Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neuromuscular electrical stimulation and dynamic bracing for the management of upper‐extremity spasticity in children with cerebral palsy

A prospective study was designed to determine whether the combined use of neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) and dynamic bracing was more effective than use of either alone in reducing upper‐extremity spasticity in children with spastic hemiplegic cerebral palsy. Twenty‐four patients (12 males, 12 females; mean age 8y 7mo [SD 4y 2mo]; age range 3–18y) diagnosed with spastic hemiplegic CP were randomly allocated to three groups: group 1 had two 30‐minute sessions of NMES a day applied on the antagonist extensors without bracing; group 2 had two 30‐minute sessions of dynamic bracing per day; and group 3 had two 30‐minute sessions of NMES and dynamic bracing every day. Treatment was continued for 6 months in all groups and applied only to the affected extremity. Patients were evaluated before therapy, at monthly intervals during the therapy, and 3 months after completion of the therapy. Three measures of outcome were taken: the Melbourne Assessment, grip strength, and posture evaluation with Zancolli's classification. The therapist performing the outcome assessments was blinded as to groups. Statistically significant differences were found in all three measures for only those treated with combined NMES and dynamic bracing. However, this significant effect lasted for only 2 months after discontinuation of the treatment. We conclude that the combined use of NMES and bracing is more effective than either alone but requires continuous application.
Why biodiversity is important to the functioning of real‐world ecosystems

Controlled experiments have substantially advanced our understanding of the links between changing biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) in recent years. However, controversy continues regarding the relevance of BEF experiments to the complex ecosystems and large spatial and temporal scales of interest in conservation and management. Here, I address some of the persistent criticisms regarding experimental BEF research and argue that these have been overstated. Contrary to some suggestions, many putative artifacts attributed to experiments render their conclusions about BEF links stronger, rather than weaker. Like other broad ecological concepts, BEF focuses on general patterns, rather than looking at species-level, applied conservation problems. Nevertheless, insights from BEF experiments conducted to date are likely to underestimate, rather than overestimate, the importance of biodiversity to ecosystem functioning and the provision of ecosystem services in the real world. These experiments suggest.
Real Time Hybrid Digital Watermarking Based On Key Dependent Basis Function

In this paper, hybrid approach is introduced where a process known as "watermark" is enabled to mark digital pictures with undetectable secrete information that are invisible by using principal component analysis and discrete wavelet transform to provide a complete copyright protection system. The concept of key dependent basis function and its application is introduced to secure robust watermarking for copyright protection and to design a secure public black-box watermark detectors which shows high imperceptibility and performance where no noticeable difference is seen between watermarked and original image. Thereby, it overcomes a possible security weakness of non-adaptive as well as global schemes that execute watermark patterns with a small number of publicly known basis function. Projection of image is embedded within the watermark onto the secret set of key dependent basis function i.e. patterns. Conclusively, we proposed a candidate for a watermarking scheme that enables the construction of secure public watermark detector.
Teaching at the Top of the Class: Black Female Educators' Perspective on Teaching High Achieving Black Children

iii Acknowledgements.iv CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Introduction.1 Problem Statement.5 Purpose of the Study.6 Research Question.7 Significance of the Study.8 Delimitations and Limitations.9 Assumptions.9 Definition of Terms.9 Summary.12 CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Chapter Overview.13 An historical Overview of Gifted Education and Intelligence Testing.15 Pioneers in the Field of Gifted Education.15 Francis Galton.15 Lewis Terman.16 Leta Hollingworth.17 Opponents of Gifted Education and Intelligence Testing.18 Critical Race Theory.19 Basic Tenets of CRT.21 CRT in education.24 Teaching at the Top of the Class: High Achieving Black Students vii Funding.25 A current update on two unaccrediated districts.27 Instruction for high achieving students.29 Differentiated Instruction.29 A look inside the differentiated classroom.30 Barriers.32 A brief overview of Othermothering.34 Othermothering in education.37 Culturally Relevant Teaching.38 Othermothering on the campus of one Historically Black College.39 Othermothering in urban elementary schools.40 Theoretical Framework.42 Summary.44 CHAPTER THREE: METHODS Introduction . 46 Research Design.48 Site Selection.50 Selection of the Participants.50 Study Participants.53 Data Collection.56 Interviews.56 Focus Groups.58 Data Collection Sequence.58 Data Analysis.59 The Coding Process.61 Teaching at the Top of the Class: High Achieving Black Students viii Analytical Memos.62 Audit Trail.63 Delimitations and Limitations.64 Researcher’s Position.65 Chapter Summary.66 CHAPTER FOUR: PARTICIPANT AND DISTRICT DEMOGRAPHICS Chapter Overview.68 Teacher Demographics.69 Ms. Derby.72 Ms. Ellington.73 Ms. Paige.74 Dr. Tamm.75 Mrs. McCausland.76 School District Demographics.78 Rose Hill.79 North Marion.80 Monroe.81 LaFontaine.82 Chapter Summary.83 CHAPTER FIVE: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION Identifying Categories.84 Instructional Planning.87 Curriculum.87 Data Tracking . 93 Restrictions . 98 Teaching at the Top of the Class: High Achieving Black Students ix Instructional Materials.99 Administrative Support.105 Professional Development Opportunities.110 Cultural Relationships.115 Personal Connections.116 Othermothering . 125 Student Learning Styles.133 Identifying those at the top of the class.133 Chapter Summary.140 CHAPTER SIX: SUMMARY OF THE STUDY AND RESEARCH FINDINGS Overview of the Problem.142 Purpose Statement and Research Question.144 Review of Methodology.145 Findings . 147 Addressing the Academic Needs of the High Achiever.147 Identifying High Achievers.150 Challenges of Teaching High Achievers.152 Connecting with Learners.157 Chapter Summary.160 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSIONS, IMPLICATONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTURE RESEARCH Conclusions . 161 Implications for practice.161 Recommendations for future research.162 Personal Implications.164 Teaching at the Top of the Class: High Achievin
Of Mice and Men: Advances in the Understanding of Neuromuscular Aspects of Myotonic Dystrophy

Intensive effort has been directed toward the modeling of myotonic dystrophy (DM) in mice, in order to reproduce human disease and to provide useful tools to investigate molecular and cellular pathogenesis and test efficient therapies. Mouse models have contributed to dissect the multifaceted impact of the DM mutation in various tissues, cell types and in a pleiotropy of pathways, through the expression of toxic RNA transcripts. Changes in alternative splicing, transcription, translation, intracellular RNA localization, polyadenylation, miRNA metabolism and phosphorylation of disease intermediates have been described in different tissues. Some of these events have been directly associated with specific disease symptoms in the skeletal muscle and heart of mice, offering the molecular explanation for individual disease phenotypes. In the central nervous system (CNS), however, the situation is more complex. We still do not know how the molecular abnormalities described translate into CNS dysfunction, nor do we know if the correction of individual molecular events will provide significant therapeutic benefits. The variability in model design and phenotypes described so far requires a thorough and critical analysis. In this review we discuss the recent contributions of mouse models to the understanding of neuromuscular aspects of disease, therapy development, and we provide a reflective assessment of our current limitations and pressing questions that remain unanswered.
A New Fine-Grained Weighting Method in Multi-Label Text Classification

Multi-label classification is one of the important research areas in data mining. In this paper, a new multilabel classification method using multinomial naive Bayes is proposed. We use a new fine-grained weighting method for calculating the weights of feature values in multinomial naive Bayes. Our experiments show that the value weighting method could improve the performance of multinomial naive Bayes learning.
From Negative Biases to Positive News: Resetting and Reframing News Consumption for a Better Life and a Better World

Research psychologists have found that people are subject to negative biases. These powerful biases may influence how journalists and editors produce the news and how citizens consume it. While not all news is negative, much of it is. Negatively biased news is both inaccurate and detrimental for well-being. This paper reviews literature about negative biases and the detrimental effects of negative news on well-being. Positive psychology interventions, taught in a workshop, may be able to mitigate or neutralize negative news effects. This paper presents a half-day workshop meant to combat negative biases in the news by training attendees in relevant positive psychology strategies. While the workshop is informed by research, testing will determine the extent to which it mitigates and combats the negative effects of bad news.
Towards tool support for spreadsheet-based domain-specific languages

Spreadsheets are commonly used by non-programmers to store data in a structured form, this data can in some cases be considered to be a program in a domain-specific language (DSL). Unlike ordinary text-based domain-specific languages, there is however currently no formalism for expressing the syntax of such spreadsheet-based DSLs (SDSLs), and there is no tool support for automatically generating language infrastructure such as parsers and IDE support. In this paper we define a simple notion of two-dimensional grammars for SDSLs, and show how such grammars can be used for automatically generating parsers that extract structured data from a spreadsheet in the form of an AST. We demonstrate automatic generation of parsers for a number of examples, including the questionnaire DSL from LWC2014 and a DSL for writing safety specifications.
BIRTH SPACING AND CHILD MORTALITY: AN ANALYSIS OF PROSPECTIVE DATA FROM THE NAIROBI URBAN HEALTH AND DEMOGRAPHIC SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM

Summary The majority of studies of the birth spacing–child survival relationship rely on retrospective data, which are vulnerable to errors that might bias results. The relationship is re-assessed using prospective data on 13,502 children born in two Nairobi slums between 2003 and 2009. Nearly 48% were first births. Among the remainder, short preceding intervals are common: 20% of second and higher order births were delivered within 24 months of an elder sibling, including 9% with a very short preceding interval of less than 18 months. After adjustment for potential confounders, the length of the preceding birth interval is a major determinant of infant and early childhood mortality. In infancy, a preceding birth interval of less than 18 months is associated with a two-fold increase in mortality risks (compared with lengthened intervals of 36 months or longer), while an interval of 18–23 months is associated with an increase of 18%. During the early childhood period, children born within 18 months of an elder sibling are more than twice as likely to die as those born after an interval of 36 months or more. Only 592 children experienced the birth of a younger sibling within 20 months; their second-year mortality was about twice as high as that of other children. These results support the findings based on retrospective data.
Mutually Reinforced Manifold-Ranking Based Relevance Propagation Model for Query-Focused Multi-Document Summarization

Manifold-ranking has been recently exploited for query-focused summarization. It propagates query relevance from the given query to the document sentences by making use of both the relationships among the sentences and the relationships between the given query and the sentences. The sentences in a document set can be grouped into several topic themes with each theme represented by a cluster of highly related sentences. However, it is a well-recognized fact that a document set often covers a number of such topic themes. In this paper, we present a novel model to enhance manifold-ranking based relevance propagation via mutual reinforcement between sentences and theme clusters. Based on the proposed model, we develop two new sentence ranking algorithms, namely the reinforcement after relevance propagation (RARP) algorithm and the reinforcement during relevance propagation (RDRP) algorithm. The convergence issues of the two algorithms are examined. When evaluated on the DUC2005-2007 datasets and TAC2008 dataset, the performance of the two proposed algorithms is comparable with that of the top three systems. The results also demonstrate that the RDRP algorithm is more effective than the RARP algorithm.
Runtime middleware for the generation of adaptive user interfaces on resource-constrained devices

Mobile computing imposes a profound level of challenges on human-computer interaction because applications are used in the move and services are accessed in different situations. Current approaches favor the design of an interactive system that is suited for a predefined set of contexts. For this reason, an adaptive middleware is needed to generate the user interfaces and adjust their characteristics to the different usage scenarios. To achieve this goal, the middleware needs to enable the separation of the adaptation mechanisms from the core operations of the interaction. Furthermore, a more structured approach is needed to describe the different aspects of the human-computer interaction, which can then be used by the middleware to generate adaptive user interfaces. Specifically, this paper describes a run-time framework that enables the generation of user interfaces on portable devices by a process of mapping and transformation of a set of abstract models, and their adaptation to suit the current context-of-use. We also present a prototype mobile application to illustrate our approach.
Accelerated Postero-Lateral Spinal Fusion by Collagen Scaffolds Modified with Engineered Collagen-Binding Human Bone Morphogenetic Protein-2 in Rats

Bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2) is a potent osteoinductive cytokine that plays a critical role in bone regeneration and repair. However, its distribution and side effects are major barriers to its success as therapeutic treatment. The improvement of therapy using collagen delivery matrices has been reported. To investigate a delivery system on postero-lateral spinal fusion, both engineered human BMP-2 with a collagen binding domain (CBD-BMP-2) and collagen scaffolds were developed and their combination was implanted into Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats to study Lumbar 4–5 (L4–L5) posterolateral spine fusion. We divided SD rats into three groups, the sham group (G1, n = 20), the collagen scaffold-treated group (G2, n = 20) and the BMP-2-loaded collagen scaffolds group (G3, n = 20). 16 weeks after surgery, the spines of the rats were evaluated by X-radiographs, high-resolution micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), manual palpation and hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining. The results showed that spine L4–L5 fusions occurred in G2(40%) and G3(100%) group, while results from the sham group were inconsistent. Moreover, G3 had better results than G2, including higher fusion efficiency (X score, G2 = 2.4±0.163, G3 = 3.0±0, p<0.05), higher bone mineral density (BMD, G2: 0.3337±0.0025g/cm3, G3: 0.4353±0.0234g/cm3. p<0.05) and more bone trabecular formation. The results demonstrated that with site-specific collagen binding domain, a dose of BMP-2 as low as 0.02mg CBD-BMP-2/cm3 collagen scaffold could enhance the posterolateral intertransverse process fusion in rats. It suggested that combination delivery could be an alternative in spine fusion with dramatically decreased side effects caused by high dose of BMP-2.
MOBIUS STRUCTURES AND TWO DIMENSIONAL EINSTEIN-WEYL GEOMETRY

Conformal 2-manifolds possess a fascinatingly rich and elegant theory which can be viewed in many ways: it is the theory of Riemann surfaces in complex analysis, or of complex curves in algebraic geometry. In this paper, a purely diierential geometric point of view will be taken, the aim being to introduce two geometric structures that a conformal 2-manifold might be equipped with, and to study the relationship between them. These structures are closely related to the projective and aane structures of Riemann surface theory. The rst structure can be viewed as a nonintegrable or nonholomorphic version of a complex projective structure, and will be called a MM obius structure. An integrable or at MM obius structure on a conformal 2-manifold induces a complex projective structure: the manifold possesses an atlas whose transition functions are complex MM obius transformations. However, contrary to common usage 9], the MM obius structures discussed herein are not necessarily integrable: they possess a curvature, analogous to the Cotton-York tensor of a conformal 3-manifold, whose vanishing is equivalent to integrability. MM obius structures are also diierent from real projective structures, in much the same way as conformal and real projective structures diier in higher dimensions. (In one dimension, MM obius and real projective structures do coincide and are always integrable.) The other topic of interest here is Einstein-Weyl geometry 3, 8, 14]. This is the geometry of a conformal manifold equipped with a compatible (or conformal) torsion free connection, such that the symmetric tracefree part of the Ricci tensor of this connection vanishes. These manifolds generalise Einstein manifolds in a natural way, and have been investigated in some detail recently (see 2, 6, 8] and references therein). In 11], Ped-ersen and Tod posed the problem of classifying compact two dimensional Einstein-Weyl manifolds|the possible geometries of compact three dimensional Einstein-Weyl mani-folds have been classiied (locally) by Tod 13]. However, the deenition just given of an Einstein-Weyl manifold is vacuous in the two dimensional case and Pedersen and Tod did not ooer an alternative deenition. One of the main goals of this paper is to give explicitly such a deenition and present a classiication of the compact orientable examples.
A searchable encryption scheme for outsourcing cloud storage

With the oncoming information explosion, cloud service providers or enterprises are often placing encrypted data into third party cloud storage via data outsourcing. It is crucial cloud service providers or enterprises provide a secure encryption algorithm and allow it to be searchable. By using secret sharing and searchable encryption techniques, we can search the encrypted tuples of the cloud databases and storages without revealing our data to third party cloud storage providers. In recent years, some schemes for searchable encryption did not consider suitable solution for encrypted numeric and non-numeric and numeric. This paper proposes a robust and searchable encryption scheme for data outsourcing in cloud computing by considering both numeric and non-numeric data. In the other aspect, this scheme provides some fault-tolerance availability for cloud computing.
Directions for m-learning research to enhance active learning

This paper aims to inform readers of suggested directions for researching how mobile technology can enhance active student learning. These directions are informed by an online survey of our students in early 2007 and a contemporary literature search. We present the findings of our search of global best-practice in m-learning, gaps in the current literature are identified and five directions are suggested for 2007 m-learning research and development. We start discussing how to investigate these suggested directions. Our five suggested action research directions are all significant issues in m-learning and all need to be better investigated. If we are interested in enhancing student learning, a priority is to design mlearning and teaching strategies that involve active experiential learning. These strategies need to effectively support our learners’ development of attitudes, understandings and skills in identified graduate attributes, curriculum objectives and stated learning outcomes.
Group-based emotion in group processes and intergroup relations

Group-based emotions are experienced as a result of group categorization and group identification. We first review the transformative idea that emotion can occur as a group-level phenomenon driven by group-level processes. We then briefly review the impact of this idea on research about intragroup processes and intergroup relations in the decades since 1998. We conclude by raising some questions whose answers would further extend the reach and predictive power of group-based emotions in both intragroup and intergroup contexts.
Do Scale-Design and Training Matter for Video QoE Assessments through Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing (CS) has evolved into a mature assessment methodology for subjective experiments in diverse scientific fields and in particular for QoE assessment. However, the results acquired for absolute category rating (ACR) scales through CS are often not fully comparable to QoE assessments done in laboratory environments. A possible reason for such differences may be the scale usage heterogeneity problem caused by deviant scale usage of the crowd workers. In this paper, we study different implementations of (quality) rating scales (in terms of design and number of answer categories) in order to identify if certain scales can help to overcome scale usage problems in crowdsourcing. Additionally, training of subjects is well known to enhance result quality for laboratory ACR evaluations. Hence, we analyzed the appropriateness of training conditions to overcome scale usage problems across different samples in crowdsourcing. As major results, we found that filtering of user ratings and different scale designs are not sufficient to overcome scale usage heterogeneity, but training sessions despite their additional costs, enhance result quality in CS and properly counterfeit the identified scale usage heterogeneity problems.
RUNAWAY VELOCITIES OF STELLAR COMPONENTS ORIGINATING FROM DISRUPTED BINARIES VIA ASYMMETRIC SUPERNOVA EXPLOSIONS

We present analytical formulae to calculate the dynamical effects of asymmetric supernova explosions which disrupt a binary system. These formulae are applied to Monte Carlo simulations of asymmetric supernovae in a large number of binaries. The expected velocities of runaway neutron stars and companion stars are calculated as a function of separation and component masses, prior to the explosion and the amount of asymmetry involved (i.e. the magnitude of the kick velocity imparted to the neutron star during the explosion) assuming an isotropic distribution of kicks. We also discuss the effect of shell impact on the companion star. Furthermore, we demonstrate that no simple constraints on the pre-supernova parameter space can be derived from observations of single neutron stars if supernova explosions are asymmetric.