Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Technology Integration Experiences of Teachers

Abstract Teachers are important providers of educational sustainability. Teachers’ ability to adapt themselves to rapidly developing technologies applicable to learning environments is connected with technology integration. The purpose of this study is to investigate teachers’ technology integration experiences in the course of learning and teaching processes. In doing so, qualitative research methods have been applied. The participants of the study were four teachers of different subject fields who work at a public secondary school in 2015–2016 school years and regard themselves as competent in technology integration. The study results indicated that the teachers took a teacher-centered stand in technology integration and the teachers’ most prominent reasons to start technology integration were the search for quality in education. Also the teachers, as IT school teachers, reported receiving support from close friends, the Ministry of National Education (MoNE), and online resources. The problems that the teachers faced in the processes of technology integration were mostly related to issues connected with the access to technology and technology proficiency.
Diagnostic Performance of an Aspergillus-Specific Nested PCR Assay in Cerebrospinal Fluid Samples of Immunocompromised Patients for Detection of Central Nervous System Aspergillosis

Central nervous system (CNS) invasive aspergillosis (IA) is a fatal complication in immunocompromised patients. Confirming the diagnosis is rarely accomplished as invasive procedures are impaired by neutropenia and low platelet count. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) cultures or galactomannan (GM) regularly yield negative results thus suggesting the need for improving diagnostic procedures. Therefore the performance of an established Aspergillus-specific nested polymerase chain reaction assay (PCR) in CSF samples of immunocompromised patients with suspicion of CNS IA was evaluated. We identified 113 CSF samples from 55 immunocompromised patients for whom CNS aspergillosis was suspected. Of these patients 8/55 were identified as having proven/probable CNS IA while the remaining 47 patients were classified as having either possible (n = 22) or no CNS IA (n = 25). PCR positivity in CSF was observed for 8/8 proven/probable, in 4/22 possible CNS IA patients and in 2/25 NoIA patients yielding sensitivity and specificity values of 1.0 (95% CI 0.68–1) and 0.93 (95% CI 0.77–0.98) and a positive likelihood ratio of 14 and negative likelihood ratio of 0.0, respectively, thus resulting in a diagnostic odds ratio of ∞. The retrospective analysis of CSF samples from patients with suspected CNS IA yielded a high sensitivity of the nested PCR assay. PCR testing of CSF samples is recommended for patients for whom CNS IA is suspected, especially for those whose clinical condition does not allow invasive procedures as a positive PCR result makes the presence of CNS IA in that patient population highly likely.
Interference Alignment and the Degrees of Freedom for the K User Interference Channel

While the best known outerbound for the K user interference channel states that there cannot be more than K/2 degrees of freedom, it has been conjectured that in general the constant interference channel with any number of users has only one degree of freedom. In this paper, we explore the spatial degrees of freedom per orthogonal time and frequency dimension for the K user wireless interference channel where the channel coefficients take distinct values across frequency slots but are fixed in time. We answer five closely related questions. First, we show that K/2 degrees of freedom can be achieved by channel design, i.e. if the nodes are allowed to choose the best constant, finite and nonzero channel coefficient values. Second, we show that if channel coefficients can not be controlled by the nodes but are selected by nature, i.e., randomly drawn from a continuous distribution, the total number of spatial degrees of freedom for the K user interference channel is almost surely K/2 per orthogonal time and frequency dimension. Thus, only half the spatial degrees of freedom are lost due to distributed processing of transmitted and received signals on the interference channel. Third, we show that interference alignment and zero forcing suffice to achieve all the degrees of freedom in all cases. Fourth, we show that the degrees of freedom $D$ directly lead to an $\mathcal{O}(1)$ capacity characterization of the form $C(SNR)=D\log(1+SNR)+\mathcal{O}(1)$ for the multiple access channel, the broadcast channel, the 2 user interference channel, the 2 user MIMO X channel and the 3 user interference channel with M>1 antennas at each node. Fifth, we characterize the degree of freedom benefits from cognitive sharing of messages on the 3 user interference channel.
Unsupervised syntax-based machine translation: the contribution of discontiguous phrases

We present a new unsupervised syntax-based MT system, termed U-DOT, which uses the unsupervised U-DOP model for learning paired trees, and which computes the most probable target sentence from the relative frequencies of paired subtrees. We test U-DOT on the German-English Europarl corpus, showing that it outperforms the state-of-the-art phrase-based Pharaoh system. We demonstrate that the inclusion of noncontiguous phrases significantly improves the translation accuracy. This paper presents the first translation results with the data-oriented translation (DOT) model on the Europarl corpus, to the best of our knowledge. Introduction: Phrase-Based vs Syntax-Based
Asset Securitization and Optimal Retention

This paper builds on recent research by Fender and Mitchell (2009) who show that if financial institutions securitize loans, retaining an interest in the equity tranche does not always induce the securitizer to diligently screen borrowers ex ante. We first determine the conditions under which this scenario becomes binding and further illustrate the implications for capital requirements. We then propose an extension to the existing model and also solve for optimal retention size. This also allows us to capture feedback effects from capital requirements into the maximization problem. Preliminary results show that equity tranche retention continues to best incentivize loan screening.
Effects of cardiorespiratory exercise on motor skill learning and cognitive executive functions in Parkinson’s disease

Background: Aerobic exercise training (AET) has been shown to provide general health benefits, and to improve motor behaviours in particular, in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, the influence of AET on motor learning capacity in PD, as well as the change in neural substrates mediating this effect remains to be explored. Objective: In the current study, we employed functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to assess the effect of a 3-month AET program on the neural correlates of implicit motor sequence learning (MSL). Methods: 20 healthy controls (HC) and 19 early PD individuals participated in a supervised, high-intensity, stationary recumbent bike training program (3 times/week for 12 weeks). Exercise prescription started at 20 minutes (+5 minutes/week up to 40 minutes) based on participant’s maximal aerobic power. Before and after the AET program, participants’ brain was scanned while
The role of positive psychology interventions in improving wellbeing and pathology in patients with borderline personality disorder : a systematic literature review.

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by a persistent pattern of impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, interpersonal conflicts and unstable identities. So far, treatment was mainly focused on diminishing BPD pathology. Positive psychology complements the problem-focused psychology, by focusing on strengths, wellbeing and quality of life. Positive psychology interventions (PPIs) have shown to enhance wellbeing, yet the effectiveness in BPD patients remained unclear. To fill the gap of research, the present review systematically searched for (1) PPIs applied on BPD patients and (2) the effectiveness of PPIs regarding diminishment of BPD symptoms or enhancement of wellbeing. A systematic search was conducted and included studies that targeted patients diagnosed with BPD, described a PPI, and performed at least post-intervention measures of outcomes in BPD symptoms or wellbeing. After screening, eight studies remained, including four (pilot) RCTs. The majority of the studies investigated the effect of mindfulness and showed significant improvement of BPD symptoms and wellbeing. Other PPIs like loving-kindness and compassion meditation (LKM/CM) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) significantly enhanced BPD symptoms and wellbeing, as well. The observations of this systematic review show that PPIs can contribute by improving wellbeing and giving support to its utility in treating symptoms of BPD.
Multi-way Tensor Factorization for Unsupervised Lexical Acquisition

This paper introduces a novel method for joint unsupervised aquisition of verb subcategorization frame (SCF) and selectional preference (SP) information. Treating SCF and SP induction as a multi-way co-occurrence problem, we use multi-way tensor factorization to cluster frequent verbs from a large corpus according to their syntactic and semantic behaviour. The method extends previous tensor factorization approaches by predicting whether a syntactic argument is likely to occur with a verb lemma (SCF) as well as which lexical items are likely to occur in the argument slot (SP), and integrates a variety of lexical and syntactic features, including co-occurrence information on grammatical relations not explicitly represented in the SCFs. The SCF lexicon that emerges from the clusters achieves an F-score of 68.7 against a gold standard, while the SP model achieves an accuracy of 77.8 in a novel evaluation that considers all of a verb’s arguments simultaneously.
Two-scale convergence

In this paper the theory of two-scale convergence (introduced by G. Nguetseng \ref[SIAM J. Math. Anal. 20 (1989), no. 3, 608--623; and developed later by G. Allaire \ref[SIAM J. Math. Anal. 23 (199 .
Financing Constraints, Irreversibility, and Investment Dynamics

We develop a model of an industry with many heterogeneous firms that face both financing constraints and irreversibility constraints. The financing constraint implies that firms cannot borrow unless the debt is secured by collateral; the irreversibility constraint that they can only sell their fixed capital by selling their business. We use this model to examine the cyclical behavior of aggregate fixed investment, variable capital investment, and output in the presence of persistent idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks. Our model yields three main results. First, the effect of the irreversibility constraint on fixed capital investment is reinforced by the financing constraint. Second, the effect of the financing constraint on variable capital investment is reinforced by the irreversibility constraint. Finally, the interaction between the two constraints is key for explaining why input inventories and material deliveries of US manufacturing firms are so volatile and procyclical, and also why they are highly asymmetrical over the business cycle.
Vacation Queues With Impatient Customers and a Waiting Server

In this paper, we study single server queueing models with impatient customers, server vacations and a waiting server. The arrival process is assumed to be Poisson. The server is allowed to take a vacation whenever the system is empty after waiting for a random period of time. Whenever the server is on vacation, each customer in the queue independently of the other customers sets up an impatience timer. If the server does not return from the vacation before the expiry of the customer impatience time, the customer abandons the system forever. We first take up the case where the service times, customer impatience times, waiting times of the server in the empty system and the duration of the server vacations are all exponentially distributed. We then generalize our results to the case where the service times and the server waiting times have general distributions. We derive the steady state probability generating functions (PGF) of the system size and the queue size. We obtain some useful performance measures for the systems. We discuss some particular cases.
Policy Reform and Income Distribution

The paper analyses the relationship between within-country income inequality and policies of domestic liberalization and external globalization. The models used to provide the rationale for such reforms—such as the Hecksher-Ohlin model—usually predict a decline in inequality. However, the evidence shows that inequality often rose with the introduction of such reforms. The paper tries to explain this discrepancy by identifying the conditions under which the models’ conclusions do not hold. Indeed, such models are based on a simplified view of reality and restrictive assumptions, and their predictions do not necessarily hold in conditions of institutional weakness, structural rigidities, inefficient markets, asymmetric information and persistent protectionism.
To Delay or Not to Delay: The Timing of Chinese Character Instruction for Secondary Learners

The timing of character instruction for beginning Chinese foreign language learners has been a controversial issue in Chinese language instruction for many decades. Some instructors teach characters early and integrate this learning with oral language; other instructors teach characters only after an oral base has been established. To date, the experimental research on this topic has been conducted exclusively with university students, and it is unknown if results can generalize to a younger demographic with different learning needs and instructional contexts. The purpose of this study was to examine the reading, writing, and oral language skills of beginning-level middle school students with no Chinese language background who were divided into early and delayed instruction groups. In addition, a questionnaire about the students’ attitudes toward character learning was administered. It was found that the early instruction group performed significantly better than the delayed group on reading comprehension and character writing tests; there were no significant differences between the groups on the oral interview and the oral fluency assessments. The attitudes survey showed no significant differences in character learning attitudes between the early and the delayed groups except in regard to the timing of character instruction. Pedagogical applications are suggested.
Chemosensory Communication of Gender Information: Masculinity Bias in Body Odor Perception and Femininity Bias Introduced by Chemosignals During Social Perception

Human body odor is a source of important social information. In this study, we explore whether the sex of an individual can be established based on smelling axillary odor and whether exposure to male and female odors biases chemosensory and social perception. In a double-blind, pseudo-randomized application, 31 healthy normosmic heterosexual male and female raters were exposed to male and female chemosignals (odor samples of 27 heterosexual donors collected during a cardio workout) and a no odor sample. Recipients rated chemosensory samples on a masculinity-femininity scale and provided intensity, familiarity and pleasantness ratings. Additionally, the modulation of social perception (gender-neutral faces and personality attributes) and affective introspection (mood) by male and female chemosignals was assessed. Male and female axillary odors were rated as rather masculine, regardless of the sex of the donor. As opposed to the masculinity bias in the odor perception, a femininity bias modulating social perception appeared. A facilitated femininity detection in gender-neutral faces and personality attributes in male and female chemosignals appeared. No chemosensory effect on mood of the rater was observed. The results are discussed with regards to the use of male and female chemosignals in affective and social communication.
Extreme Compressive Sampling for Covariance Estimation

This paper studies the problem of estimating the covariance of a collection of vectors using only highly compressed measurements of each vector. An estimator based on back-projections of these compressive samples is proposed and analyzed. A distribution-free analysis shows that by observing just a single linear measurement of each vector, one can consistently estimate the covariance matrix, in both infinity and spectral norm, and this analysis leads to precise rates of convergence in both norms. Through information-theoretic techniques, lower bounds showing that this estimator is minimax-optimal for both infinity and spectral norm estimation problems are established. These results are also specialized to give matching upper and lower bounds for estimating the population covariance of a collection of Gaussian vectors, again in the compressive measurement model. The analysis conducted in this paper shows that the effective sample complexity for this problem is scaled by a factor of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m^{2}/d^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the compression dimension and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$d$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the ambient dimension. Applications to subspace learning (principal components analysis) and learning over distributed sensor networks are also discussed.
Performance of 10 Gb/s optical receiver in 50-GHz DWDM transmission over 40-km SSMF

This paper describes the design of our 10 Gb/s Avalanche Photo-Detector (APD) optical receiver and its overall performance in 50-GHz Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) transmission over 40-km Standard Single Mode Fiber (SSMF). The experimental eye-diagram results show that our receiver can reduce the effects from channel crosstalk and fiber dispersion. In addition, its measured bit error rate (BER) is below 10−9 and the power penalty is within standard limit.
Integration of ASR and machine translation models in a document translation task

This paper is concerned with the problem of machine aided human language translation. It addresses a translation scenario where a human translator dictates the spoken language translation of a source language text into an automatic speech dictation system. The source language text in this scenario is also presented to a statistical machine translation system (SMT). The techniques presented in the paper assume that the optimum target language word string which is produced by the dictation sys-tem is modeled using the combined SMT and ASR statistical models. These techniques were evaluated on a speech corpus involving human translators dictating English language translations of French language text obtained from transcriptions of the proceedings of the Canadian House of Commons. It will be shown in the paper that the combined ASR/SMT modeling techniques described in the paper were able to reduce ASR WER by 26.6 percent relative to the WER of an ASR system that did not incorporate SMT knowledge.
Research Paper Series Globalisation and Labour Markets Economic Crisis and Plant Employment Growth Multinationals as Stabilizers?: Economic Crisis and Plant Employment Growth

Acknowledgements Holger Görg gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Leverhulme Trust (Programme Grant F114/BF). We thank seminar participants at Central Bank of Chile, Department of Economics at University of Chile, and the 2006 Chilean Economic Society Conference for valuable comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to José Miguel Benavente and Kevin Cowan for detailed comments and Claudio Raddatz for providing us access to his data. Abstract This paper examines the link between multinational enterprises and employment growth at the plant-level. We investigate in detail the comparative response of multinationals and domestic firms to an economic crisis, using the empirical setting of a well defined case of economic slowdown in Chile as a natural experiment. In our empirical analysis we find that employment growth in manufacturing plants has been drastically reduced during the economic crisis. More importantly, we do not find evidence that multinationals react to the economic crisis differently than do domestic firms. Our findings hold in a number of robustness tests, in which we also investigate the role of access to finance. The results are in contrast to the idea that multinationals are less affected by an economic crisis and that they may be able to act as stabilizers in developing countries.
Modeling Viscoelastic Behavior of Arterial Walls and Their Interaction with Pulsatile Blood Flow

A horizontal rotary table is provided and a mounting arm is supported above the table and generally parallels the latter. The arm extends along a path paralleling an axis of rotation of the table and an upright shaft is journalled from the mounting arm for rotation about an upright axis coinciding with the axis of rotation of the table. Drive structure drivingly connects the table and the upright shaft for rotation of the latter at twice the speed of rotation of the table and a support is mounted on the support arm for guided movement therealong. A scribe tool is carried by the support for engagement with and scribing a workpiece disposed on the table for rotation with the latter and motion converting and drive structure is operatively connected between the upright shaft and the support for effecting oscillation of the support along the arm responsive to and an in timed relation with rotation of the shaft. The motion converting and drive structure includes operational features which function to continuously vary the linear displacement rate of the support along the arm during constant angular velocity of the upright shaft.