Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Achievement Outcomes Among High School Graduates in College and Career Readiness Programs of Study

This study investigated the relationships between completing the high school portion of a college- and career-preparatory program of study and high school achievement outcomes in a large urban district in the West. Programs of study are secondary-to-postsecondary educational programs mandated by the federal legislation (Perkins IV) governing career and technical education (CTE) in the United States. At graduation, 49.5% of students in the sample who began a program of study had completed their programs. Using multiple regression models, we compared graduates who completed a program of study (hereafter POS completers) to graduates who completed a number of CTE courses in a specific occupational area (CTE concentrators), and to graduates who may have taken a CTE course or two during high school but were neither POS completers nor CTE concentrators (All Others). POS completers were more likely to (a) have a higher overall GPA, (b) have a higher CTE GPA, and (c) earn more STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) credits than All Other students. Compared with CTE concentrators, POS completers were more likely to (a) have a higher overall GPA and (b) earn more STEM credits. Qualitative data describe contextual elements of programs of study as offered in West District that could explain these results. Study results suggest that districts should consider implementing career-themed programs such as programs of study that enhance their existing college- and career-readiness initiatives. We also call for further study of the postsecondary and labor market outcomes associated with programs of study in order to generate a clearer picture of their potential to increase academic and technical achievement and promote successful student transitions to higher education and the workplace.
Identification of oleanolic and ursolic acid in aquatic plant Cabomba furcata

Preliminary studies of Cabomba furcata from Chini Lake, Pahang, Malaysia has shown that this plant containing bioactive phytochemical such as saponin. Unfortunately no intensive research has been conducted since saponin are believed to have medicinal benefits to the humankind and they have the potential to be commercialized in pharmaceutical field. This study was done to identify the type of saponin that are present in C. furcata. Hot extraction was performed by using methanol and HPLC - Dad with C18 column had confirmed the presence of oleanolic acid and ursolic acid in the aquatic plant.
Calculation of Multivariate Normal Probabilities by Simulation, with Applications to Maximum Simulated Likelihood Estimation

We discuss methods for calculating multivariate normal probabilities by simulation and two new Stata programs for this purpose: mdraws for deriving draws from the standard uniform density using either Halton or pseudorandom sequences, and an egen function, mvnp(), for calculating the probabilities themselves. Several illustrations show how the programs may be used for maximum simulated likelihood estimation.
Efecto del Maltrato Físico en la Calidad de las Representaciones de Apego Infantil en Chile: Resultados Preliminares The Effect of Physical Abuse on The Quality of Infant Attachment Representations in Chile: Preliminary Results

The aim of this paper is to present preliminary results of a study analyzing the effects of physical abuse on the quality of attachment representations in children. In order to assess the attachment representation the Attachment Story Completion Task was used with de A.S. C.T. Q-sort coding system. The physical abuse was coded using the Modified Maltreatment Classification System. The results show that physical abuse has a negative effect on the quality of attachment representation. The children who were victims of physical abuse have a higher preference for the use of hyperactivation and disorganization attachment strategies than non abused children. The results are discussed in relation to attachment theory and empirical evidence on this issue.
Negative databases for biometric data

Negative databases -- negative representations of a set of data -- have been introduced in 2004 to protect the data they contain. Up to this day, there was no known solution to constitute biometric negative databases. This is surprising as biometric applications are very needy of such protection for privacy reasons. The main difficulty comes from the fact that biometric captures of the same trait give different results and comparisons of the stored reference with the fresh captured biometric data has to take into account this variability. In this paper, we give a first answer to this problem by exhibiting a way to create and exploit biometric negative databases.
Physical and digital design of the BlueBio biomonitoring system prototype, to be used in emergency medical response

This paper presents the physical and digital design of a wireless biomonitoring system meant to be used especially in the prehospital medical emergency response. The handling of many patients with a minimum of resources at major incidents is an immense challenge for the emergency personnel at work on an accident site. New technology such as the BlueBio biomonitoring system, can help emergency personnel monitor the patients and support them in making priorities of treatment and transport of patients. However, if new technology is to be introduced in such a complex and stressed situation it must relate to the palpable aspects of pervasive computing. It must be able to comply with the scale of the situation and still be understandable. It must also be able to comply with change of location and users and yet still be stable, and it must comply with the shifting requirements from the users regarding automation and user control. Our design framework, in relation to the BlueBio monitoring system, approaches these challenges from the perspective of familiarity, medical assessment and person ID/registration of data. We present how this informs and has implications for both the physical and digital design of the current prototype
Branding News with Opinion¤

Should the CEO’s of newspaper care about the political pro.le of their newspaper? We investigate whether the political beliefs of the consumers in a market in‡uence the sale. A demand model is estimated using a two step estimation technique that allows us to account for the endogeneity arising from the editor’s strategic choice on political pro.le. The demand is generally well behaved. Unit elastic demand cannot be rejected for our monopoly markets. Our results suggest that political newspapers face a higher demand then independent newspapers all other things equal. This implies that if the political composition allows for a political newspaper, potential pro.ts increases.
Report on the First SIGIR Workshop on Graph Search and Beyond (GSB'15)

Modern Web data is highly structured in terms of entities and relations from large knowledge resources, geo-temporal references and social network structure, resulting in a massivemultidimensional graph. This graph essentially unifies both the searcher and the information resources that played a fundamentally different role in traditional IR, and "Graph Search" offers major new ways to access relevant information. Graph search affects both query formulation (complex queries about entities and relations building on the searcher's context) as well as result exploration and discovery (slicing and dicing the information using the graph structure) in a completely personalized way. This new graph based approach introduces great opportunities, but also great challenges, in terms of data quality and data integration, user interface design, and privacy. We view the notion of "graph search" as searching information from your personal point of view (you are the query) over a highly structured and curated information space. This goes beyond the traditional two-term queries and ten blue links results that users are familiar with, requiring a highly interactive session covering both query formulation and result exploration. The workshop brought together researchers from a range of areas in information access, who worked together on searching information from your personal point of view over a highly structured and curated information space.
Consumer video dataset with marked head trajectories

Content-based test video corpora usually builds on top of professional material or controlled settings. However, recent years have shown strong increase in user-generated content on the web. The increase in content volume creates challenges in accessibility and utility of the video content. In order to improve the utility of the user-generated videos, better automation for content-based descriptions are needed. Proper test sets are required to develop robust methods for content analysis. Detecting people from video is a common feature that is often seen in both in science and in commercial services. Unfortunately there is a lack of test data for person tracking from consumer videos. In this paper, we introduce a novel video dataset to accommodate this shortage. The dataset is done with two consumer-priced devices: a handheld camcorder and a mobile phone. Both devices were used to store material in indoor and outdoor settings with different attention levels from the people being filmed. The dataset comes with ground truth data that includes person head trajectories and other people marked in the background in MPEG-7-based metadata model. We give description of this metadata model and publish an annotation tool we used for creating the ground truth data. Also, we provide experimental results as a benchmark for all those who would like to use our dataset.
Visualization of Statistical Uncertainty

Visualization strives to present a comprehensive representation of information by displaying the data in a visual manner. An important aspect of comprehension is the understanding of error, confidence and other uncertainties present in the data or information. These additional characteristics of the information are often displayed as charts and graphs alongside the dataset, however it is often left out of visualizations. Techniques for visually representing the meaning of statistical descriptors including error, confidence and uncertainty can improve the effectiveness of visualizations used for data exploration and decision making.
Attention decit hyperactivity disorder in adults

Adults with putative attention deﬁcit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are increasingly beingreferred to psychiatric clinics, often following a self-diagnosis, and demanding a prescriptionfor stimulant medication. This has disconcerted many clinicians and started a debate on theappropriateness of this diagnosis in adults (Shaﬀer, 1994; Lomas, 1995; Diller, 1996) that isreminiscent of the controversies of the childhood diagnosis in previous years (
Expression of Noncoding Vault RNA in Human Malignant Cells and Its Importance in Mitoxantrone Resistance

Several noncoding RNAs do vital cellular functions, including gene regulation and cell differentiation. Previously, we reported that vault RNA (vRNA) has the ability to recognize chemotherapeutic compounds, such as mitoxantrone, based on biophysical and biochemical analyses. In the present study, we show that human glioblastoma-, leukemia-, and osteocarcinoma-derived cell lines overexpress vRNA and exhibit higher resistance toward mitoxantrone. Interestingly, when vRNA expression was suppressed by RNA interference in these cells, the resistance progressively decreased. In agreement with these findings, overexpression of vRNA-1 caused resistance to mitoxantrone. These results suggest a role of vRNA in mitoxantrone resistance in malignant cells and justify further studies on the importance and application of noncoding RNAs in cancer chemotherapeutics. Mol Cancer Res; 8(11); 1536–46. ©2010 AACR.
Objetivos gerais de um programa de desenvolvimento profissional docente

The paper analyses a teacher professional development program focusing the teachers' educator performance. We've investigated how the educator developed three objectives that were transversal in teachers' education: the reflection about practice, the development of autonomy and the comprehension of a teaching-learning conception. The analysis includes extracts of dialogues in the program, in which such knowledge is being worked, so as to produce results that account for the modus operandi of the educator, identifying his attitudes, his sequence of actions and the emphases he attributes in the educative process. In our results, we characterized the abilities that were favorable to the development of the education objectives and knowledge that allowed the establishment of a productive interaction. Amongst our conclusions, we emphasize the profound respect towards the professionals who participated in the program, by taking as premises the competence, commitment and ethics of those professionals.
Dynamic Routing: A Prerequisite for Reliable NoCs

With an increase in the number of transistors on-chip, the complexity of the system also increases. In order to cope with the growing interconnect infrastructure, the “Ne twork on chip (NoC)” concept was introduced. With network methodologies coming on-chip, various characteristics of traditional networks come into play. So far, failures that are common in regular networks were hardly considered onchip; this paper introduces ideas of dynamic routing in the context of NoCs and explains how they could be applied to cope with adverse physical effects of deep sub-micron technology.
Hearing evolution across the air-water interface: lessons from comparative audiometry in turtles and salamanders

ii Acknowledgments . iv List of Tables . ix List of Figures . x List of Abbreviations . xii Chapter 1: General Introduction . 1 Adaptive use of sensory information . 3 Benefits, cost, and constraints in using sensory information . 3 Useful information sources . 4 Intrinsic constraints on the detection and use of sensory information . 5 Environmental constraints on the amount of sensory information . 5 Auditory evolution in aquatic-terrestrial transitions . 6 Sensory constraints in aquatic versus terrestrial environments . 6 Sensory evolution in aquatic-terrestrial transitions . 6 Medium acoustic impedance sets middle ear design specifications . 8 Hearing evolution in aquatic-terrestrial transitions . 11 Turtles and salamanders as models for hearing evolution in aquatic-terrestrial transitions . 13 Evolutionary histories in relation to aquatic-terrestrial niches . 13
Hispanic Faces

Immigration and globalization have dramatically changed the ethnic landscape of the United States, yet stereotypes about race continue to exist. Foreign language classrooms are at the heart of teaching about diversity. We investigated whether undergraduates (with varying exposure to Spanish language education) could accurately identify the race of Hispanic people depicted in photographs. The amount of Spanish courses was unrelated to participants’ accuracy; however, the number of courses was inversely related to confidence. The findings from this exploratory study suggest that the more Spanish language education one has, the more one realizes that appearances can be deceiving; as a result, individuals may be less likely to adhere to societally conditioned stereotypes of specific groups of people. At a time when foreign language programs are at risk of being eliminated from colleges and universities, these findings should serve as a message to educators and administrators alike about the importance of foreign language education.
Low-complexity Integer Frequency Offset Synchronization for OFDMA System

This paper presents a integer frequency offset (IFO) estimation scheme for the 3GPP long term evolution (LTE) downlink system. Firstly, the conventional joint detection method for IFO and sector cell index (CID) information is introduced. Secondly, an IFO estimation without explicit sector CID information is proposed, which can operate jointly with the proposed IFO estimation and reduce the time delay in comparison with the conventional joint method. Also, the proposed method is computationally efficient and has almost similar performance in comparison with the conventional method over the Pedestrian and Vehicular channel models. Keywords—LTE, OFDMA, primary synchronization signal (PSS), IFO, CID.
An Improved Data Encryption Standard to Secure Data Using Smart Cards

This paper is directed towards the development of an improved DES to secure the data using smart cards. An improved Data Encryption Standard has been developed by incorporating an ODD/EVEN bit conversion to the existing DES algorithm. The proposed algorithm is expected to provide greater security to further protect the data in Smart Cards. The data is secured from any illegal retrieval and intended modification. The program simulation also provides a good start to explore for a more robust encryption technique that will not require so much mathematical computations.
Retinopathy is reduced during experimental diabetes in a mouse model of outer retinal degeneration.

PURPOSE Diabetic patients who also have retinitis pigmentosa (RP) appear to have fewer and less severe retinal microvascular lesions. Diabetic retinopathy may be linked to increased inner retinal hypoxia, with the possibility that this is exacerbated by oxygen usage during the dark-adaptation response. Therefore, patients with RP with depleted rod photoreceptors may encounter proportionately less retinal hypoxia, and, when diabetes is also present, there may be fewer retinopathic lesions. This hypothesis was tested in rhodopsin knockout mice (Rho-/-) as an RP model in which the diabetic milieu is superimposed. The study was designed to investigate whether degeneration of the outer retina has any impact on hypoxia, to examine diabetes-related retinal gene expression responses, and to assess lesions of diabetic retinopathy. METHODS Streptozotocin-induced diabetes was created in male C57Bl6 (wild-type; WT) and Rho-/- mice, and hyperglycemia was maintained for 5 months. The extent of diabetes was confirmed by measurement of glycated hemoglobin (%GHb) and accumulation of advanced glycation end products (AGEs). Retinal hypoxia was assessed using the bioreductive drug pimonidazole. The retinal microvasculature was studied in retinal flatmounts stained by the ADPase reaction, and the outer retina was evaluated histologically in paraffin-embedded sections. Retinal gene expression of VEGF-A, TNF-alpha, and mRNAs encoding basement membrane component proteins were quantified by real-time RT-PCR. RESULTS The percentage GHb increased significantly in the presence of diabetes (P < 0.001) and was not different between WT or Rho-/- mice. Hypoxia increased in the retina of WT diabetic animals when compared with controls (P < 0.001) but this diabetes-induced change was absent in Rho-/- mice. Retinal gene expression of VEGF-A was significantly increased in WT mice with diabetes (P < 0.05), but was unchanged in Rho-/- mice. TNF-alpha gene expression significantly increased (4.9-fold) in WT mice with diabetes (P < 0.05) and also increased appreciably in Rho-/- mice but to a reduced extent (1.5 fold; P < 0.05). The outer nuclear layer in nondiabetic Rho-/- mice was reduced to a single layer after 6 months, but when diabetes was superimposed on this model, there was less degeneration of photoreceptors (P < 0.05). Vascular density was attenuated in diabetic WT mice compared with the nondiabetic control (P < 0.001); however, this diabetes-related disease was not observed in Rho-/- mice. CONCLUSIONS Loss of the outer retina reduces the severity of diabetic retinopathy in a murine model. Oxygen usage by the photoreceptors during dark adaptation may contribute to retinal hypoxia and exacerbate the progression of diabetic retinopathy.
Differential activation during immediate and delayed recall seen with fMRI one year prior to definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia

Poster: "ECR 2013 / C-0621 / Differential activation during immediate and delayed recall seen with fMRI one year prior to definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia" by: "R. Meijboom, R. Steketee, F. J. de Jong, A. van der Lugt, J. C. van Swieten, M. Smits; Rotterdam/NL"
A Model-Aided Data Gathering Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

How to collect data energy-efficiently from sensor nodes is an important research issue in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we address the problem of gathering data from sensor nodes using a model-aided data gathering approach. In our approach, a model is maintained by a node and a replica of the model is maintained the base station. The base station uses the replica model to estimate the actual measurement data of the sensor node in usual time, and an actual measurement datum is sent to the base station only when the error of the model's corresponding estimation exceeds allowable error bound. In such a way, energy can be saved by reducing the transmission of actual measurement data. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.
Public Disclosure of Patent Applications, R&D, and Welfare

In Europe and in Japan, patent applications are publicly disclosed after 18 months from the filing date regardless of whether a patent has been or will be registered. In the U.S. in contrast, patent applications are publicly disclosed only when a patent is granted. In this paper we examine the consequences of this difference for (i) firm's R&D and patenting behavior, (ii) consumers' surplus and social welfare, and (iii) the incentives of firms to innovate in a setting where patent protection is imperfect in the sense that patent applications may be rejected and patents are not always upheld in court. The main conclusions are that public disclosure leads to fewer patent applications and fewer innovations, but for a given number of innovations, it raises the probability that new technologies will reach the product market and thereby enhances consumers' surplus and possibly total welfare as well.
New applications of UVA-1 cold light therapy

UVA 1 therapy is a relatively new form of light therapy for atopic dermatitis. We describe that after 4 weeks of UVA-1 patients were better capable to maintain clinical improvement than after 3 weeks of therapy. Furthermore, UVA 1 therapy proved to be better than placebo therapy in patients with dyshidrotic eczema. Also, we described the favorable effect of UVA 1 therapy in chronic, generalized lichen ruber planus. Because of deep penetration of UVA 1, it could not only influence dermal inflammatory infiltrates in T-cell mediated diseases mentioned above, but also reach circulating activated B-cells in dermal capillaries in SLE. We investigated the effect of 6 and 12 J/cm2 UVA 1 in SLE patients, in a double-blinded, placebo-controlled, cross over study. Three weeks of 12 J/cm2 resulted in improved disease activity and proved to be more effective than placebo. Furthermore, a decrease of auto-antibody titers was observed in several patients. In vitro we showed that 40% of UVA 1 reached the dermis and increasing numbers of PBMCs died after rising doses of UVA-1. Also, immunoglobulin production by activated B cells decreased after increasing doses of UVA 1. It would be interesting to investigate UVA 1 therapy for other auto immune diseases.