Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of a robotic storyteller's moody gestures on storytelling perception

A parameterized behavior model was developed for robots to show mood during task execution. In this study, we applied the model to the coverbal gestures of a robotic storyteller. This study investigated whether parameterized mood expression can 1) show mood that is changing over time; 2) reinforce affect communication when other modalities exist; 3) influence the mood induction process of the story; and 4) improve listeners' ratings of the storytelling experience and the robotic storyteller. We modulated the gestures to show either a congruent or an incongruent mood with the story mood. Results show that it is feasible to use parameterized coverbal gestures to express mood evolving over time and that participants can distinguish whether the mood expressed by the gestures is congruent or incongruent with the story mood. In terms of effects on participants we found that mood-modulated gestures (a) influence participants' mood, and (b) influence participants' ratings of the storytelling experience and the robotic storyteller.
Policy Coherence for Development in the EU Council: Strategies for the Way Forward. CEPS Paperbacks. July 2006

In recognition of the fact that EU policies in non-development areas, such as trade, energy and migration, can also profoundly affect the poor in developing countries, the EU has affirmed ‘Policy Coherence for Development’ as an important principle for achieving more effective development cooperation. This new CEPS study analyses whether policy-making processes in the EU Council provide sufficient scope for development inputs to be made in 12 key policy areas: trade, environment, climate change, security, agriculture, fisheries, social dimension of globalisation, employment and decent work, migration, research and innovation, information society, transport and energy. The study also includes coverage of the policy-making processes in the European Commission as it initiates and defends most of the policies being discussed in the EU Council. Its findings point to the highly segregated character of EU policy-making and provide interesting insights into the internal challenges the EU will need to address in order to fulfil its goal of achieving greater coherency in its (external) policy-making. To strengthen the potential for PCD the study suggests six proposals for structural reform as well as a set of specific recommendations.
The Modernization and Improvement of Government and Public Services: Deepening Democracy or Élite Governance? New Political Management Arrangements in Local Government

This article discusses the introduction of new political management arrangements in local government. It places the Government's current proposals for change in the context of recent research and debate about the strengths and weaknesses of local democracy, and then draws on recent research evidence, which suggests that current reforms may have a contradictory impact. The Government’s proposals are likely to bring tighter and more strategic political leadership, more effective partnership with other local organizations and, if certain steps are taken, better ‘scrutiny’ of policy and performance. However, there are serious concerns about democratic accountability and transparency, community involvement and the implications for many councillors, party groups and a healthy local party politics. It is concluded that more thorough evaluation of the impact of the changes is desirable.
Duality, a-invariants and canonical modules of rings arising from linear optimization problems

The aim of this paper is to study integer rounding properties of various systems of linear inequalities to gain insight about the algebraic properties of Rees algebras of monomial ideals and monomial subrings. We study the normality and Gorenstein property—as well as the canonical module and the a-invariant—of Rees algebras and subrings arising from systems with the integer rounding property. We relate the algebraic properties of Rees algebras and monomial subrings with integer rounding properties and present a duality theorem.
Information retrieval using word senses: root sense tagging approach

Information retrieval using word senses is emerging as a good research challenge on semantic information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a new method using word senses in information retrieval: root sense tagging method. This method assigns coarse-grained word senses defined in WordNet to query terms and document terms by unsupervised way using co-occurrence information constructed automatically. Our sense tagger is crude, but performs consistent disambiguation by considering only the single most informative word as evidence to disambiguate the target word. We also allow multiple-sense assignment to alleviate the problem caused by incorrect disambiguation.Experimental results on a large-scale TREC collection show that our approach to improve retrieval effectiveness is successful, while most of the previous work failed to improve performances even on small text collection. Our method also shows promising results when is combined with pseudo relevance feedback and state-of-the-art retrieval function such as BM25.
Associations between classroom CO2 concentrations and student attendance in Washington and Idaho.

UNLABELLED Student attendance in American public schools is a critical factor in securing limited operational funding. Student and teacher attendance influence academic performance. Limited data exist on indoor air and environmental quality (IEQ) in schools, and how IEQ affects attendance, health, or performance. This study explored the association of student absence with measures of indoor minus outdoor carbon dioxide concentration (dCO(2)). Absence and dCO(2) data were collected from 409 traditional and 25 portable classrooms from 22 schools located in six school districts in the states of Washington and Idaho. Study classrooms had individual heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, except two classrooms without mechanical ventilation. Classroom attributes, student attendance and school-level ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES) were included in multivariate modeling. Forty-five percent of classrooms studied had short-term indoor CO(2) concentrations above 1000 p.p.m. A 1000 p.p.m. increase in dCO(2) was associated (P < 0.05) with a 0.5-0.9% decrease in annual average daily attendance (ADA), corresponding to a relative 10-20% increase in student absence. Annual ADA was 2% higher (P < 0.0001) in traditional than in portable classrooms. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS This study provides motivation for larger school studies to investigate associations of student attendance, and occupant health and student performance, with longer term indoor minus outdoor CO(2) concentrations and more accurately measured ventilation rates. If our findings are confirmed, improving classroom ventilation should be considered a practical means of reducing student absence. Adequate or enhanced ventilation may be achieved, for example, with educational training programs for teachers and facilities staff on ventilation system operation and maintenance. Also, technological interventions such as improved automated control systems could provide continuous ventilation during occupied times, regardless of occupant thermal comfort demands.
The Pragmatic Curriculum: Teacher Reskilling as Cultural Politics

It is said that teachers can, and do, use curricula different from the standardized versions presented to them. The author argues that teachers are more than deskilled technicians and, using excerpts from three case studies, demonstrates that teachers apply cultural politics to create pragmatic curricula and to reskill themselves. The application of cultural politics alleviates oppressive, alienating, and subordinating relations in schools. It is suggested that, to transform themselves from deskilled technicians to reskilled practitioners, teachers question seriously the socio-political climate in which curricula fonction.
The burden of influenza-like illness in the US workforce.

BACKGROUND The disease burden of influenza-like illnesses (ILIs) on the working population has been documented in the literature, but statistical evidence of ILI-related work absenteeism in the USA is limited due to data availability. AIMS To assess work absenteeism due to ILIs among privately insured employees in the USA in 2007-8 and 2008-9. METHODS We used the 2007-9 MarketScan® research databases. Full-time employees aged 18-64 years, with the ability to incur work absence and continuously enrolled in the same insurance plan during each season were included. We identified ILI episodes using ICD-9 codes for influenza and pneumonia (480-487). For each season, we calculated the mean work-loss hours per ILI episode and the proportion of employees who had at least one ILI episode. Work-loss hours and ILI rates were examined by subgroups. RESULTS The mean number of work hours lost per ILI episode was 23.6 in 2007-8 and 23.9 in 2008-9. The proportion of employees with at least one ILI was 1.7% in 2007-8 and 1.2% in 2008-9. In both seasons, the proportion with ILI was higher among older (2.1 and 1.5%) and hourly workers (2.0 and 1.3%), workers in the southern region (1.9 and 1.3%) and those in oil, gas or mining industries (1.9 and 1.4%). CONCLUSIONS Our results indicate that the disease burden associated with ILIs in the working population is not trivial and deserves attention from policymakers and health care professionals to design effective strategies to reduce this burden.
Running head : RELIANCE ON FEELINGS AND TIME PERSPECTIVES Differential Reliance on Feelings in the Present vs . the Future ( or Past ) : Affect as a Decision Making System of the Present ( Abridged version )

We posit that compared to the reason-based system, the affective system of judgment and decision making is relatively more engaged in the present. Specifically, we hypothesize that, even if their accessibility is held constant, affective feelings are weighted more heavily in consumer judgments and decisions set in the present than in equivalent judgments and decisions set in the future or in the past. Consistent with this proposition, results from four experiments show that (a) compared to a more distant future, a nearer future increases consumers’ relative preferences for options that are superior in terms of integral affect over options that are cognitively superior, (b) compared to a more distant future, a nearer future also increases the influence of incidental moods on consumers’ evaluations and willingness-to-pay; (c) consumers find the reliance on feelings more “natural” in decisions set in a near future than in decisions set in a more distant future; and (d) compared to a more distant past, a recent past increases the influence of incidental moods on consumers’ evaluations and willingness-to-pay. These results are consistent with recent theorizing suggesting that affect is inherently a decision-making system of the present (Pham 2004, 2007).
HIV/AIDS and lipodystrophy: Implications for clinical management in resource-limited settings

Lipodystrophy is a term used to describe a metabolic complication of fat loss, fat gain, or a combination of fat loss and gain, which is associated with some antiretroviral (ARV) therapies given to HIV‐infected individuals. There is limited research on lipodystrophy in low‐ and middle‐income countries, despite accounting for more than 95% of the burden of HIV/AIDS. The objective of this review was to evaluate the prevalence, pathogenesis and prognosis of HIV‐related lipoatrophy, lipohypertrophy and mixed syndrome, to inform clinical management in resource‐limited settings.
The heterotic string, the tangent bundle and derived categories

We consider the compactification of the E8xE8 heterotic string on a K3 surface with "the spin connection embedded in the gauge group" and the dual picture in the type IIA string (or F-theory) on a Calabi-Yau threefold X. It turns out that the same X arises also as dual to a heterotic compactification on 24 point-like instantons. X is necessarily singular, and we see that this singularity allows the Ramond-Ramond moduli on X to split into distinct components, one containing the (dual of the heterotic) tangent bundle, while another component contains the point-like instantons. As a practical application we derive the result that a heterotic string compactified on the tangent bundle of a K3 with ADE singularities acquires nonperturbatively enhanced gauge symmetry in just the same fashion as a type IIA string on a singular K3 surface. On a more philosophical level we discuss how it appears to be natural to say that the heterotic string is compactified using an object in the derived category of coherent sheaves. This is necessary to properly extend the notion of T-duality to the heterotic string on a K3 surface.
PARALLELIZATION OF THE PENELOPE MONTE CARLO PARTICLE TRANSPORT SIMULATION PACKAGE

We have parallelized the PENELOPE Monte Carlo particle transport simulation package [1]. The motivation is to increase efficiency of Monte Carlo simulations for medical applications. Our parallelization is based on the standard MPI message passing interface. The parallel code is especially suitable for a distributed memory environment, and has been run on up to 256 processors on the Indiana University IBM Teraflop SP. Parallel speedup is nearly linear. Fortran 90 features have been incorporated in the parallelized PENELOPE code. The code utilizes the parallel random number generator (p.r.n.g.) developed by the MILC lattice-QCD collaboration [2]. We have tested the parallelized PENELOPE in an application of calibration dosimetry of the Leksell Gamma Knife R [3]. The parallel results of the test correspond with the serial results, which in turn have been empirically verified in [3]. The parallelized PENELOPE Fortran 90 code, along with a simple example main program, will be available from the Radiation Safety Information Computational Center (RSICC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory [4] upon completion of benchmark testing.
The gap between medical and monetary choices under risk persists in decisions for others

Decisions under risk in the medical domain have been found to systematically diverge from decisions in the monetary domain. When making choices between monetary options, people commonly rely on a decision strategy that trades off outcomes with their probabilities; when making choices between medical options, people tend to neglect probability information. In two experimental studies, we tested to what extent differences between medical and monetary decisions also emerge when the decision outcomes affect another person. Using a risky choice paradigm for medical and monetary decisions, we compared hypothetical decisions that participants made for themselves to decisions for a socially distant other (Study 1) and to recommendations as financial advisor or doctor (Study 2). In addition, we examined people's information search in a condition in which information about payoff distributions had to be learned from experiential sampling. Formal modeling and analyses of search behavior revealed a similarly pronounced gap between medical and monetary decisions in decisions for others as in decisions for oneself. Our results suggest that when making medical decisions, people try to avoid the worst outcome while neglecting its probability — even when the outcomes affect others rather than themselves. the best of our knowledge, there are no studies investigating decision processes in risky choices made for others in the medical and monetary domains, but we can derive three possible scenarios from the existing literature: (a) People make more defensive decisions for others and deviate more strongly from rational norms, independent of choice domain (main effect of decision perspective), (b) people make more rational decisions for others, independent of choice domain (main effect of decision perspective), and (c) the gap between medical and monetary choices decreases in decisions for others (inter-action between decision perspective and choice domain). We next describe these possible scenarios in more detail.
Auto-tuning 3-D FFT library for CUDA GPUs

Existing implementations of FFTs on GPUs are optimized for specific transform sizes like powers of two, and exhibit unstable and peaky performance i.e., do not perform as well in other sizes that appear in practice. Our new auto-tuning 3-D FFT on CUDA generates high performance CUDA kernels for FFTs of varying transform sizes, alleviating this problem. Although auto-tuning has been implemented on GPUs for dense kernels such as DGEMM and stencils, this is the first instance that has been applied comprehensively to bandwidth intensive and complex kernels such as 3-D FFTs. Bandwidth intensive optimizations such as selecting the number of threads and inserting padding to avoid bank conflicts on shared memory are systematically applied. Our resulting autotuner is fast and results in performance that essentially beats all 3-D FFT implementations on a single processor to date, and moreover exhibits stable performance irrespective of problem sizes or the underlying GPU hardware.
School Health Reform: Investigating the Role of Teachers.

Please note that this study was published before the implementation of Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which went into effect during the 2012-13 school year, and its provision for Smart Snacks Nutrition Standards for Competitive Food in Schools, implemented during the 2014-15 school year. As such, certain research may not be relevant today. ABSTRACT National and local polices have positioned schools to play an integral role in addressing the obesity epidemic by establishing preventive activities. Teachers are ideally suited to have a role in this process because teachers have direct and indirect impacts on student health outcomes. The purpose of this exploratory study was to assess the health status of teachers in a large urban school district and understand their beliefs and self-efficacy on the intersection of learning and health for the students they teach. This exploratory study assessed the self-reported health status of 83 teachers in a large, urban school district and investigated teachers' beliefs and self-efficacy on the intersection of learning and health. Results indicate that although teachers surveyed were not practicing daily habits that promote health, they believe it is important to teach health education in schools. The teachers responding to this survey did not feel prepared, empowered, or able to integrate health education into their current curricula. Information from this survey may assist in identifying strategies to actively involve teachers in promoting health so that students will have the opportunity to learn health information in the classroom and observe healthier behaviors modeled by their teachers.
LJMU Research Online

We examine the nature of the progenitor of the giant stellar stream in M31 using as constraints new radial velocity measurements of stream red giant stars (presented in the companion paper by Guhathakurta and coworkers) along with other M31 data sets available in the literature. We ﬁnd that the observations are best ﬁtted by orbits that are highly eccentric and close to edge-on, with apocenter to pericenter ratios on the order of 25–30 and with apocenters at or only slightly beyond the southern edge of the current data. Among these orbits we are able to ﬁnd a few that plausibly connect the stream with the northern spur or with the low surface brightness feature of high metallicity similar to that of the stream (originally reported by Ferguson and coworkers) to the east of M31’s center. In the latter case, if the connection is real, then the eastern debris should lie well in front of M31, near the apocenter of the orbit. Both the width of the debris and velocity dispersion measurements imply a rough lower limit on the mass of the progenitor of 10 8 M (cid:1) . We use this limit and our orbits to discuss which of M31’s satellites could be plausibly associated with the stream. In addition, we predict that the width of the stream should increase beyond the southern edge of the current data around the apocenter of the orbit and that the line-of-sight velocity dispersion should exhibit signiﬁcant variations along the stream.
Exploring Identity-Safety Cues and Allyship Among Black Women Students in STEM Environments

Black women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and report feeling unwelcome in STEM. A successful scientist exemplar or role model may signal to Black women they are valued in STEM environments. We investigated who acts as an identity-safety cue for Black women. In Study 1, Black women students who learned about a Black man or a Black woman professor in a hypothetical School of Science and Engineering reported greater anticipated belonging and trust, relative to those learning about a White man or a White woman professor. In Study 2, we recruited Black women STEM majors from a predominantly White institution and a women-only historically Black college. We examined how both groups identified role models in STEM and assessed how perceptions that role models were allies related to belonging in the institution and belonging in STEM. Across both educational environments, having Black women and Black men role models, and perceiving role models who lacked a common racial identity as allies, positively related to belonging in the institution. We encourage the use of Black exemplars and role models, as well as allies, in interventions geared toward increasing belonging among Black women in STEM. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ’s website at http://journals.sagepub. com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0361684319830926 and a podcast for instructors who want to use this article for teaching is available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub. com/page/pwq/suppl/index
Corporate governance and firm performance in listed companies in the United Arab Emirates

Corporate governance has received much attention in recent years and has been a growing topic for debate in the public domain in both developed and developing countries. This is mainly because of the many financial scandals and failures that have occurred in a number of countries. Good corporate governance is now considered crucial for regulating companies and enhancing their performance. However, the effects of corporate governance on firm performance may vary in developed and developing countries based on cultural, economic and social factors. Therefore, much of the current research now focuses on investigating corporate governance from the point of view of developing countries. The main objective of this research is to understand corporate governance and the effects of corporate governance on firm performance in a unique economic, political and social context such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and particularly the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
A STUDY OF FACTORS INFLUENCING THE SELECTION OF A HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION

The higher education landscape in Malaysia has gone through substantial changes. With improvements in the quality of education and better academic performance at the primary and secondary school level, the demand for tertiary education has increased many fold. The increased public demand for tertiary education and the government’s aspiration to position Malaysia as a regional centre of academic excellence have led to the higher education market becoming monopolistically competitive. The purpose of the research was to examine the expectations on higher education institutions among three groups of respondent i.e. prospective students, parents of prospective students and first year university students, and to identify the factors influencing their preferences in selecting a particular higher education institution.