Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
It Takes (Only) Two: Adversarial Generator-Encoder Networks

We present a new autoencoder-type architecture that is trainable in an unsupervised mode, sustains both generation and inference, and has the quality of conditional and unconditional samples boosted by adversarial learning. Unlike previous hybrids of autoencoders and adversarial networks, the adversarial game in our approach is set up directly between the encoder and the generator, and no external mappings are trained in the process of learning.The game objective compares the divergences of each of the real and the generated data distributions with the prior distribution in the latent space. We show that direct generator-vs-encoder game leads to a tight coupling of the two components, resulting in samples and reconstructions of a comparable quality to some recently-proposed more complex architectures.
Hong Kong tertiary students' conceptions of assessment of academic ability

Students' beliefs, attitudes, experiences and responses towards assessment reflect the ecology of their specific context. The study examines Hong Kong tertiary students' conceptions of assessment using focus group interviews and the content analysis technique. Using six focus groups, 26 Hong Kong university students were interviewed. Hong Kong tertiary students associated assessment with lifelong high-stake examinations. The assessment determined an individual's personal value or worth and achievement was an obligation one had towards one's family. As a legitimate tool for selecting the best candidates for educational and career opportunities, assessment provided upward social mobility, but also served the function of monitoring and surveillance to shape people's behaviour according to societal expectations. Resilience was reflected in both self-regulative agentic responses of effort, persistence and gaming strategy and passive escaping from the oppressive assessment system. The general emotional reaction towards assessment was negative; and participants cast doubts on the assessment validity, accuracy and the limited utility confined by academic-only content. In addition to the portrayal of the Chinese student as an effective, persistent learner, this study shows that Chinese students are very aware of the negative, controlling impact of assessment on their lives.
Homophily and Transitivity in Dynamic Network Formation

In social and economic networks linked agents often share additional links in common. There are two competing explanations for this phenomenon. First, agents may have a structural taste for transitive links -- the returns to linking may be higher if two agents share links in common. Second, agents may assortatively match on unobserved attributes, a process called homophily. I study parameter identifiability in a simple model of dynamic network formation with both effects. Agents form, maintain, and sever links over time in order to maximize utility. The return to linking may be higher if agents share friends in common. A pair-specific utility component allows for arbitrary homophily on time-invariant agent attributes. I derive conditions under which it is possible to detect the presence of a taste for transitivity in the presence of assortative matching on unobservables. I leave the joint distribution of the initial network and the pair-specific utility component, a very high dimensional object, unrestricted. The analysis is of the `fixed effects&apos; type. The identification result is constructive, suggesting an analog estimator, whose single large network properties I characterize.
Dreams of Pure Sociology*

Unlike older sciences such as physics and biology, sociology has never had a revolution. Modern sociology is still classical—largely psychological, teleological, and individualistic—and even less scientific than classical sociology. But pure sociology is different: It predicts and explains the behavior of social life with its location and direction in social space—its geometry. Here I illustrate pure sociology with formulations about the behavior of ideas, including a theory of scienticity that predicts and explains the degree to which an idea is likely to be scientific (testable, general, simple, valid, and original). For example: Scienticity is a curvilinear function of social distance from the subject. This formulation explains numerous facts about the history and practice of science, such as why some sciences evolved earlier and faster than others and why so much sociology is so unscientific. Because scientific theory is the most scientific science, the theory of scienticity also implies a theory of theory and a methodology for the development of theory.
Superimposed training on redundant precoding for low-complexity recovery of block transmissions

The adoption of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) by wireless local area networks and audio/video broadcasting standards testifies to the importance of recovering block precoded transmissions propagating through frequency-selective FIR channels. Existing block transmission standards invoke bandwidth-consuming error control codes to mitigate channel fades and training sequences to identify the FIR channels. For low-complexity block-by-block processing, redundant precoders with cyclic prefix (CP) along with superimposed training sequence are optimally designed to enable least squares estimation of time-varying FIR channels and symbol recovery regardless of the underlying FIR frequency-selective multipath channel. Numerical results are also presented to access the performance of the proposed affine precoders.
An unsupported common view: Comparing Japan and the U.S. on individualism/collectivism

It has long been believed that the Japanese are more collectivistic than the Americans. To assess the validity of this common view, we reviewed 15 empirical studies that compared these two nations on individualism/collectivism. Surprisingly, 14 studies did not support the common view; the only study that supported it turned out to bear little relevance to the ordinary definition of individualism/collectivism. An examination of the supportive evidence of the common view disclosed that this view had been formed on an unexpectedly flimsy ground. It further turned out that the wide acceptance of the common view may have been the result of the fundamental attribution error, which may have led to an underestimation of situational factors in interpreting the past obviously collectivistic behavior of the Japanese.
Aggression in an Australian forensic psychiatric hospital

There is a considerable body of research on the assessment and prediction of aggression in psychiatric hospitals. A range of clinical and demographic characteristics associated with aggressive inpatients, such as young age and active symptoms of psychosis, have repeatedly been shown to contribute to aggression. Environmental factors have also been shown to be important. The study examined aggressive behaviours in an Australian forensic psychiatric hospital, using aggression‐specific recording instrumentation developed for the study. The purpose of the study was to compare results using aggression specific‐recording instrumentation with a previous study using retrospective methods relying on standard hospital incident forms, and to examine the relationship between type, direction and severity of aggression with the use of seclusion.In contrast with the results obtained in a previous study, staff rather than patients were more often the victims of both verbal and physical aggression, although patients were more frequently the victims of more severe forms of aggression. Patients were verbally and physically aggressive towards other patients at similar rates, although they were more frequently verbally, rather than physically, aggressive to staff. Acute wards recorded more aggression than rehabilitation wards. Males and females were aggressive at similar rates. A reduction in reported incidents of verbal and physical aggression, particularly against staff, occurred over the course of the study. Patients were secluded and incident forms were completed following approximately 30% of aggressive behaviours. Whether or not a patient was secluded and whether or not an incident form was completed depended on a range of factors, including the nature of the victim and the type and severity of the aggression.
Effects of load on diagnosing broken bar faults in induction motors using the pendulous oscillation of the rotor magnetic field orientation

The effects of load level on the ability to diagnose broken bar faults in squirrel cage induction motors are studied in this paper. The pendulous oscillation of the rotor magnetic field orientation is implemented as a fault signature for rotor fault diagnostic purposes. Moreover, the effects of load level on the low side band component of the stator current spectrum are reported as well. These investigations were performed through testing 2-hp and 5-hp induction motors over a wide range of load levels and control-drives. The results of these tests and investigations demonstrate that the pendulous oscillation signature can be used for a wide range of motor operating conditions.
Casual 3D photography

We present an algorithm that enables casual 3D photography. Given a set of input photos captured with a hand-held cell phone or DSLR camera, our algorithm reconstructs a 3D photo, a central panoramic, textured, normal mapped, multi-layered geometric mesh representation. 3D photos can be stored compactly and are optimized for being rendered from viewpoints that are near the capture viewpoints. They can be rendered using a standard rasterization pipeline to produce perspective views with motion parallax. When viewed in VR, 3D photos provide geometrically consistent views for both eyes. Our geometric representation also allows interacting with the scene using 3D geometry-aware effects, such as adding new objects to the scene and artistic lighting effects. Our 3D photo reconstruction algorithm starts with a standard structure from motion and multi-view stereo reconstruction of the scene. The dense stereo reconstruction is made robust to the imperfect capture conditions using a novel near envelope cost volume prior that discards erroneous near depth hypotheses. We propose a novel parallax-tolerant stitching algorithm that warps the depth maps into the central panorama and stitches two color-and-depth panoramas for the front and back scene surfaces. The two panoramas are fused into a single non-redundant, well-connected geometric mesh. We provide videos demonstrating users interactively viewing and manipulating our 3D photos.
Genetics of P450 oxidoreductase: Sequence variation in 842 individuals of four ethnicities and activities of 15 missense mutations

P450 oxidoreductase (POR) is an electron-donating flavoprotein required for the activity of all microsomal cytochrome P450 enzymes. We sequenced 5,655 bp of the POR gene in a representative population of 842 healthy unrelated individuals in four ethnic groups: 218 African Americans, 260 Caucasian Americans, 179 Chinese Americans, and 185 Mexican Americans. One hundred forty SNPs were detected, of which 43 were found in ≥1% of alleles. Twelve SNPs were in the POR promoter region. Fifteen of 32 exonic variations altered the POR amino acid sequence; 13 of these 15 are previously undescribed missense variations. We found eight indels, only one of which was in the coding region. A previously described variant, A503V, was found on 27.9% of all alleles with some ethnic predilection (19.1% in African Americans, 26.4% in Caucasian Americans, 36.7% Chinese Americans, and 31.0% in Mexican Americans). We built cDNA expression vectors for the 13 previously undescribed missense variants, expressed each protein lacking 27 N-terminal residues in Escherichia coli, and assayed the apparent Km and Vmax of each in four assays: reduction of cytochrome c, oxidation of NADPH, 17α-hydroxylase activity of P450c17, and 17,20 lyase activity of P450c17. The catalytic activities of several missense mutants differed substantially in these assays, indicating that each POR mutant must be assayed separately with each potential target P450 enzyme. The activity of A503V was reduced to a modest but statistically significant degree in all four assays, suggesting that it may play an important role in interindividual variation in drug response.
Privatization, Market Liberalization, and Learning in Transition Economies

Privatization and market liberalization are widely considered to be complementary reforms in transition economies. This paper challenges this view and the closely related "big bang" approach to economic reform. Our analysis suggests that when pursued simultaneously, privatization may actually impede the transition process following market liberalization and reduce social welfare. Our result is based on an explicit model of market learning, which is a vital component of the economic transition process. Compared to a fully-functioning market in a mature market economy, a market in transition is characterized by greater uncertainty regarding market conditions, including free market equilibrium levels of prices and quantities. Market participants must learn about these conditions through their participation in the market process. When the effects of learning are incorporated into the analysis, the optimal level of privatization decreases monotonically as the level of uncertainty increases.
The Role of Optimism and Religious Involvement in the Association Between Race-Related Stress and Anxiety Symptomatology

This study examined the associations between individual, institutional, and cultural race-related stress and somatic and cognitive anxiety. We adopted a risk and resilience framework to investigate the protective role of optimism and religious involvement in the race-related stress-anxiety link. A total of 171 African American young adults completed measures of race-related stress, optimism, religious involvement, and anxiety symptomatology. Institutional race-related stress was positively associated with cognitive and somatic anxiety. Optimism moderated the association between individual race-related stress and cognitive anxiety. Religious involvement enhanced the protective function of optimism in the association between individual and cultural race-related stress and cognitive anxiety. These results illustrate the utility of a multidimensional framework for understanding the impact of race-related stress on anxiety symptomatology. Moreover, the pattern of findings suggests that high religious involvement and high optimism may produce the most advantageous outcomes with respect to the association between race-related stress and anxiety in African American young adults.
Language Based Secure Communication

Secure communication in distributed systems is notoriously hard to achieve due to the variety of attacks an adversary can mount, based on message interception, modification, redirection, eavesdropping or, even more subtly, on traffic analysis. In the literature on process calculi, traditional solutions to the problem either draw on low-level cryptographic primitives, as in the spi or applied-pi calculi, or rely on very abstract, and hard-to-implement, mechanisms to hide communication by means of private channels, as in the pi-calculus. A more recent line of research follows a different approach, aimed at identifying security primitives adequate as high-level programming abstractions, and at the same time well-suited for security analysis and verification in adversarial settings. The present paper makes a step further in that direction. We develop a calculus of secure communication based on core abstractions that support concise, high-level programming idioms for distributed, security-sensitive applications, and at the same time are powerful enough to express a full-fledged adversarial setting. Drawing on this calculus, we investigate reasoning methods for security based on the long-established practice by which security properties are defined in terms of behavioral equivalences. We give a co-inductive characterization of behavioral equivalence, in terms of bisimulation, and develop powerful up-to techniques to provide simple co-inductive proofs. We illustrate the adequacy of the model with several security laws for secrecy and authentication.
Predictive Utility of Subject-, Task-, and Problem-Specific Self-Efficacy Judgments for Immediate and Delayed Academic Performances

Abstract Self-efficacy perceptions of Korean female high school students (N = 202) were assessed at 3 different levels of specificity in English and mathematics. Problem-specific, task-specific, and subject-specific self-efficacy beliefs all formed separate factors in both subject areas. However, the 3 self-efficacy factors were too highly correlated to contribute independently to outcome prediction. Various nested models produced comparable fits as long as they contained predictive paths from either the problem- or the task-specific self-efficacy factor. Contrary to the hypothesis, predictive relations between self-efficacy and achievement were not much affected by their temporal contiguity. When the author combined English and math factors in a single structural model, English achievement was predicted only by English self-efficacy and math achievement only by math self-efficacy. The same pattern was maintained regardless of the specificity of self-efficacy measures.
Does Sarcasm Always Sting? Investigating the Impact of Ironic Insults and Ironic Compliments

In previous research, there have been inconsistent findings regarding interpretation of ironic insults. Colston (1997) reported that irony enhances the criticism conveyed by a more direct insult, but Dews and Winner (1995; Dews, Kaplan & Winner, 1995) reported that irony mutes the criticism conveyed by more direct insult. In this study we examined the possibility that the perception of ironic insults depends on whether participants were asked to judge speaker intent (e.g., mocking) or social impression (e.g., politeness). Results supported this possibility because ironic insults were perceived to be more mocking, but also more polite, than direct insults. In contrast, ironic compliments were perceived to be more mocking and less polite than direct compliments.
Custard: Computing Norm States over Information Stores

Norms provide a way to model the social architecture of a sociotechnical system (STS) and are thus crucial for understanding how such a system supports secure collaboration between principals, that is, autonomous parties such as humans and organizations. Accordingly, an important challenge is to compute the state of a norm instance at runtime in a sociotechnical system. Custard addresses this challenge by providing a relational syntax for schemas of important norm types along with their canonical lifecycles and providing a mapping from each schema to queries that compute instances of the schema in different lifecycle stages. In essence, Custard supports a norm-based abstraction layer over underlying information stores such as databases and event logs. Specifically, it supports deadlines; complex events, including those based on aggregation; and norms that reference other norms. We prove important correctness properties for Custard, including stability (once an event has occurred, it has occurred forever) and safety (a query returns a finite set of tuples). Our compiler generates SQL queries from Custard specifications. Writing out such SQL queries by hand is tedious and error-prone even for simple norms, thus demonstrating Custard's practical benefits.
Were Height and Mass Related to Performance at the 2007 and 2011 Rugby World Cups?

It has previously been reported that there are trends for height and mass in rugby players to be greater with higher levels of competition and historical increases over time are greater than the rates of increase seen in the normal population. The purpose of this study was to examine the importance of height and mass on performance in international rugby by analyzing final pool rankings at the 2007 and 2011 Rugby World Cups (RWC). The 2007 and 2011 RWCs both had four pools of five teams. Each team would play four games in the pool stages and points were given for wins, ties, scoring four or more tries and losing by less than seven points. The points accumulated from this system were used to examine the influence of height and mass on performance. Teams were subdivided into groups (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th) depending on final rankings in the pool stages. An ANOVA and Pearson's correlation were used to compare the influence of height, mass and Body Mass Index on final pool rankings and points accumulated in each of the two tournaments. Of all of the anthropometric measurements considered, the height and mass of forwards seem to be the best indicators of team performance.
Differential transcriptional responses between the interferon-gamma-induction and iron-limitation models of persistence for Chlamydia pneumoniae.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Chlamydia spp. are important pathogens of humans and animals that cause a wide range of acute and chronic infections. A persistence model has been developed in which Chlamydia spp. do not complete their developmental cycle, have significantly reduced infectivity for new host cells, and exhibit abnormal inclusion and reticulate body morphology. This study was performed to compare the interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) induction and iron-limitation models of persistence for Chlamydia spp. to investigate the common and unique transcriptional pathways involved. METHODS A quantitative real time-polymerase chain reaction approach was used to compare the IFN-gamma induction and iron-limitation models of Chlamydia pneumoniae persistence at the transcriptional level by analyzing selected genes in each of 5 distinct, functionally relevant subcategories. RESULTS The models showed minimal evidence of a general transcriptional stress response in persistence, with only 1 of the 7 genes analyzed in the IFN-gamma induction model (htrA) and 4 of the genes in the iron-limitation model (htrA, clpB, clpP1, ahpC) showing increased mRNA levels. Both models showed similar responses in relation to the genes associated with lack of reticulate body to elementary body conversion (ctcB, lcrH1, and hctB levels were all unchanged or downregulated). The models also showed similar responses to the key cell wall/envelope genes, ompA, omcB, and crpA, exhibiting lower mRNA levels in both models. CONCLUSIONS These data show that several key transcriptional pathways (lack of late developmental cycle completion, key cell wall components) respond similarly between the models. However, other pathways appear to differ depending on the persistence-inducing mechanism. This result suggests that Chlamydia spp. have evolved more than 1 mechanism to respond to different persistence-inducing conditions, but ultimately the pathways probably converge through a common persistence regulon.