Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE EFFECTS OF THE pep NUCLEAR REACTION AND OTHER IMPROVEMENTS IN THE NUCLEAR REACTION RATE LIBRARY ON SIMULATIONS OF THE CLASSICAL NOVA OUTBURST

Nova explosions occur on the white dwarf (WD) component of a cataclysmic variable binary stellar system which is accreting matter lost by its companion. When sufficient material has been accreted by the WD, a thermonuclear runaway (TNR) occurs and ejects material in what is observed as a classical nova (CN) explosion. We have continued our studies of TNRs on 1.25 M☉ and 1.35 M☉ WDs (ONeMg composition) under conditions which produce mass ejection and a rapid increase in the emitted light, by examining the effects of changes in the nuclear reaction rates on both the observable features and the nucleosynthesis during the outburst. In order to improve our calculations over previous work, we have incorporated a modern nuclear reaction network into our one-dimensional, fully implicit, hydrodynamic computer code. We find that the updates in the nuclear reaction rate libraries change the amount of ejected mass, peak luminosity, and the resulting nucleosynthesis. Because the evolutionary sequences on the 1.35 M☉ WD reach higher temperatures, the effects of library changes are more important for this mass. In addition, as a result of our improvements, we discovered that the pep reaction (p + e− + p → d + ν) was not included in our previous studies of CN explosions (or to the best of our knowledge those of other investigators). Although the energy production from this reaction is not important in the Sun, the densities in WD envelopes can exceed 104 g cm−3 and the presence of this reaction increases the energy generation during the time that the p–p chain is operating. Since it is only the p–p chain that is operating during most of the accretion phase prior to the final rise to the TNR, the effect of the increased energy generation is to reduce the evolution time to the peak of the TNR and, thereby, the accreted mass as compared to the evolutionary sequences done without this reaction included. As expected from our previous work, the reduction in accreted mass has important consequences on the characteristics of the resulting TNR and is discussed in this paper.
Optimal and Worst-Case Performance of Mastery Learning Assessment with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing

By implementing mastery learning, intelligent tutoring systems aim to present students with exactly the amount of instruction they need to master a concept. In practice, determination of mastery is imperfect. Student knowledge must be inferred from performance, and performance does not always follow knowledge. A standard method is to set a threshold for mastery, representing a level of certainty that the student has attained mastery. Tutors can make two types of errors when assessing student knowledge: (1) false positives, in which a student without knowledge is judged to have mastered a skill, and (2) false negatives, in which a student is presented with additional practice opportunities after acquiring knowledge. Viewed from this perspective, the mastery threshold can be viewed as a parameter that controls the relative frequency of false negatives and false positives. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding the role of the mastery threshold in Bayesian Knowledge Tracing and use simulations to model the effects of setting different thresholds under different best and worst-case skill modeling assumptions.
Time Perspective and Emotion Regulation as Predictors of Age-Related Subjective Passage of Time

Hardly any empirical work exists concerning the relationship between the intra-individually stable time perspective relating to the past, present, and future and the subjective speed of time passing in everyday life. Moreover, studies consistently show that the subjective passage of time over the period of the last ten years speeds up as we get older. Modulating variables influencing this phenomenon are still unknown. To investigate these two unresolved issues, we conducted an online survey with n = 423 participants ranging in age between 17 and 81 assessing trait time perspective of the past, present, and future, and relating these subscales with a battery of measures pertaining to the subjective passage of time. Moreover, the subjective passage of time as an age-dependent variable was probed in relationship to emotion awareness, appraisal and regulation. Results show how present hedonism is linked with having fewer routines in life and a faster passage of the last week; the past negative perspective is related to time pressure, time expansion and more routine; a pronounced future perspective is related to a general faster passage of time. Importantly, increased emotion regulation and a balanced time perspective are related to a slower passage of the last ten years. These novel findings are discussed within models of time perception and the time perspective.
Failure of the International Prognostic Index to prognosticate outcome in primary gastric DLBC lymphoma.

We read with interest the original article published in the Annals of Oncology by Binn et al. [1], addressing the role of surgery plus chemotherapy in the management of diffuse large B-cell gastric lymphoma. We would like to make a correction in this regard. The authors stated that their results support the prognostic value of the International Prognostic Index (IPI) in predicting survival outcome in localized gastric lymphoma, and in the next sentence they indicate that these results are in agreement with ours, published in 1999, in one of the largest published series about this disease [2]. In fact, according to our paper, the IPI failed to classify patients into prognostically meaningful risk strata. A modified prognostic index was developed and proved to be of more prognostic significance. However, we recommended that prospective validation of the proposed model be attempted. It might be of interest if the authors can re-examine their data according to our proposed model.
Item-Level Social Influence Prediction with Probabilistic Hybrid Factor Matrix Factorization

Social influence has become the essential factor which drives the dynamic evolution process of social network structure and user behaviors. Previous research often focus on social influence analysis in network-level or topic-level. In this paper, we concentrate on predicting item-level social influence to reveal the users' influences in a more fine-grained level. We formulate the social influence prediction problem as the estimation of a user-post matrix, where each entry in the matrix represents the social influence strength the corresponding user has given the corresponding web post. To deal with the sparsity and complex factor challenges in the research, we model the problem by extending the probabilistic matrix factorization method to incorporate rich prior knowledge on both user dimension and web post dimension, and propose the Probabilistic Hybrid Factor Matrix Factorization (PHF-MF) approach. Intensive experiments are conducted on a real world online social network to demonstrate the advantages and characteristics of the proposed method.
The Glucose Sensor-Like Protein Hxs1 Is a High-Affinity Glucose Transporter and Required for Virulence in Cryptococcus neoformans

Cryptococcus is a major fungal pathogen that frequently causes systemic infection in patients with compromised immunity. Glucose, an important signal molecule and the preferred carbon source for Cryptococcus, plays a critical role in fungal development and virulence. Cryptococcus contains more than 50 genes sharing high sequence homology with hexose transporters in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. However, there is no report on their function in glucose sensing or transport. In this study, we investigated two hexose transporter-like proteins (Hxs1 and Hxs2) in Cryptococcus that share the highest sequence identity with the glucose sensors Snf3 and Rgt2 in S. cerevisiae. The expression of HXS1 is repressed by high glucose, while the HXS2 expression is not regulated by glucose. Functional studies showed that Hxs1 is required for fungal resistance to oxidative stress and fungal virulence. The hxs1Δ mutant exhibited a significant reduction in glucose uptake activity, indicating that Hxs1 is required for glucose uptake. Heterologous expression of Cryptococcus HXS1 rendered the S. cerevisiae mutant lacking all 20 hexose transporters a high glucose uptake activity, demonstrating that Hxs1 functions as a glucose transporter. Heterologous expression of HXS1 in the snf3Δ rgt2Δ double mutant did not complement its growth in YPD medium containing the respiration inhibitor antimycin A, suggesting that Hxs1 may not function as a glucose sensor. Taken together, our results demonstrate that Hxs1 is a high-affinity glucose transporter and required for fungal virulence.
Ju n 20 13 SPECTRAL CONVERGENCE OF THE CONNECTION LAPLACIAN FROM RAND OM SAMPLES

Spectral methods that are based on eigenvectors and eigenvalues of discrete graph Laplacians, such as Diffusion Maps and Laplacian Eigenmaps are extremely useful for manifold learning. It was previously shown by Belkin and Niyogi [4] that the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian converge to the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of the Laplace-Beltrami operator of the manifold in the limit of infinitely many uniformly sampled data points. Recently, we introduced Vector Diffusion Maps and showed that the Connection Laplacian of the tangent bundle of the manifold can be approximated from random samples. In this paper, we present a unified framework for approximating other Connection Laplacians over the manifold by considering its principle bundle structure. We prove that the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of these Laplacians converge in the limit of infinitely many random samples. Our results for spectral convergence also hold in the case where the data points are sampled from a non-uniform distribution, and for manifolds with and without boundary.
A Street Children Dilemma: Between a Student and a Breadwinner

The study investigated psychological factors of street children in opting for study or work. A descriptive qualitative approach was adopted to demonstrate the process of determining to stay in one or to survive both environments, taking into consideration: initial motives, internal conflicts, justifications, and final decisions. Data were collected from semi structured interviews using purposive samplings. Results indicated that inadequacy of financial support, poor family planning, child economic value, lack of role models, and incapability of children upbringing played a significant role in the process of making the call. Efforts to overcome this persisting phenomenon may be worthwhile examined in the future. For policymakers in particular, this study serves as a basis to formulate strategic policies that aim at street children betterment. At the grassroot level, fully understanding the phenomenon of street children helps them design various activities to keep them away from streets and provide compulsory education. Keywords—street children; psychosocial; cognitive dissonance
Parenting and college enrollment: The effects of parenting style and practices on college enrollment for Black, White and Hispanic children from different economic and family contexts

Title of dissertation: PARENTING AND COLLEGE ENROLLMENT: THE EFFECTS OF PARENTING STYLE AND PRACTICES ON COLLEGE ENROLLMENT FOR BLACK, WHITE AND HISPANIC CHILDREN FROM DIFFERENT ECONOMIC AND FAMILY CONTEXTS Erica Shannel Mckinney, Doctor of Philosophy, 2011 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Franes Goldscheider Department of Family Sciences Dr. Sherick Hughes Department of Curriculum and Instruction This study used logistic regression to analyze the effects of parenting style and practices on college enrollment for 2116 Hispanic, Black and White respondents from differing economic and family contexts. Using data from the young adult children of women of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, five key findings related to parenting and college enrollment were identified. They include: 1) The effect of parenting practices on college enrollment is not influenced by the parenting style adopted by the parent 2) The authoritarian parenting style is a better predictor of college enrollment than the authoritative parenting style for Hispanic respondents 3) Higher parental involvement at home is associated with higher odds of college enrollment 4) Higher parental involvement at school is associated with higher odds of college enrollment only for White students from single-mother and dual-parent families 5) There is a negative interaction between being Black and higher parental involvement at school The findings of this study contribute to the literature on parenting styles, parental involvement and college enrollment. The implications for practice and research are discussed. PARENTING AND COLLEGE ENROLLMENT: THE EFFECTS OF PARENTING STYLE AND PRACTICES ON COLLEGE ENROLLMENT FOR BLACK, WHITE AND HISPANIC CHILDREN FROM DIFFERENT ECONOMIC AND FAMILY CONTEXTS
Assessing the Challenges of Ghanaian Pre-Service Teachers’ in Their Learning of Geometric Transformation Concepts and Perception of Factors Inhibiting the Development of Their Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching

: This study sought to assess the challenges of Ghanaian pre-service teachers’ in their learning of geometric transformation concepts and perception of factors inhibiting the development of their mathematical knowledge for teaching. A sample size of 200 pre-service teachers was selected from Colleges of Education (CSE) in Eastern region of Ghana. In seeking views from pre-service regarding their learning of geometric transformation concepts, the study employed the use of survey method. Sampling procedures for the purpose of this study was purposive and data collected was qualitative. The method that was used in obtaining data on the views of pre-service teachers on their learning of geometric transformation concepts was through questionnaire. Data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics. Findings from the study showed challenges of pre-service teachers were as a result of factors such as lecture approaches adopted by mathematics tutors in the teaching of geometric transformations, inadequate exercises on geometric transformation concepts taught to consolidate their understanding; and poor nature of assessment task given on geometric transformations. Further findings made with regards to difficulties of pre-service teachers in their learning of geometric transformation concepts were: reflection of figure in other mirror lines apart from      , rotation of figure with different centre
Skills for successful 21st century school leaders

Time and labor saving dispensing means by way of which short cables, designated as chokers, can be systematically, protectively and readily stored for selectively withdrawable use. Almost any logging job requires the use of a multiplicity of choker-cables ranging from eight to ten feet in length and which, as is known, are used to wrap around logs so that the wrapped logs can be dragged to a decking or loading area. To cope with this storage problem means is mounted accessibly atop an available roof of a canopy embodied, for example, in a logging bulldozer. For the result desired a plurality of tubes are mounted atop a canopy roof, each tube having self-contained facilities in which the withdrawable chokers are orderly stored in a manner to reduce intertwining to an acceptable minimum.
Analysis of Multisampled Current Control for Active Filters

This paper investigates the multisampling techniques applied to the current control in active-power-filter (APF) applications. In APF applications with digital control, the main bandwidth limitation derives from A/D conversion and computational delays and the sampling-related delay of the digital pulsewidth modulation (DPWM). Using field-programmable gate arrays and fast A/D converters for the control implementation, it is possible to minimize the former two; thus, the overall phase lag is dominated by the DPWM, which can strongly be reduced by the multiple-sampling approach, breaking bandwidth limitations of single-sampled solutions. Moreover, as the multisampling approach triggers nonlinear behaviors that can negatively impact the filter-compensating capabilities, a solution based on a simple digital filter is proposed which linearizes the system behavior and does not waste the multisampling advantages. Simulation and experimental results on a 10-kVA prototype confirm the theoretical expectations.
Speech-to-text and speech-to-speech summarization of spontaneous speech

This paper presents techniques for speech-to-text and speech-to-speech automatic summarization based on speech unit extraction and concatenation. For the former case, a two-stage summarization method consisting of important sentence extraction and word-based sentence compaction is investigated. Sentence and word units which maximize the weighted sum of linguistic likelihood, amount of information, confidence measure, and grammatical likelihood of concatenated units are extracted from the speech recognition results and concatenated for producing summaries. For the latter case, sentences, words, and between-filler units are investigated as units to be extracted from original speech. These methods are applied to the summarization of unrestricted-domain spontaneous presentations and evaluated by objective and subjective measures. It was confirmed that proposed methods are effective in spontaneous speech summarization.
iSPCG: Incremental subgraph-preconditioned conjugate gradient method for online SLAM with many loop-closures

We propose a novel method to solve online SLAM problems with many loop-closures on the basis of two state-of-the-art SLAM methods, iSAM and SPCG. We first use iSAM to solve a sparse sub-problem to obtain an approximate solution. When the error grows larger than a threshold or the optimal solution is requested, we use subgraph-preconditioned conjugate gradient method to solve the original problem where the subgraph preconditioner and initial estimate are provided by iSAM. Finally we use the optimal solution from SPCG to regularize iSAM in the next steps. The proposed method is consistent, efficient and can find the optimal solution. We apply this method to solve large simulated and real SLAM problems, and obtain promising results.
PPrint , a prettier printer

My long term research goal is to develop algorithms that allow robots to autonomously learn to act appropriately in typical human environments, executing daily manual tasks alongside humans, and in places where it is dangerous for humans to work. Thus I seek to create robots that accomplish tasks ranging from cleaning and maintaining one’s house, to search and rescue and elder care. The current instantiation of this research goal is outdoor Autonomous Robotics in unstructured environments, which is described in Section 3. Today’s robots are only able to function reliably in structured, well engineered environments, such as those found in the manufacturing industry. As evidence, one only need look at the DARPA Grand Challenge, where robots that completed the course required extensive use of well chosen GPS way points, sometimes only a few meters apart [31, 32]. Similar constraints have allowed successful completion of the DARPA Urban Challenge (www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge). The fact remains that the problem of navigating between two GPS way points more that a few hundred meters apart in unknown outdoor terrain remains unsolved [33, 36].
Racism, whiteness, and burnout in antiracism movements: How white racial justice activists elevate burnout in racial justice activists of color in the United States

Social movement scholars have described activist burnout—when the stressors of activism become so overwhelming they debilitate activists’ abilities to remain engaged—as a formidable threat to the sustainability of social movements. However, studies designed to map the causes of burnout have failed to account for ways burnout might operate differently for privileged-identity activists such as white antiracism activists and marginalized-identity activists such as antiracism activists of color. Building on previous studies of activist burnout in racial justice activists and examinations of the roles of white activists in antiracism movements, this study represents one attempt to fill this gap. We analyzed data from interviews with racial justice activists of color in the United States who have experienced burnout to identify the ways they attributed their burnout to the attitudes and behaviors—the racism—of white activists. These included (1) harboring unevolved or racist views, (2) undermining or invalidating the racial justice work of activists of color, (3) being unwilling to step up and take action when needed, (4) exhibiting white fragility, and (5) taking credit for participants’ racial justice work and ideas. Implications for racial justice movements and the participation of white activists are discussed.
The Hot Disk Corona and Magnetic Turbulence in Radio-quiet Active Galactic Nuclei: Observational Constraints

We compile a sample consisting of 56 radio-quiet active galactic nuclei so as to investigate the statistical properties of the hot corona in accretion disks from ASCA observations. The black hole masses in the sample are estimated via several popular methods, and the bolometric luminosities from the multiwavelength continuum. This allows us to estimate the Eddington ratio (ℰ ≡ Lbol/LEdd) so that the undergoing physical processes can be tested via hard X-ray data. We use the least-squares method of multivariate regression and find a strong correlation between ℱX ≡ L2-10 keV/Lbol and ℰ as ℱX ∝ ℰ-0.64. This indicates that the release of gravitational energy in the hot corona is controlled by the Eddington ratio. On the other hand, the correlation between the hard X-ray spectral index (Γ) and ℰ depends critically on the types of objects: Γ is nearly constant (Γ ∝ ℰ 0) in broad-line Seyfert 1 galaxies, whereas Γ ∝ log ℰ 0.18 in narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies, although this is not very significant. We can set constraints on the forms of the magnetic stress tensor on the condition that ℱX is proportional to the fraction f of gravitational energy dissipated in the hot corona and that f is proportional to the magnetic energy density in the disk. We find that the shear stress tensor trϕ ∝ Pgas is favored by the correlation in the present sample, where Pgas is the gas pressure.
Improved Delay-Dependent Asymptotic Stability Criteria for Delayed Neural Networks

This brief is concerned with asymptotic stability of neural networks with uncertain delays. Two types of uncertain delays are considered: one is constant while the other is time varying. The discretized Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional (LKF) method is integrated with the technique of introducing the free-weighting matrix between the terms of the Leibniz–Newton formula. The integrated method leads to the establishment of new delay-dependent sufficient conditions in form of linear matrix inequalities for asymptotic stability of delayed neural networks (DNNs). A numerical simulation study is conducted to demonstrate the obtained theoretical results, which shows their less conservatism than the existing stability criteria.