Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multimodal Teacher Input and Science Learning in a Middle School Sheltered Classroom.

This article reports the results of an ethnographic research about the multimodal science discourse in a sixth-grade sheltered classroom involving English Language Learners (ELLs) only. Drawing from the perspective of multimodality, this study examines how science learning is constructed in science lectures through multiple semiotic resources, including oral language, gestures, and visual products. Specifically, the study asks three research questions: 1. What is the nature of multimodal communication between the teacher and students? 2. How does science learning occur in the classroom from a multimodal perspective? and 3. How does language development occur in the classroom? Data include eight months of classroom observation with video and audio recordings, fieldnotes, formal, and informal interviews with the teacher and students, photographs of textbook pages, students' final products, and teacher products. Results show that the gap between the multimodal representation and communication, as well as the disconnection between teacher discourse and student discourse, provides limited evidence of the students' knowledge reconstruction. The gap between the everyday language and scientific language leads to limited language development. The study expands the current knowledge base about ELLs' multimodal classroom experiences in relating to science learning and language development. The results can be used to help both researchers and educators in the future to examine the multimodal instructional design in terms of its effectiveness for science learning. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 53: 7–30, 2016.
Health habits and risk of cognitive impairment and dementia in old age: A prospective study on the effects of exercise, smoking and alcohol consumption

Previous research has yielded inconsistent results on the effects of exercise, smoking and alcohol use on cognitive impairment and dementia in old age. We analysed data from the Sydney Older Persons Study to see if these health habits were associated with cognitive functioning, dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Health habits were assessed in Wave 1 of the study, when the subjects were aged 75 years or over. Three years later, the subjects were tested for cognitive functioning and clinically examined for dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The analysis was restricted to the 327 subjects examined in Wave 2 who were non‐demented in Wave 1. There were few significant associations between health habits and cognitive performance and these were not found consistently across cognitive measures. No associations were found with dementia or Alzheimer's disease. While these health habits do not affect risk for dementia and cognitive impairment in the very elderly, who are at highest risk for these disorders, we cannot discount a role at younger ages.
A coupling of homology modeling with multiple molecular dynamics simulation for identifying representative conformation of GPCR structures: a case study on human bombesin receptor subtype-3

In this study, a computational pipeline was therefore devised to overcome homology modeling (HM) bottlenecks. The coupling of HM with molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is useful in that it tackles the sampling deficiency of dynamics simulations by providing good-quality initial guesses for the native structure. Indeed, HM also relaxes the severe requirement of force fields to explore the huge conformational space of protein structures. In this study, the interaction between the human bombesin receptor subtype-3 and MK-5046 was investigated integrating HM, molecular docking, and MD simulations. To improve conformational sampling in typical MD simulations of GPCRs, as in other biomolecules, multiple trajectories with different initial conditions can be employed rather than a single long trajectory. Multiple MD simulations of human bombesin receptor subtype-3 with different initial atomic velocities are applied to sample conformations in the vicinity of the structure generated by HM. The backbone atom conformational space distribution of replicates is analyzed employing principal components analysis. As a result, the averages of structural and dynamic properties over the twenty-one trajectories differ significantly from those obtained from individual trajectories.
News Web Text Extraction Based on the Maximum Subsequence Segmentation

Many people use the web as the main information source in their daily lives. However, most web pages contain non-information components, such as site bars, footers and ads, etc., which make it complicated to extract text from the original HTML documents. Because of the high human intervention and the low results extraction quality, although the web text extraction techniques have been developed, the popularization and efficiency of the usage still need to be solved. In this paper, we proposed a maximum subsequence segmentation (MSS) algorithm and discussed its application in the domain of news web sites. Differing from the tree structure analysis and VIPS, the algorithm divided the web into text segmentation and label segmentation. Experiment shows that the MSS algorithm achieves 93.73% accuracy over 2000 news pages from 5 different news sites and the efficiency is much faster than DOM-based using same dataset.
Normative versus social constructivist processes in the allocation of citations : A network-analytic model

I assess competing arguments on the determinants of scientists' citation patterns by developing a new approach to the multivariate study of citations that builds upon a network-analytic model. Using data on articles about celestial masers, an astrophysics research area, logistic regressions with robust standard errors examine the extent to which characteristics of both potentially citing and potentially cited papers influence the probability that a citation exists between the papers. The results identify significant positive effects of cited article cognitive content and cited article quality, providing support for a normative interpretation of the allocation of citations in which citations reflect payment of intellectual debt. In contrast, indicators of an author's position within the stratification structure of science fail to significantly improve the fit of the model, and thus provide no support for the social constructivist claim that citations are rhetorical tools of persuasion. Furthermore, the lack of effects of social ties between citing and cited authors provides little support for the argument that authors who know one another are more likely to cite one another's work. Overall, these results suggest that authors are likely to cite those articles most relevant to their work in terms of intellectual content, and seem little concerned with the characteristics of authors who write them.
Aspect Oriented Software Architecture : a Structural Perspective

The positive results obtained by researchers on aspect-oriented programming during the last few years are promoting the aim to export their ideas to the whole software development process. One of the stages in which Aspect Oriented Software Development (AOSD) techniques can be introduced is software architectural design. This would make design of complex systems an easier task whilst cost development, cost maintenance, reuse, etc., would be improved. However, integrating both architectural design and aspect orientation is a non-trivial task. The different nature of the aspects that can be involved in an application and the different requirements that applications impose on the treatment of aspects make it difficult to handle aspects in a uniform way while at the same time preserving the simplicity of the design process. In this study the structure of the problem of separation of crosscutting concerns in the architectural design based on the aspect oriented approach is analysed. The analysis will identify the kind of changes that must be made in the current technology to manage this sort of integration. In particular, this paper focuses on how aspects separation can be handled by Architecture Description Languages and architectural styles. The aim of this article is not to propose a particular solution but to propose some general guidelines on which solutions can be based.
Accurate and Timely Situation Awareness Retrieval from a Bandwidth Constrained Camera Network

Wireless cameras can be used to gather situation awareness information (e.g., humans in distress) in disaster recovery scenarios. However, blindly sending raw video streams from such cameras, to an operations center or controller can be prohibitive in terms of bandwidth. Further, these raw streams could contain either redundant or irrelevant information. Thus, we ask "how do we extract accurate situation awareness information from such camera nodes and send it in a timely manner, back to the operations center? " Towards this, we design ACTION, a framework that (a) detects objects of interest (e.g., humans) from the video streams, (b) combines these streams intelligently to eliminate redundancies and (c) transmits only parts of the feeds that are sufficient in achieving a desired detection accuracy to the controller. ACTION uses small amounts of metadata to determine if the objects from different camera feeds are the same. A resource-aware greedy algorithm is used to select a subset of video feeds that are associated with the same object, so as to provide a desired accuracy, for being sent to the operations center. Our evaluations show that ACTION helps reduce the network usage up to threefold, and yet achieves a high detection accuracy of &#x2248; 90%.
Evolutionary Learning Organization in a System Orientation of Ethico-Economics

A new theory of learning organization bordering evolutionary economics and management is introduced. It is referred to as evolutionary learning organizational theory of behavior, decision-making, and goals of wellbeing in the larger context of the organization in a systemic sense of organic relations. The structure, functions, and analytical features of such an organization are studied in the context of an epistemological approach in order to lay down the inherent theory. This leads to a mathematical and rigorous explanation of the theory in a comparative and contrasting light with other contributions on learning organizations. The exemplification of the unique theory of evolutionary learning organization is found to exist in Islamic epistemological context. The study then is made for this particular case within a generalized system model of wellbeing for decision-making of the firm that over-arches-intra-system and inter-systems at large.
Request Routing in Content Distribution Networks

CDNs can provide scalable service that can meet aggregate user demand while improving the performance and quality of delivery. Several issues arise in the architecture of the CDNs. In this paper, we consider the routing of the user requests to the most suitable surrogates or CDNs. We model the problem as a delay-constrained routing problem and develop a near-optimal routing algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm with respect to a tight lower bound determined as a solution to the dual integer programming problem. Our algorithm promises to minimize a measure of service cost while maintaining a delay bound.
What helminth genomes have taught us about parasite evolution

SUMMARY The genomes of more than 20 helminths have now been sequenced. Here we perform a meta-analysis of all sequenced genomes of nematodes and Platyhelminthes, and attempt to address the question of what are the defining characteristics of helminth genomes. We find that parasitic worms lack systems for surface antigenic variation, instead maintaining infections using their surfaces as the first line of defence against the host immune system, with several expanded gene families of genes associated with the surface and tegument. Parasite excretory/secretory products evolve rapidly, and proteases even more so, with each parasite exhibiting unique modifications of its protease repertoire. Endoparasitic flatworms show striking losses of metabolic capabilities, not matched by nematodes. All helminths do however exhibit an overall reduction in auxiliary metabolism (biogenesis of co-factors and vitamins). Overall, the prevailing pattern is that there are few commonalities between the genomes of independently evolved parasitic worms, with each parasite having undergone specific adaptations for their particular niche.
A theoretical and empirical exegesis of the consumer involvement construct : the psychology of the food shopper.

Despite the plethora of consumer behavior and social psychology literature on consumer involvement, no common conceptual or methodological framework is evident in either literature. The paper presents an exegesis of the consumer involvement construct through a meta-analysis of extant literature and an empirical investigation in five European countries, where food is selected as an appropriate application. The findings show that four of the five most commonly observed dimensions of involvement remain robust, suggesting the four-factor involvement model might have universal meaning. Finally, the conceptual and operational clarification of the construct proposes a more precise context in which it should be placed for predictive analysis.
Aid and Capital Flight

2 Abstract Aid is now small relative to the international movements of private capital to and from low-income countries. Although most attention has been given to foreign private capital inflows, for some regions outflows of domestically owned capital have been more substantial. In this paper we investigate whether aid affects capital flight. The issue relates to the important matter of whether aid is 'scaled up' by private movements in capital. This is usually seen in the context of whether aid attracts or displaces foreign private capital. Aid will be 'scaled up' if it induces domestic residents to retain a greater proportion of their wealth within the country, and it will be offset and potentially vitiated, if it induces a greater proportion of private wealth to be held outside the country. In the theoretical part we argue that even the sign of any link from aid to capital flight cannot be determined a priori. In the context of private portfolio choice we suggest that there are six distinct and sometimes opposing routes by which aid might affect portfolio choices. Using a global panel data set, spanning 48 aid recipient countries over 1970-98, we investigate the relationship empirically. We allow for the potential endogeneity of aid and find aid substantially reduces capital flight. As a consequence, aid is 'scaled up' by the induced decisions of domestic wealth holders. In the short term additional aid has substantial effects on the portfolio, being matched more than dollar-for-dollar by induced reductions in capital flight. In the longer term such changes in the portfolio are only maintained if aid itself is maintained for a substantial period, perhaps a decade. We tentatively suggest that taking a long view each dollar of aid might be scaled up by around twenty to forty cents of induced domestic investment that would otherwise have left the country as capital flight.
Preference-based disease-specific health-related quality of life instrument for glaucoma: a mixed methods study protocol

Introduction A primary objective of healthcare services is to improve patients' health and health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Glaucoma, which affects a substantial proportion of the world population, has a significant detrimental impact on HRQoL. Although there are a number of glaucoma-specific questionnaires to measure HRQoL, none is preference-based which prevent them from being used in health economic evaluation. The proposed study is aimed to develop a preference-based instrument that is capable of capturing important effects specific to glaucoma and treatments on HRQoL and is scored based on the patients' preferences. Methods A sequential, exploratory mixed methods design will be used to guide the development and evaluation of the HRQoL instrument. The study consists of several stages to be implemented sequentially: item identification, item selection, validation and valuation. The instrument items will be identified and selected through a literature review and the conduct of a qualitative study. Validation will be conducted to establish psychometric properties of the instrument followed by a valuation exercise to derive utility scores for the health states described. Ethics and dissemination This study has been approved by the Trillium Health Partners Research Ethics Board (ID number 753). All personal information will be de-identified with the identification code kept in a secured location including the rest of the study data. Only qualified and study-related personnel will be allowed to access the data. The results of the study will be distributed widely through peer-reviewed journals, conferences and internal meetings.
A combination of CUSUM-EWMA for Anomaly Detection in time series data

In this work we investigate the use of parametric statistical methods for Anomaly Detection in time series data. The approach involves the use of simple and computationally efficient algorithms, the Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) and Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA), that have demonstrated an acceptable performance in detecting different shifts from the process mean. However, while the performance of these algorithms is found to be adequate in datasets where anomalies have a profound form, they produce many false positives when anomalies become more complex. To address this limitation, we propose a solution that has greater flexibility, in the form of a combined CUSUM-EWMA algorithm. Four different statistical methods are investigated and implemented, including the classic CUSUM and EWMA, and two variants of a combined CUSUM-EWMA algorithm. These algorithms have been evaluated on ten benchmark datasets. The F-Score for each of the algorithms has been used to measure their performance appropriately. The preliminary experimental results prove to be promising for the proposed method in detecting anomalies from time series data.
Impact-Free Measurement of Microtubule Rotations on Kinesin and Cytoplasmic-Dynein Coated Surfaces

Knowledge about the three-dimensional stepping of motor proteins on the surface of microtubules (MTs) as well as the torsional components in their power strokes can be inferred from longitudinal MT rotations in gliding motility assays. In previous studies, optical detection of these rotations relied on the tracking of rather large optical probes present on the outer MT surface. However, these probes may act as obstacles for motor stepping and may prevent the unhindered rotation of the gliding MTs. To overcome these limitations, we devised a novel, impact-free method to detect MT rotations based on fluorescent speckles within the MT structure in combination with fluorescence-interference contrast microscopy. We (i) confirmed the rotational pitches of MTs gliding on surfaces coated by kinesin-1 and kinesin-8 motors, (ii) demonstrated the superiority of our method over previous approaches on kinesin-8 coated surfaces at low ATP concentration, and (iii) identified MT rotations driven by mammalian cytoplasmic dynein, indicating that during collective motion cytoplasmic dynein side-steps with a bias in one direction. Our novel method is easy to implement on any state-of-the-art fluorescence microscope and allows for high-throughput experiments.
A joint frequency and DOA estimation algorithm with diagonal load

We have developed a novel method for joint frequency and 2D angle estimation of incoming signals upon a circular array over a very wide frequency band (2-18 GHz)[1]. This paper presents the algorithm with diagonal load for robust performance with improved accuracy and resolution. A temporal domain ESPRIT frequency estimation algorithm was extended for azimuth and elevation angles estimation. These direction estimation results are automatically paired with frequency. The algorithm provides non-ambiguous, high resolution and accuracy in both frequency and direction of arrival estimation over the frequency range. The DOA estimation resolution was analyzed for two signals with different frequency. The estimation accuracy vs. signal to noise ratio (SNR) and array was studied. The frequency estimation accuracy was compared with the standard FFT method. The DOA estimation accuracy and resolution were compared with the original MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC)[2] DOA estimation results. The proposed technique can be used for wireless communication applications and wireless sensor networks and it can also be used for RF emitter detection and tracking. The system is consistent with the Air Force's layered sensing architecture concept.12
The “Mysterious” Origin of Brown Dwarfs

Hundreds of brown dwarfs (BDs) have been discovered in the last few years in stellar clusters and among field stars. BDs are almost as numerous as hydrogen-burning stars, and so a theory of star formation should also explain their origin. The "mystery" of the origin of BDs is that their mass is 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the average Jeans mass in star-forming clouds, and yet they are so common. In this work we investigate the possibility that gravitationally unstable protostellar cores of BD mass are formed directly by the process of turbulent fragmentation. Supersonic turbulence in molecular clouds generates a complex density field with a very large density contrast. As a result, a fraction of BD mass cores formed by the turbulent flow are dense enough to be gravitationally unstable. We find that with density, temperature, and rms Mach number typical of cluster-forming regions, turbulent fragmentation can account for the observed BD abundance.
Social and Emotional Intelligence in School Environment

The article focuses on the problem of social and emotional intelligence in school environment, as this aspect of social psychology has never been researched in detail from the pedagogical viewpoint. The main objectives of the research were to find out whether headmasters, teachers and students are socially and emotionally skilled, whether social and emotional intelligence are viewed differently according to gender and whether there are any connections between the mentioned aspects and the age of respondents. In the first part of the analysis we tried to find differences between the position within an organisation and social and emotional intelligence. The second part focuses on the differences between gender and social and emotional intelligence. The third part describes the connections between the age of respondents and social and emotional intelligence. The research was carried out by means of the TSIS and TEIQue-SF questionnaires on the sample of 569 participants.
A Multiway Design-driven Partitioning Algorithm for Distributed Verilog Simulation

Many partitioning algorithms have been proposed for distributed Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) simulation. Typically, they make use of a gate level netlist and attempt to achieve a minimal cutsize subject to a load balance constraint. The algorithm executes on a hypergraph which represents the netlist. We propose a design-driven iterative partitioning algorithm for Verilog based on module instances instead of gates. We do this in order to take advantage of the design hierarchy information contained in the modules and their instances. A Verilog instance represents one vertex in the circuit hypergraph. The vertex can be flattened into multiple vertices in the event that a load balance is not achieved by instance-based partitioning. In this case, the algorithm flattens the largest instance and moves gates between the partitions in order to improve the load balance. Our experiments show that this partitioning algorithm produces a smaller cutsize than is produced by hMetis on a gate-level netlist. It produces better speedup for the simulation because it takes advantage of the design hierarchy.