Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How well do we measure non-cognitive skills in developing countries? Initial lessons from STEP skills measurement program

Standard skills indicators leave an information gap on workforce skill characteristics, job skill requirements, and quality of worker-job matches that prevents policymakers from making informed and timely decisions on training and education for current and future employees. Thus, there is growing interest on measures of cognitive, socio-emotional (non-cognitive), and technical skills to analyze determinants of skills formation, economic decisions and labor market outcomes. Recent work from Kenya in 2017 highlighted some of the challenges of collecting reliable and valid data for a set of commonly used skills measures. This study evaluates how well the Big 5 (B5) personality traits, commonly used to proxy for non-cognitive (or more properly socio-emotional) skills are measured in the Skills Towards Employability and Productivity (STEP) surveys using self-reported questionnaires so far applied in fifteen developing countries.
Estudos sobre o compliance para prevenção da corrupção nos negócios públicos: ética, ciência da administração e direito

This research emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge within Ethics, Administration Science, and Law, with the objective of magnifying the importance of the subject of compliance in face of the many corruption scandals of state-owned companies. This research is limited, at this moment, to the presentation of categories in the field of ethics, business management, and law in relation to the adoption of integrity programs in corporate management as outlined by laws 12.846/13 (anticorruption law) and 13.303/16 (law for state-owned enterprises). Integrity programs are important tools for a company´s internal control as it stimulates the formation of an ethical organizational culture. Considering the scope, in present-day society, of the innumerous acts of corruption in government and state-owned companies, these laws work to trace not only a traditionally and legally sanctioning path but also establishes positive norms, which help to reinforce positive actions since the former does not always achieve the objective of inhibiting or discouraging such malign practices. Nevertheless, these laws introduced norms in the Brazilian legal system that incentivize (i) the implementation of compliance programs by private companies who negotiate with public authorities; and the (ii) adoption of this style of management by state-owned companies. In conclusion, this research sustains that the previously mentioned areas can and should interconnect because they contribute in preventing corruption by public and private entities.
A Survey of Successful Evaluations of Program Visualization and Algorithm Animation Systems

This article reviews successful educational experiences in using program and algorithm visualizations (PAVs). First, we survey a total of 18 PAV systems that were subject to 33 evaluations. We found that half of the systems have only been tested for usability, and those were shallow inspections. The rest were evaluated with respect to their educational effectiveness. Script-based systems seem to be well suited for the viewing, responding, and changing engagement levels, while compiler-based systems do well for the construction and presenting engagement levels. Finally, we analyze additional PAV features of successful evaluations and hypothesize that they are relevant.
The ridge gap waveguide as a wideband rectangular hard waveguide

The present paper will give an overview of the research on hard surfaces and hard waveguides leading to the wideband ridge gap waveguide. The overview will be supported by both computed and measured results of the performance of hard waveguides and gap waveguides, clearly showing the wide bandwidth and low losses of the latter. This is a major improvement compared to the original hard waveguides, enabled by the wideband parallel-plate cut-off fenomena used for the gap waveguides.
Applying the lens of sensory ethnography to sustainable HCI

Sociological appropriations of practice theory as applied to sustainable design have successfully problematized overly simplistic and individualistic models of consumer choice and behavior change. By taking everyday practices as the principal units of analysis, they move towards acknowledging the socially and materially structured nature of human activity. However, to inform sustainable HCI we also need to understand how practices are part of wider experiential environments and flows of practical activity. In this article, we develop an approach rooted in phenomenological anthropology and sensory ethnography. This approach builds on theories of place, perception and movement and enables us to situate practices, and understand practical activity, as emplaced within complex and shifting ecologies of things. Drawing on an interdisciplinary study of domestic energy consumption and digital media use, we discuss ethnographic and design practice examples. We demonstrate how this theoretical and methodological framework can be aligned with the 3rd paradigm of HCI.
5-Lipoxygenase Pathway, Dendritic Cells, and Adaptive Immunity

5-lipoxygenase (5-LO) pathway is the major source of potent proinflammatory leukotrienes (LTs) issued from the metabolism of arachidonic acid (AA), and best known for their roles in the pathogenesis of asthma. These lipid mediators are mainly released from myeloid cells and may act as physiological autocrine and paracrine signalling molecules, and play a central role in regulating the interaction between innate and adaptive immunity. The biological actions of LTs including their immunoregulatory and proinflammatory effects are mediated through extracellular specific G-protein-coupled receptors. Despite their role in inflammatory cells, such as neutrophils and macrophages, LTs may have important effects on dendritic cells (DC)-mediated adaptive immunity. Several lines of evidence show that DC not only are important source of LTs, but also become targets of their actions by producing other lipid mediators and proinflammatory molecules. This review focuses on advances in 5-LO pathway biology, the production of LTs from DC and their role on various cells of immune system and in adaptive immunity.
Bridging Animal and human models Translating From ( and to ) Animal Genetics

Amanda m. Barkley-Levenson is a graduate student and John c. crabbe, Ph.D., is a professor, both at the Portland Alcohol Research Center, Department of Behavioral Neuroscience, Oregon Health and Science University, and VA Medical Center, Portland, Oregon. Genetics play an important role in the development and course of alcohol abuse, and understanding genetic contributions to this disorder may lead to improved preventative and therapeutic strategies in the future. Studies both in humans and in animal models are necessary to fully understand the neurobiology of alcoholism from the molecular to the cognitive level. By dissecting the complex facets of alcoholism into discrete, welldefined phenotypes that are measurable in both human populations and animal models of the disease, researchers will be better able to translate findings across species and integrate the knowledge obtained from various disciplines. Some of the key areas of alcoholism research where consilience between human and animal studies is possible are alcohol withdrawal severity, sensitivity to rewards, impulsivity, and dysregulated alcohol consumption.
Route-Angularity Effect The Influence of Turns on Distance Cognition : New Experimental Approaches to Clarify the

Three experiments investigated the route-angularity effect, which is demonstrated when a greater number of turns along a route increases the estimated length. So far, a route-angularity effect has not been demonstrated in school-age children. Because of the lack of a developmental theory, this finding could only be explained by a minor control of environmental features or by the experimental design. The experiments were conducted in a controlled virtual environment. In the first experiment, 11-year-old children explored two routes of equal length, which differed in the number of turns. Each child explored only one of the two routes in the second experiment. Only the first experiment demonstrated an influence in the number of turns on distance estimation. This result was confirmed in the last experiment with adults. If participants had no possibility to compare the routes in respect to their number of turns, both routes were estimated as equally long.
A Subset of Autism-Associated Genes Regulate the Structural Stability of Neurons

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) comprises a range of neurological conditions that affect individuals’ ability to communicate and interact with others. People with ASD often exhibit marked qualitative difficulties in social interaction, communication, and behavior. Alterations in neurite arborization and dendritic spine morphology, including size, shape, and number, are hallmarks of almost all neurological conditions, including ASD. As experimental evidence emerges in recent years, it becomes clear that although there is broad heterogeneity of identified autism risk genes, many of them converge into similar cellular pathways, including those regulating neurite outgrowth, synapse formation and spine stability, and synaptic plasticity. These mechanisms together regulate the structural stability of neurons and are vulnerable targets in ASD. In this review, we discuss the current understanding of those autism risk genes that affect the structural connectivity of neurons. We sub-categorize them into (1) cytoskeletal regulators, e.g., motors and small RhoGTPase regulators; (2) adhesion molecules, e.g., cadherins, NCAM, and neurexin superfamily; (3) cell surface receptors, e.g., glutamatergic receptors and receptor tyrosine kinases; (4) signaling molecules, e.g., protein kinases and phosphatases; and (5) synaptic proteins, e.g., vesicle and scaffolding proteins. Although the roles of some of these genes in maintaining neuronal structural stability are well studied, how mutations contribute to the autism phenotype is still largely unknown. Investigating whether and how the neuronal structure and function are affected when these genes are mutated will provide insights toward developing effective interventions aimed at improving the lives of people with autism and their families.
Role of CaMKII and PKA in Early Afterdepolarization of Human Ventricular Myocardium Cell: A Computational Model Study

Early afterdepolarization (EAD) plays an important role in arrhythmogenesis. Many experimental studies have reported that Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) and β-adrenergic signaling pathway are two important regulators. In this study, we developed a modified computational model of human ventricular myocyte to investigate the combined role of CaMKII and β-adrenergic signaling pathway on the occurrence of EADs. Our simulation results showed that (1) CaMKII overexpression facilitates EADs through the prolongation of late sodium current's (I NaL) deactivation progress; (2) the combined effect of CaMKII overexpression and activation of β-adrenergic signaling pathway further increases the risk of EADs, where EADs could occur at shorter cycle length (2000 ms versus 4000 ms) and lower rapid delayed rectifier K+ current (I Kr) blockage (77% versus 85%). In summary, this study computationally demonstrated the combined role of CaMKII and β-adrenergic signaling pathway on the occurrence of EADs, which could be useful for searching for therapy strategies to treat EADs related arrhythmogenesis.
Complementarity in marine biodiversity manipulations: Reconciling divergent evidence from field and mesocosm experiments

Mounting concern over the loss of marine biodiversity has increased the urgency of understanding its consequences. This urgency spurred the publication of many short-term studies, which often report weak effects of diversity (species richness) driven by the presence of key species (the sampling effect). Longer-term field experiments are slowly accumulating, and they more often report strong diversity effects driven by species complementarity, calling into question the generality of earlier findings. However, differences among study systems in which short- and long-term studies are conducted currently limit our ability to assess whether these differences are simply due to biological or environmental differences among systems. In this paper, we compared the effect of intertidal seaweed species richness on biomass accumulation in mesocosms and field experiments using the same pool of species. We found that seaweed species richness increased biomass accumulation in field experiments in both short (2-month) and long (3-year) experiments, although effects were stronger in the long-term experiment. In contrast, richness had no effect in mesocosm experiments, where biomass accumulation was completely a function of species identity. We argue that the short-term experiments, like many published experiments on the topic, detect only a subset of possible mechanisms that operate in the field over the longer term because they lack sufficient environmental heterogeneity to allow expression of niche differences, and they are of insufficient length to capture population-level responses, such as recruitment. Many published experiments, therefore, likely underestimate the strength of diversity on ecosystem processes in natural ecosystems.
Performance Analysis of Hardware/Software Co-Design of Matrix Solvers

Solving a system of linear and nonlinear equations lies at the heart of many scientific and engineering applications such as circuit simulation, applications in electric power networks, and structural analysis. The exponentially increasing complexity of these computing applications and the high cost of supercomputing force us to explore affordable high performance computing platforms. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop hardware friendly parallel processing algorithms and build cost effective high performance parallel systems using hardware in order to enable the solution of large linear systems. In this thesis, FPGA-based general hardware architectures of selected iterative methods and direct methods are discussed. Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK) hardware/software (HW/SW) codesigns of these methods are also presented. For iterative methods, FPGA based hardware architectures of Jacobi, combined Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel, and conjugate gradient (CG) are proposed. The convergence analysis of the LNS-based Jacobi processor demonstrates to what extent the hardware resource constraints and additional conversion error affect the convergence of Jacobi iterative method. Matlab simulations were performed to compare the performance of three iterative methods in three ways, i.e., number of iterations for any given tolerance, number of iterations for different matrix sizes, and computation time for different matrix sizes. The simulation results indicate that the key to a fast implementation of the three methods is a fast implementation of matrix multiplication. The simulation results also show that CG method takes less number of iterations for any given tolerance, but more computation time as matrix size increases compared to other two methods, since matrix-vector multiplication is a more dominant factor in CG method than in the other two methods. By implementing matrix multiplications of the three methods in hardware with Xilinx EDK HW/SW codesign, the performance is significantly improved over pure software Power PC (PPC) based implementation. The EDK implementation results show that CG takes less computation time for any size of matrices compared to other two methods in HW/SW codesign, due to that fact that matrix
The teacher 's motivational style and the students' extrinsic motivation

The classroom environment is considered as a key factor for the students’ interest regarding school contents. In this context, the teacher ’s motivational style is considered as one of the main influences on students’ motivation. Literature points to a predominance of extrinsic motivation in relation to the school due to the teacher ’s actions in the classroom. In this work, the implications of the teacher’s motivational style for the involvement of students will be presented, based on the self-determination theory. Moreover, it will be described the procedures and results of a stage of the validation work of the Brazilian version of an evaluation questionnaire of the teacher ’s motivational style (Problems in School). Based on the literature of the area, assessment items of the teacher’s motivational style were elaborated and this first instrument was shown to a group of 10 teachers. The analyses of interviews carried out after the first contact with this instrument, are also shown in this article.
A Comparison of the Effect of Sonar Grid Map Building Based on DSmT and DST

Information acquired in map building presents characteristics of uncertainty, imprecision and even high conflict, especially in the course of building grid map using sonar. Here a new method of information fusion - DSmT (Dezert-Smarandache theory) recently developed from DST and Bayesian theory was introduced to apply to managing and dealing with this uncertainty. Aiming to static environment, classic DSm mathematic modal was established by constructing the general basic belief assignment function, so that the global evidence grid map is built by applying the classic DSm rule. Pioneer II virtual mobile robot served as an experiment platform. By comparing the numbers of acquiring-information spot, the quality of grid map building and the time in need of finishing the global map building, better fusion results than that with DST are gotten. Especially when dealing with high conflictive information from sonar grid map building, DSmT was more effective and successful than DST. In short, this study not only found a new method for building map under static environment, but also supplied with a theory foundation for us to further apply hybrid DSmT to dynamic unknown environment and multi-robots' building map together
Analysis of Teachers' Role as Emotional Guide under Flipped Classroom Teaching Context

Emotions affect students’ developments from many aspects, and emotional education is an indivisible part of whole education. This research looks at teachers’ role as emotional guide under flipped classroom teaching context. Grounded in holistic review of emotional education and significance analysis of teacher emotion guide, we offer solutions for teachers to optimize academic outcomes and emotional intelligence. Our proposition is that teachers’ role as emotional guide under flipped classroom teaching context may be carried out on two planes, guide for avoiding negative emotions of learners and guide for generating positive emotions of learners. It’s predicted that teachers’ role as emotional guide should sustain positive learning outcomes and foster emotional attainments within flipped classroom teaching mode.
Sudoku Solver

Sudoku[15], in its simplest form, is defined as a n2× n2 grid that is initially filled in with a certain number of cells. The objective is to fill every cell with numbers 1 to n2, without using any number more than once in the same row, column, or n× n block. Due to the puzzle’s popularity, numerous variants have emerged, changing the size of the puzzle, or adding additional rules. In this report, the design, implementation, and evaluation of an android Sudoku solving app is discussed. The developed app allows users to solve a puzzle using pencil marks, while allowing them to request hints which are generated based on an extensive set on human solving techniques. The app was also evaluated by multiple users of variable Sudoku knowledge and familiarity with similar apps. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the popularity of online apps has grown significantly[44, 36]. This observation motivated the idea of multiplayer Sudoku. An idea that is mostly unexplored, despite the popularity of the puzzle spanning multiple decades. Both competitive and cooperative Sudoku are examined, with an initial version of the latter being designed and implemented.
The Complexity of Euclidian 2 Dimension Travelling Salesman Problem versus General Assign Problem, NP is not P

This paper presents the differences between two NP problems. It focuses in the Euclidian 2 Dimension Travelling Salesman Problems and General Assign Problems. The main results are the triangle reduction to verify the solution in polynomial time for the former and for the later the solution to the Noted Conjecture of the NP-Class, NP is not P.
Development and Persistence of Limbic Epileptogenesis Are Impaired in Mice Lacking Progesterone Receptors

Progesterone plays a key role in ovarian cycle-related synaptic plasticity and neuronal excitability. Progesterone receptors (PRs), which mediate the cellular actions of progesterone, are expressed in the hippocampus and other limbic regions, but their functional significance remains unknown. Here, we report a novel role of PRs as crucial mediators in the development of epileptogenesis, which is the process whereby a normal brain becomes progressively epileptic because of precipitating factors. The PR knock-out (PR−/−) mouse, which lacks both the PR-A and PR-B isoforms, exhibited an increased resistance to epileptogenesis in the hippocampus and amygdala kindling models. Lack of PRs markedly impaired the persistence of seizure expression at 4 weeks after kindling development. We further show that selective inhibition of PRs in the brain by antisense oligos or pharmacological blockade of PRs by RU-486 [11β-[p-(dimethylamino)phenyl]-17β-hydroxy-17-(1-propynyl)estra-4,9-dien-3-one] resulted in a significant decrease in epileptogenesis in wild-type (PR+/+) mice. The delayed epileptogenesis in PR knock-out mice was not substantially affected by inhibition of neurosteroid synthesis. Mice lacking PRs show supersensitivity to the antiseizure responses of progesterone. Collectively, these results suggest that PRs in the hippocampus are linked to signaling pathways that control susceptibility to epileptogenesis and possibly persistence of an epileptic-like state. The PR pathway may represent a unique target for preventing or retarding epileptogenesis in females.
Blind restoration and superresolution using generalized cross-validation with Gauss quadrature rules

In many image restoration/superresolution applications, the blurring process, i.e., point spread function (PSF) of the imaging system, is not known or known only to within a set of parameters. We estimate these PSF parameters for this ill-posed class of inverse problem from raw data, along with the regularization parameters required to stabilize the solution, using the generalized crossvalidation method (GCV). To reduce the computational complexity of GCV, we propose e cient approximation techniques based on the Lanczos algorithm and Gauss quadrature theory. Data-driven blind restoration/superresolution experiments with synthetic and Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) image sequences are presented to demonstrate the e ectiveness and robustness of our method. Nhat Nguyen and Gene Golub are with Scienti c Computing and Computational Mathematics Program, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305-9025, fnguyen,golubg@sccm.stanford. edu Peyman Milanfar is with the Deparment of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, milanfar@cse.ucsc. edu The work in this report was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Grant CCR-9505393.