Multiscale homogenization for dual porosity time-dependent Darcy-Brinkman/Darcy coupling and its application to the lymph node.

We study the coupling between time-dependent Darcy-Brinkman and the Darcy equations at the microscale subjected to inhomogeneous body forces and initial conditions to describe a double porosity problem. We derive the homogenized governing equations for this problem using the asymptotic homogenization technique, and as macroscopic results, we obtain a coupling between two Darcy equations, one of which with memory effects, with mass exchange between phases. The memory effects are a consequence of considering the time dependence in the Darcy-Brinkman equation, and they allow us to study in more detail the role of time in the problem under consideration. After the formulation of the model, we solve it in a simplified setting and we use it to describe the movement of fluid within a vascularized lymph node.

Dataset of Vietnamese preschool teachers' readiness towards teaching mathematics through experiential education.

Experiential education is an approach that promotes initiative and creativity in students. Many preschool education programs in countries around the world are applying this approach to educational innovation. However, teachers' competencies and readiness to implement experiential education are irreplaceable in determining Mathematics activities' frequency and effectiveness. This dataset surveyed 678 preschool teachers across five cities and provinces in Vietnam from 24 Sep 2023 to 22 Dec 2023. The survey sample was randomly selected, representing different regions of Vietnam. The dataset includes six main sections: (i) Demographics; (ii) Teachers' know-how about Mathematics in early years and experiential education; (iii) Teachers' competencies; (iv) Conditions to implement experiential education; (v) School policies; and (vi) Teachers' readiness to implement experiential education. This dataset can be used by educational policy researchers and early childhood education researchers to study experiential educational practices in early childhood education in Southeast Asian countries or regions of Asia.

Enhancing fraud detection in auto insurance and credit card transactions: a novel approach integrating CNNs and machine learning algorithms.

Fraudulent activities especially in auto insurance and credit card transactions impose significant financial losses on businesses and individuals. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel approach for fraud detection, combining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with support vector machine (SVM), k nearest neighbor (KNN), naive Bayes (NB), and decision tree (DT) algorithms. The core of this methodology lies in utilizing the deep features extracted from the CNNs as inputs to various machine learning models, thus significantly contributing to the enhancement of fraud detection accuracy and efficiency. Our results demonstrate superior performance compared to previous studies, highlighting our model's potential for widespread adoption in combating fraudulent activities.

False Beliefs about Mathematics in Spanish Pre-Service Teachers and Relations with Math Anxiety.

Teachers may hold beliefs about how students learn mathematics and about the subject itself. However, some of these beliefs, often referred to as "math myths", may be oversimplified ideas that appear valid but lack solid scientific evidence. This study was aimed to investigate the prevalence of math myths among Spanish pre-service teachers and compare it with the degree of support for these myths reported in previous studies; investigate the possible underlying structure of a set of false beliefs about math; and determine the relationships of certain math misconceptions with math anxiety. A total of 212 Spanish pre-service teachers were administered questionnaires about math myths and about general and math anxiety. The results showed prevalence patterns of each math misconception similar to those in previous studies. False beliefs about math showed weak or negligible correlations with each other and did not exhibit a discernible underlying structure. Furthermore, math anxiety was related to the belief that some individuals are perceived to possess a "math mind" while others do not. Our results suggest diverse origins for the development of different math myths, rather than the myths being the consequence of a single underlying factor. Finally, the endorsement of certain beliefs about who can do mathematics may contribute to negative emotions towards mathematics.

Learners' Spontaneous Gesture Before a Math Lesson Predicts the Efficacy of Seeing Versus Doing Gesture During the Lesson.

Gestures-hand movements that accompany speech and express ideas-can help children learn how to solve problems, flexibly generalize learning to novel problem-solving contexts, and retain what they have learned. But does it matter who is doing the gesturing? We know that producing gesture leads to better comprehension of a message than watching someone else produce gesture. But we do not know how producing versus observing gesture impacts deeper learning outcomes such as generalization and retention across time. Moreover, not all children benefit equally from gesture instruction, suggesting that there are individual differences that may play a role in who learns from gesture. Here, we consider two factors that might impact whether gesture leads to learning, generalization, and retention after mathematical instruction: (1) whether children see gesture or do gesture and (2) whether a child spontaneously gestures before instruction when explaining their problem-solving reasoning. For children who spontaneously gestured before instruction, both doing and seeing gesture led to better generalization and retention of the knowledge gained than a comparison manipulative action. For children who did not spontaneously gesture before instruction, doing gesture was less effective than the comparison action for learning, generalization, and retention. Importantly, this learning deficit was specific to gesture, as these children did benefit from doing the comparison manipulative action. Our findings are the first evidence that a child's use of a particular representational format for communication (gesture) directly predicts that child's propensity to learn from using the same representational format.

Knowing what they know: Preschool teachers' knowledge of math skills and its relation to instruction.

Math experiences during the preschool years play an important role in children's later math learning. Preschool teachers exhibit considerable variability in the amount and types of mathematics activities they engage in with their students; one potentially important source of these individual differences is adults' knowledge of early math development. The current study aimed to describe preschool teachers' knowledge of numeracy, patterning, and spatial/geometric skills developed in preschool and its relation to their reported mathematics instruction. Participants (N = 83) completed a survey in which they judged whether particular early math skills could be observed in typically developing 4-year-olds in the United States and reported their frequency of engaging in different math instructional activities. Pre- and in-service preschool teachers' knowledge varied across the different domains (i.e., numeracy, patterning, and spatial/geometric) of mathematical thinking, but their reported frequency of instruction did not. Teachers who were found to be more accurate in their knowledge of early math development were more likely to report higher frequency of math instruction; looking specifically at the domains, the strength of association between knowledge and instruction was the strongest for numeracy. Such findings highlight the possibility that supporting preschool teachers' knowledge of the range of math skills their students can be developing may be one component of improving early math teaching and learning.

The Treatment Selection for a 36-Year-Old Woman With Stress Urinary Incontinence Using a Discrete Mathematical Approach: A Case Report.

This case report describes the treatment selection process for a 36-year-old woman with stress urinary incontinence (SUI) and an overactive bladder (OAB) who desired pregnancy. The patient had comorbidities of hypertension and type 2 diabetes, which required consideration to improve her quality of life and reproductive health. A recently developed decision support tool using a discrete mathematical approach was used to select a treatment method tailored to the patient's individual situation. The analysis determined that vaginal erbium laser (VEL) treatment (Renovalase SP Dynamis Fotona d.o.o, Ljubljana, Slovenia) was the most suitable for this patient. VEL treatment significantly improved both SUI and OAB and changing antihypertensive medication eliminated nocturia. This case suggests the potential application of graph theory in treatment selection for SUI patients.

Navigating Treatment Choices for Stress and Urgency Urinary Incontinence Using Graph Theory in Discrete Mathematics.

In this study, we propose a method for navigating the choice of treatment for stress urinary incontinence (SUI) and urgency urinary incontinence (UUI) using graph theory in discrete mathematics. Our previous study accumulated data from 150 patients who underwent tension-free vaginal tape (TVT), transobturator tape (TOT), and vaginal non-ablation Erbium YAG laser (VEL) surgeries between 2014 and 2016. Network diagrams were created using this data. The treatments TVT, TOT, and VEL, along with patient characteristics (1-hour pad test: 1-hrPadTest, Overactive Bladder Symptom Score: OABSS), were represented as nodes and edges in the network diagram. We then employed a heuristic function to select the optimal treatment method for the patients with SUI and UUI. This process enables medical professionals to easily navigate the data for patients with both SUI and UUI concerns by calculating the shortest path connecting the 1-hrPadTest and OABSS. These results, which are consistent with those of previous studies, suggest that VEL is the optimal treatment. Unlike previous studies that employed statistical knowledge that is challenging for patients to understand, our study aids patients in visually comprehending and developing a customized treatment plan. This approach introduces a novel perspective for clinical decision-making in the treatment of urinary incontinence. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to apply discrete mathematics to patient decision-making for urinary incontinence treatment.

Perinatal influences on academic achievement and the developing brain: a scoping systematic review.

Introduction and methods: In this PRISMA-compliant systematic review, we identify and synthesize the findings of research in which neuroimaging and assessments of achievement have been used to examine the relationships among aspects of developmental programming, neurodevelopment, and achievement in reading and mathematics. Results: Forty-seven studies met inclusion criteria. The majority examined the impact of prematurity (n = 32) and prenatal alcohol exposure (n = 13). Several prematurity studies reported a positive correlation between white-matter integrity of callosal fibers and executive functioning and/or achievement, and white matter properties were consistently associated with cognitive and academic performance in preterm and full-term children. Volumetric studies reported positive associations between academic and cognitive abilities and white and gray matter volume in regions such as the insula, putamen, and prefrontal lobes. Functional MRI studies demonstrated increased right-hemispheric language processing among preterm children. Altered activation of the frontoparietal network related to numerical abilities was also reported. Prenatal alcohol exposure studies reported alterations in white matter microstructure linked to deficits in cognitive functioning and academic achievement, including mathematics, reading, and vocabulary skills. Volumetric studies reported reductions in cerebral, cerebellar, and subcortical gray matter volumes associated with decreased scores on measures of executive functioning, attention, working memory, and academic performance. Functional MRI studies demonstrated broad, diffuse activation, reduced activation in canonical regions, and increased activation in non-canonical regions during numeric tasks. Discussion: A preponderance of studies linked prematurity and prenatal alcohol exposure to altered neurodevelopmental processes and suboptimal academic achievement. Limitations and recommendations for future research are discussed. Systematic review registration: Identifier: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/ZAN67.

Drug-target interaction prediction using knowledge graph embedding.

The prediction of drug-target interactions (DTIs) is a critical phase in the sustainable drug development process, especially when the research focus is to capitalize on the repositioning of existing drugs. Computational approaches to predicting DTIs can provide important insights into drug mechanisms of action. However, current methods for predicting DTIs based on the structural information of the knowledge graph may suffer from the sparseness and incompleteness of the knowledge graph and neglect the latent type information of the knowledge graph. In this paper, we propose TTModel, a knowledge graph embedding model for DTI prediction. By exploiting biomedical text and type information, TTModel can learn latent text semantics and type information to improve the performance of representation learning. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly on the task of DTI prediction.

Boredom due to being over- or under-challenged in mathematics: A latent profile analysis.

BACKGROUND: Recent research on boredom suggests that it can emerge in situations characterized by over- and under-challenge. In learning contexts, this implies that high boredom may be experienced both by low- and high-achieving students. AIMS: This research aimed to explore the existence and prevalence of boredom due to being over- and under-challenged in mathematics, for which empirical evidence is lacking. SAMPLE: We employed a sample of 1.407 students (fifth to ninth graders) from all three secondary school tracks (lower, middle and upper) in Bavaria (Germany). METHODS: Boredom was assessed via self-report and achievement via a standardized mathematics test. We used latent profile analysis to identify groups characterized by different levels of boredom and achievement, and we additionally examined gender and school track as group membership predictors. RESULTS: Results revealed four distinct groups, of which two showed considerably high boredom. One was coupled with low achievement on the test (i.e. 'over-challenged group', 13% of the total sample), and one was coupled with high achievement (i.e. 'under-challenged group', 21%). Furthermore, we found a low boredom and high achievement (i.e. 'well-off group', 27%) and a relatively low boredom low achievement group (i.e. 'indifferent group', 39%). Girls were overrepresented in the over-challenged group, and students from the upper school track were underrepresented in the under-challenged group. CONCLUSION: Our research emphasizes the need to openly discuss and further investigate boredom due to being over- and under-challenged.

Bridging cognitive neuroscience and education: Insights from EEG recording during mathematical proof evaluation.

BACKGROUND: Much of modern mathematics education prioritizes symbolic formalism even at the expense of non-symbolic intuition, we contextualize our study in the ongoing debates on the balance between symbolic and non-symbolic reasoning. We explore the dissociation of oscillatory dynamics between algebraic (symbolic) and geometric (non-symbolic) processing in advanced mathematical reasoning during a naturalistic design. METHOD: Employing mobile EEG technology, we investigated students' beta and gamma wave patterns over frontal and parietal regions while they engaged with mathematical demonstrations in symbolic and non-symbolic formats within a tutor-student framework. We used extended, naturalistic stimuli to approximate an authentic educational setting. CONCLUSION: Our findings reveal nuanced distinctions in neural processing, particularly in terms of gamma waves and activity in parietal regions. Furthermore, no clear overall format preference emerged from the neuroscientific perspective despite students rating symbolic demonstrations higher for understanding and familiarity.

Elucidating the interaction between stretch and stiffness using an agent-based spring network model of progressive pulmonary fibrosis.

Pulmonary fibrosis is a deadly disease that involves the dysregulation of fibroblasts and myofibroblasts, which are mechanosensitive. Previous computational models have succeeded in modeling stiffness-mediated fibroblasts behaviors; however, these models have neglected to consider stretch-mediated behaviors, especially stretch-sensitive channels and the stretch-mediated release of latent TGF-ß. Here, we develop and explore an agent-based model and spring network model hybrid that is capable of recapitulating both stiffness and stretch. Using the model, we evaluate the role of mechanical signaling in homeostasis and disease progression during self-healing and fibrosis, respectively. We develop the model such that there is a fibrotic threshold near which the network tends towards instability and fibrosis or below which the network tends to heal. The healing response is due to the stretch signal, whereas the fibrotic response occurs when the stiffness signal overpowers the stretch signal, creating a positive feedback loop. We also find that by changing the proportional weights of the stretch and stiffness signals, we observe heterogeneity in pathological network structure similar to that seen in human IPF tissue. The system also shows emergent behavior and bifurcations: whether the network will heal or turn fibrotic depends on the initial network organization of the damage, clearly demonstrating structure's pivotal role in healing or fibrosis of the overall network. In summary, these results strongly suggest that the mechanical signaling present in the lungs combined with network effects contribute to both homeostasis and disease progression.

Iconic logic: the visual art of drawing the right conclusion.

Most people, evidence suggests, have a hard time thinking straight. Symbolic logic is a tool that can help remedy this problem. Unfortunately, it is highly abstract and uses symbols whose meanings rely on unintuitive arbitrary conventions. Without sacrificing rigor, iconic logic is more concrete and uses icons that resemble what they stand for and whose meanings are thus easier to picture, process, and remember. Here I review and critique iconic existential graphs and concept diagrams-the former link iconic logic to iconic mathematics; the latter expand popular Euler or Venn diagrams and have, to some degree, been empirically investigated for user-friendliness. I lay out how expertise in perception, cognition, and genetics can inform and improve such empirical research to help make iconic logic more ergonomic. After all, logic is a tool, and tools should not only suit their use but also their user.

Gender differences in mathematics anxiety: A meta-analysis of Chinese children.

Mathematics anxiety (MA) is a widespread phenomenon that affects an individual's learning of mathematics. MA between different genders has been of great interest to researchers. Meta-analysis was used to examine the relationship between MA and gender in Chinese children, along with the influencing factors. After literature search and screening, 83 papers and 91 independent samples met the inclusion criteria. The results of the main effect test of the random effect model revealed a correlation of significant levels between MA and gender, r = -0.131, 95%CI [-0.158, -0.105], Z = -9.508, and p < 0.001. Girls had higher MA than boys. The outcomes of the moderating effect test indicated that the moderating effect of age, economic region and measurement instrument in the relationship between MA and gender was significant. But the moderating effect of period was not significant. Specifically, gender differences in MA were greater at the middle school compared to the elementary school. And the greatest correlation between children's MA and gender was in the western region. The gender difference of MA measured by different instruments varied.

Dysexecutive symptomatology in everyday functioning and academic achievement in adolescents.

Background: During the educational stage, academic achievement depends on various social, family, and personal factors. Among the latter, executive skills in everyday life play a significant role in dealing with the academic demands of adolescents. Therefore, the aim of this study is to ascertain the effects of executive symptomatology in everyday functioning on academic achievement in adolescents. Method: The study involved 910 students aged between 13 and 15 years (M = 14.09, SD = 0.68) from both public and private schools in the Community of Madrid. The DEX, BDEFS-CA, and BRIEF-SR questionnaires were utilised to assess executive difficulties, while grades in language, mathematics, and natural sciences were used as a measure of academic achievement. Results: The data revealed statistically significant differences in working memory, emotional control, materials organisation, and task completion. In relation to language and natural sciences subjects. In the case of mathematics, emotional control and task completion were significant variables. Conclusion: Our results indicate that certain executive skills that are manifested in everyday life activities can contribute, albeit in a variable way, to academic achievement in the subjects studied. This aspect is relevant insofar as it allows us to develop preventive interventions based on the executive training of these everyday skills.

A statistical approach for identifying single nucleotide variants that affect transcription factor binding.

Non-coding variants located within regulatory elements may alter gene expression by modifying transcription factor (TF) binding sites, thereby leading to functional consequences. Different TF models are being used to assess the effect of DNA sequence variants, such as single nucleotide variants (SNVs). Often existing methods are slow and do not assess statistical significance of results. We investigated the distribution of absolute maximal differential TF binding scores for general computational models that affect TF binding. We find that a modified Laplace distribution can adequately approximate the empirical distributions. A benchmark on in vitro and in vivo datasets showed that our approach improves upon an existing method in terms of performance and speed. Applications on eQTLs and on a genome-wide association study illustrate the usefulness of our statistics by highlighting cell type-specific regulators and target genes. An implementation of our approach is freely available on GitHub and as bioconda package.

Differences in the Development of Mathematics Motivation within and across Socioeconomic Status: Do Early Adolescents' Failure Beliefs Matter?

Interest in socioeconomic differences in academic motivation has been longstanding. However, previous research has often treated both low- and high-SES students as homogenous groups. This study aims to address this gap by investigating the developmental trajectory profiles of mathematics motivation during early adolescence, with a focus on variations within and across SES groups. Multigroup latent class growth analysis was used on a sample of 3718 early adolescents in China (initial Mage was 9.40 ± 0.52 years; 48.0% girls) across 2 years from grades 4 through 6. The analysis identified three distinct self-determined mathematics motivation trajectory profiles within each SES group: a good-quality profile (i.e., initially high autonomous but low controlled), a high-quantity profile (i.e., initially high both autonomous and controlled), and a low-quantity profile (i.e., initially low both autonomous and controlled). A greater proportion of low-SES students were observed within the low-quantity profile than within the good-quality profile. The study found that the failure-is-enhancing view was a protective factor against two relatively maladaptive motivational trajectory profiles (i.e., high-quantity profile and low-quantity profile), irrespective of socioeconomic background. These findings emphasize the importance of implementing motivational interventions for early adolescents that consider both structural factors (e.g., socioeconomic backgrounds) and psychological factors (e.g., failure beliefs), to foster students' academic development.