Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Near-optimal algorithms for unique games

Unique games are constraint satisfaction problems that can be viewed as a generalization of Max-Cut to a larger domain size. The Unique Games Conjecture states that it is hard to distinguish between instances of unique games where almost all constraints are satisfiable and those where almost none are satisfiable. It has been shown to imply a number of inapproximability results for fundamental problems that seem difficult to obtain by more standard complexity assumptions. Thus, proving or refuting this conjecture is an important goal. We present significantly improved approximation algorithms for unique games. For instances with domain size k where the optimal solution satisfies 1-ε fraction of all constraints, our algorithms satisfy roughly k-ε/(2-ε) and 1- O(√εlog k) fraction of all constraints. Our algorithms are based on rounding a natural semidefinite programming relaxation for the problem and their performance almost matches the integrality gap of this relaxation. Our results are near optimal if the Unique Games Conjecture is true, i.e. any improvement (beyond low order terms) would refute the conjecture.
Analysis of multiple antenna systems with finite-rate feedback using high resolution quantization theory

This paper considers the development of a general framework for the analysis of transmit beamforming methods in multiple antenna systems with finite-rate feedback. Inspired by the results of classical high resolution quantization theory, the problem of a finite-rate quantized communication system is formulated as a general fixed-rate vector quantization problem with side information available at the encoder (or the quantizer) but unavailable at the decoder. The framework of the quantization problem is sufficiently general to include quantization schemes with general non-mean square distortion functions, and constrained source vectors. The result of the asymptotic distortion analysis of the proposed general quantization problem is presented, which extends the vector version of Bennett's integral. Specifically, tight lower and upper bounds on the average asymptotic distortion are proposed. The proposed general methodology provides a powerful analytical tool to study a wide range of finite-rate feedback systems. To illustrate the utility of the framework, the analysis of a finite-rate feedback MISO beamforming system over i.i. d. Rayleigh flat fading channels is derived. Numerical and simulation results are presented to further confirm the accuracy of the analytical results.
Beziehungserfahrungen und Partnerschaftsverläufe vor der Heirat. Eine empirische Analyse von Angehörigen der Eheschließungskohorte 1999-2005

Zusammenfassung Im Zuge des Wandels der Familie haben sich auch die Partnerschaftsbiografien bis zur Heirat verandert. Eheschliesende bringen, so lasst sich mit einiger empirischer und theoretischer Evidenz feststellen, mehr Beziehungserfahrungen in die Ehe ein und der Verlauf der Partnerschaft mit dem spateren Ehepartner ist heute starker individualisiert und folgt weniger traditionellen Mustern als noch vor einigen Jahrzehnten. Welche Beziehungserfahrungen vorliegen und welche biografischen Ubergange den Partnerschaftsverlauf mit dem spateren Ehepartner bis zur Heirat kennzeichnen, daruber gibt es jedoch nur einen wenig entwickelten Forschungsstand. Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, mit den Daten der Mainzer „Value of Marriage“-Studie, die Beziehungsbiografien und Partnerschaftsverlaufe von Angehorigen der Eheschliesungskohorte 1999-2005 zu analysieren und wesentliche Einflussfaktoren herauszuarbeiten. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Beziehungserfahrungen vor der Ehe zugenommen haben und die Partnerschaftsverlaufe vor der Heirat bei allen Individualisierungstendenzen viele Regelmasigkeiten aufweisen. Schlagworte: Beziehungsbiografie, Heirat, Kohabitation, Verlobung, Partnerschaftsverlauf ----- Experiences with relationships and the course of the premarital partnership. An empirical analysis of members of the 1999-2005 marriage cohort in Germany Abstract With the change of the family also couple’s careers before marriage have changed. When people marry, so we can say with some empirical and theoretical evidence, they are more experienced with living in partnerships. Moreover it is discoverable that the couple’s career with the spouse-to-be is much more individualised and it is following much less traditional patterns than it did a few decades ago. There is, however, little research regarding which experiences with partnerships people have in general and which biographical transitions are characteristic for the couple’s career with the spouse-to-be. The aim of this article is to analyse the partnership biographies and couple’s career of the marriage cohorts 1999 to 2005 and to identify major factors with data of the Mainz “Value of Marriage” study. The results show that the experience with partnerships in general before marriage has increased and that couple’s careers before marriage show much regularity, despite all tendencies of individualisation. Keywords: biography of relationships, marriage, cohabitation, affiance, course of premarital partnership
Work Sample Exams and Gender Adverse Impact Potential: The Influence of Self-Concept, Social Skills, and Written Skills

We clarify the existing literature on gender differences in work sample exams by disentangling such differences on work sample exams from other predictors (e.g., situational judgment tests). In fact, we note that there are only two articles specifically related to gender differences in work sample exams. Based on theory and literature from social psychology, neuropsychology, and applied psychology, we propose that the three constructs of self-concept, social skills, and writing skills are likely to influence work sample gender differences. We tested our hypotheses on two samples of managers. We found in one instance that males scored higher on a technical exercise, but there was stronger support for females, on average, scoring higher on exercises that involved social skills and on exercises that involved writing skills. Work samples that targeted a broad array of knowledge, skills, and abilities were associated with higher overall scores for females (ds of −.37 and −.34) and, thus, were unlikely to be associated with gender-based adverse impact against females.
Keynote address by Dr Astrid N. Heiberg, President of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

At the heart of the Red Cross and Crescent lies humanity. Humanity as a principle of preventing and alleviating human suffering, but also humanity as the power of the human spirit — such as in our more than 100 million volunteers keeping hope alive throughout the world. "Keep hope alive! " was the motto of the 26th International Conference in 1995, which I had the honour to chair. Hope has been kept alive all through this brutal and devastating century. Through world wars, cold war, ethnic wars. Hope was kept alive in the muddied fields of Central America last year, in the flooded areas of China and Bangladesh, in the rubble in Turkey and Taipei, in the refugee camps in the Balkans, in the mine-riddled lands in Angola. And if hope has survived this century, this age of extremes, then I believe we will keep hope alive for the next century as well. But to do so calls for commitment — our common humanitarian commitment.
First Principles Prediction of the Propagation Rate Coefficients of Acrylic and Vinyl Esters: Are We There Yet?

High-level ab initio molecular orbital theory calculations have been used to calculate the rate coefficients and Arrhenius parameters for dimer models of the propagation steps for the free-radical homopolymerization of methyl acrylate and vinyl acetate at 298.15 K. Gas-phase Arrhenius parameters, as calculated under the hindered rotor model, showed large deviations from the corresponding solution-phase experimental data, because the stabilizing effect of hydrogen bonding in the transition structures of these reactions is much less significant in solution compared with the gas phase. This also leads to qualitative differences in the preferred transition state conformations in the respective phases, and it is therefore necessary to base all calculations (including the conformational analysis) on the solution-phase free energies. We find that chemically accurate values can be obtained via a thermodynamic cycle in which accurate G3(MP2)-RAD calculations in the gas phase are corrected to the solution phase usi.
Potential Output , the Output Gap , and the Labor Wedge

We estimate a monetary business cycle model on post-war U.S. data. We first show that an i.i. d. shock to the labor market is better interpreted as measurement error, while a persistent labor market shock is the main driver of hours. We then study the behavior of the potential level of output and the output gap, and show that the estimated gap is very sensitive to the structural interpretation of the persistent labor market shock: two observationally equivalent interpretations of the model generate very different behavior of the output gap, and therefore have very different implications for the welfare costs of business cycles and the design of optimal monetary policy. Finally, we demonstrate that the dynamics of the output gap are closely related to the dynamics of hours and the “labor wedge,” that is, the wedge between consumers’ marginal rate of substitution between leisure and consumption and firms’ marginal product of labor. We conclude that the interpretation of labor market fluctuations is crucial when using models in this class for welfare analysis or to design optimal monetary policy.
Women's opinions and the implications of first‐ versus second‐trimester screening for fetal Down's syndrome

Two groups of pregnant women were questioned regarding their opinions on serum screening for Down's syndrome in the first trimester of pregnancy. One group comprised 83 women attending our antenatal clinic who were questioned at the time of the existing second‐trimester screening test. Seventy‐six per cent of those who participated in the second‐trimester screening programme would have preferred the test to have been in the first trimester, mainly because of the easier termination of pregnancy and/or the earlier reassurance provided. The remaining 24 per cent could see no advantage in the earlier time frame. Of the 49 women who had declined second‐trimester screening, only two would have participated in screening had it been in the first trimester. The other group comprised those women attending our antenatal diagnosis clinic who were considering chorionic villus sampling (CVS). Forty‐four per cent of these women would have allowed serum screening in the first trimester to influence their decision as to whether to undergo definitive prenatal diagnostic testing. In general, those women who made use of second‐trimester serum screening would also do so in the first trimester. Those who declined the existing screening programme would also decline first‐trimester screening. Many women currently deciding to undergo CVS would allow a first‐trimester screening test to influence their decision. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Do fights prohibit helping?: The influence of task interdependence and conflict norms on helping behavior during task conflict

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of group conflict norms and task interdependence on individuals' willingness to help others under conditions of task conflict to better understand how group characteristics influence individual helping behavior.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 81 university students participate in a scenario study. The scenario has a 2 (task interdependence: high vs low) ×2 (group conflict norm: open vs avoiding) design.Findings – The results suggest that in groups characterized with open conflict norms and high‐task interdependence members are less willing to help than members in groups with avoiding conflict norms and high‐task interdependence.Research limitations/implications – This research implies that helping behavior in high‐task interdependent workgroups is highest when groups have an avoiding conflict norm. Limitations include amongst others discussing the explicit request for help coming from the group used in this study and the external valid.
Building Environmentalism: The Founding of Environmental Movement Organizations in the United States, 1900–2000

Between the 19th and the mid-20th century, the environmental movement transformed American culture, forcing a rethinking of the “Manifest Destiny” ideology that had long dominated political thinking toward an understanding of the need to protect and restore the balance between humans and nature. In 1900, there were only a few environmental movement organizations (EMOs), but by 2000, there were over 6,000 national and regional EMOs and over 20,000 local EMOs. What drove this phenomenal growth of EMOs? We examine a 100-year time series of EMO founding, showing that, in addition to the “legitimation-and-competition” effects of organizational density, EMO founding is facilitated by the discourse-creative activities of critical communities, objective threats in terms of air pollution, foundation giving, and powerful political allies in the presidency and Congress. Environmental discourses also legitimized and competed against one another, favoring “early risers” and preservationist discourse. Environmental mobilization needs to be understood in terms of the creation of new discursive frames that identify environmental problems, as well as objective environmental threats, resources, and political opportunities.
The Attentional Blink

In order for recognition of a certain stimulus to take place, visual attention needs to be directed towards said stimulus. To the earliest parts of the visual system, objects are not objects, they are collections of visual features-lines, corners, changes in texture, color, and light. Attention is the resource that is necessary for later processing in order to recognize what a given bundle of features adds up to. This makes attention a central focus of research. One especially important set of questions concerns how people sustain attention, that is, the extent to which they can continuously maintain a focus of attention from moment-to-moment. It is now known that sustained attention takes great effort. When attention needs to be focused very rapidly on something that is moving or changing very quickly, the effort involved causes a momentary lapse in attention once it is disengaged. This kind of lapse in attention is called an attentional blink. It is like the brain blinks for a moment, shutting down attention for a rest. Stimuli that appear during an attentional blink will not be perceived.
How the Basal Ganglia Use Parallel Excitatory and Inhibitory Learning Pathways to Selectively Respond to Unexpected Rewarding Cues

After classically conditioned learning, dopaminergic cells in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) respond immediately to unexpected conditioned stimuli (CS) but omit formerly seen responses to expected unconditioned stimuli, notably rewards. These cells play an important role in reinforcement learning. A neural model explains the key neurophysiological properties of these cells before, during, and after conditioning, as well as related anatomical and neurophysiological data about the pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus (PPTN), lateral hypothalamus, ventral striatum, and striosomes. The model proposes how two parallel learning pathways from limbic cortex to the SNc, one devoted to excitatory conditioning (through the ventral striatum, ventral pallidum, and PPTN) and the other to adaptively timed inhibitory conditioning (through the striosomes), control SNc responses. The excitatory pathway generates CS-induced excitatory SNc dopamine bursts. The inhibitory pathway prevents dopamine bursts in response to predictable reward-related signals. When expected rewards are not received, striosomal inhibition of SNc that is unopposed by excitation results in a phasic drop in dopamine cell activity. The adaptively timed inhibitory learning uses an intracellular spectrum of timed responses that is proposed to be similar to adaptively timed cellular mechanisms in the hippocampus and cerebellum. These mechanisms are proposed to include metabotropic glutamate receptor-mediated Ca2+ spikes that occur with different delays in striosomal cells. A dopaminergic burst in concert with a Ca2+ spike is proposed to potentiate inhibitory learning. The model provides a biologically predictive alternative to temporal difference conditioning models and explains substantially more data than alternative models.
Fast Gaussian process methods for point process intensity estimation

Point processes are difficult to analyze because they provide only a sparse and noisy observation of the intensity function driving the process. Gaussian Processes offer an attractive framework within which to infer underlying intensity functions. The result of this inference is a continuous function defined across time that is typically more amenable to analytical efforts. However, a naive implementation will become computationally infeasible in any problem of reasonable size, both in memory and run time requirements. We demonstrate problem specific methods for a class of renewal processes that eliminate the memory burden and reduce the solve time by orders of magnitude.
Learning to Rank with Nonsmooth Cost Functions

The quality measures used in information retrieval are particularly difficult to optimize directly, since they depend on the model scores only through the sorted order of the documents returned for a given query. Thus, the derivatives of the cost with respect to the model parameters are either zero, or are undefined. In this paper, we propose a class of simple, flexible algorithms, called LambdaRank, which avoids these difficulties by working with implicit cost functions. We describe LambdaRank using neural network models, although the idea applies to any differentiable function class. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the resulting implicit cost function to be convex, and we show that the general method has a simple mechanical interpretation. We demonstrate significantly improved accuracy, over a state-of-the-art ranking algorithm, on several datasets. We also show that LambdaRank provides a method for significantly speeding up the training phase of that ranking algorithm. Although this paper is directed towards ranking, the proposed method can be extended to any non-smooth and multivariate cost functions.
Género y autoestima: un análisis de las diferencias por sexo en una muestra de estudiantes de educación general básica

En este estudio se analizan las relaciones entre el nivel de autoestima del nino (evaluado mediante una adaptacion de la Escala de Autoconcepto para Ninos de Piers-Harris) y el sexo. Se utiliza una muestra constituida por 935 ninos, estratificada de acuerdo a las variables sexo, nivel socioeconomico y curso.Los resultados indican que los varones muestran, en promedio, niveles de autoestima significativamente mas altos que las ninas. Las ninas superan a los varones solo en el subfactor conducta, independientemente del nivel socioeconomico al que pertenecen, paralelamente tienen los mas bajos puntajes en el subfactor ansiedad, es decir, ellas son mas temerosas, preocupadas y se sienten menos satisfechas. En el resto de los subfactores evaluados, los varones obtienen consistentemente puntajes mas altos.
Deep learning with COTS HPC systems

Scaling up deep learning algorithms has been shown to lead to increased performance in benchmark tasks and to enable discovery of complex high-level features. Recent efforts to train extremely large networks (with over 1 billion parameters) have relied on cloudlike computing infrastructure and thousands of CPU cores. In this paper, we present technical details and results from our own system based on Commodity Off-The-Shelf High Performance Computing (COTS HPC) technology: a cluster of GPU servers with Infiniband interconnects and MPI. Our system is able to train 1 billion parameter networks on just 3 machines in a couple of days, and we show that it can scale to networks with over 11 billion parameters using just 16 machines. As this infrastructure is much more easily marshaled by others, the approach enables much wider-spread research with extremely large neural networks.
An Observer-Based Diagnosis Scheme for Single and Simultaneous Open-Switch Faults in Induction Motor Drives

In this paper, the detection and isolation of open-switch faults in induction motor (IM) drives are addressed from a model-based perspective. Residuals are synthesized by using nonlinear observers followed from a directional characterization. First, it is observed that the IM model can be written in a recurrent decoupled structure by taking the stator currents and mechanical velocity as outputs. In this way, residuals can be insensitive to load torque and operating conditions, and simultaneous faults can be addressed. A pulsewidth modulation three-phase inverter is studied as power actuator for the IM. Hence, in order to isolate faults related to the six switching devices, a directional residual evaluation in the -frame is employed. Hence, three residuals are constructed to isolate the faulty switches. The ideas presented in this paper are validated experimentally in a test bench of 1-hp IM under single and simultaneous faults.
Substantia Nigra D1 Receptors and Stimulation of Striatal Cholinergic Interneurons by Dopamine: A Proposed Circuit Mechanism

Dopamine release can regulate striatal acetylcholine effluxin vivo through at least two receptor mechanisms: (1) direct inhibition by dopamine D2 receptors on the cholinergic neurons, and (2) excitation initiated by dopamine D1 receptors. The neuroanatomical locus of the latter population of D1 receptors and the pathway(s) involved in the expression of their influence are controversial issues. We have tested the hypothesis that D1 receptors in substantia nigra pars reticulata are involved in the excitatory component of dopaminergic actions on striatal acetylcholine output. In vivo microdialysis was used in awake rats. Infusion of the selective D1 receptor agonistR(+)-1-Phenyl-2,3,4,5-tetrahydro-1H-3-benzazepine-7,8-diol (SKF 38393) hydrochloride into pars reticulata of substantia nigra elicited a significant increase in striatal acetylcholine efflux. Likewise, d-amphetamine applied into pars reticulata of substantia nigra by reverse dialysis produced an elevation in acetylcholine output measured at a second microdialysis probe in the striatum. Application of d-amphetamine in the striatum by reverse dialysis elicited a decrease in striatal acetylcholine efflux that could be reversed subsequently by local application ofd-amphetamine in substantia nigra pars reticulata. A 2 mg/kg intraperitoneal dose of d-amphetamine, which has no net effect on striatal acetylcholine output under control conditions, elicited a significant decrease in acetylcholine efflux when the D1 receptor antagonistR(+)-7-Chloro-8-hydroxy-3-methyl-1-phenyl-2,3,4,5-tetrahydro-1H-3-benzazepine (SCH 23390) hydrochloride was applied simultaneously via a second microdialysis probe in substantia nigra pars reticulata. Thus, an excitatory D1-mediated influence on striatal acetylcholine output is initiated in substantia nigra pars reticulata, and this influence contributes to the effects of indirect dopaminergic agonists such as d-amphetamine on striatal acetylcholine efflux. These results indicate an important role of somatodendritic dopamine release, in addition to nerve terminal dopamine release, in the regulation of activity in basal ganglia circuits.