Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Social network analysis: measuring symmetry of information flow in virtual learning groups

The sociocultural constructivist perspective regards interaction as vital to collaborative learning. In e-learning contexts, the quality of electronic educational discourse has been extensively analyzed for indications of information sharing and meaning negotiation with discourse and content analytical methods. Recently, the method of social network analysis (SNA) has been applied to the discourse of computer-mediated communication (CMC) supported learning groups. While research has mainly focused on network analysis of asynchronous CMC interaction, this study examines patterns of information flow in synchronous CMC exchanges of two virtual learning groups in terms of SNA measures of actor-node types and group reciprocity. The quantitative results from comparative group analysis reveal both higher reciprocity at group level and mutuality in information sharing at actor level in one group. These findings on the symmetry of information flow in virtual groups have implications for e-tutor facilitation of collaborative learning processes.
Optimization Design of the Rectangular 3-D Braided Composite Based on PSO Algorithm

Due to the better performance of three-dimensional (3-D) braided composite, the new type composites have been obtained rapid development. In this paper, considering wide application of hollow-rectangular-section 3-D braided composite in engineering, the stiffness analysis of the hollow-rectangular-section three-dimensional braided composite made by 2-step method were performed. Then, the mathematical models for optimization of the stiffness of the 3-D braided composite were proposed. The objective functions are the stiffness coefficient of the composite. The design variables are the braiding parameters of the composites and sectional geometrical size of the composite. The results of numeral examples show that the better stiffness characteristic could be obtained by using hybrid optimization algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), contenting the determinate restriction. The method proposed here is useful for the design and engineering application of the kind of member.
Effect of Brefeldin A on the synthesis and transport of cell wall polysaccharides and proteins in pea root seedlings

The in vivo effect of Brefeldin A (BFA) on the synthesis and transport of cell wall polysaccharides and proteins in the roots of pea seedlings (Pisum sativum L. cv. Alaska) was investigated. BFA (10 //gml"1) inhibited the synthesis of cell wall matrix polysaccharides by approximately 43%. Under the same conditions, cellulose synthesis was inhibited by approximately 77%. The percentage of incorporation of L-[U-14C]leucine and L-[U-14C]proline into cytosolic, membrane and cell wall proteins was only slightly changed in the presence of BFA. In addition, the drug did not change the pattern of newly synthesized proteins in the three fractions as judged by SDS-PAGE fluorography. Double labelling of proteins and cell wall polysaccharides confirmed the above reported data. All these results showed that the synthesis and transport of proteins to the cell wall was only slightly affected by BFA under similar conditions to those which brought about a strong inhibition of the synthesis of matrix and cellulosic polysaccharides. BFA had no effect on the activity of membranebound and digitonin-solubilized mannan and glucomannan synthase isolated from the third internode of pea seedlings. This would exclude an effect of BFA at the level of the catalytic site of the synthases. The inhibition of polysaccharid e synthesis by the drug was rapidly eliminated after its removal. It is concluded that the effect of BFA on the biosynthesis of cell wall polysaccharides could be caused by an interaction of the drug with the topological organization of the synthase complexes in the membranes. This effect would precede the action of the drug at the level of vesicle transport to the walls.
Sport stars, narrativization and masculinities

In the last ten years academic research has turned its attention to analyses of masculinity, and, increasingly, such analyses are examining the tensions within and between masculinities. The concept of a crisis in masculinity has become an element of public discourse. The macho-ization of male culture in the 1980s, and the emergence of new laddism in the 1990s could be seen as aspects of this supposed ‘crisis’. This paper examines these issues through analysis of the representation of sport stars and in particular the ways in which their stories are narrativized. It analyses the ways in which sporting excellence can be narrated in terms of maverick individualism. It suggests that events around the 1998 World Cup were framed in terms of tensions between the hedonism of the new lad lifestyle and the disciplined needs of national football success, and that in the process a disciplined masculinity was re-asserted as against dysfunctional new laddism.
Social innovation, an answer to contemporary societal challenges? Locating the concept in theory and practice

Social innovation discourses see in social challenges opportunities to make societies more sustainable and cohesive through inclusive practices, coproduction and pro-active grassroots initiatives. In this paper we are concerned first that the concept has been stretched in so many directions that it is at breaking point. We illustrate this by documenting the varied uses of social innovation in different academic and policy discourses. Second, we assume that, if social innovation is to be a useful concept for policy-makers, then it must tell us something about what adjustments are needed to develop an effective political economy that is social innovation ready. Finally, we argue that what is needed is more theoretical and empirical work to help social innovation to develop into an effective policy tool.
The environmental two-step.

An important stage in macromolecular crystallography is that of phase extension and refinement when initial phase estimates are available from isomorphous replacement or anomalous scattering or other methods. For this purpose, an alternative method called the twin variables (TwiV) method has been proposed. The algorithm is based on alternately transferring the phase information between the twin variable sets. The phase extension and refinement is evaluated with the crystallographic symmetry test by deliberately sacrificing the space-group symmetry in the starting set, then using its re-appearance as a criterion for correctness. Here we present a software program (CrysTwiV) that runs on the web (freely available at: http://btweb.aua.gr/crystwiv/) implementing the above-mentioned method.
The experience of a professional community: teachers developing a new image of themselves and their workplace

This paper presents a study of a secondary school in Queensland, Australia, involved in an innovative change process called IDEAS (Innovative Design for Enhancing Achievement in Schools). This process of change centres on the action of teachers in classrooms rather than change in organizational structures. Our main findings illustrate how a group of teachers created a professional community through their participation in the process. We found that shared understanding developed through professional learning can impact on action in the classroom. However, the sustainability of this action within the organization will depend on the established professional community's ability to create a broader 'school-wide' understanding of these new relationships. It will also require developing a new image of teacher and student and their workplace. Through their development of this image, the teachers are in the process of creating a school for students of the twenty-first century, in line with their vision.
APPLY ANT COLONY ALGORITHM TO TEST CASE PRIORITIZATION

Regression test always take resource constraints into consideration, so how to choose an appropriate set of test cases among all is a crucial issue for regression test planning. This paper aims to utilize Ant Colony Algorithm and design a suitable prioritization process to optimize defect detection rate and performance of regression test under certain defined constraints. In addition, historical testing records and defect severity are also taken into account. Finally, for research validation, Average Percentage of Faults Detected (APFD) metric is employed to compare the result with the one of a set of test cases conducted by experienced testing leaders.
The brain correlates of the effects of monetary and verbal rewards on intrinsic motivation

Apart from everyday duties, such as doing the laundry or cleaning the house, there are tasks we do for pleasure and enjoyment. We do such tasks, like solving crossword puzzles or reading novels, without any external pressure or force; instead, we are intrinsically motivated: we do the tasks because we enjoy doing them. Previous studies suggest that external rewards, i.e., rewards from the outside, affect the intrinsic motivation to engage in a task: while performance-based monetary rewards are perceived as controlling and induce a business-contract framing, verbal rewards praising one's competence can enhance the perceived self-determination. Accordingly, the former have been shown to decrease intrinsic motivation, whereas the latter have been shown to increase intrinsic motivation. The present study investigated the neural processes underlying the effects of monetary and verbal rewards on intrinsic motivation in a group of 64 subjects applying functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that, when participants received positive performance feedback, activation in the anterior striatum and midbrain was affected by the nature of the reward; compared to a non-rewarded control group, activation was higher while monetary rewards were administered. However, we did not find a decrease in activation after reward withdrawal. In contrast, we found an increase in activation for verbal rewards: after verbal rewards had been withdrawn, participants showed a higher activation in the aforementioned brain areas when they received success compared to failure feedback. We further found that, while participants worked on the task, activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex was enhanced after the verbal rewards were administered and withdrawn.
Implementation of Learning Community Principles: A Study of Six High Schools

The transformation of a high school to a learning community is a slow and challenging process. This study tracked the efforts of teacher and administrative leaders from six high schools who worked to develop professional learning communities. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of interviews with school leaders revealed that the early days of transition to a learning community tend to focus on sharing materials and resources, whereas critical issues such as learning results or best practice are seldom discussed.
High-performance infrared micro-bolometer arrays manufactured using very large scale heterogeneous integration

This paper reports on the implementation and characterization of arrays of uncooled infrared bolometers containing mono-crystalline Si/SiGe quantum well (QW) thermistors. The bolometer arrays are integrated on silicon fan-out wafers using very-large scale heterogeneous integration that is compatible with standard CMOS wafers. Infrared bolometer arrays with 320×240 pixels and pixel pitches of 25 µm × 25 µm and 17 µm × 17 µm have been implemented, respectively.
Silicon micromachined interconnects for on-wafer packaging of MEMS devices

A silicon micromachined on-wafer packaging scheme for RF MEMS switches is proposed that has excellent performance at K-band. The designed RF transition has an insertion loss of 0.1 dB and a return loss of 32 dB at 20 GHz along with a 55% bandwidth of operation. A novel fabrication technique previously presented is utilized for patterning the RF interconnects inside micromachined silicon cavities. The fabrication process is designed so as to be completely compatible with the MEMS switch process, hence allowing the parallel fabrication of all the components on one wafer. The on-wafer packages require no external wiring to achieve signal propagation and thus have potential for lower loss and better performance at higher frequencies.
Odor Memory and Aging

Although, odor memory is considered to be impervious to time, an unfortunate reality is that many older people lose some olfactorial abilities across the adult life span. This review examines the unique features of odor memory and detection in perspective of the aging adult. Memory for odors does not inherently diminish with age, but neither is it impervious to the effects of time. Many, if not most of the declines typically associated with age are the result of insult and injury, neuropathologies, pharmacological and nutritional imbalance, cognitive slowing, and diminished memorial capacity. Extent research has typically ignored major facets of efficient memory encoding and recall, especially context and experience. Among the most salient experimental factors in need of more research are lexicality effects, in which some stimuli are more easily remembered because of the ability to label or name them, either overtly or covertly. Another important experimental factor is context, typically relied on more by older persons to aid in both encoding and recall. Specific suggestions for research are discussed.
Evaluating the Effect of Inter Process Communication Efficiency on High Performance Distributed Scientific Computing

Scientific applications like weather forecasting require high performance and fast response time. But this ideal requirement has always been constrained by peculiarities of underlying platforms specially distributed platforms. One such constraint is the efficiency of communication between geographically dispersed and physically distributed processes running these applications, that is the efficiency of inter process communication (IPC) mechanisms. This paper provides hard evidence that an operating system kernel-level implementation of IPC on multi-computers reduces the execution time of a weather forecasting model by nearly half on average compared to when the IPC mechanism is implemented at library level. A well known non-hydrostatic version of the Penn state/NCAR mesoscale model, called MM5, is executed on a networked cluster. The performance of MM5 is measured with two distributed implementations of IPC, a kernel-level implementation called DIPC2006 and a renowned library level implementation called MPI. It is both shown how and argued why the performance of MM5 on a DIPC2006 configured cluster is by far better than its performance on an MPI configured similar cluster. Even ignoring the favorable points of kernel-level implementations, like safety, privilege, reliability, and primitiveness, the insight is twofold. Scientist may look for more efficient distributed implementations of IPC to run their simulations faster, and computer engineers may try harder to develop more efficient distributed implementations of IPC for scientists.
China’s move to mass higher education in a comparative perspective

This paper analyzes how China has managed to embrace mass higher education in a short timeline, and examines how far this move has followed the existing or established patterns elsewhere through comparing its core aspects with those of four identifiable models of mass higher education: the American model, the Western European model, the Latin American model and the East Asian model. While acknowledging that the current structure of the Chinese higher education system appears to resemble the American in many ways, this paper concludes that it is fundamentally different from the American model, as well as from the Western European and the Latin American models. Largely mirroring the East Asian model, the Chinese approach features a strong sense of ‘state instrumentism’ and is also characterized by integral tensions among its various sectors, which could turn into either positive dynamics for vibrant growth or negative forces leading to serious social justice and equity issues. After enjoying an unprecedented expansion between 1999 and 2006, Chinese higher education has come to a historical juncture to reconsider its success in the light of more collaborative and normative ideologies, such as those grounded in social justice and human potential.
Cortical entrainment to continuous speech: functional roles and interpretations

Auditory cortical activity is entrained to the temporal envelope of speech, which corresponds to the syllabic rhythm of speech. Such entrained cortical activity can be measured from subjects naturally listening to sentences or spoken passages, providing a reliable neural marker of online speech processing. A central question still remains to be answered about whether cortical entrained activity is more closely related to speech perception or non-speech-specific auditory encoding. Here, we review a few hypotheses about the functional roles of cortical entrainment to speech, e.g., encoding acoustic features, parsing syllabic boundaries, and selecting sensory information in complex listening environments. It is likely that speech entrainment is not a homogeneous response and these hypotheses apply separately for speech entrainment generated from different neural sources. The relationship between entrained activity and speech intelligibility is also discussed. A tentative conclusion is that theta-band entrainment (4–8 Hz) encodes speech features critical for intelligibility while delta-band entrainment (1–4 Hz) is related to the perceived, non-speech-specific acoustic rhythm. To further understand the functional properties of speech entrainment, a splitter’s approach will be needed to investigate (1) not just the temporal envelope but what specific acoustic features are encoded and (2) not just speech intelligibility but what specific psycholinguistic processes are encoded by entrained cortical activity. Similarly, the anatomical and spectro-temporal details of entrained activity need to be taken into account when investigating its functional properties.
Food Sharing Among Ache Foragers: Tests of Explanatory Hypotheses [and Comments and Reply]

This paper aims to describe and explain aspects of food sharing among Ache hunter-gatherers of eastern Paraguay. Food sharing has been widely held to be a fundamental feature of the hunting and gathering way of life and has been hypothesized to have played a major role in the evolution of language, intelligence, and the sexual division of labor. The very general question that guided the research is: What factors are responsible for the evolution of food sharing among adult conspecifics, and how can we account for the variation among groups in the extent to which food is shared? Five alternative hypotheses concerning the evolution of adult-adult food sharing are reviewed and analyzed in terms of the competing predictions they generate. These hypotheses invoke (1) kin selection, (2) tolerated theft, (3) temporal reciprocity, (4) cooperative acquisition of food resources, and (5) conservation of resources. For meat and honey, the resources the Ache share most, the data conform to the predictions of the tolerated-theft and temporal-reciprocity hypotheses, with some qualifications. Long-term differences in productivity between foragers suggest that reciprocity is not completely balanced. The implications of these results for a general theory of food sharing are discussed.
A Sequence within the Varicella-Zoster Virus (VZV) OriS Is a Negative Regulator of DNA Replication and Is Bound by a Protein Complex Containing the VZV ORF29 Protein

ABSTRACT The architecture of the varicella-zoster virus (VZV) origin of DNA replication (OriS) differs significantly from that of the herpes simplex virus (HSV) DNA replication origin. Novel aspects of the VZV OriS include a GA-rich region, three binding sites for the VZV origin-binding protein (OBP) all on the same strand and oriented in the same direction, and a partial OBP binding site of unknown function. We have designated this partial binding site Box D and have investigated the role it plays in DNA replication and flanking gene expression. This has been done with a model system using a replication-competent plasmid containing OriS and a replication- and transcription-competent dual-luciferase reporter plasmid containing both the OriS and the intergenic region between VZV open reading frames (ORFs) 62 and 63. We have found that (i) Box D is a negative regulator of DNA replication independent of flanking gene expression, (ii) the mutation of Box D results in a decrease in flanking gene expression, thus a sequence within the VZV OriS affects transcription, which is in contrast to results reported for HSV-1, (iii) there is a specific Box D complex formed with infected cell extracts in electrophoretic mobility shift assay experiments, (iv) supershift assays show that this complex contains the VZV ORF29 single-strand DNA-binding protein, and (v) the formation of this complex is dependent on the presence of CGC motifs in Box D and its downstream flanking region. These findings show that the VZV ORF29 protein, while required for DNA replication, also plays a novel role in the suppression of that process.