Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

ask why parents opt for Catholic schools when their own practice is not always informed by participation in Church, and likewise, without the support of government subsidies to fund their children’s education, with all of the attendant issues that school fi nances impose upon our ability to serve children well. Similarly, we Catholic educators in the United States could explore how effectively we meet the needs of students who face physical, emotional, or intellectual challenges. Have we been dismissive of them because of lack of funding? Within school communities, how do we make a place of welcome and encouragement for children who are “different? ” Do we extend the graced moment to ourselves and all of our students to become a Eucharistic people by embracing students who may demand more from us? These are just a few of the questions that Cosentino and Bezzina’s pamphlet invite us to ponder.
Bayesian LASSO for QTL Mapping

Mapping quantitative trait loci (QTL) is to identify molecular markers or genomic loci that influence the variation of complex traits. The problem is complicated by the facts that QTL data usually contain a large number of markers across the entire genome and most of them have little or no effect on the phenotype. In this paper, we propose several Bayesian hierarchical models for mapping multiple QTL that simultaneously fit and estimate all possible genetic effects associated with all markers. The proposed models use prior distributions for the genetic effects that are scale mixtures of normal distributions with mean zero and variances distributed to give each effect a high probability of being near zero. We consider two types of priors for the variances, exponential and scaled inverse-2 χ distributions, which result in Bayesian version of the popular LASSO model and the well-known Student-t model, respectively. Unlike most applications where fixed values are preset for hyperparameters in the priors, we treat all hyperparameters as unknowns and estimate them along with other parameters. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are developed to simulate the parameters from the posteriors. The methods are illustrated using a well known barley data.
Urban Inequality under Socialism: Case Studies from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union

Acknowledgements Preface The author 1. Socialism and the city 2. Moscow: showpiece of Soviet socialism 3. Residential segregation and social inequality: evidence from other Soviet cities 4. Prague: the imposition of socialism 5. Housing distribution: the experience of hungarian cities 6. Warsaw: re-creation of socialism 7. Urban inequality in Poland: evidence from other cities 8. Summary and conclusions Bibliography and sources.
Pension coverage among private wage and salary workers: preliminary findings from the 1988 survey of employee benefits.

Based on data for private wage and salary workers in May 1988, this article examined pension coverage under two types of employer-sponsored pension plans. Some of the factors associated with employer-financed pension coverage were also examined, and comparisons were made to findings on pension coverage of full-time workers in 1972, 1979, and 1983. "Covered" workers were defined as those actually participating in a pension plan. Among all private sector employees studied, 34 percent were covered by a "basic" pension plan (most of which, presumably, were defined benefit plans), and 14 percent were covered by a pretax retirement savings plan--a subtype of defined contribution plan. With 7 percent of the respondents covered by both types of plans, the total coverage rate under employer-sponsored plans was 41 percent. Twelve percent of the respondents reported that they had contributed to an IRA in 1987. The reported IRA usage was somewhat higher among those already covered by a pension plan than among noncovered workers. Six percent of the respondents were not covered by an employer-sponsored plan but were contributing to an IRA, yielding a total of 47 percent who were participating in either an employer-sponsored or an individual retirement plan. While it was assumed--as in previous studies--that all "basic" coverage was being funded by employers, only four-fifths of those in pretax retirement savings plans reported that employers were also contributing to these plans. The remainder of the analysis was restricted to coverage under employer-financed plans, and it was further restricted to full-time workers. A total of 46 percent of these workers were covered under employer-financed pension plans--33 percent covered only by a basic plan, 7 percent covered only by a pretax plan, and 6 percent dually covered. Among men, the coverage rate was 49 percent, compared with 43 percent among women. Several individual and job-related characteristics were found to be associated with employer-financed pension coverage among full-time employees. Coverage rates were quite low among workers under age 25, but were substantially higher among those aged 35-59. Pension coverage was also low among those with less than 5 years of employment on the job, but relatively high among those with 5 years or more of job tenure. Coverage rate differences by race were not substantial. Whites reported a coverage rate of 47 percent, compared with 42 percent among blacks and 45 percent among other races. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Drug therapy in brain ischaemia.

After many years of research, drug treatment in cerebral hypoxia is still controversial and no treatment appears to be firmly established. Not even the mechanisms causing damage have been established (Siesjo, 1981), only that they are linked to a disturbance in the oxygen demand: supply ratio. Enthusiasm for new modes of therapy have waxed and waned. We have witnessed alternating enthusiasm for cerebral vasodilators, cerebral vasoconstrictors, cerebral metabolic depressants, free radical scavengers, membrane stabilizers, calcium blockers, drugs that improve blood rheology, and drugs that are reported simply to improve cerebral function in a "black box" fashion. Part of the apparent conflicts in the literature may result from great variety in the models used to test pharmacological brain protection. To clarify some of the confusion it is important to differentiate between species, preand post-treatment and the main categories of cerebral hypoxia (table I).
Serotonin Drives a Novel GABAergic Synaptic Current Recorded in Rat Cerebellar Purkinje Cells: A Lugaro Cell to Purkinje Cell Synapse

We recorded a novel fast GABAergic synaptic current in cerebellar Purkinje cells in rat brain slices using patch-clamp techniques. Because of a relatively low sensitivity to bicuculline, these currents can be recorded under conditions in which basket and stellate cell inputs are blocked. The observations that the novel synaptic currents occur spontaneously only in the presence of serotonin, and the specific limited positions in the slice from which they can be electrically evoked, suggest that the presynaptic cell is the Lugaro cell. Cell-attached recordings confirm that the Lugaro cell is the only interneuron in the cerebellar cortex with firing behavior consistent with the spontaneous activity recorded in Purkinje cells. The input shows a strong presynaptic modulation mediated by GABAA receptors, resulting in a dynamic range from almost 0 to >90% release probability. Modeling GABAA receptor responses to different GABA transients suggests that the relatively low sensitivity of the synaptic currents to bicuculline, compared with the higher affinity GABAA receptor antagonist SR-95531 (2-(3-carboxypropyl)-3-amino-6-(4-methoxyphenyl) pyridazinium), is attributable to an unusually long GABA dwell time and/or high GABA concentration in the synaptic cleft. The significance of this novel input is discussed in relation to other GABAergic synapses impinging on Purkinje cells. We suggest that the release of GABA onto Purkinje cells from Lugaro cells would primarily occur during motor activity under conditions in which the activity of basket and stellate cells might be inhibited.
La Dirección Estratégica en la Economía Social: utilización de herramientas de análisis estratégico en las Cooperativas

Social Economy companies and Cooperatives need to improve their management capacity using strategic tools to increase their efficiency whilst at the same time maintaining their effectiveness. In increasingly competitive markets, these organizations must bring their social objectives into line with their business objectives. The social dimension, which is based on Cooperative Principles and takes the form of employee integration and corporate social responsibility, represents the goal to achieve through the development of their business dimension. This article proposes the need to adopt a strategic model based on the process of Strategic Management that is specifically designed for such companies, paying particular attention to characterizing certain contingent factors: small organizational size, shortage of financial resources and limitations in the professionalisation of management. The proposed model is based on concepts of strategic reflection and the three key elements of deduction, intuition and action, proposing the use of techniques such as SWOT and VRIO analyses.
Prebreakdown Process in Freon-Nitrogen Mixtures at Low Gas Pressures

Steady-state prebreakdown currents were measured under a uniform field in freon-nitrogen mixtures over the range 110¿ E/p¿240 (E = electric field in V.cm -1torr -1, and p = gas pressure in torr) and at pressures ranging from 1-20 torr for different concentrations of freon. From the measured currents, the values of ionization and attachment coefficients and the ratio of diffusion coefficients to mobility for electrons (mean energy), were determined. The addition of a small concentration of freon (¿10 percent) to nitrogen at high E/p values is found to increase the ionization rate considerably with a corresponding reduction in sparking potentials. A peak in the value of mean energy for electrons was also observed under this condition. This is attributed to a significant difference in the ionization potentials of freon and nitrogen molecules, which is capable of ionizing molecules.
Institutional Transition And Transition Cost: A Methodological Consideration

This paper attempts to explain why institutional changes, whose direction look obvious at the beginning, arouse controversies and, more often than not, face ‘setbacks’. It starts from critically assessing North’s (1981; 1990) analysis of relating transaction cost and economic performance and argues for considering ‘transition cost’, separately from transaction cost, in designing institutional change. The ‘reformers’ are often interested in possible transaction cost reducing effect of institutional transition. But an institutional transition can be justified only if the reduction in transaction cost more than compensates for transition cost involved. It seems that many institutional reforms face problems because they ignore or underestimate the aspect of transition cost, the size of which is specific to institutions concerned.
Logical , Testing , and Observation Equivalence for Processes in a Linear Logic Programming

Linear logic programming has recently been proposed and shown to be able to integrate a wide range of mechanisms for concurrent computation uniformly in terms of proof search. This paper introduces several process equivalence relations for linear logic programming and investigate relationships between them in order to establish foundations for program transformation in linear logic programming. We also introduce unfold/fold transformation procedure for linear logic programming and prove its soundness with respect to a testing equivalence.
A INTERFACE ENTRE SENTIMENTOS E CULTURA ORGANIZACIONAL: EVIDÊNCIAS DE UMA OPERAÇÃO DE AQUISIÇÃO

Neste artigo, teve-se como objetivo identificar quais sentimentos emergiram em funcionarios que vivenciaram a operacao de aquisicao da instituicao financeira internacional em que trabalhavam, no ano de 2006, por outra nacional, pois buscou-se compreender quais pressupostos passaram a ser compartilhados no ambiente de trabalho em transformacao, deflagrando assim, um recorte para o termo cultura organizacional quando em processos de aquisicao de instituicoes financeiras. A pesquisa e qualitativa, descritiva, de corte temporal seccional com perspectiva longitudinal. Os dados foram coletados junto aos funcionarios remanescentes. Os resultados apontaram que emergiram distintos sentimentos negativos nos funcionarios, de modo que o recorte deflagrado para a cultura organizacional quando em processos de aquisicao de instituicoes financeiras foi: o risco e compartilhado como um pressuposto de valor pelos funcionarios, em face das suposicoes projetadas sobre as mudancas organizacionais, sejam elas um acontecimento futuro, esperado ou temido.
Harmonia: A globally coordinated garbage collector for arrays of Solid-State Drives

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) offer significant performance improvements over hard disk drives (HDD) on a number of workloads. The frequency of garbage collection (GC) activity is directly correlated with the pattern, frequency, and volume of write requests, and scheduling of GC is controlled by logic internal to the SSD. SSDs can exhibit significant performance degradations when garbage collection (GC) conflicts with an ongoing I/O request stream. When using SSDs in a RAID array, the lack of coordination of the local GC processes amplifies these performance degradations. No RAID controller or SSD available today has the technology to overcome this limitation. This paper presents Harmonia, a Global Garbage Collection (GGC) mechanism to improve response times and reduce performance variability for a RAID array of SSDs. Our proposal includes a high-level design of SSD-aware RAID controller and GGC-capable SSD devices, as well as algorithms to coordinate the global GC cycles. Our simulations show that this design improves response time and reduces performance variability for a wide variety of enterprise workloads. For bursty, write dominant workloads response time was improved by 69% while performance variability was reduced by 71%.
Cooperation technology and power loss in a wireless network

According to nonlinear equation of path loss, cooperative communication based on relay technique can reduce the total power loss of a wireless network and average power consumption of terminals. At the same time, the cooperation between relay nodes result in more complexity in design and work, extra power consumption and some other problems. In an energy-constrained network, the effect on power loss in the system and terminals resulted from cooperation must be synthetically considered. In this paper, we analyzed the principle of why cooperation technology can reduce power loss firstly. Then, some potential problems caused by cooperation were discussed and corresponding advices were given at the same time. At last, we made the conclusion that cooperation technology based on relay and diversity techniques will not reduce power loss necessarily if above questions can't be processed adequately.
CULTIVATING THE COMPASS: Examining the role of emotional appraisal and professional agency among stakeholders in Kentucky agricultural education

OF THESIS CULTIVATING THE COMPASS: Examining the role of emotional appraisal and professional agency among stakeholders in Kentucky agricultural education. Agricultural Education has been informed by four major areas including agricultural education (teaching and learning), educational policy, agricultural policy (industry collaboration) and research. Historically agriculture teachers have been removed from the policy process affecting their profession in these four areas (Thompson, 1963). A review of historical literature suggests that only twice have teachers been involved in the policy process. The purpose of this study was to examine the involvement levels of stakeholders in agricultural education across the state of Kentucky. Specifically, examining the emotional appraisal of specific issues in agricultural education and if the emotions of stakeholders influence their involvement in these issues (Sherer, 2005). The researcher found that the involvement level of stakeholders in Kentucky was consistent with the historical research suggesting that stakeholders including teachers are not actively engaged in policy affecting their profession. The researcher also found that stakeholders that appraised a specific issue with a joyous emotion (contentment) became more involved in a local agricultural education program than those apprehensive about the same issues. Recommendations for the profession and specific stakeholder groups have been provided by the researcher to attempt to engage stakeholders in the polices that affect their classroom and profession.
Learning Styles and Student Performance in Java Programming Courses

It is crucial for a teacher to take students’ learning styles into account to enhance teaching effectiveness. This study examines correlations between students’ learning styles and their performance in writing and debugging Java programs. Eighty-four college freshmen who enrolled in two introductory Java programming courses participated in this study. Students were given the Soloman-Felder Index of Learning Styles test to determine their preferred learning styles, which were correlated with their performance on three tests—a written test, a hands-on programming test, and a debugging test. It was found that sensing learners performed the best on the written test, and the reflective/sensing/visual/sequential learners achieved the highest average scores on each of the three tests.
Homeostatic Plasticity Studied Using In Vivo Hippocampal Activity-Blockade: Synaptic Scaling, Intrinsic Plasticity and Age-Dependence

Homeostatic plasticity is thought to be important in preventing neuronal circuits from becoming hyper- or hypoactive. However, there is little information concerning homeostatic mechanisms following in vivo manipulations of activity levels. We investigated synaptic scaling and intrinsic plasticity in CA1 pyramidal cells following 2 days of activity-blockade in vivo in adult (postnatal day 30; P30) and juvenile (P15) rats. Chronic activity-blockade in vivo was achieved using the sustained release of the sodium channel blocker tetrodotoxin (TTX) from the plastic polymer Elvax 40W implanted directly above the hippocampus, followed by electrophysiological assessment in slices in vitro. Three sets of results were in general agreement with previous studies on homeostatic responses to in vitro manipulations of activity. First, Schaffer collateral stimulation-evoked field responses were enhanced after 2 days of in vivo TTX application. Second, miniature excitatory postsynaptic current (mEPSC) amplitudes were potentiated. However, the increase in mEPSC amplitudes occurred only in juveniles, and not in adults, indicating age-dependent effects. Third, intrinsic neuronal excitability increased. In contrast, three sets of results sharply differed from previous reports on homeostatic responses to in vitro manipulations of activity. First, miniature inhibitory postsynaptic current (mIPSC) amplitudes were invariably enhanced. Second, multiplicative scaling of mEPSC and mIPSC amplitudes was absent. Third, the frequencies of adult and juvenile mEPSCs and adult mIPSCs were increased, indicating presynaptic alterations. These results provide new insights into in vivo homeostatic plasticity mechanisms with relevance to memory storage, activity-dependent development and neurological diseases.
Performing Dynamic and Distributed Adaptation with a Novel Approach: Global Adaptation

Lately, distributed applications have been improved with the emergence of a great number of different terminals and networks. Adaptability has become a common approach to solve heterogeneity problems involved by the use of multiple devices. Indeed, we have introduced global adaptation to improve merging adaptability with distributed applications. Global adaptation allows dynamic, transparent and distributed adaptation of data transmitted between several users. To realize global adaptation, we have built a platform called Appat (Adaptation Proxies PlATform). This platform is composed of adaptation proxies and includes mechanisms necessary to handle transmissions and to perform global adaptation tasks. Results prove the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the contribution of the Appat platform in a web application.
Towards a Concept how the Structure of Time can Support the Visual Analytics Process

The primary goal of Visual Analytics (VA) is the close intertwinedness of human reasoning and automated methods. An important task for this goal is formulating a description for such a VA process. We propose the design of a VA process description that uses the inherent structure contained in time-oriented data as a way to improve the integration of human reasoning. This structure can, for example, be seen in the calendar aspect of time being composed of smaller granularities, like years and seasons. Domain experts strongly consider this structure in their reasoning, so VA needs to consider it, too.
Modeling of tunneling current and gate dielectric reliability for nonvolatile memory devices

We present a hierarchy of tunneling models suitable for the two- and three-dimensional simulation of logic and nonvolatile semiconductor memory devices. The crucial modeling topics are comprehensively discussed, namely, the modeling of the energy distribution function in the channel to account for hot-carrier tunneling, the calculation of the transmission coefficient of single and layered dielectrics, the influence of quasi-bound states in the inversion layer, the modeling of static and transient defect-assisted tunneling, and the modeling of dielectric degradation and breakdown. We propose a set of models to link the gate leakage to the creation of traps in the dielectric layer, the threshold voltage shift, and eventual dielectric breakdown. The simulation results are compared to commonly used compact models and measurements of logic and nonvolatile memory devices.
Where is your dive buddy: tracking humans underwater using spatio-temporal features

We present an algorithm for underwater robots to track mobile targets, and specifically human divers, by detecting periodic motion. Periodic motion is typically associated with propulsion underwater and specifically with the kicking of human swimmers. By computing local amplitude spectra in a video sequence, we find the location of a diver in the robot's field of view. We use the Fourier transform to extract the responses of varying intensities in the image space over time to detect characteristic low frequency oscillations to identify an undulating flipper motion associated with typical gaits. In case of detecting multiple locations that exhibit large low-frequency energy responses, we combine the gait detector with other methods to eliminate false detections. We present results of our algorithm on open-ocean video footage of swimming divers, and also discuss possible extensions and enhancements of the proposed approach for tracking other objects that exhibit low- frequency oscillatory motion.