Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The National Student Survey

2007 SEES the third National Student Survey (NSS). At the time of writing the results have only just been published, and so this is an initial rather than a measured comment. The results this year echo the pattern of the previous two surveys, with law maintaining its position as a subject in which students are neither the most nor the least satisfied with their course, in a general environment of overall satisfaction across the sector. Indeed, the headline in the Times Higher announcing the most recent results (14/9/ 07 "Students: yes, we're satisfied") is almost identical to that which greeted the publication of the results of the first survey in 2005 (9/9/05 "Students satisfied—official"). Levels of satisfaction also seem to be rising, which we may take at face value or, more sceptically, view as law schools succeeding in engaging with the exercise in ways that encourage a positive response. But whilst it provides copy for the Times Higher, more fundamental questions arise as to what the object of the exercise is and what is the survey telling us as law teachers? As to the first, we may wonder why it is necessary to undertake such an exercise at all. Student evaluation of all manner of university provision, whether academic relating to individual modules or courses, or of other activities as diverse as library and catering services, is, these days, not only commonplace but is, in some cases, required. The days when students were seen but not heard have long gone. Universities have mechanisms for engaging with students on a range of matters, and whilst some of the informality of staff-student dialogue may have gone with the onset of mass higher education, channels exist whereby the views of students become known. If this is correct, then the results of the NSS should not have come as a surprise to any law school, as there will already be knowledge of the views of students. The major difference that the NSS brings to the process of the expression of student views is that its results are made public. It has been clear from the outset, when the NSS was first mooted, that it was intended to provide information to stakeholders, primarily prospective students, about institutions in order to help them to determine where they might like to go. In this, the NSS is strongly supported by the NUS, HEFCE and the government. This, then, leads to consideration of what the survey is telling those to whom it is addressed.
Rural-Urban Migration and Remittances in Vietnam: Evidence from Migrant Tracer Data

We examine remittance behavior of rural-urban migrants in Vietnam using a unique data set that links the 2012 round of the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) with a 2013 tracer study of migrants from VHLSS households. We estimate factors associated with remittances, taking migrant selection issues into account. We also estimate impacts of net remittances on per capita income in migrant-sending rural households, taking into account the endogeneity of remittances. We find that migration and remittances increase the incomes of rural households. However, the estimated direct income effects are small, and become smaller still as migrants become more established in their new place of residence. Members of ethnic minority groups gain far less than others from migration and remittances. More data and research are needed to broaden these assessments to include non-economic benefits and costs of migration.
Milling Characteristics of Rice Cultivars and Hybrids

ABSTRACT Many rice cultivars and hybrids have unique physical characteristics that affect milling performance. The purpose of this study was to quantify the rate of bran removal during milling for several rice cultivars and hybrids common to the southern United States, and compare the quantity of lipids remaining on the kernel surface to that located throughout the kernel. This was accomplished by analyzing two sample sets. The first comprised cultivars Cocodrie, Cypress, and Lemont, and hybrids XL7 and XL8, which were milled for 0 (brown rice), 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 sec in a laboratory mill. In the second set, cultivars Cocodrie, Cypress, and Wells, and hybrids XL7 and XL8 were milled for 0, 20, 40, and 60 sec. The surface lipid content (SLC) and color of head rice samples were measured as indications of the degree of milling (DOM). The total lipid content (TLC) of ground head rice was also measured to determine the total amount of lipids present throughout the entire kernel. Results showed that at .
Characterization and Discrimination of Plastic Materials Using Laser-Induced Fluorescence

The most meaningful spectral components in laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) spectra for several different commercial plastics have been individuated and used to automatically discriminate among different plastic materials and between plastics and complex organic materials, such as woods. Starting from LIF measurements on known samples, a number of significant wavelengths have been identified by principal component analysis (PCA). These have been used to produce intensity ratios functional to the discrimination. Threshold values for such ratios have been individuated in order to obtain an automatic recognition of plastics. The work done has been preparatory to the design and development of a multispectral imaging LIF system for fast detection of plastic debris in a post-blast scene.
Roots and Routes

Social and behavioral science has often described place attachment and mobility as opposite and mutually exclusive phenomena, has regarded one as better or more important than the other, or has done both. This article presents findings from a qualitative interview study that suggest that people may regard place attachment and mobility, and the relationship between them, in several different ways. Some regard place attachment and mobility as contradictory and feel they have to choose between them; some regard them as opposites but try to find an equilibrium; some regard them as complementary and enjoy both. This article suggests a “roots/routes” perspective, investigating the perceived meanings of and relationships between place attachment and mobility, and argues that further research along these lines would contribute to current debates about the roles and meanings of place.
Age-Related Changes in the Circadian System Unmasked by Constant Conditions1,2,3

Abstract Circadian timing systems, like most physiological processes, cannot escape the effects of aging. With age, humans experience decreased duration and quality of sleep. Aged mice exhibit decreased amplitude and increased fragmentation of the activity rhythm, and lengthened circadian free-running period in both light-dark (LD) and constant dark (DD) conditions. Several studies have shown that aging impacts neural activity rhythms in the central circadian clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). However, evidence for age-related disruption of circadian oscillations of clock genes in the SCN has been equivocal. We hypothesized that daily exposure to LD cycles masks the full impact of aging on molecular rhythms in the SCN. We performed ex vivo bioluminescent imaging of cultured SCN slices of young and aged PER2::luciferase knock-in (PER2::LUC) mice housed under LD or prolonged DD conditions. Under LD conditions, the amplitude of PER2::LUC rhythms differed only slightly between SCN explants from young and aged animals; under DD conditions, the PER2::LUC rhythms of aged animals showed markedly lower amplitudes and longer circadian periods than those of young animals. Recordings of PER2::LUC rhythms in individual SCN cells using an electron multiplying charge-coupled device camera revealed that aged SCN cells showed longer circadian periods and that the rhythms of individual cells rapidly became desynchronized. These data suggest that aging degrades the SCN circadian ensemble, but that recurrent LD cycles mask these effects. We propose that these changes reflect a decline in pacemaker robustness that could increase vulnerability to environmental challenges, and partly explain age-related sleep and circadian disturbances.
ACQUIRING A SECOND LANGUAGE

Perhaps the most important discovery researchers in second-language acquisition have made in recent years is something that most people knew already: acquiring a second language is not simply a matter of ‘knowing the rules’. Real second-language competence is subconscious knowledge, similar to knowledge of a first language. Competent second-language users, like competent users of the native language, do not think grammatical rules when they are producing or understanding the second language, and in many cases never consciously ‘learned’ the rules they use so well. (Grammar rules do help in certain limited situations: good ‘grammar’ users can apply conscious rules when they have time to think about and use them, as in writing, but even here our research indicates that grammar use makes a very modest contribution to grammatical accuracy. For most people, using ‘grammar’ in real conversation only leads to trouble. Constantly referring to rules gives one a very hesitant style of speaking that is not pleasant to listen to, and some of us have the bad habit of constructing our sentences via grammar rules while the other person is talking, which means that we are not listening! )
A Sensor-Based Controller for Homing of Underactuated AUVs

A new sensor-based homing integrated guidance and control law is presented to drive an underactuated autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) toward a fixed target, in three dimensions, using the information provided by an ultrashort baseline (USBL) positioning system. The guidance and control law is first derived using quaternions to express the vehicle's attitude kinematics, which are directly obtained from the time differences of arrival (TDOA) measured by the USBL sensor. The dynamics are then included resorting to backstepping techniques. The proposed Lyapunov-based control law yields global asymptotic stability in the absence of external disturbances and is further extended, keeping the same properties, to the case where constant known ocean currents affect the dynamics of the vehicle. Finally, a globally exponentially stable nonlinear TDOA and range-based observer is introduced to estimate the ocean current and uniform asymptotic stability is obtained for the overall closed-loop system. Simulations are presented illustrating the performance of the proposed solutions.
The haptic test battery: A new instrument to test tactual abilities in blind and visually impaired and sighted children

A new psychological test battery was designed to provide a much-needed comprehensive tool for assessing the perceptual and cognitive abilities of visually handicapped children in using active touch. The test materials consist of raised-line, raised-dot, raised-surface shapes and displays, and familiar and novel 3-D objects. The research used 20 sub-tests, ranging from tactual discrimination, systematic scanning and shape coding to short-term and longer-term memory tasks. The research sample consisted of 119 participants. Fifty-nine were blind and visually impaired schoolchildren, aged from 3 to 16 years (the total visually handicapped population of the region), and 60 sighted school children, matched to them on age, gender and social class, living in the Madrid region (capital and province). The dual aim here is to report the reliability, validity and relation to age and visual status of the sub-tests, and to use the data to refine and shorten the test battery further for more general use.
Age‐group differences in the psychological well‐being and academic attainment of distance learners

This was an exploratory study of possible differences in reported symptoms of psychological well‐being and academic attainment among a representative sample of 379 U.K. Open University distance learners. Three levels of the independent variable of Age were observed: under 30, 30–40, and over 40. There were two numerical dependent variables: student scores on the eight scales of a self‐report on feelings about study; and academic attainment in both course work and end‐of‐session examination. Students in the under 30 and 30—40 age groups performed significantly better in the end‐of‐session examination than the over 40s. But no difference was observed in course work assessment. By contrast, the over 40 group was better organised, more highly motivated, and work‐satisfied than the other two groups. A plausible explanation for these results is that the presumed natural decline with age in cognitive functioning and response speed results in a performance deficit in the over 40s under the timed conditions of the.
Velocity Constraints on Apparent Rotational Movement

The visual illusion of apparent rigid rotation was produced by sequential alternation of two views of the same object in different orientations. The minimum stimulus-onset asynchrony required for the appearance of rigid rotation was a linearly increasing function of the angular difference in orientation between the two views. Variation in the size of the object affected the zero-intercept of the function, but the slope was virtually constant. The slope invariance suggests that the appearance of rigid rotation is constrained by an upper bound on the apparent angular velocity of the object as a whole, rather than a bound on the linear velocity of its parts.
VISUAL PROPERTIES AND AFFECTIVE APPRAISALS IN RESIDENTIAL AREAS AFTER DARK

Abstract The present study examined multiple relationships within and between two sets of variables — visual properties and affective appraisals — in night-time neighbourhood experience. Twenty-eight participants rated twenty night-time neighbourhood scenes on 12 visual property variables and six affective appraisal variables. Canonical correlation revealed relationships between evaluative and natural/open dimensions, arousal and disorder dimensions, and between behavioural active/safe and well-lit/visible dimensions.
Low cost and high throughput multiplierless design of a 16 point 1-D DCT of the new HEVC video coding standard

This paper presents the hardware design of a 16-points 1-D DCT used in the emerging video coding standard HEVC - High Efficiency Video Coding. The 1-D DCT is used by the 16×16 2-D DCT of the HEVC standard. The transforms stage is one of the innovations proposed by HEVC, not only because of the variable size (from 4×4 to 32×32) but also because higher dimension transforms other than the traditional 4×4 and 8×8 are used. The hardware design presented in this work focuses on low cost and high throughput. To achieve such objectives, the 16-points algorithm from HEVC was simplified, so that a more efficient hardware design could be implemented. Some strategies were used during this simplification, such as operations reordering, factoring to compress the length of the operators, multiplications by constant turned into shifts and adds, sub-expressions sharing, among others. The architecture was designed in a fully combinational way in order to reduce hardware overhead. Synthesis results obtained using Altera FPGAs from the Cyclone II and Stratix III families showed hardware resources reduction reaching 72% when compared to an architecture described as a direct transcription of the non-optimized version of the algorithm. Even with a purely combinational implementation, the designed architecture achieved a throughput between 376 Msamples/s and 1.4 Gsamples/s. With these results, the architecture is capable of processing, in the worst case, more than 30 QFHD frames (3840×2160 pixels) per second. Therefore, the architecture is capable of processing videos with significantly high resolutions in real time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the literature that presents hardware results for the HEVC transforms.
CVS Decomposition of 3D Homogeneous Turbulence Using Orthogonal Wavelets

This paper compares the filtering used in Coherent Vortex Simulation (CVS) decomposition with an orthogonal wavelet basis, with the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) or Fourier filtering. Both methods are applied to a field of Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) data of 3D forced homogeneous isotropic turbulence at microscale Reynolds number R(sub lambda) = 168. We show that, with only 3%N retained modes, CVS filtering separates the coherent vortex tubes from the incoherent background flow. The latter is structureless, has an equipartition energy spectrum, and has a Gaussian velocity probability distribution function (PDF) and an exponential vorticity PDF. On the other hand, the Fourier basis does not extract the coherent vortex tubes cleanly and leaves organized structures in the residual high wavenumber modes whose PDFs are stretched exponentials for both the velocity and the vorticity.
In‐service training needs in an African context: a study of headteacher and teacher perspectives in the Gucha District of Kenya

Improving the quality of teaching is an educational priority in Kenya, as in many developing countries. The present paper considers various aspects on in‐service education, including views on the effectiveness of in‐service, teacher and headteacher priorities in determining in‐service needs and the constraints on providing in‐service courses. These issues are examined though an empirical study of 30 secondary headteachers and 109 teachers in a district of Kenya. The results show a strong felt need for in‐service provision together with a firm belief in the efficacy of in‐service in raising pupil achievement. Headteachers had a stronger belief in the need for in‐service for their teachers than did the teachers themselves. The priorities of both headteachers and teachers were dominated by the external pressures of the schools, in particular the pressures for curriculum innovation and examination success. The resource constraints on supporting attendance at in‐service courses were the major problems facing headteachers. The results reflect the difficulties that responding to an externally driven in‐service agenda creates in a context of scarce resources.
Secure Beamforming Design for SWIPT in MISO Broadcast Channel With Confidential Messages and External Eavesdroppers

This paper studies the secure beamforming design for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer in a multiple-input single-output broadcast channel with confidential messages and external eavesdroppers, where each receiver adopts the power splitting (PS) scheme to decode information and harvest energy concurrently, and it is also seen as a potential eavesdropper for messages not intended for it. Our objective is to minimize the total transmit power while guaranteeing the individual secrecy rate and energy harvesting constraints at each receiver by jointly optimizing transmit beamforming vectors, artificial noise covariance, and receive PS ratios. Both scenarios of perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter are considered. For the perfect CSI case, we propose a two-stage optimization approach to solve the original non-convex problem global optimality, and also provide a low-complexity suboptimal solution based on the particle swarm optimization algorithm. Furthermore, we also extend the above result to the colluding eavesdroppers scenario. For the imperfect CSI case, we propose a worst-case-based robust formulation, where the CSI errors are norm-bounded. With the aid of S-Procedure, we derive the equivalent forms for constraints and then transform the non-convex robust design into a convex optimization problem. Simulation results are finally presented to demonstrate the performance of our proposed schemes.
The role of FDG-PET/CT in detecting unsuspected and unknown distant metastasis in the initial staging of NSCLC.

BACKGROUND/AIM Our purpose in this retrospective study was to determine the ratio of unexpected [metastases within the coverage area of thorax computed tomography (CT)] and unknown (metastases out of the coverage area of thorax CT) metastases by positron emission tomography/CT (PET/CT) in patients with newly diagnosed non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who had no defined metastatic lesion, and to investigate the contribution of fludeoxyglucose (FDG)-PET/CT in metastasis staging. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 567 patients (489 males and 78 females, mean age 60.9 ± 10.7 years) were enrolled in this study. Among the 567 patients, a total of 156 patients who underwent PET/CT for metabolic characterization (group 1) and had solitary pulmonary nodules (group la, n = 39) or solitary pulmonary masses (group lb, n = 117) and the remaining 411 patients (group 2) with NSCLC who had PET/CT performed for staging formed the basis of this study RESULTS In group 1, 5/39 (12.8%) patients with a solitary pulmonary nodule and 29/117 (24.8%) patients with a solitary pulmonary mass had distant metastases. In group 2, 129 patients of 411 (31.4%) had distant metastasis. CONCLUSION FDG-PET/CT is proven to be an effective method in detection of unsuspected-unknown metastasis, either in patients with solitary pulmonary lesion or in the initial staging of patients with NSCLC.
Predictors of High School Academic Course Offerings: The Role of School Size

Relationships between high school structural characteristics and curricular offerings are examined in this study using survey data from High School and Beyond. Emphasis is placed on the role played by high school size. The study’s central thesis is that the effects of school size on the curriculum will vary depending on subject area, the character of the course being offered (e.g., advanced versus remedial), and the setting in which the school is located. The influence of other structural features, most notably socioeconomic status (SES), unionization, urban location, and grade configuration, are also examined. Findings are consistent with the basic proposition that the effects of size are differentiated within high schools. The findings have implications for assessments of equality of educational opportunity as well as for the renewed debate over optimal high school size.
The Effect of Mass Transit Systems on Price of Condominium in Bangkok

Since 1999, the BTS Skytrain and MRT Subway systems have helped ease the severe traffic problems in Bangkok, Thailand and increased the real estate properties’ values especially condominiums near the mass transit route significantly as consumers are willing to pay more for the convenience. A hedonic price model is used to analyze the effect of mass transit systems on the price of condominiums in different areas of Bangkok. The regression results indicate that the valuation of condominiums near the mass transit system is sensitive to changes in distance from the mass transit stations as well as other housing traits.
Cooperative Compressed Sensing for Wide-Band Spectrum Detection

We present a cooperative compressed sensing scheme for wide-band spectrum detection in cognitive radio where analog-to-information converter are applied to map a continuous-time signal to a discrete sequence of measurements. The measurements are collected from each second user to a fusion center where a novel cooperative compressed sensing recovery algorithm named SCSMP is utilized to reconstruct the sparse vectors of the wide-band estimated spectrum. The spectrum is then used to make a decision on spectrum occupancy. We compare the performance of this cooperative scheme with single SU scheme. Meanwhile, the performance of SCSMP algorithm and SOMP algorithm is evaluated by MSE and detection time.