Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Japanese Middle Schools: A Reflection on Practices, Issues and Trends.

This paper discusses practices, issues, and trends in Japanese middle school education that have bearing on U.S. education, grouping them into four categories. Section 1, "School Reform," discusses central control of education, opportunities for student creativity, improved teacher education, and the examination system. Section 2, "Centralization," observes Japan's move toward decentralization while the United States concurrently moves away from decentralization. Section 3, "School Organization and the Use of Time," describes middle school grade levels, block scheduling, the school year, team teaching, teacher collaboration, looping, and student uniforms. Section 4, "Curriculum," discusses how the Japanese school curricula differs from U.S. curricula. Some of the differences are that in Japan, the academic curriculum is determined by the Ministry of Japan, while in the U.S., it is determined by local boards of education. In Japan, unlike the U.S., there are academic requirements for music, art, and moral education. Japan has less focus on teamwork and cooperative learning. In recent years, both countries have increased technology use in the schools. Section 5, "Equity Issues," explains that educational equity has different meanings in the two countries. In the U.S., the concept of individualism ties in with the concept of equal educational opportunity, with students grouped by their ability and taught curricula in keeping with an individual student's development. Equal opportunity in Japan means providing each student with the same contents to learn, equal financial support, and equal physical facilities. (SM) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
The Politics Of Central Banks

This book is a study of power. In particular, it is a study of governmental power in Britain and France. Its focus is the changing relationship between the government and the central bank in the two countries, and it examines the politics of this relationship since the time when the Bank of England and the Bank of France were first created. The book begins by considering the issue of governmental control generally. It then focuses on monetary policy making, and asks what has been the role of governments in this area and what freedom have central banks enjoyed? After a detailed historical analysis of this issue in Britain and France, the authors conclude by considering the likely role of the European Central Bank.
A Neural Basis for Auditory Feedback Control of Vocal Pitch

Hearing one's own voice is essential for the production of correct vocalization patterns in many birds and mammals, including humans. Bats, for instance, adjust temporal, spectral, and intensity parameters of their echolocation calls by precisely monitoring the characteristics of the returning echo signals. However, neuronal substrates and mechanisms for auditory feedback control of vocalizations are still mostly unknown in any vertebrate. We used echolocating horseshoe bats to investigate the role of the midbrain and hindbrain tegmentum for the control of call frequencies in response to changing auditory feedback. These bats accurately control the frequency of their echolocation calls through auditory feedback both when the bat is at rest [resting frequency (RF)] and when it is flying and compensating for changes in echo frequency caused by flight-induced Doppler shifts [Doppler shift compensation (DSC)]. We iontophoretically injected various GABAergic and glutamatergic transmitter agonists and antagonists into the brainstem tegmentum. We found that within the parabrachial nuclei and the immediately adjacent tegmentum, excitatory effects caused by application of the glutamate agonist AMPA or the GABAAantagonist bicuculline raised RF and the frequency of calls emitted during DSC. Bicuculline application routinely blocked DSC altogether. Alternately, inhibitory effects caused by application of either the GABAA agonist muscimol or the AMPA antagonist CNQX lowered call frequencies emitted at rest and during DSC. Such an audio–vocal feedback mechanism might share basic aspects with audio–vocal feedback controlling the pitch of vocalizations in other mammals, including the involuntary response to “pitch-shifted feedback” in humans.
Term Expansion using Stemming and Thesauri in Spanish

The objective of our participation this year in the Spanish monolingual task at CLEF2002 is to continue the study in term expansion. Last year we showed results in stemming. Now, our effort is centered in term expansion using thesauri. Many words that derive from the same stem have a close romantic content. However other words with very different stem origin have near semantic sense. In this case, the analysis of the word relationships in document collection can be used to construct a thesaurus of related terms. After, the thesaurus is used to expand a term with the best related terms
R&D Appropriability, Opportunity, and Market Structure: New Evidence on Some Schumpeterian Hypotheses

One of the largest bodies of literature in the field of industrial organization is devoted to the interpretation and testing of several hypotheses advanced by Joseph Schumpeter (1950) concerning innovation and industrial market structure. One set of hypotheses focuses on the role of firm size as a determinant of R&D spending and the rate of technological advance. Another set focuses on the effect of market concentration on R&D and technological advance. In this paper, we reexamine the latter set of hypotheses at the industry level, using new data on R&D appropriability and technological opportunity collected by Levin et al. (1984) in a survey of R&D executives in 130 industries.
GEOMETRICAL AND PHYSICAL PARAMETERS AFFECTING DISTANT ELECTRIC FIELDS RADIATED BY LIGHTNING RETURN STROKES.

In this paper detailed numerical results are presented for the estimation of the electric fleld generated by the flrst return stroke, in order to reproduce the main characteristics of fleld waveforms measured at distances beyond 50km. The efiect of parameters such as the lightning channel geometry, distance from the source, return-stroke current speed, its attenuation along the channel is discussed by comparing numerical and experimental results.
Use of local anesthesia for arterial punctures.

BACKGROUND Except for intravenous therapy, arterial access is the most common invasive procedure performed on critically ill patients. Arterial puncture is a source of pain and discomfort. Intradermal injection of lidocaine around the puncture site decreases the incidence and severity of localized pain when used before arterial puncture. OBJECTIVE To review the recommendations and studies related to the use of intradermal lidocaine to decrease pain during arterial punctures. METHODS Articles were identified by doing a systematic computerized search of MEDLINE (1980 to January 2006) to evaluate articles and reference lists of articles and a manual search of the references listed in original and review articles. English-language articles that evaluated any aspect of pain related to arterial puncture and cannulation, pain related to and methods of introducing lidocaine subcutaneously, and perceptions and use of local anesthesia for arterial or intravenous punctures were reviewed. RESULTS Except among anesthesia providers, the use of a local anesthetic before arterial puncture is not universal, contrary to the standard of practice. A number of false perceptions may prevent wider use of such anesthetics. CONCLUSION Before a plan for behavior modification or policy change is recommended for use of local anesthesia to decrease pain associated with arterial puncture, further research must be done to determine nurses' perceptions of use, actual practice, and currently established local policies.
IT/IM academic network in Taiwan via social networks analyze of conference committees

For inexperience researcher, academic network (AN) is a specific network and hard to acquire relative information. To realize AN is an important but difficult work because of the constituents of AN are complicated and dynamic variation. In this research, two academic networks are established individually from academic conference and committee member perspectives. Particularly, for conference academic network, every academic conference is regarded as a AN node and two connection types among nodes are further analyzed, including: the relationship of CFP topic list and the relationship of committee member. Finally, 20 IT/IM relative target conferences in Taiwan 2009 are analyzed via social network analysis methodology. As the experiment result shown, from degree and between values by SNA, some interesting findings are revealed, such as TANEY, OOTA and IMP are important bridge conferences. Additionally, as the cluster analyzed result shown, academic network somehow represents domain expertise because of the committee are grouped according to their research domain. These finding is consist with the research assumptions and can be further helpful information for academic network understanding to capture research trend and new research issue.
Use of NLP to Mine Frequent Pattern for XML Query-Answering Support

Extracting information from semi structured documents is difficult task. It is more crucial as there is a huge amount of digital information on the Internet is growing rapidly. Sometimes, documents are often so large that the data set returned as answer to a query may be large to even convey interpretable knowledge. This paper describes an approach which takes RSS feeds as input for which Tree-Based Association Rules (TARs): mined rules are used. It provides more approximate and intentional information on both the structure and the contents of Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents which can then be stored in XML format as well. This generated mined knowledge is later used to provide: 1) The gist of the structure and the content of the XML document and 2) Quick and more approximate answers to queries. This paper focuses on the second feature. In this paper we show a novel approach for finding frequent patterns in XML documents.
Twitter and the Opportunity for Small Business Entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia

Twitter is extensively used by small business entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia especially by virtual shop owners. This preliminary study aimed to identify the reasons that make small business entrepreneurs use Twitter in their businesses; and to determine the level of effectiveness of the use of Twitter. We gather quantitative and qualitative data using survey questionnaire. We found that the employment of Twitter as a virtual shop is growing continuously in the last two years. Results of this study have shown that Twitter is perceived as a valuable tool in customer acquisition, advertising, and sales. The study also reveals that Twitter has many positives with major concern of the apprehension of dealing with unknown persons. Overall, Twitter is exploited as an effective tool among small business entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia.
Passive Acoustic Tracking of Singing Humpback Whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) on a Northwest Atlantic Feeding Ground

Passive acoustic tracking provides an unobtrusive method of studying the movement of sound-producing animals in the marine environment where traditional tracking methods may be costly or infeasible. We used passive acoustic tracking to characterize the fine-scale movements of singing humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) on a northwest Atlantic feeding ground. Male humpback whales produce complex songs, a phenomenon that is well documented in tropical regions during the winter breeding season, but also occurs at higher latitudes during other times of year. Acoustic recordings were made throughout 2009 using an array of autonomous recording units deployed in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Song was recorded during spring and fall, and individual singing whales were localized and tracked throughout the array using a correlation sum estimation method on the time-synchronized recordings. Tracks were constructed for forty-three song sessions, revealing a high level of variation in movement patterns in both the spring and fall seasons, ranging from slow meandering to faster directional movement. Tracks were 30 min to 8 h in duration, and singers traveled distances ranging from 0.9 to 20.1 km. Mean swimming speed was 2.06 km/h (SD 0.95). Patterns and rates of movement indicated that most singers were actively swimming. In one case, two singers were tracked simultaneously, revealing a potential acoustic interaction. Our results provide a first description of the movements of singers on a northwest Atlantic feeding ground, and demonstrate the utility of passive acoustic tracking for studying the fine-scale movements of cetaceans within the behavioral context of their calls. These methods have further applications for conservation and management purposes, particularly by enhancing our ability to estimate cetacean densities using passive acoustic monitoring.
The virtues of gradualism and legitimacy in the transition to a market economy

This paper presents a simplified model of sectoral restructuring in Eastern Europe. A move towards allocative efficiency is desired by the reform-minded government, but the shift to higher productivity which such efficiency requires would lead to massive layoffs and labour reallocation in the transition period. We look at the impact of political constraints (unanimity and/or majority worker approval) on reform proposals when the government faces a heterogeneous workforce, holding private information on relative outside opportunities. When the budgetary consequences of exit compensations are so important as to make partial reforms preferable to full reforms, gradualism emerges as the optimum in a dynamic context without government commitment. It is also shown that under democratic majority rule, a government in control of the agenda of reforms can win majority approval for plans which end up hurting majority interests intertemporally by threatening to switch majorities in future reform proposals.
Cell Polarization: A Comparative Cell Biology and Immunological View

Cell polarization and the establishment of functionally specialized domains play a pivotal role in many cellular processes such as vectorial transport of molecules, cell division and differentiation, directional movement of the cells in a chemotactic gradient and activation of the immune response. Cell polarization is a complex phenomenon, in which the interplay among cell cytoskeletal components, extra- and intracellular signals and organelle and membrane reorganization is crucial to achieve a correct cell shape change. The intracellular machinery needed for cell polarization has been elucidated in several well-established models, including yeast, epithelial, neuronal and germ-line cells. Cells of the immune system also polarize in response to extracellular cues, but many of the intracellular signals that control cell polarization and the role of genes with a well-defined function in other polarization processes are still unknown. In this review, recent advances in the study of leukocyte polarization are examined highlighting the similarities and differences with other models of cell polarization. The extracellular signals which direct cell polarization, the signal transduction pathways involved as well as the role of cell polarization in the development of the immune response are discussed.
COMMENTS AND CONTROVERSIES Functional MRI of the Human Amygdala

In view of an increasing number of publications that deal with functional mapping of the human amygdala using blood oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) magnetic resonance imaging, we reevaluated the underlying image quality of T2*-weighted echoplanar imaging (EPI) and fast low angle shot (FLASH) sequences at 2.0-T with regard to susceptibility-induced signal losses and geometric distortions. Apart from the timing of the gradient echoes, the degree of susceptibility influences is controlled by the image voxel size. Whereas published amygdala studies report voxel sizes ranging from 22 to 125 ␮l, the present results suggest that reliable imaging of the amygdala with BOLD sensitivity requires voxel sizes of 4 to 8 ␮l or less. Preferentially, acquisitions should be performed with a coronal section orientation. Although high-resolution BOLD MRI is at the expense of temporal resolution and volume coverage, it seems to provide the only solution to this physical problem.
Fault Tolerance in Distributed Paradigms

Distributed systems are responsible for providing the main execution platform for High Performance Computing (HPC). As distributed systems can be homogeneous (cluster) as well as heterogeneous (grid and cloud etc), they are prone to different kinds of problems. The issues in distributed systems can be Security, Quality of Service, Resource Selection and Fault Tolerance etc. Fault tolerance is responsible for handling the reliability and availability of distributed systems. It is not feasible to ignore job failures in distributed environments where long and persistent commitments of resources are required. In this paper we have presented a comprehensive classification of errors, failures and faults that can be encountered in a Distributed environment. Furthermore, we have examined different fault identification and tolerance techniques available in different Clustered and Grid Computing environments. Fault detection and tolerance techniques used in homogeneous and heterogeneous environments are different from each other and are not interoperable. We have proposed in this paper that a standard fault tolerant framework should be there capable of handling all the identified errors, failures and faults.
Parallel Transport Approach to Curve Framing

We propose an algorithm for generating a moving coordinate frame on a space curve based on the concept of parallel transport. Such algorithms can be used for creating ribbons, tubes, and camera orientations that are smoothly varying and controlled by the curve geometry itself. The more familiar Frenet frame approach su(cid:11)ers from ambiguity and sudden orientation changes when the curve straightens out momentarily. We compare the properties of alternative framing methods and point out when the parallel transport approach has unique advantages. We discuss a variety of implementation issues and illustrate the application of the algorithm to ribbons and tubes based on open and closed curves, as well as to the generation of moving camera orientations
Three dimensions ontology modification matrix

The Semantic Web vision provides the current Web with the necessary infrastructure that allows the computer to process knowledge. One of the cornerstones of this infrastructure is the Ontology. Ontology is a formal way of sharing knowledge via a machine-readable format in order to facilitate the reuse of the knowledge among different parties. For example, Web Ontology Language (OWL) defines the <;owl:import> that allows the reuse of a desired content of another ontology. That is, ontology is expected to be modified in order to be accommodated with added, removed, or refined knowledge in order to fulfill new requirements. Otherwise, it would be outdated; resulting in poor Semantic Web applications. Also, when an ontology is about to be built or chosen, it is worthwhile to make sure that this ontology can be easily modified by other parties in order to suit new tasks. Thus, in this work, a three dimensions ontology modification matrix approach is proposed as an attempt to relatively indicate the complexity of an ontology. This approach can assist in estimating ontology modification efforts and tracking the ontology development process; yet, it is a simple approach. An empirical analysis on this work has performed including real world ontologies. The results indicate that the proposed work is effective and competitive. Moreover, some applications for the proposed work have noted.
Significance of outer blood-retina barrier breakdown in diabetes and ischemia.

PURPOSE The outer blood-retina barrier (BRB) separates the neural retina from the choroidal vasculature, which is responsible for approximately 80% of blood supplies in the eye. To determine the significance of outer BRB breakdown in diabetic retinopathy, the outer BRB-specific leakage of macromolecules in diabetic and ischemic rodents was investigated. METHODS Diabetes and ischemia were induced in rodents by streptozotocin and oxygen-induced retinopathy, respectively. Diabetic and ischemic rodents were injected intravenously with fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC)-dextran. The outer BRB-specific leakage in diabetic and ischemic rodents was visualized by fluorescent microscopy. RESULTS A microscopic imaging assay was developed to examine outer BRB breakdown. The outer BRB-specific leakage of fluorescent macromolecules was visualized in diabetic and ischemic rodents. Substantial leakages of macromolecules through the outer BRB in diabetic and ischemic rodents were detected with this assay. The number of severe outer BRB leakage sites is inversely proportional to the size of macromolecules. Significant depletion of occludin in the RPE of ischemic and diabetic rodents was also observed. CONCLUSIONS For the first time, a microscopic imaging assay for directly visualizing macromolecules leaked through the outer BRB in rodents was developed. Using this assay, the authors demonstrated the significance of outer BRB breakdown in diabetes and ischemia, which will have implications to the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of diabetic macular edema and other ocular diseases with outer BRB defects. The microscopic imaging assay established in this study will likely be very useful to the development of drugs for macular edema.
Impact of devaluation on Pakistan's external trade : an econometric approach

Exchange rate policy to improve external competitiveness has now become the centre piece of any adjustment effort. It is expected that a nominal devaluation will result in expenditure switching, increased production of tradeable, higher exports, and in an improvement of the external accounts of the country in question. Recently, the traditional stabilisation packages, and especially their devaluation component, have come under attack by a number of authors.1 It has been argued that devaluation can be counterproductive because exports and imports are relatively insensitive to price and exchange rate changes, especially in developing and semi-industrialised countries.2*3 If the price elasticities of imports and exports are sufficiently low, the trade balance expressed in domestic currency may worsen. Grubel (1976) has argued that a country's persistent payments imbalances can be due only to faulty monetary policy and cannot be corrected by either devaluation (exchange rate policy) or the use of fiscal policy. In a recent article, Miles (1979) claims to have provided the requisite evidence to support GrubePs argument. Miles (1979) shows that devaluation does not improve the trade balance but improves the balance of payments. This results implies that the improvement comes through the capital account. He, therefore, concludes that the devaluation mechanism involves only a portfolio stock adjustment and is essentially monetary in nature. If