Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Three types of musical instruction: Effects on young Taiwanese EFL learners’ word decoding and rhyme production

This study compared effectiveness of song versus chant instruction against a combination of these on word decoding (word reading or sounding out words) and rhyme production among four groups of Taiwanese EFL fourth graders. Three intact classes were randomly assigned to receive one of three musical instruction types: song only, chant only, or combination of song and chant instruction, whereas a fourth (control) group received its regular instruction. The instructional period lasted for five weeks with eighty minutes of instruction per week. Researcher-developed sight word decoding and rhyme production tests rated each type of musical instruction. Decoding results for sight words and all words (sight words plus non-words) showed that: (a) three experimental groups (Song, Chant, S + C) not only made significant progress but also remarkably outperformed the Control Group on the decoding posttest; (b) the S + C Group significantly outperformed the Chant Group on decoding posttest; (c) non-significant differences emerged between the Chant Group and other experimental groups. Rhyme production posttest scores regarding real words and all words (real words plus non-words) indicated: (a) all groups significantly progressed in rhyme production; (b) three experimental groups significantly excelled the Control Group; (c) non-significant differences arose among experimental groups. ANOVA results of non-word scores on both decoding and rhyme production posttests revealed nonsignificant differences among four groups. Ranking of four groups’ gain scores (posttest minus pretest) across decoding and rhyme production is consistent: S + C > Song > Chant > Control. Four educational implications and several suggestions for future research are provided based on results of this study. Feng-lan Kuo, Yihsiang Kuo, Yen-hsin Chen and Robert Pierce 256
An Evaluation of MTBE Impacts to California Groundwater Resources

In particular we wish to thank Dave Rice of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for his creative approach of treating LUFT sites as a statistical population. This work borrows liberally from this philosophy and we are grateful that the path was previously traveled. We also wish to thank Dorothy Bishop and all of the other members of the Environmental Restoration Division at Livermore for their support. In addition we wish to thank James Giannopoulis, Rick Rempel and Heidi Temko of the Underground Tank Program of the California State Water Resources Control Board for their continuous assistance and ideas throughout all stages of this project. A number of individuals in the petroleum industry contributed their time, experience and, most importantly, their data without which this work would have been impossible. We wish to thank these individuals for providing requested information freely in the interest of an objective assessment of MTBE impacts. Finally, we wish to thank Brendan P. Dooher whose daily input and extensive knowledge of LUFT site regulation, assessment and remediation was invaluable to this investigation. i EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) is a fuel oxygenate added to gasoline to reduce air pollution and increase octane ratings. Widespread use of this chemical has resulted in frequent detections of MTBE in samples of shallow groundwater from urban areas throughout the United States (Squillace et al., 1996). Limited contamination of drinking water has also occurred and is of concern because MTBE is considered a possible human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) and has a disagreeable taste and odor at extremely low concentrations. Our work focuses on the inadvertent release of this compound to the environment from leaking underground fuel tanks (LUFTs) with the goal of providing information on the potential for MTBE to impact California's groundwater resources. Because data collected for regulatory compliance from any one LUFT site are limited, recent studies evaluating the behavior of fuel hydrocarbon releases from a population perspective have proved valuable in evaluating contaminant behavior (Rice et al. Therefore, we have focused our efforts on analysis of data from populations of LUFT sites to elucidate general trends in the behavior of MTBE. Monitoring for this compound at California sites has been required only since July 1996. As a result, sufficient MTBE data for even the simplest statistical and time-series analyses are just now becoming available. Results presented here are the initial findings of …
Circular interpretation of bijective transformations in lossless watermarking for media asset management

The need for reversible or lossless watermarking methods has been highlighted in the literature to associate subliminal management information with losslessly processed media and to enable their authentication. The paper first analyzes the specificity and the application scope of lossless watermarking methods. It explains why early attempts to achieve reversibility are not satisfactory. They are restricted to well-chosen images, strictly lossless context and/or suffer from annoying visual artifacts. Circular interpretation of bijective transformations is proposed to implement a method that fulfills all quality and functionality requirements of lossless watermarking. Results of several bench tests demonstrate the validity of the approach.
Differential privacy in new settings

Differential privacy is a recent notion of privacy tailored to the problem of statistical disclosure control: how to release statistical information about a set of people without compromising the the privacy of any individual [7]. We describe new work [10, 9] that extends differentially private data analysis beyond the traditional setting of a trusted curator operating, in perfect isolation, on a static dataset. We ask • How can we guarantee differential privacy, even against an adversary that has access to the algorithm's internal state, eg, by subpoena? An algorithm that achives this is said to be pan-private. • How can we guarantee differential privacy when the algorithm must continually produce outputs? We call this differential privacy under continual observation. We also consider these requirements in conjunction.
Exploring the effects of Sentence Simplification on Hindi to English Machine Translation System

Even though, a lot of research has already been done on Machine Translation, translating complex sentences has been a stumbling block in the process. To improve the performance of machine translation on complex sentences, simplifying the sentences becomes imperative. In this paper, we present a rule based approach to address this problem by simplifying complex sentences in Hindi into multiple simple sentences. The sentence is split using clause boundaries and dependency parsing which identifies different arguments of verbs, thus changing the grammatical structure in a way that the semantic information of the original sentence stay preserved.
Aggregate Representations of Aggregate Games 1

An aggregate game is a normal-form game with the property that each player’s payoff is a function only of his own strategy and an aggregate function of the strategy profile of all players. Aggregate games possess a set of purely algebraic properties that can often provide simple characterizations of equilibrium aggregates without first requiring that one solves for the equilibrium strategy profile. The defining nature of payoffs in an aggregate game allows one to project the n-player strategic analysis of a normal form game onto a lower-dimension aggregate-strategy space, thereby converting an n-player game to a simpler object – a self-generating single-person maximization program. We apply these techniques to a number of economic settings including competition in supply functions and multi-principal common agency games with nonlinear transfer functions.
Waiting for Work: An Ethnography of a Day Labor Agency

This paper addresses the shifting temporal dimensions of work brought about by the flexibilization of employment. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a corporate day labor agency located in a West Coast city, I examine the way in which uncertainty is both produced and experienced in an effort to analyze the mode of domination captured by Bourdieu’s concept of “flexploitation. ” Specifically, I examine the organization of the hiring and job allocation process, workers’ experience and understanding of this temporally uncertain employment relationship, and the way in which management manipulates this temporal experience as a technique of labor control. I argue that the enforced waiting period that is endemic in this industry is not only a strategy of externalizing risk (through “time funneling”) but of manufacturing a reserve army of labor that is highly disciplined.
A Survey on Mobility and Mobility-Aware MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks nodes can be static or mobile, depending on the application requirements. Dealing with mobility can pose some formidable challenges in protocol design, particularly, at the link layer. These difficulties require mobility adaptation algorithms to localize mobile nodes and predict the quality of link that can be established with them. This paper surveys the current state-of-art in handling mobility. It first describes existing mobility models and patterns; and analyzes the challenges caused by mobility at the link layer. It then provides a comparative study of several mobility-aware MAC protocols.
A longitudinal analysis of the impact of workplace empowerment on work satisfaction

A longitudinal predictive design was used to test a model linking changes in structural and psychological empowerment to changes in job satisfaction. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed a good fit of the data from 185 randomly selected staff nurses to the hypothesized model. Changes in perceived structural empowerment had direct effects on changes in psychological empowerment and job satisfaction. Changes in psychological empowerment did not explain additional variance in job satisfaction beyond that explained by structural empowerment. The results suggest that fostering environments that enhance perceptions of empowerment can have enduring positive effects on employees. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Emotion Regulation and Memory: The Cognitive Costs of Keeping One's Cool

An emerging literature has begun to document the affective consequences of emotion regulation. Little is known, however, about whether emotion regulation also has cognitive consequences. A process model of emotion suggests that expressive suppression should reduce memory for emotional events but that reappraisal should not. Three studies tested this hypothesis. Study 1 experimentally manipulated expressive suppression during film viewing, showing that suppression led to poorer memory for the details of the film. Study 2 manipulated expressive suppression and reappraisal during slide viewing. Only suppression led to pooler slide memory. Study 3 examined individual differences in typical expressive suppression and reappraisal and found that suppression was associated with poorer self-reported and objective memory but that reappraisal was not. Together, these studies suggest that the cognitive costs of keeping one's cool may vary according to how this is done.
IPHAS extinction distances to planetary nebulae

Aims. The determination of reliable distances to planetary nebulae (PNe) is a major difficulty in the study of this class of objects in the Galaxy. The availability of new photometric surveys such as IPHAS (the INT/WFC photometric Hα survey of the northern Galactic plane) covering large portions of the sky provide an opportunity to apply the so-called extinction method to determine the distances of a large number of objects. Methods. The technique is applied to a sample of 137 PNe located between −5 and 5 degrees in Galactic latitude, and between 29.52 and 215.49 degrees in longitude. The characteristics of the distance-extinction method and the main sources of errors are carefully discussed. Results. The data on the extinction of the PNe available in the literature, complemented by new observations, allow us to determine extinction distances for 70 PNe. A comparison with statistical distance scales from different authors is presented.
Work and Religion: Artificial Dichotomy or Competing Interests?

(cid:3) Abstract — Prior research has examined the relationship between religiosity, religious involvement, and involvement in secular, civic organizations. However, research has not examined the influence of religious involvement on secular, non -civic organizations (i.e. work organizations). This study examines the link between religiosity, religious involvement, and the three-component model of organizational commitment. More specifically, the author hypothesizes that individuals high in religiosity (and religious involvement) will have lower affective, continuance, and normative commitment than less religious (or non-religious) individuals. In addition, it is hypothesized that this relationship is moderated by a third factor: organizational spirituality. Further, the author hypothesizes that for organizations that are “spiritual” the negative relationship between religiosity and job commitment will be weakened or even negated.
Consumer Participation in Co-creation: An Enlightening Model of Causes and Effects Based on Ethical Values and Transcendent Motives

In the current highly interconnected modern world, the role of consumers has changed substantially due to their active collaboration with companies in product and process innovation. Specifically, consumer participation has become key to the development of successful products and services, as companies have come to rely more and more on consumers' opinion as a source of innovative ideas and brand value. However, whereas existing research has focused on identifying the different elements involved in consumers' co-creation, there is still the need to comprehend better this complex mechanism by integrating distinct dimensional insights. With an integrative review of research into three important perspectives, one nurturing from the Service-Dominant logic, another one based on the information and communication technologies (ICTs) platforms, and (the ethical values-driven) Marketing 3.0 paradigm, this article proposes a conceptual framework in which consumers' ethical values and transcendent motivations play an important role in encouraging their engagement in co-creation activities. In this connection, and with consumers increasingly embracing the need to fulfill a social and ethical function in society, the co-creation process is here comprehended as a means to emphasize the social and moral aspects of co-creation. This article also identifies the important, supportive role of the Marketing 3.0 paradigm and Web 3.0 tools to initiate the co-creation process, as well as the important valuable benefits attained by both companies and consumers after consumers engage in this process. Importantly, these benefits are highlighted to increase when ethical products are the object of these co-creation activities. All these insights have notable implications for both research and managerial practice.
Aortic Aneurysm Screening in a High-Risk Population: A Non-Contrast Computed Tomography Study in Korean Males with Hypertension

Background and Objectives Screening strategies for aortic aneurysm (AA) according to risk factors and ethnicity are controversial. This study explored the prevalence of AA and determined whether screening is necessary in a population of multiple risk factors. Subjects and Methods From June, 2012 to April, 2013, 542 consecutive elderly (≥65 years) male hypertensive patients without a history of AA were prospectively enrolled. After excluding 15 patients (2.8%) with aortic valve surgery, 30 patients (5.5%) with suboptimal computed tomography (CT) images, the remaining 496 patients (age 73±5 years) comprised the study population. Maximal diameters of the thoracic and abdominal aorta were measured using non-contrast CT. Results The prevalence of thoracic AA (TAA, diameter ≥40 mm) and abdominal AA (AAA, diameter ≥30 mm) was 36.5% (181/496) and 6.0% (30/496), respectively. In the multivariate logistic regression analysis, determinants for TAA were age {odds ratio (OR) 1.059, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.018-1.101, p=0.005}, dyslipidemia (OR 0.621, 95% CI 0.418-0.923, p=0.018), body surface area (OR 11.92, 95% CI 2.787-50.97, p=0.001), diastolic blood pressure (OR 1.029, 95% CI 1.009-1.049, p=0.004) and AAA (OR 3.070, 95% CI 1.398-6.754, p=0.005). In contrast, AAA was independently associated with dysplipidemia (OR 2.792, 95% CI 1.091-7.143, p=0.032), current/past smokerfs (OR 4.074, 95% CI 1.160-14.31, p=0.028), and TAA (OR 3.367, 95% CI 1.550-7.313, p=0.002). Conclusion The prevalence of AA was significant and TAA was more prevalent than AAA in elderly Korean males with hypertension. Future research should establish distinct screening strategies for TAA and AAA according to risk factors and ethnicity.
1420 MHz Continuum Absorption toward Extragalactic Sources in the Galactic Plane

We present a 21 cm emission-absorption study toward extragalactic sources in the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey (CGPS). We have analyzed H I spectra toward 437 sources with Sν ≥ 150 mJy, giving us a source density of 0.6 sources per square degree at arcminute resolution. We present the results of a first analysis of the H I temperatures, densities, and feature statistics. Particular emphasis is placed on five features with observed spin temperatures below 40 K. We find most spin temperatures in the range 40-300 K. A simple H I two-component model constrains the bulk of the cold component to temperatures (Tc) between 40 and 100 K. We find that Tc peaks in the Perseus arm region, and clearly drops off with Galactocentric radius R beyond that. The H I density follows this trend, ranging from a local value of 0.4 cm-3 to less than 0.1 cm-3 at R = 20 kpc. We find that H I emission alone on average traces about 75% of the total H I column density, as compared to the total inferred by the emission and absorption. Comparing the neutral hydrogen absorption to CO emission, no correlation is found in general, but all strong CO emission is accompanied by a visible H I spectral feature. Finally, the number of spectral H I absorption features per kiloparsec drops off exponentially with increasing R.
Near Work Related Behaviors Associated with Myopic Shifts among Primary School Students in the Jiading District of Shanghai: A School-Based One-Year Cohort Study

Purpose To investigate the characteristics of various near work related behaviors among primary students and their associations with changes in myopia related ocular biometric parameters during one-year of follow up. Methods A school-based sample of 4,814 primary 1st to 4th grade students aged 6–10 years old were selected by cluster randomization based on probability proportion to size in 2013. At baseline, students together with their parents filled in a self-administered questionnaire on 9 aspects of near work related behaviors and some important covariants of myopia. A comprehensive set of eye examinations including axial length (AL) and cycloplegic refraction was conducted both at baseline and one year later. Results With the grade level increase, students did increasingly better at finding various ways to have an eye break, but they were increasingly likely to continuously do long-time near work without an eye break. Keeping a reasonable eye distance and correct hand posture for reading, writing, or watching TV became worse for the first time before grade 2, but then became better at grade 3. In contrast, selecting appropriate lighting environments or situations and keeping a balanced diet became better for the first time before grade 2, but then became worse at grade 3. At one-year follow up, the mean AL increased by 0.32 ± 0.35 mm, the ratio of AL divided by the mean corneal radius of curvature (AL/CR ratio) increased by 0.032 ± 0.054, the myopic spherical equivalent (SE) increased by -0.51 ± 0.51 diopters and the incidence of myopia was 16.0% (237/1,477). After controlling for the confounding effects of parental myopia, student’s age, gender, height, daily near work time, daily outdoor activity time and all of the other near work related behaviors, keeping a reasonable distance when reading, writing and watching TV was associated with elongation of the AL [standard coefficient beta = -0.062, P = 0.004], a change in SE [beta = -0.072, P = 0.020] and incident myopia [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) = 0.90, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.84–0.96]. Selecting an environment with adequate light for visual comfort to read and write was related to elongation of the AL [beta = -0.039, P = 0.034] and increase of AL/CR ratio [beta = -0.030, P = 0.048]. Also, not continuing to do near work for more than 30–40 minutes without an eye break was related to increase of the AL/CR ratio [beta = -0.028, P = 0.044] and a change in SE [beta = -0.064, P = 0.023]. Conclusion Various near work related behaviors changed according to grade level in primary school students. Independent of hereditary factors, daily near work load and outdoor activity, near work related behaviors such as keeping an inappropriate eye distance for near work, selecting inadequate lighting environments, and continuing to do near work without an eye break were risk factors for myopic shifts.
What can Australia learn from the Europeans about public participation? Article 6 of the Aarhus Convention and environmental impact statements

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention) is the only international convention that is exclusively devoted to public participation in environmental matters. Although it is European in origin, much of the detail of the Convention draws upon national environmental legislation, including aspects of the Australian environmental legal system. This article compares the public review provisions relating to environmental impact statements in Australia with Art 6 of the Convention governing "Public Participation in Decisions on Specific Activities". The article finds that much of the Australian laws with some exceptions satisfy the minimum requirements of public participation in Art 6.
Empirical Generalizations About Market Evolution and Stationarity

We present empirical generalizations about conditions under which marketing variables evolve or remain stationary. We first define evolution statistically and make the case why it is an important concept for increasing our understanding of long-run marketing effectiveness. We then briefly review ways in which evolution can be tested empirically from readily available data. We present a database of over 400 prior analyses and catalog the relative incidence of stationarity versus evolution in market performance and marketing spending. We find that evolution is the dominant characteristic for sales and marketing-mix spending, but that stationarity is the dominant characteristic for market share. Thus we find strong support for the conjecture that many markets are in a long-run equilibrium where the relative position of the players is only temporarily disturbed by their respective marketing activities. We assess the impact of a number of covariates on the likelihood of finding stationarity/evolution in sales and market share, and discuss the managerial implications of our findings.