catenin N-terminal regulatory domain as the docking site for RhoA. Moreover, we demonstrate that the binding of RhoA to p120-catenin is tightly controlled by the Src family-dependent phosphorylation of p120-catenin on tyrosine residues. The phosphorylation induced by Src and Fyn tyrosine kinases on p120-catenin induces opposite effects on RhoA binding. Fyn, by phosphorylating a residue located in the regulatory domain of p120-catenin (Tyr112), inhibits the interaction of this protein with RhoA. By contrast, the phosphorylation of Tyr217 and Tyr228 by Src promotes a better affinity of p120-catenin towards RhoA. In agreement with these biochemical data, results obtained in cell lines support the important role of these phosphorylation sites in the regulation of RhoA activity by p120-catenin. Taken together, these observations uncover a new regulatory mechanism acting on p120-catenin that contributes to the fine-tuned regulation of the RhoA pathways during specific signaling events.
Sentiment Analysis on Monolingual, Multilingual and Code-Switching Twitter Corpora

We address the problem of performing polarity classification on Twitter over different languages, focusing on English and Spanish, comparing three techniques: (1) a monolingual model which knows the language in which the opinion is written, (2) a monolingual model that acts based on the decision provided by a language identification tool and (3) a multilingual model trained on a multilingual dataset that does not need any language recognition step. Results show that multilingual models are even able to outperform the monolingual models on some monolingual sets. We introduce the first code-switching corpus with sentiment labels, showing the robustness of a multilingual approach.
Predictive state representations with options

Recent work on predictive state representation (PSR) models has focused on using predictions of the outcomes of open-loop action sequences as state. These predictions answer questions of the form "What is the probability of seeing observation sequence o1, o2, . , oN if the agent takes action sequence a1, a2, . , aN from some given history? " We would like to ask more expressive questions in our representation of state, such as "If I behave according to some policy until I terminate, what will be my last observation? " We extend the linear PSR framework to answer questions like these about options -- temporally extended, closed-loop courses of action -- bounding the size of the linear PSR needed to model questions about a certain class of options. We introduce a hierarchical PSR (HPSR) that can make predictions about both options and primitive action sequences and show empirical results from learning HPSRs in simple domains.
ON THE LAGRANGIAN AVERAGED EULER EQUATIONS: LOCAL WELL-POSEDNESS AND BLOW-UP CRITERION

In this article we study local and global well-posedness of the Lagrangian Averaged Euler equations. We show local well-posedness in Triebel-Lizorkin spaces and further prove a Beale-Kato-Majda type necessary and sufficient condition for global existence involving the stream function. We also establish new sufficient conditions for global existence in terms of mixed Lebesgue norms of the generalized Clebsch variables.
Complete Genome Sequence of the Soil Actinomycete Kocuria rhizophila

ABSTRACT The soil actinomycete Kocuria rhizophila belongs to the suborder Micrococcineae, a divergent bacterial group for which only a limited amount of genomic information is currently available. K. rhizophila is also important in industrial applications; e.g., it is commonly used as a standard quality control strain for antimicrobial susceptibility testing. Sequencing and annotation of the genome of K. rhizophila DC2201 (NBRC 103217) revealed a single circular chromosome (2,697,540 bp; G+C content of 71.16%) containing 2,357 predicted protein-coding genes. Most of the predicted proteins (87.7%) were orthologous to actinobacterial proteins, and the genome showed fairly good conservation of synteny with taxonomically related actinobacterial genomes. On the other hand, the genome seems to encode much smaller numbers of proteins necessary for secondary metabolism (one each of nonribosomal peptide synthetase and type III polyketide synthase), transcriptional regulation, and lateral gene transfer, reflecting the small genome size. The presence of probable metabolic pathways for the transformation of phenolic compounds generated from the decomposition of plant materials, and the presence of a large number of genes associated with membrane transport, particularly amino acid transporters and drug efflux pumps, may contribute to the organism's utilization of root exudates, as well as the tolerance to various organic compounds.