Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interracial Best Friendships: Relationship with 10th Graders' Academic Achievement Level

The authors examined the relationships between interracial best friendships and 10th-grade students' academic achievement. The analysis consisted of data from 13,134 participants in the ELS:2002 database. The results indicated that interracial best friendships for minority students (African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians) generally have a positive relationship with students' academic achievement. Discussion and implications of the results are presented.
Analytical Solution for Rotor Eddy-Current Losses in a Slotless Permanent-Magnet Motor: The Case of Current Sheet Excitation

We present an analytical solution for the magnetic field, induced eddy currents, and the corresponding losses generated in the rotor of a slotless permanent-magnet (PM) motor. The field excitation is a current sheet placed at the stator interior surface. The solution is based on an analytical solution of the diffusion equation using double Fourier series and in the complex domain. The first and the second Fourier series correspond to the time and space harmonics, respectively. We have analyzed the effect of each time harmonic in detail, and verified the results with FEM software.
Turning the contradictions of competence: competency-based training and beyond

Abstract The purpose of this article is to provide a critique of the idea widely promoted by governments and industrial parties in Australia that competency-based training (CBT) is a coherent model of vocation education and training with universal applicability. The critique is made first by way of illustration with reference to case material gathered in the course of a recent national research project on CBT. The argument is made that CBT, contrary to its image in the public policy literature, is not a singular and universal model of vocational education and training (VET). Rather, it embeds a series of radically different decisions or options with regard to notions of competency, and the use of competencies or competency standards. These decisions or options, once enacted, give rise to transformed models of VET. Shifting the critique to more theoretical ground, the argument is made that these models need not be seen as alternatives. Indeed, they are not entirely separate. Rather, they interact, support and/or challenge one another, as well as support and/or challenge CBT. The conclusion is drawn that, while all of these models have a place in the process of competence development as well as their particular strengths and weaknesses, models that maintain the tension between a focus on the outcomes of education and training and a focus on processes of educating and training, rather than resolve this tension in favour of outcomes, are most appropriate in VET. Thus, the models that contribute most to VET tend to be hybrid (e.g. education/training model, training/development model), mirroring the make-up of VET itself.
A Scalable Media Job Framework for an Open Source Search Engine

This paper explores efficient ways to implement various media-updating features like news aggregation, video conversion, and bulk email handling. All of these jobs share the property that they are periodic in nature, and they all benefit from being handled in a distributed fashion. The data for these jobs also often comes from a social or collaborative source. We isolate the class of periodic, one round map reduce jobs as a useful setting to describe and handle media updating tasks. As such tasks are simpler than general map reduce jobs, programming them in a general map reduce platform could easily become tedious. This paper presents a MediaUpdater module of the Yioop Open Source Search Engine Web Portal designed to handle such jobs via an extension of a PHP class. We describe how to implement various media-updating tasks in our system as well as experiments carried out using these implementations on an Amazon Web Services cluster.
College Students' Willingness to Seek Help for their Learning Disabilities

Eighty-six university students with learning disabilities (LDs) completed measures of self-esteem and of perceptions of their LDs. In addition, they rated their willingness to seek help from academic services in response to two experimental manipulations: (a) they read vignettes about a student requesting help from professors or peers and receiving positive or negative reactions; and (b) they listened to audiotaped radio advertisements for academic services on a college campus, emphasizing either learning or performance goals. Participants reported the most willingness to seek help after reading about a positive reaction from a professor and the least willingness to seek help after reading about a negative reaction from a professor. In a nonsignificant trend, participants were more willing to seek help after hearing the ad emphasizing performance goals, such as improved grades. Students who viewed their LDs as more stigmatizing, non-modifiable, and global were less likely to report a willingness to seek help in response to negative situations and had lower overall self-esteem. These results suggest that learning services departments could bolster use of academic support by (a) intervening with faculty to try to prevent negative reactions to requests for accommodations and (b) attempting to destigmatize LDs among students themselves.
Received Signal Strength-Based Emitter Geolocation Using an Iterative Maximum Likelihood Approach

Batch-mode maximum likelihood (ML) received signal strength (RSS) emitter geolocation algorithms produce location estimates from a block of data collected over an observation period using either a single sensor or collected at one time instant by multiple spatially dispersed sensors. Due to practical constraints such as processor speed, memory for data storage, time for data transfer and communications bandwidth, batch-mode algorithms can only be implemented in real-time for small data sets. This paper presents an iterative formulation of the likelihood function for the ML RSS geolocation algorithm for real-time implementation with large data sets. Simulation and experimental results are included to validate the proposed formulation.
An Illuminating Counterexample

Sd+1PI1 occurs exactly as a product (aci . .* aliklaak . aid)(/llaj), where the index j belongs to {1, 2, . , n} \ {il, . , id) and ik-1 < j < ik. (Of course if j < ii, then aj is the first factor, while if id < j, then aj is the last factor in the bracket.) Therefore each such summand ailai2 . a d Occurs n d times. Precisely because (n d)sd consists of the monomials y-(n d)ail . aid where 1 < i1 < i2 < . < id < n, we see that B contains no positive monomial. The upshot: we see that in the sum A + B there are only negative monomials, whereas in C there are only positive monomials. Therefore no monomial in A + B can be cancelled out by a monomial in C. Thus A + B = 0 = C, and our proof is complete.
Penetrative internally heated convection in two and three dimensions

Convection of an internally heated fluid, confined between top and bottom plates of equal temperature, is studied by direct numerical simulation in two and three dimensions. The unstably stratified upper region drives convection that penetrates into the stably stratified lower region. The fraction of produced heat escaping across the bottom plate, which is one half without convection, initially decreases as convection strengthens. Entering the turbulent regime, this decrease reverses in two dimensions but continues monotonically in three dimensions. The mean fluid temperature, which grows proportionally to the heating rate ( $H$ ) without convection, grows proportionally to $H^{4/5}$ when convection is strong in both two and three dimensions. The ratio of the heating rate to the fluid temperature is likened to the Nusselt number of Rayleigh–Bénard convection. Simulations are reported for Prandtl numbers between 0.1 and 10 and for Rayleigh numbers (defined in terms of the heating rate) up to $5\times 10^{10}$ .
Identification of vitamin B1 metabolism as a tumor-specific radiosensitizing pathway using a high-throughput colony formation screen

Colony formation is the gold standard assay for determining reproductive cell death after radiation treatment, since effects on proliferation often do not reflect survival. We have developed a high-throughput radiosensitivity screening method based on clonogenicity and screened a siRNA library against kinases. Thiamine pyrophosphokinase-1 (TPK1), a key component of Vitamin B1/thiamine metabolism, was identified as a target for radiosensitization. TPK1 knockdown caused significant radiosensitization in cancer but not normal tissue cell lines. Other means of blocking this pathway, knockdown of thiamine transporter-1 (THTR1) or treatment with the thiamine analogue pyrithiamine hydrobromide (PyrH) caused significant tumor specific radiosensitization. There was persistent DNA damage in cells irradiated after TPK1 and THTR1 knockdown or PyrH treatment. Thus this screen allowed the identification of thiamine metabolism as a novel radiosensitization target that affects DNA repair. Short-term modulation of thiamine metabolism could be a clinically exploitable strategy to achieve tumor specific radiosensitization.
Temporal relationship of serum markers and tissue damage during acute intestinal ischemia/reperfusion

OBJECTIVE: It is essential to identify a serological marker of injury in order to study the pathophysiology of intestinal ischemia reperfusion. In this work, we studied the evolution of several serological markers after intestinal ischemia reperfusion injury in rats. The markers of non-specific cell damage were aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransaminase, and lactic dehydrogenase, the markers of inflammation were tumor necrosis factor alpha, interleukin-6, and interleukin-1 beta, and the markers of intestinal mucosal damage were intestinal fatty acid binding protein and D-lactate. We used Chiús classification to grade the histopathological damage. METHODS: We studied 35 Wistar rats divided into groups according to reperfusion time. The superior mesenteric artery was clamped for 30 minutes, and blood and biopsies were collected at 1, 3, 6, 12, 24, and 48 hours after reperfusion. We plotted the mean ± standard deviation and compared the baseline and maximum values for each marker using Student's t-test. RESULTS: The maximum values of interleukin-1 beta and lactic dehydrogenase were present before the maximal histopathological damage. The maximum tumor necrosis factor alpha and D-lactate expressions coincided with histopathological damage. Alanine aminotransaminase and aspartate aminotransferase had a maximum expression level that increased following the histopathological damage. The maximum expressions of interluken-6 and intestinal fatty acid binding protein were not significantly different from the Sham treated group. CONCLUSION: For the evaluation of injury secondary to acute intestinal ischemia reperfusion with a 30 minute ischemia period, we recommend performing histopathological grading, quantification of D-lactate, which is synthesized by intestinal bacteria and is considered an indicator of mucosal injury, and quantification of tumor necrosis factor alpha as indicators of acute inflammation three hours after reperfusion.
Dopamine D1 and D2 Receptor Co-activation Generates a Novel Phospholipase C-mediated Calcium Signal*

Although dopamine D1 and D2 receptors belong to distinct subfamilies of dopamine receptors, several lines of evidence indicate that they are functionally linked. However, a mechanism for this linkage has not been elucidated. In this study, we demonstrate that agonist stimulation of co-expressed D1 and D2 receptors resulted in an increase of intracellular calcium levels via a signaling pathway not activated by either receptor alone or when only one of the co-expressed receptors was activated by a selective agonist. Calcium signaling by D1-D2 receptor co-activation was abolished following treatment with a phospholipase C inhibitor but not with pertussis toxin or inhibitors of protein kinase A or protein kinase C, indicating coupling to the Gq pathway. We also show, by co-immunoprecipitation from rat brain and from cells co-expressing the receptors, that D1 and D2 receptors are part of the same heteromeric protein complex and, by immunohistochemistry, that these receptors are co-expressed and co-localized within neurons of human and rat brain. This demonstration that D1 and D2 receptors have a novel cellular function when co-activated in the same cell represents a significant step toward elucidating the mechanism of the functional link observed between these two receptors in brain.
Dynamic Capacity Management with General Upgrading

This paper studies a capacity management problem with upgrading. A firm needs to procure multiple classes of capacities and then allocate the capacities to satisfy multiple classes of customers that arrive over time. A general upgrading rule is considered, i.e., unmet demand can be satisfied using multistep upgrade. No replenishment is allowed and the firm has to make the allocation decisions without observing future demand. We first characterize the structure of the optimal allocation policy, which consists of parallel allocation and then sequential rationing. Specifically, the firm first uses capacity to satisfy the same-class demand as much as possible, then considers possible upgrading decisions in a sequential manner. We also propose a heuristic based on certainty equivalence control to solve the problem. Numerical analysis shows that the heuristic is fast and delivers close-to-optimal profit for the firm. Finally, we conduct extensive numerical studies to derive insights into the problem. It is found that under the proposed heuristic, the value of using sophisticated multistep upgrading can be quite significant; however, using simple approximations for the initial capacity leads to negligible profit loss, which suggests that the firm’s profit is not sensitive to the initial capacity decision if the optimal upgrading policy is used.
Identification of Primary and Secondary Measles Vaccine Failures by Measurement of Immunoglobulin G Avidity in Measles Cases during the 1997 São Paulo Epidemic

ABSTRACT Despite almost universal use of measles vaccines in recent decades, epidemics of the disease continue to occur. Understanding the role of primary vaccine failure (failure to seroconvert after vaccination) and secondary vaccine failures (waning immunity after seroconversion) in measles epidemics is important for the evaluation of measles control programs in developing countries. After a measles epidemic in São Paulo, Brazil, 159 cases previously confirmed by detection of specific immunoglobulin M (IgM) antibodies were tested for IgG avidity, and a secondary immune response, defined by an IgG avidity index of at least 30%, was established in 30 of 159 (18.9%) patients. Among the 159 patients, 107 (67.3%) had not been vaccinated and 52 (32.7%) had received one or more doses of measles vaccine. Of the 107 unvaccinated patients, 104 (97.2%) showed a primary immune response, defined as an IgG avidity index of less than 30%. Among the 52 patients with documented vaccination, 25 (48.1%) showed a primary immune response and 27 (51.9%) showed a secondary immune response, thereby constituting a secondary vaccine failure. Primary vaccine failure was observed in 13 of 13 patients vaccinated prior to 1 year of age and in 43.5 and 12.5%, respectively, of patients receiving one or two doses after their first birthdays. These results provide evidence that measurement of IgG avidity can be used to distinguish between primary and secondary vaccine failures in vaccinated patients with measles; the method can also be a useful tool for the evaluation of measles control programs.
Disciplinary roots of knowledge management: a theoretical review

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to reflect on the development of knowledge management so as to argue whether knowledge management (KM) is a multidisciplinary field.Design/methodology/approach – To set the scene by reviewing and synthesizing the scholarly works and published practices of knowledge management, this paper presents an overview of the recent and rapidly growing literature on knowledge management.Findings – The paper presents a discussion, addressing the question of what those disciplines are on which knowledge management discourse is exactly drawn on. The fact is that knowledge management draws from a wide range of disciplines. Although scholars from several disciplines attempt to claim ownership of the knowledge management, today both practitioners and academics alike recognize that knowledge management is an eclectic field rather than grounded in a specific ideology.Research limitations/implications – The paper does not offer comprehensive understanding of the disciplinary roots of .
THEMIS: A Mutually Verifiable Billing System for the Cloud Computing Environment

With the widespread adoption of cloud computing, the ability to record and account for the usage of cloud resources in a credible and verifiable way has become critical for cloud service providers and users alike. The success of such a billing system depends on several factors: The billing transactions must have integrity and nonrepudiation capabilities; the billing transactions must be nonobstructive and have a minimal computation cost; and the service level agreement (SLA) monitoring should be provided in a trusted manner. Existing billing systems are limited in terms of security capabilities or computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a secure and nonobstructive billing system called THEMIS as a remedy for these limitations. The system uses a novel concept of a cloud notary authority for the supervision of billing. The cloud notary authority generates mutually verifiable binding information that can be used to resolve future disputes between a user and a cloud service provider in a computationally efficient way. Furthermore, to provide a forgery-resistive SLA monitoring mechanism, we devised a SLA monitoring module enhanced with a trusted platform module (TPM), called S-Mon. The performance evaluation confirms that the overall latency of THEMIS billing transactions (avg. 4.89 ms) is much shorter than the latency of public key infrastructure (PKI)-based billing transactions (avg. 82.51 ms), though THEMIS guarantees identical security features as a PKI. This work has been undertaken on a real cloud computing service called iCubeCloud.
PR ] 2 4 A ug 2 00 0 Explicit isoperimetric constants , phase transitions in the random-cluster and Potts models , and Bernoullicity

The random-cluster model is a dependent percolation model that has applications in the study of Ising and Potts models. In this paper, several new results for the random-cluster model with cluster parameter q ≥ 1 are obtained. These include an explicit pointwise dynamical construction of random-cluster measures for arbitrary graphs, and for unimodular transitive graphs, lack of percolation for the free random-cluster measure at the lower critical value on nonamenable graphs, and a number of inequalities for the critical values. Some of these inequalities lead to considerations of isoperimetric constants in certain hyperbolic graphs, and the first nontrivial explicit calculations of such constants are obtained. Applications to the Potts model include Bernoullicity in the Z case at all temperatures, and non-robust phase transition in the case of nonamenable regular graphs.
Evaluating dead reckoning variations with a multi-player game simulator

One of the most difficult tasks when creating an online multi-player game is to provide the players with a consistent view of the virtual world despite the network delays. Most current games use prediction algorithms to achieve this, but usually it does not go beyond applying the DIS [2] dead reckoning algorithm proposed in the mid-90s. In this paper we introduce a simulator called GLS that allows us to evaluate different aspects of DIS and its variations. We examine the impact of prediction and clock synchronization on game consistency. We also evaluate the convergence algorithm we introduce here. Furthermore we look into ways for compensating increasing delays to keep the player's view of the game state sufficiently consistent with other players.
Development and application of optimization model for customized text summarization

Conventional text summarization methodologies do not take individual requirements of readers into consideration. In order to generate document summaries that can meet reader requirements, this research develops an automatic document summarization model that generates summaries on the basis of individual requirements of readers. The document summarization problem is transformed into a mathematical problem by analysis of the quality factors for summary and calculation of summary quality indices and constraints of quality factors. The proposed model can be used to properly summarize documents by taking user requirements into consideration. In the near future, a web-based text summarization system will be established in order to evaluate performance of the proposed methodology.
Self-Regulated Learning and Academic Achievement: An Overview

Educational researchers have begun recently to identify and study key processes through which students self-regulate their academic learning. In this overview, I present a general definition of self-regulated academic learning and identify the distinctive features of this capability for acquiring knowledge and skill. Drawing on subsequent articles in this journal issue as well as my research with colleagues, I discuss how the study of component processes contributes to our growing understanding of the distinctive features of students' self-regulated learning. Finally, the implications of self-regulated learning perspective on students' learning and achievement are considered.
Does reward increase or decrease creativity

Two studies involving 504 school children investigated why behaviorists and cognitively oriented investigators have come to opposite conclusions about reward's erects on creativity. A monetary reward for a high degree of divergent thought in 1 task (word construction) increased children's subsequent originality in a different task (picture drawing). The same reward, made contingent on a low degree of divergent thought, reduced this generalized originality. These effects were eliminated by using a large reward and were restored by keeping the large reward out of the children's sight. The results suggest that reward training increases generalized creativity when (a) a high degree of divergent thought is required and (b) the reward is presented in not too salient a fashion