Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
University ranking as social exclusion

In this article we explore the dual role of global university rankings in the creation of a new, knowledge-identified, transnational capitalist class and in facilitating new forms of social exclusion. We examine how and why the practice of ranking universities has become widely defined by national and international organisations as an important instrument of political and economic policy. We consider the development of university rankings into a global business combining social research, marketing and public relations, as a tangible policy tool that narrowly redefines the social purposes of higher education itself. Finally, it looks at how the influence of rankings on national funding for teaching and research constrains wider public debate about the meaning of ‘good' and meaningful education in the United Kingdom and other national contexts, particularly by shifting the debate away from democratic publics upward into the elite networked institutions of global capital. We conclude by arguing that, rather than regarding world university rankings as a means to establish criteria of educational value, the practice may be understood as an exclusionary one that furthers the alignment of higher education with neoliberal rationalities at both national and global levels.
Alterations in Mitochondrial and Endoplasmic Reticulum Signaling by p53 Mutants

The p53 protein is probably the most important tumor suppressor, acting as a nuclear transcription factor primarily through the modulation of cell death. However, currently, it is well accepted that p53 can also exert important transcription-independent pro-cell death actions. Indeed, cytosolic localization of endogenous wild-type or transactivation-deficient p53 is necessary and sufficient for the induction of apoptosis and autophagy. Here, we present the extra-nuclear activities of p53 associated with the mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum, highlighting the activities of the p53 mutants on these compartments. These two intracellular organelles play crucial roles in the regulation of cell death, and it is now well established that they also represent sites where p53 can accumulate.
Mitochondria-Ros Crosstalk in the Control of Cell Death and Aging

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are highly reactive molecules, mainly generated inside mitochondria that can oxidize DNA, proteins, and lipids. At physiological levels, ROS function as “redox messengers” in intracellular signalling and regulation, whereas excess ROS induce cell death by promoting the intrinsic apoptotic pathway. Recent work has pointed to a further role of ROS in activation of autophagy and their importance in the regulation of aging. This review will focus on mitochondria as producers and targets of ROS and will summarize different proteins that modulate the redox state of the cell. Moreover, the involvement of ROS and mitochondria in different molecular pathways controlling lifespan will be reported, pointing out the role of ROS as a “balance of power,” directing the cell towards life or death.
Preconscious and Postconscious Processes Underlying Construct Accessibility Effects: An Extended Search Model

In this article we first review research relevant to current models of assimilation and contrast effects. Second, we introduce a new theoretical model that specifies how preconscious and postconscious processes jointly contribute to the occurrence of assimilation and contrast effects. Furthermore, a central tenet of our model is that the perceiver's information-processing goals (expediency and accuracy goals) regulate these preconscious and postconscious processes, and they thus play an important role in moderating the magnitude of assimilation and contrast effects. We propose that our new theoretical model provides a parsimonious account for existing findings and derives a number of novel hypotheses to be tested by empirical research.
The effects of supervised work experience on the personal development of psychology undergraduates

Les stages controles sont frequents a l'Universite. L'impact psychologique de ces stages sur les etudiants reste mal connu, bien que leurs defenseurs pretendent que les avantages sont considerables. On a, au cours de cette recherche, etudie les consequences d'une annee de travail en situation reelle et ce que retirent les etudiants de leurs experiences de stage. Les donnees ont ete recueillies aupres de 218 etudiants anglais de 1° cycle de psychologie, en trois fois sur une periode de 17 mois. Aucun element ne permet de dire qu'un stage rehausse l'estime de soi ou favorise l'orientation professionnelle; il ameliore par contre l'auto-estimation de ses capacites. L'autonomie (percue) dans le travail et le soutien social durant le stage agissent faiblement, mais de facon significative sur les variables dependantes. Les resultats indiquent que les stages controles doivent etre soigneusement planifies pour avoir une chance de stimuler le developpement personnel des etudiants. Supervised work experience (SWE) is a part of many degree courses. The psychological effects of SWE on students are relatively unknown, although considerable claims are made by advocates of SWE. In this research the effects of a work placement year, and of students' experiences of placement work, are investigated with data from 218 UK psychology undergraduates on three occasions over a 17-month period. There was no evidence that a placement enhanced students' self-esteem or career decidedness, but some evidence that it enhanced their self-rated abilities. Perceived work autonomy and social support on placement had a small but significant effect on the dependent variables. The results indicate that SWE must be carefully designed if it is to enhance students' personal development.
UniCache: Hypervisor Managed Data Storage in RAM and Flash

Application and OS-level caches are crucial for hiding I/O latency and improving application performance. However, caches are designed to greedily consume memory, which can cause memory-hogging problems in a virtualized data centers since the hypervisor cannot tell for what a virtual machine uses its memory. A group of virtual machines may contain a wide range of caches: database query pools, memcached key-value stores, disk caches, etc., each of which would like as much memory as possible. The relative importance of these caches can vary significantly, yet system administrators currently have no easy way to dynamically manage the resources assigned to a range of virtual machine data caches in a unified way. To improve this situation, we have developed UniCache, a system that provides a hypervisor managed volatile data store that can cache data either in hypervisor controlled main memory (hot data) or on Flash based storage (cold data). We propose a two-level cache management system that uses a combination of recency information, object size, and a prediction of the cost to recover an object to guide its eviction algorithm. We have built a prototype of UniCache using Xen, and have evaluated its effectiveness in a shared environment where multiple virtual machines compete for storage resources.
Multimodal real-time contingency detection for HRI

Our goal is to develop robots that naturally engage people in social exchanges. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recognizing that a person is responsive to a robot's request for interaction. Inspired by human cognition, our approach is to treat this as a contingency detection problem. We present a simple discriminative Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to compare against previous generative methods introduced in prior work by Lee et al. [1]. We evaluate these methods in two ways. First, by training three separate SVMs with multi-modal sensory input on a set of batch data collected in a controlled setting, where we obtain an average F1 score of 0.82. Second, in an open-ended experiment setting with seven participants, we show that our model is able to perform contingency detection in real-time and generalize to new people with a best F1 score of 0.72.
Non-isolated DC-DC converters with wide conversion range used to drive high-brightness LEDs

Light emitting diodes (LEDs) have many features that make them attractive for use in an increasing number of applications. Particularly in lighting, the small size of LEDs compared to fluorescent and incandescent bulbs is a prominent advantage. This paper presents two topologies based on the buck converter, which have higher step-down characteristic than that of the original converter. The quadratic buck converter is studied and used to drive series-connected LEDs. Improved characteristics if compared with the traditional converter include the continuous current maintained through the LEDS and the possibility of driving several types of LED arrays. The study is then extended to the cubic buck converter, as a novel arrangement to obtain the mentioned step-down characteristic is introduced in this work. The use of such converter allows obtaining lower output voltages than those resulting from the quadratic buck converter. Experimental prototypes of the converters are implemented and fully tested. It must be also mentioned that a PIC microcontroller is used to control the current through the LED array, what provides robustness and flexibility in the adjust of the control algorithm without the need of hardware modification.
Uncertainty analysis of single‐concentration exposure data for risk assessment—introducing the species effect distribution approach

In recent years, the inclusion of uncertainty analysis in risk assessment has been much debated. One pertinent issue is the translation of the effects observed with a limited number of test species to a general protection level for most or all species present in the environment. In a number of cases, toxicity data may consist of data from tests employing only a control and one treatment. Given that more species (or processes) have been tested with the same treatment, the treatment can be considered as fixed, and the effect level of the individual species (or processes) can be considered as variable. The distribution of effects can be viewed as a species effect distribution for that treatment. The distribution will represent all organisms and may be used to predict the maximum impact on any fraction of all organisms (e.g., 95% of all species). Hence, it is possible to predict the maximum effect level, with a selected certainty, for a given fraction of all species.
Faster makespan estimation for GPU threads on a single streaming multiprocessor

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are widely used to reduce the load on CPUs and liberate other resources of a given computer system. The recent trend of utilizing GPUs in embedded systems necessitates the development of timing analysis techniques for finding the joint worst-case execution time for a group of GPU threads of the same parallel application, on a streaming multiprocessor. The state-of-the-art approaches for computing the exact maximum makespan of GPU threads running on a single streaming multiprocessor are computationally expensive and even pessimistic approximations usually take a long time to complete. We therefore develop a technique for finding an estimate of the maximum makespan using metaheuristics. Its simplicity, flexibility and ability for massive parallelization, determine a potential of usage for soft real-time systems.
Effects of Motor Skill Intervention on Developmental Coordination Disorder: A Meta-Analysis

The purpose was to determine whether evidence exists in published research from 1970 to 1996 to support motor skill intervention for children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) or equivalent conditions. The following questions were addressed: (a) Which (if any) of three theoretical approaches to motor skill interventions is supported by evidence? (b) How do age of participants, research design, intervention setting, and intervention duration affect motor outcomes? (c) What are the results of meta-analysis? Twenty-one relevant studies were identified, and 13 (all that reported means and standard deviations) were subjected to meta-analysis. Findings indicated that motor skill intervention is most effective when applied with (a) children with DCD over age 5, (b) the specific skill theoretical approach, (c) intervention conducted in a group setting or as a home program, and (d) intervention frequency of at least 3 to 5 times per week. No clear findings emerged in regard to other variables.
An Examination of Organizational Communication as a Moderator of the Relationship Between Job Performance and Job Satisfaction

Organizational communication received strong support as a predictor of job sat isfaction and weak support as a moderator of the job performance-job satisfaction relationship in this study. Using data collected from 302 employees at two manu facturing firms, moderated regression analyses explored the influence of organi zational communication on the relationship between job performance and job satisfaction. Lateral communication was found to moderate the relationship between satisfaction with pay and performance, while accuracy of information was shown to moderate the association between satisfaction with work and performance. Communication dimensions with the greatest support as predictors were accuracy of information, desire for interaction, communication load, trust in superior, influence of superior, and satisfaction with communication.
Systems support for preemptive disk scheduling

Allowing higher-priority requests to preempt ongoing disk IOs is of particular benefit to delay-sensitive and real-time systems. In this paper, we present semi-preemptible IO, which divides disk IO requests into small temporal units of disk commands to improve the preemptibility of disk access. We first lay out main design strategies to allow preemption of each component of a disk access-seek, rotation, and data transfer, namely, seek-splitting, JIT-seek, and chunking. We then present the preemption mechanisms for single and multidisk systems-JIT-preemption and JIT-migration. The evaluation of our prototype system showed that semi-preemptible IO substantially improved the preemptibility of disk access with little loss in disk throughput and that preemptive disk scheduling could improve the response time for high-priority interactive requests.
Coordination of a Multi-Joint Movement in Normal Humans and in Patients with Cerebellar Dysfunction

ABSTRACT: The contribution of the cerebellar cortex to coordination of a multi-joint throwing movement was studied by measuring various movement and EMG parameters while normal control subjects and patients with cerebellar cortical atrophy threw a ball at a target. Although patients did not throw as accurately as controls, several coordination measurements were normal in the patients. These included parameters used by us to assess elbow-wrist coordination and the coordination of hand opening with activation of more proximal arm muscles. Postural support for the movement at the shoulder was also normal in that the shoulder was not pushed backwards by the reaction forces resulting from the rapid forward acceleration of the forearm and hand. In contrast, however, patients were unable to coordinate the muscles so as to produce the same hand direction from trial to trial when throwing at the same target. In addition, EMG onset times were abnormal in the antagonist muscles relative to agonist EMG bursts and kinematic parameters of the movement. In conclusion, our patients with cerebellar cortical atrophy showed abnormalities in visual-motor coordination, in that they were unable to consistently produce the appropriate hand direction in response to a visual target. Agonist-antagonist relationships were also impaired. Other aspects of coordination, such as the relative timing of EMG onsets of agonist muscles, even when these were active at different joints, were normal.
Evaluation of the Allergenicity and Antigenicity of Bovine‐Milk αs1‐Casein Using Extensively Purified Synthetic Peptides

αs1‐Casein (CAS1_BOVIN), the major allergen of cow's milk (CM), is widely used as hydrolysates in infant diet formulae and additive to other processed food items. To date, most of the reported B‐cell epitope mapping were performed on polyethylene pins or cellulose‐derivative membrane. We sought to locate the motifs critical for human‐specific IgE and rabbit polyclonal IgG binding using extensively purified CAS1_BOVIN, synthetic peptides and derivatives. Thirteen overlapping peptides covering the whole CAS1_BOVIN encompassing 17 : 20 amino acid (AA) were synthesized by f‐moc AA solid‐phase polyamide peptide synthesis. In addition, six cyanogen bromide (CNBr) cleavage fragments were prepared. Limited hydrolysis, oxidized and reduced/alkylated derivatives were also produced. The preparations were purified by ion exchange, gel filtration chromatography, reversed phase and high‐performance liquid chromatography. The homogeneity was visualized by sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and poly acryl amide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) followed by IgE and IgG immunoblotting. IgE binding was measured by Biotin Streptavidin (Bio/strep) fluoro enzyme immuno assay (FEIA) or ELISA‐inhibition. Eighteen CM allergy (CMA) sera from 45 clinically examined children (Melbourne) and five adults (Bergen) were selected. Individual sera and pools were used for mapping IgE‐binding epitopes. Rabbit IgG sera and pools were used for locating the antigenic sites of the molecule. Results indicated that all the individual CMA sera and pools recognized the intact molecule and three of the CNBr fragments as major antibody‐binding allergens. The N‐ and C‐terminal peptides (CAS 16‐35; CAS 136‐155) showed high IgE‐binding affinity. CAS 1‐18 and CAS 181‐199 showed high IgG bindings. Considering the diversity of the antibody specificities, a reasonable agreement between IgE and IgG epitopes were found at the N‐ and C‐terminals of CAS1_BOVIN. Mapping IgE B‐cell epitopes by direct Bio/strep FEIA allowed the development of a sensitive modified technique for detecting unlabelled, casein immune dominant peptides in food products.
Severe obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome in an adult patient with Laron syndrome.

A 68 year old patient with Laron syndrome (primary growth hormone (GH) resistance-insensitivity due to a molecular defect of the GH receptor) and severe obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome is described. Treatment with continuous positive air pressure therapy resulted in improved nocturnal sleep, daytime alertness and cognitive functions.
The Development and Use of Individual Learning Plans for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students in Victoria, Australia

Abstract This study investigated the Individual Learning Plans of eighty-eight students who were deaf and hard of hearing attending facilities and schools for the deaf in Victoria Australia. The students' assessment and planning portfolios were scrutinised for evidence of formal and informal assessment used to generate goals for the Individual Learning Plan. These goals were then assessed according to the SMART criteria. Findings showed that results of assessments were seldom used to inform goal setting. Despite this, most goals appeared relevant and achievable, although the specificity and measurability of goals remained an area to work on. These results suggest various avenues for improving current practice through further in-service for teachers of the deaf, as well as further research.
Generalizing and Scaling up Dynamic Topic Models via Inducing Point Variational Inference

Dynamic topic models (DTMs) model the evolution of prevalent themes in literature, online media, and other forms of text over time. DTMs assume that topics change continuously over time and therefore impose continuous stochastic process priors on their model parameters. In this paper, we extend the class of tractable priors from Wiener processes to the generic class of Gaussian processes (GPs). Second, we show how to perform scalable approximate inference in these models based on ideas around stochastic variational inference and Gaussian processes with inducing points. Our experiments show that our generalized model allows us to find interesting patterns that were not accessible by previous approaches.
Problemas de conducta de los adolescentes en acogimiento preadoptivo, residencial y con familia extensa

Behavioural problems in adolescents who are in adoption, residential care, and grandparent fostering. The aim of this research is to identify the severity and type of behavioural problems found in a sample of 181 Spanish adolescents, aged 11 and 18, who have been, or still are in the protective system and to provide give up-to-date figures about behavioural problem situations of children are living under protective measures, and to determine the existence of diverse behavioural problems concerning the kind of care the adolescents are receiving (adoption, residential care, or with grandparent fostering). The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) was used in this study. The results show that most of the adolescents scored within the normal range and only a small percentage of them had important behavioural problems and were therefore situated within the clinical range of the trial. The adopted adolescents scored higher than the adolescents who were either fostered by their extended families or in residential care. The main problems identified in each section are discussed, along with the results, in the context of modernising the Spanish protection system.
FtsZ-less prokaryotic cell division as well as FtsZ- and dynamin-less chloroplast and non-photosynthetic plastid division

The chloroplast division machinery is a mixture of a stromal FtsZ-based complex descended from a cyanobacterial ancestor of chloroplasts and a cytosolic dynamin-related protein (DRP) 5B-based complex derived from the eukaryotic host. Molecular genetic studies have shown that each component of the division machinery is normally essential for normal chloroplast division. However, several exceptions have been found. In the absence of the FtsZ ring, non-photosynthetic plastids are able to proliferate, likely by elongation and budding. Depletion of DRP5B impairs, but does not stop chloroplast division. Chloroplasts in glaucophytes, which possesses a peptidoglycan (PG) layer, divide without DRP5B. Certain parasitic eukaryotes possess non-photosynthetic plastids of secondary endosymbiotic origin, but neither FtsZ nor DRP5B is encoded in their genomes. Elucidation of the FtsZ- and/or DRP5B-less chloroplast division mechanism will lead to a better understanding of the function and evolution of the chloroplast division machinery and the finding of the as-yet-unknown mechanism that is likely involved in chloroplast division. Recent studies have shown that FtsZ was lost from a variety of prokaryotes, many of which lost PG by regressive evolution. In addition, even some of the FtsZ-bearing bacteria are able to divide when FtsZ and PG are depleted experimentally. In some cases, alternative mechanisms for cell division, such as budding by an increase of the cell surface-to-volume ratio, are proposed. Although PG is believed to have been lost from chloroplasts other than in glaucophytes, there is some indirect evidence for the existence of PG in chloroplasts. Such information is also useful for understanding how non-photosynthetic plastids are able to divide in FtsZ-depleted cells and the reason for the retention of FtsZ in chloroplast division. Here we summarize information to facilitate analyses of FtsZ- and/or DRP5B-less chloroplast and non-photosynthetic plastid division.