Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Faculty Views of Student Evaluation of College Teaching

The literature abounds with psychometric studies of course evaluation measures and articles debating the merits of student ratings of instruction, but little research has focused on faculty perceptions of this procedure. In the present study faculty perceptions are explored at a teachers' college where evaluation is carried out annually on a sample of courses. The sample includes 101 instructors who completed the research questionnaire. Faculty attitudes reflected a broad range of responses towards validity of student ratings, and their usefulness for improving instruction. Although overall attitudes were mildly positive, few instructors reported changing instruction as a result of student ratings. Moreover, few supported sending evaluation results directly to college administrators or publishing them for student consumption.
Effective Data Access Control for Multi-Authority Cloud Storage with Intrusion Detection

Business Record (BR) is an emerging centric model of information exchange, which is often outsourced to be stored at a third party, such as cloud providers. However, there have been wide privacy concerns as business information could be exposed to those third party servers and to unauthorized parties. To assure the business data control over access to their own BRs, it is a promising method to encrypt the BRs before outsourcing. Yet, issues such as risks of privacy exposure, scalability in key management, flexible access and efficient user revocation, have remained the most important challenges toward achieving fine-grained, cryptographically enforced data access control. To achieve fine-grained and scalable data access control for BRs, we leverage attribute based encryption (ABE) techniques to encrypt all business file. We focus on the multiple data owner scenario, and divide the users in the BR system into multiple security domains that greatly reduces the key management complexity for owners and users. A high degree of data privacy is guaranteed simultaneously by exploiting multi- authority ABE.
Disruption of Leptin Receptor–STAT3 Signaling Enhances Leukotriene Production and Pulmonary Host Defense against Pneumococcal Pneumonia

The adipocyte-derived hormone leptin regulates energy homeostasis and the innate immune response. We previously reported that leptin plays a protective role in bacterial pneumonia, but the mechanisms by which leptin regulates host defense remain poorly understood. Leptin binding to its receptor, LepRb, activates multiple intracellular signaling pathways, including ERK1/2, STAT5, and STAT3. In this study, we compared the responses of wild-type and s/s mice, which possess a mutant LepRb that prevents leptin-induced STAT3 activation, to determine the role of this signaling pathway in pneumococcal pneumonia. Compared with wild-type animals, s/s mice exhibited greater survival and enhanced pulmonary bacterial clearance after an intratracheal challenge with Streptococcus pneumoniae. We also observed enhanced phagocytosis and killing of S. pneumoniae in vitro in alveolar macrophages (AMs) obtained from s/s mice. Notably, the improved host defense and AM antibacterial effector functions in s/s mice were associated with increased cysteinyl-leukotriene production in vivo and in AMs in vitro. Augmentation of phagocytosis in AMs from s/s mice could be blocked using a pharmacologic cysteinyl-leukotriene receptor antagonist. Phosphorylation of ERK1/2 and cytosolic phospholipase A2 α, known to enhance the release of arachidonic acid for subsequent conversion to leukotrienes, was also increased in AMs from s/s mice stimulated with S. pneumoniae in vitro. These data indicate that ablation of LepRb-mediated STAT3 signaling and the associated augmentation of ERK1/2, cytosolic phospholipase A2 α, and cysteinyl-leukotriene synthesis confers resistance to s/s mice during pneumococcal pneumonia. These data provide novel insights into the intracellular signaling events by which leptin contributes to host defense against bacterial pneumonia.
Can Black Colleges Solve the Problem of Access for Black Students?

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have for over 125 years provided higher education access for the overwhelming majority of blacks. With the advent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Adams desegregation decision, and federal student aid, college enrollment of black students dramatically increased; however, the majority (83 percent) of black students now attend predominantly white institutions. Although most private HBCUs will remain strong, the increasing desegregation of public HBCUs, and the increasing black enrollment in community colleges, places the primary responsibility for black educational access on federal and state governments and on majority institutions. In restructuring their mission to meet new realities, HBCUs will have to increasingly stress early outreach, support programs, and transfer programs.
Incentives for Truthful Peer Grading

Peer grading systems work well only if users have incentives to grade truthfully. An example of non-truthful grading, that we observed in classrooms, consists in students assigning the maximum grade to all submissions. With a naive grading scheme, such as averaging the assigned grades, all students would receive the maximum grade. In this paper, we develop three grading schemes that provide incentives for truthful peer grading. In the first scheme, the instructor grades a fraction p of the submissions, and penalizes students whose grade deviates from the instructor grade. We provide lower bounds on p to ensure truthfulness, and conclude that these schemes work only for moderate class sizes, up to a few hundred students. To overcome this limitation, we propose a hierarchical extension of this supervised scheme, and we show that it can handle classes of any size with bounded (and little) instructor work, and is therefore applicable to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Finally, we propose unsupervised incentive schemes, in which the student incentive is based on statistical properties of the grade distribution, without any grading required by the instructor. We show that the proposed unsupervised schemes provide incentives to truthful grading, at the price of being possibly unfair to individual students.
Towards Neurofeedback Training of Associative Brain Areas for Stroke Rehabilitation

We propose to extend the current focus of BCI-based stroke rehabilitation beyond sensorimotor-rhythms to also include associative brain areas. In particular, we argue that neurofeedback training of brain rhythms that signal a state-of-mind beneficial for motorlearning is likely to enhance post-stroke motor rehabilitation. We propose an adaptive neurofeedback paradigm for this purpose and demonstrate its viability on EEG data recorded with five healthy subjects.
Reducing Air Conditioning Waste by Signalling it is Cool Outside

This experiment looked at the effects on residential energy consumption of providing homeowners with (1) a signalling device that indicated a conservation opportunity and (2) information feedback about their rate of energy use. The signalling device operated when the outside temperature was below 680F and the air conditioner was on. Homeowners were told that the signalling device indicated when they could cool their house effectively by opening the windows and turning off their air conditioner. Forty households were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: signalling device only, feedback only, both, neither. The results showed a significant 15.7% decrease in energy use for those households with the signalling devices. Neither the feedback nor interaction effect was significant. The advantages and disadvantages of having people in the control cycle were discussed.
Theoretical analysis on the element diffusion during thermomigration

With the miniaturization trend and functional demand in high-density microelectronic packaging, the thermomigration in flip chip solder joints due to the joule heating becomes a serious reliability issue in recent years. A majority of researches have been devoted to understanding the failure mechanism of the thermomigration accompanied by the electromigration behavior; and based on the microstructure observation, the thermomigration in eutectic SnPb and other lead free solders in terms of SnBi, SnCu and SnAgCu has been investigated and the dominate diffusion element in each solder bulk has been identified according to the microstructure evolution. However, only a few works are focused on the theoretical analysis for this novel migration process. In this study, according to our previous research of the thermomigration in the composite SnPb solder bump of the flip chip system at low ambient temperature, the tendency of the each diffusion element in this composite SnPb solder is certificated based on the diffusion theory. It is proved that both Sn and Pb atoms in the solder bulk tend to migrate from the hot side to the cold side during thermomigration, and the different microstructure phenomenon appeared in the other studies, such as Sn and Pb atoms are detected to be the dominate diffusion element when the ambient temperature is higher and lower than 100°C respectively, is mainly due to the different diffusion rate of them. Furthermore, this conclusion can be set up as the universal law for the diffusion process under a certain thermal gradient, which indicates that no matter what kind of atoms they are in the solder bulk, all of them have the tendency to move from the hot zone to the cold zone due to the asymmetrical temperature distribution. On the other hands, the important thermomigration parameter, the molar heat flux Q∗of Sn atoms in the SnPb solder alloy is calculated to be 19.1 kJ/mole.
Influence of hepatic artery occlusion on tumor growth and metastatic potential in a human orthotopic hepatoma nude mouse model: Relevance of epithelial–mesenchymal transition

Hepatic artery ligation (HAL), transarterial embolization (TAE), and transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) have been treatment choices for unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Obstruction of tumor blood supply is one of the most important mechanisms of these therapeutics measures. Here we introduced HAL into a metastatic human HCC orthotopic nude mouse model (using MHCC97L and HepG2 cell lines) to examine the effects of hepatic blood flow obstruction on the metastatic potential of hepatic tumor cells, and to investigate the mechanisms underlying these effects. Our results indicated that HAL inhibited tumor growth but concomitantly elicited tumor adaptation and progression, with increased potential for invasion and distant metastases. The underlying proinvasive mechanism of HAL appeared to be associated with enhanced intratumoral hypoxia and epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) due to hypoxia. This was in accord with the in vitro response of MHCC97L and HepG2 cells to hypoxia. The therapeutic effects of HAL could be enhanced by the phosphatidyl inositol 3‐kinase (PI3K) inhibitor LY294002, through arrest of EMT in hepatic tumor cells. It could be useful in the development of mechanism‐based combination therapies to enhance the initial antitumor response. (Cancer Sci 2009)
To hope, to lose, and to hope again

Abstract The author's (Snyder, 1994b) recent theory of hope is introduced and discussed in the context of potential reactions to the loss of important goal objects. In particular, hope is defined as goal-directed thinking in which the person appraises his or her perceived capability to produce workable routes to goals (this is called pathways thinking), as well as the potential to initiate and sustain movement along the pathways (this is called agentic thinking). In this sense, hope is an acquisition type of thinking in that it reflects instances in which people perceive that they are capable of progressing toward desired objects. In contrast to the procurement properties of higher hopeful thinking, loss reflects instances in which goal-directed thinking is lessened or curtailed because the goal object (i.e., a thing, experience, or person) is unobtainable. At one level, therefore, losses are antithetical to hopeful thinking. At another level, however, losses are an inherent part of goal-directed thinking.
Plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1 deficiency

Summary. Plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1 (PAI‐1) is an important component of the coagulation system that down‐regulates fibrinolysis in the circulation. Reduced PAI‐1 levels may result in increased fibrinolysis and an associated bleeding diathesis. Clear documentation of PAI‐1 deficiency as a cause of a bleeding disorder has been rare. PAI‐1 was initially identified in the 1980s, and the first reported case of PAI‐1 deficiency appeared in 1989. Several reports followed, although only two identified an underlying genetic defect. These reports of PAI‐1 deficiency suggest that affected individuals exhibit mild to moderate bleeding symptoms, including epistaxis, menorrhagia, and delayed bleeding after trauma or surgical procedures. Affected individuals rarely exhibit spontaneous bleeding events commonly seen in other procoagulant deficiencies. The majority of bleeding events are controlled with antifibrinolytic agents, such as tranexamic acid and ε‐aminocaproic acid. A major issue that contributes to difficulty in establishing an accurate diagnosis of PAI‐1 deficiency is that the activity assay is accurate in detection of elevated levels but not at the lowest range. Reported normal ranges begin at zero, thereby making a deficiency state because of a dysproteinaemia difficult to distinguish from that of a normal unaffected individual. Although the antigen assay may be helpful in some circumstances, it assists only with complete quantitative disorders. Because of lack of standardized commercially available PAI‐1 activity assay sensitive in the lowest range, the true prevalence of this rare condition has not been established.
enoLOGOS: a versatile web tool for energy normalized sequence logos

enoLOGOS is a web-based tool that generates sequence logos from various input sources. Sequence logos have become a popular way to graphically represent DNA and amino acid sequence patterns from a set of aligned sequences. Each position of the alignment is represented by a column of stacked symbols with its total height reflecting the information content in this position. Currently, the available web servers are able to create logo images from a set of aligned sequences, but none of them generates weighted sequence logos directly from energy measurements or other sources. With the advent of high-throughput technologies for estimating the contact energy of different DNA sequences, tools that can create logos directly from binding affinity data are useful to researchers. enoLOGOS generates sequence logos from a variety of input data, including energy measurements, probability matrices, alignment matrices, count matrices and aligned sequences. Furthermore, enoLOGOS can represent the mutual information of different positions of the consensus sequence, a unique feature of this tool. Another web interface for our software, C2H2-enoLOGOS, generates logos for the DNA-binding preferences of the C2H2 zinc-finger transcription factor family members. enoLOGOS and C2H2-enoLOGOS are accessible over the web at .
Hyperspectral Image Feature Extraction and Selection Using Empirical Mode Decomposition PCA

Hyperspectral Images are a set of datasets used in the recognition and mapping of surface materials such as minerals and vegetation affiliated to ore deposits. Usually these hyperspectral Image datasets are of high dimensionality which makes its classification process a complex task and of low accuracy using conventional classification approaches since we don’t have enough observations in estimating fitting parameters. Based on this issue, image segmentation, feature extraction and image component classification has become a necessary step in multi-dimensional image processing. This study investigates on spatial features extracted using empirical mode decomposition (EMD) coupled with a spectral dimensionality reduction of these features using principal component analysis (PCA) and comparing their classification with wavelet PCA dimensionality reduced features. The K-nearest neighbor classifier is used in the classification step for both features.
Evidence for transient perinatal glutamatergic innervation of globus pallidus

There is no known glutamatergic innervation of globus pallidus (GP) in adult mammals, but we report that during postnatal development of the GP there are large, transient increases in both presynaptic high- affinity glutamate uptake and postsynaptic Na+-independent glutamate receptor binding. These glutamatergic markers increase rapidly in rat GP after birth and then decrease to adult levels over a period of weeks. A similar developmental pattern of pallidal glutamate binding was found in human brains. In contrast, binding in rat caudate-putamen (CPu) increases after birth, reaches a peak, and remains constant into adulthood. The results suggest that a glutamatergic pathway transiently innervates the globus pallidus during the perinatal period. Because glutamate is an excitotoxin, this pathway may account, in part, for the basal ganglia damage seen in some forms of cerebral palsy after perinatal hypoxia/ischemia.
The Social Ecology of Red-Light Districts

Research on modern red-light districts (RLDs) is deficient in some key respects. Centered largely on street prostitution zones and nations where prostitution is illegal, this literature gives insufficient attention to settings where RLDs consist of a cluster of indoor venues that are legal and regulated by the authorities. Using classic Chicago School research on vice districts as a point of departure, this article examines the physical structure and social organization of red-light zones in two Belgian cities: Antwerp and Brussels. The comparative analysis identifies major differences in the social ecology of the two settings. Differences are explained by the distinctive ways in which each municipal government manages its respective RLD, which are related to the contrasting social backgrounds and political capital of the population residing in the vicinity of each district. Policy implications are briefly discussed.
Asynchronous exception propagation in blocked tasks

Asynchronous exception propagation is a useful alternative form of communication among threads, especially if timely propagation is ensured. However, timely propagation is impossible for blocked threads. An approach is presented to transparently unblock threads to begin propagation of asynchronous termination and resumption exceptions. The approach does not require additional syntax, simplifies certain programming situations, and can improve performance.
The Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS): Ecological, Concurrent and Construct Validity

Issues of validity, and in particular ecological validity, are a current concern for tests examining disorders of executive abilities related to frontal systems dysfunction. The Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS, Wilson et al., 1996) was developed in response to the need for better neuropsychological tests in this area. The present study examines the validity of the BADS, along with six other commonly used tests of executive ability in two groups of participants with either neurological disorder (n = 36) or without brain damage (n = 37). The BADS and most of its subtests correlate significantly with the standard executive tests indicating that it possesses adequate concurrent validity. In terms of construct validity, it is comparable to standard executive tests in discriminating between neurological and non-brain-damaged participants. The ecological validity of the BADS is superior to standard executive tests in terms of predicting competency in role functioning.
Selective hardening methodology for combinational logic

Defects as well as soft errors are a growing concern in micro and nanoelectronics. Multiple faults induced by single event effects are expected to be seen more often. Thus, reliability has become an important design criterion. In this context we introduce a cost-aware methodology for selective hardening of combinational logic cells. The methodology is based on the SPRA algorithm for calculating logical masking, and it is capable to automatically perform a trade-off between reliability improvements and associated costs, providing a list of the most effective candidates for hardening. The methodology is applied to a set of benchmark circuits using costs extracted from an actual standard cell library. The results then show that the methodology is able to diminish the unreliability of circuits in a cost-effective manner.
The Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in Norwegian

The Given-before-New principle has been identified as one of the strongest pragmatic principles governing how information is organized in adult grammar (Clark & Clark 1977; Gundel 1988). The question of whether child grammars organize information in the same way is as yet unresolved. We address this question by considering the Dative Alternation in Norwegian. In an experimental study, we investigate to what extent Norwegian children's and adults’ sentence production is governed by givenness when the speaker chooses one word order over another. Our results suggest that givenness influences the word-order choices of both children and adults. However, children more often than adults tend to omit given recipients and have a tendency to produce prepositional datives even when the recipient represents given information. The results are discussed in light of previous acquisition findings and syntactic accounts of the phenomenon. We argue that children's behavior is not a result of a pragmatic deficit or an immature syntactic component per se but rather a failure to consistently integrate the two.
Smart Home Futures: Algorithmic Challenges and Opportunities

Humans are increasingly spending their time indoors. This, along with higher wealth levels and rise of internet of things, has provided designers and planners the opportunity to reimagine living spaces. The smart homes that have arisen out of this reimagining come in many different shapes; but to gain widespread acceptance they have to increase the utility of building occupants in some meaningful way while not being intrusive. The most straightforward way of achieving this end goal is assumed to be through artificial intelligence. In this paper, we take a critical look at some algorithmic approaches that have been formulated to do so and the opportunities they will create in the short term. We also present some key challenges that must be overcome before these opportunities can be realized in practice.
Predicting ligand binding residues using multi-positional correlations and kernel canonical correlation analysis

We present a new computational method for predicting ligand binding sites in protein sequences. The method uses kernelbased canonical correlation analysis and linear regression to identify binding sites in protein sequences as the residues that exhibit strong correlation between the residues' evolutionary characterization at the sites and the structure based functional classification of the proteins in the context of a functional family. We explore the effect of correlations among multiple positions in the sequences and show that their inclusion enhances the prediction accuracy significantly.