Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LEARNERS’ EXPERIENCES OF AN AUTHENTIC ONLINE ASSESSMENT TEST IN UNDERSTANDING OF BASIC ACCOUNTING CONTENT KNOWLEDGE: A CASE STUDY

Accounting as a school subject provides a foundation for understanding the economic activities and conditions of a business, and it serves as a common language both within the business and for communicating business information to the external financial community. When learners grasp the key financial transactions as well as the analysis, interpretation and communication of financial statements, they are able to understand the fundamental concepts of basic accounting principles and practice. However, there is a lack of adequate preparation at school level in accounting. Learners are taught how to do accounting, but the principles and reasons for accounting, that is, the basic concepts of accounting, are not adequately taught and assessed. As a result, South African learners’ performance in the subject is poor. We contend that teachers contribute to poor performance because they have inadequacies in their own content knowledge of the subject, as they were not properly trained and equipped to teach it competently. They also employ inadequate assessment techniques in the subject by using a traditional paper-based approach. As a way of supporting teachers in their teaching practice, the Department of Education has formulated assessment guidelines that prescribe an alternative form of assessment that can be completed electronically, using online assessment to gauge learners’ understanding of content knowledge of any topic. The usefulness of an online assessment tool is measured in terms of how it reveals the understanding and content knowledge of learners in a meaningful social context. Thus, the aim of this paper is to report on the design of an authentic online assessment of grade 10 learners’ understanding of basic accounting content knowledge. QuestBase software was used in the design of online assessment embedded within the theoretical constructs of authentic learning, and with the first three cognitive levels of the revised Bloom’s taxonomy. The theoretical framework of authentic learning mirrors real-world relevance with authentic activities from multiple perspectives and provides the opportunity for learners to reflect on the learning process. An exploratory qualitative case study design was used in this inquiry and qualitative data was generated from individual and focus-group interviews and observation. Findings indicated that the participants had positive experiences in completing the authentic online assessment test of basic accounting content knowledge. However, they still struggled to successfully deal with calculations and also showed a lack of knowledge and understanding of the basic concepts of the subject. Most significantly, this paper aims not to “prove that learning has improved” but rather that the use of an online assessment tool (QuestBase) within the theoretical framework of authentic learning and assessment reflects the real-life context of learners.
NECA derivatives exploit the paralog-specific properties of the site 3 side pocket of Grp94, the endoplasmic reticulum Hsp90

The hsp90 chaperones govern the function of essential client proteins critical for normal cell function as well as cancer initiation and progression. Hsp90 activity is driven by ATP, which binds to the N-terminal domain and induces large conformational changes that are required for client maturation. Inhibitors targeting the ATP-binding pocket of the N-terminal domain have anticancer effects, but most bind with similar affinity to cytosolic Hsp90α and Hsp90β, endoplasmic reticulum Grp94, and mitochondrial Trap1, the four cellular hsp90 paralogs. Paralog-specific inhibitors may lead to drugs with fewer side effects. The ATP-binding pockets of the four paralogs are flanked by three side pockets, termed sites 1, 2, and 3, which differ between the paralogs in their accessibility to inhibitors. Previous insights into the principles governing access to sites 1 and 2 have resulted in development of paralog-selective inhibitors targeting these sites, but the rules for selective targeting of site 3 are less clear. Earlier studies identified 5′N-ethylcarboxamido adenosine (NECA) as a Grp94-selective ligand. Here we use NECA and its derivatives to probe the properties of site 3. We found that derivatives that lengthen the 5′ moiety of NECA improve selectivity for Grp94 over Hsp90α. Crystal structures reveal that the derivatives extend further into site 3 of Grp94 compared with their parent compound and that selectivity is due to paralog-specific differences in ligand pose and ligand-induced conformational strain in the protein. These studies provide a structural basis for Grp94-selective inhibition using site 3.
B Cell Lymphoma-2 (BCL-2) Homology Domain 3 (BH3) Mimetics Demonstrate Differential Activities Dependent upon the Functional Repertoire of Pro- and Anti-apoptotic BCL-2 Family Proteins*

Background: BH3 mimetics are promising chemotherapeutics, but their full mechanisms of action are underexplored. Results: BAX, BID, and BIM directly influence BH3 mimetics to pharmacologically inhibit anti-apoptotic BCL-2 proteins. Conclusion: BH3 mimetics display differential activities that are dependent upon both anti- and proapoptotic BCL-2 members function. Significance: Understanding how BH3 mimetics function within the BCL-2 family repertoire will improve the utility of these drugs. The B cell lymphoma-2 (BCL-2) family is the key mediator of cellular sensitivity to apoptosis during pharmacological interventions for numerous human pathologies, including cancer. There is tremendous interest to understand how the proapoptotic BCL-2 effector members (e.g. BCL-2-associated X protein, BAX) cooperate with the BCL-2 homology domain only (BH3-only) subclass (e.g. BCL-2 interacting mediator of death, BIM; BCL-2 interacting-domain death agonist, BID) to induce mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization (MOMP) and apoptosis and whether these mechanisms may be pharmacologically exploited to enhance the killing of cancer cells. Indeed, small molecule inhibitors of the anti-apoptotic BCL-2 family members have been designed rationally. However, the success of these “BH3 mimetics” in the clinic has been limited, likely due to an incomplete understanding of how these drugs function in the presence of multiple BCL-2 family members. To increase our mechanistic understanding of how BH3 mimetics cooperate with multiple BCL-2 family members in vitro, we directly compared the activity of several BH3-mimetic compounds (i.e. ABT-263, ABT-737, GX15-070, HA14.1, TW-37) in biochemically defined large unilamellar vesicle model systems that faithfully recapitulate BAX-dependent mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization. Our investigations revealed that the presence of BAX, BID, and BIM differentially regulated the ability of BH3 mimetics to derepress proapoptotic molecules from anti-apoptotic proteins. Using mitochondria loaded with fluorescent BH3 peptides and cells treated with inducers of cell death, these differences were supported. Together, these data suggest that although the presence of anti-apoptotic BCL-2 proteins primarily dictates cellular sensitivity to BH3 mimetics, additional specificity is conferred by proapoptotic BCL-2 proteins.
Heart checks in college-aged students link poor sleep to cardiovascular risk

Abstract Objective: To describe the relationships between the cardiovascular health, lifestyle behaviors, and lifestyle beliefs among college-aged students. Participants: Seven hundred and twenty-nine college-aged students participated between October 2016 and April 2017. Methods: Heart checks, consisting of a cross-sectional survey and biometric screening, were conducted on a large Midwestern university campus. Results: A small proportion of students (24.5%) engaged in the recommended 150+ minutes of physical activity per week and 7.9% consumed 5+ servings of fruit/vegetables daily. Half (49.6%) slept 7 hours or less per night. Biometric screenings found that 26.4% of the students had high stress, 31.9% were overweight or obese, and 17.3% had prehypertension or hypertension. Less sleep was significantly associated with higher risks of being stressed, being overweight/obese, and having elevated blood pressure. Conclusions: Early detection, treatment, and education is critical to identify individuals at risk for cardiovascular disease and to promote healthy lifestyle changes before heart disease develops or progresses.
Cytokine-Independent Detection of Antigen-Specific Germinal Center T Follicular Helper Cells in Immunized Nonhuman Primates Using a Live Cell Activation-Induced Marker Technique

A range of current candidate AIDS vaccine regimens are focused on generating protective HIV-neutralizing Ab responses. Many of these efforts rely on the rhesus macaque animal model. Understanding how protective Ab responses develop and how to increase their efficacy are both major knowledge gaps. Germinal centers (GCs) are the engines of Ab affinity maturation. GC T follicular helper (Tfh) CD4 T cells are required for GCs. Studying vaccine-specific GC Tfh cells after protein immunizations has been challenging, as Ag-specific GC Tfh cells are difficult to identify by conventional intracellular cytokine staining. Cytokine production by GC Tfh cells may be intrinsically limited in comparison with other Th effector cells, as the biological role of a GC Tfh cell is to provide help to individual B cells within the GC, rather than secreting large amounts of cytokines bathing a tissue. To test this idea, we developed a cytokine-independent method to identify Ag-specific GC Tfh cells. RNA sequencing was performed using TCR-stimulated GC Tfh cells to identify candidate markers. Validation experiments determined CD25 (IL-2Rα) and OX40 to be highly upregulated activation-induced markers (AIM) on the surface of GC Tfh cells after stimulation. In comparison with intracellular cytokine staining, the AIM assay identified >10-fold more Ag-specific GC Tfh cells in HIV Env protein–immunized macaques (BG505 SOSIP). CD4 T cells in blood were also studied. In summary, AIM demonstrates that Ag-specific GC Tfh cells are intrinsically stingy producers of cytokines, which is likely an essential part of their biological function.
Combining Optical, Fluorescence, Thermal Satellite, and Environmental Data to Predict County-Level Maize Yield in China Using Machine Learning Approaches

Maize is an extremely important grain crop, and the demand has increased sharply throughout the world. China contributes nearly one-fifth of the total production alone with its decreasing arable land. Timely and accurate prediction of maize yield in China is critical for ensuring global food security. Previous studies primarily used either visible or near-infrared (NIR) based vegetation indices (VIs), or climate data, or both to predict crop yield. However, other satellite data from different spectral bands have been underutilized, which contain unique information on crop growth and yield. In addition, although a joint application of multi-source data significantly improves crop yield prediction, the combinations of input variables that could achieve the best results have not been well investigated. Here we integrated optical, fluorescence, thermal satellite, and environmental data to predict county-level maize yield across four agro-ecological zones (AEZs) in China using a regression-based method (LASSO), two machine learning (ML) methods (RF and XGBoost), and deep learning (DL) network (LSTM). The results showed that combining multi-source data explained more than 75% of yield variation. Satellite data at the silking stage contributed more information than other variables, and solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) had an almost equivalent performance with the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) largely due to the low signal to noise ratio and coarse spatial resolution. The extremely high temperature and vapor pressure deficit during the reproductive period were the most important climate variables affecting maize production in China. Soil properties and management factors contained extra information on crop growth conditions that cannot be fully captured by satellite and climate data. We found that ML and DL approaches definitely outperformed regression-based methods, and ML had more computational efficiency and easier generalizations relative to DL. Our study is an important effort to combine multi-source remote sensed and environmental data for large-scale yield prediction. The proposed methodology provides a paradigm for other crop yield predictions and in other regions.
SURVEY ON FRIEND RECOMMENDATION METHODS FOR ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS

Online social networking sites, like Facebook and Google+, provides a new communication service for online users to stay in contact. With this service, user can share any kind of information with their friends and family over internet. Such communication among user generates the huge amount of data on social networking sites. But with this facility, question is arises regarding mining useful knowledge from such huge amount of data. The analysis of such data will be used in various applications for identification of potential users and promotion of items according to the user interest. From another point of view, online users of such sites often want to make new friends, so the need of good friend recommendation system is arises. It will be helpful to online users to increase the social connections and sharing of information. Old friend recommendation system makes use of users profile for recommendation purpose. But such methods are not reliable if the user wants privacy of their profiles. So another need is arises for privacy preserving friend recommendation approach based on the security of user profiles. Such methods achieve the privacy of personal information of users like friend list. In this paper, we present the comparative survey of recent privacy preserving friend recommendation system based on their advantages and limitations.
An Energy-aware Dynamic Data Allocation Mechanism for Many-channel Memory Systems

A modern memory system is equipped with many memory channels to obtain a high memory bandwidth. To take the advantage of this organization, applications’ data are distributed among the channels and transferred in an interleaved fashion. Although memory-intensive applications benefit from a high bandwidth by many memory channels, applications such as compute-intensive ones do not need the high bandwidth. To reduce the energy consumption for such applications, the memory system has low-power modes. During no memory request, the main memory can enter these modes and reduce energy consumption. However, these applications often cause intermittent memory requests to the channels that handle their data, resulting in not entering the low-power modes. Hence, the memory system cannot enter the low-power modes even though the applications do not need the high bandwidth. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a dynamic data allocation mechanism for many-channel memory systems. This mechanism forces data of such applications to use the specified channels by dynamically changing the address-mapping schemes and migrating the data. As a result, the other channels to which the data are not allocated can have a chance to enter the low-power modes for a long time. Therefore, the proposed mechanism has the potential to reduce the energy consumption of many-channel memory systems. The evaluation results show that this mechanism can reduce the energy consumption by up to 11.8% and 1.7% on average.
Molecular biology of circadian rhythms

Preface. Acronyms. PART I: INTRODUCTION TO CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS. 1. General Concepts (Amita Sehgal). 2. Genetic and Molecular Approaches Used to Analyze Rhythms (Amita Sehgal and Jeffrey L. Price). PART II: MOLECULAR CONTROL OF CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS: ANIMAL MODELS. 3. Drosophila melanogaster: A Model System for Molecular Chronobiology (Jeffrey L. Price). 4. Molecular Analysis of Circadian Rhythms: Nonmammalian Vertebrates (Julie A. Williams). 5. Genetic Basis for Circadian Rhythms in Mammals (John D. Alvarez). PART III: MOLECULAR CONTROL OF CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS: FROM CYANOBACTERIA TO PLANTS. 6. Circadian Rhythms in Cyanobacteria (Nirnjini Naidoo). 7. Molecular Analysis of Circadian Rhythms in Neurospora (Amita Sehgal). 8. Physiological and Molecular Characteristics of Plant Circadian Clocks (Jose A. Jarillo, Juan Capel, and Anthony R. Cashmore). PART IV: CIRCADIAN ORGANIZATION IN COMPLEX ORGANISMS. 9. Multiple Oscillators (Jadwiga M. Giebultowicz). 10. Hormonal Rhythms (Peter McNamara). 11. Human Circadian Rhythms (Hans P. A. Van Dongen, Gerard A. Kerkhof, and David F. Dinges). Index.
Remnant Vegetation Analysis of Guanabara Bay Basin, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Using Geographical Information System

The importance of tropical forests and the surrounding environment has been increasing, as specific threats and problems (e.g. deforestation, timber logging, infrastructure development, and mining) are generating increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, with severe present and future consequences in climate (Schulze in Carreiras et al., 2006). Rio de Janeiro is a Brazilian state that presents the greatest diversity of ecosystems, including major portions of Atlantic Forest (Mata Atlântica in Portuguese), considered a hotspot for its importance and relevance in terms of natural resources and biodiversity. The high biodiversity in this biome is a function of the extreme variations in environmental conditions, and great differences in altitude, ranging from sea level to over 1800 meters. The Atlantic Forest domain has the following delimitations established by the Brazilian Vegetation Map of IBGE (Veloso et al., 1991): ombrophilous dense Atlantic Forest; mixed ombrophilous forests; open ombrophilous forests; semidecidual stational forests; decidual stational forests; the countryside swamps, the northeastern forest enclaves (regionally called "brejos") and the associated ecosystems mangroves and restingas. According to publication of SOS Atlantic Forest Foundation and the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (2009) between 2005 and 2009, there was a loss of 1,039 hectares of Atlantic Forest in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The Forest is now fragmented in isolated remnants scattered throughout a landscape dominated by agricultural uses. According to Grimm et al. (2008), ecosystem responses to land changes are complex and integrated, occurring on all spatial and temporal scales as a consequence of connectivity of resources, energy, and information among social, physical, and biological systems. As terrestrial landscapes become increasingly fragmented, so do hydrologic connections between landscape elements (Pringle, 2001). The extensive deforestation at the Basin took place over a historic period. The colonization process of the area, specially of dense ombrophilous forest, was initially with sugar cane, coffee and orange plantations, followed by cattle raising and annual crops (CIBG, 2010), which favored the formation of erosive processes as well as silting of water bodies. The only area with significant forest remnants is found in high slopes, inappropriate for agriculture,
Floating mist nets: a technique for capturing birds in flooded habitat

Banding birds is essential for detailed demographic studies of avian populations. Mist nets are a widely used, effective method of capturing birds for banding, but are difficult to use under certain conditions. While conducting a demographic study of Southwestern Willow Flycatchers (Empidonax traillii extimus), rising reservoir levels flooded large tracts of flycatcher breeding habitat and made traditional mist-netting techniques impossible to use. In response, we devised a technique for capturing birds over deep water using mist nets suspended between poles kept afloat on compact buoys. In 2005, we used this technique to safely capture 17 Willow Flycatchers that could not have been captured by any other means, and over 40 additional passerines were incidentally captured with no injuries occurring. This versatile apparatus was simple to build and employ, and capture success was similar to that over dry land. SINOPSIS. Redes de niebla flotantes: t? cnica para capturar aves en lugares inundados El anillamiento de las aves es esencial para estudios demogr? ficos detallados. Las redes de niebla son ampliamente utilizadas como m? todo efectivo para capturar aves para su anillamiento, pero son dif? ciles de utilizar bajo algunas circunstancias. Mientras se condujo un estudio demogr? fico de Empidonax traillii extinmus, se inund? gran parte del habitat de dicha especie haciendo sumamente dif? cil el colocar redes de niebla. En respuesta, desarrollamos una t? cnica para capturar las aves en lugares inundados, colocando las redes entre postes sostenidos con boyas. En el 2005, se capturaron 17 aves que de otra forma hubiera sido imposible capturar. Incidentalmente se capturaron otros 40 p? sennos sin da? o alguno a estos. El vers? til aparato fue f? cil de construir y el ? xito de captura fue similar al que hubo en tierra firme.
Contrasting effects of climate change on seasonal survival of a hibernating mammal

Significance Climate change is altering the seasonal environmental conditions to which animals have adapted, but the outcome may differ between seasons for a particular species. Demographic responses therefore need disentangling on a seasonal basis to make accurate forecasts. Our study shows that climate change is causing seasonally divergent demographic responses in a hibernating mammal. Continued climate change will likely have a positive effect on summer survival but a negative effect on winter survival. This potentially has wide-ranging consequences across other species occupying temperate to more extreme arctic and alpine habitats, which are also where the most rapid changes in climate are observed. Seasonal environmental conditions shape the behavior and life history of virtually all organisms. Climate change is modifying these seasonal environmental conditions, which threatens to disrupt population dynamics. It is conceivable that climatic changes may be beneficial in one season but result in detrimental conditions in another because life-history strategies vary between these time periods. We analyzed the temporal trends in seasonal survival of yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer) and explored the environmental drivers using a 40-y dataset from the Colorado Rocky Mountains (USA). Trends in survival revealed divergent seasonal patterns, which were similar across age-classes. Marmot survival declined during winter but generally increased during summer. Interestingly, different environmental factors appeared to drive survival trends across age-classes. Winter survival was largely driven by conditions during the preceding summer and the effect of continued climate change was likely to be mainly negative, whereas the likely outcome of continued climate change on summer survival was generally positive. This study illustrates that seasonal demographic responses need disentangling to accurately forecast the impacts of climate change on animal population dynamics.