Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Science in a Free Society

No study in the philosophy of science created such controversy in the seventies as Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method. " In this work, Feyerabend reviews that controversy, and extends his critique beyond the problem of scientific rules and methods, to the social function and direction of science today. In the first part of the book, he launches a sustained and irreverent attack on the prestige of science in the West. The lofty authority of the "expert" claimed by scientists is, he argues, incompatible with any genuine democracy, and often merely serves to conceal entrenched prejudices and divided opinions with the scientific community itself. Feyerabend insists that these can and should be subjected to the arbitration of the lay population, whose closes interests they constantly affect--as struggles over atomic energy programs so powerfully attest. Calling for far greater diversity in the content of education to facilitate democratic decisions over such issues, Feyerabend recounts the origin and development of his own ideas--successively engaged by Brecht, Ehrenhaft, Popper, Mill and Lakatos--in a spirited intellectual self-portrait. " Science in a Free Society" is a striking intervention into one of the most topical debates in contemporary culture and politics.
Daily rest-activity patterns in the bipolar phenotype: A controlled actigraphy study

This study assessed daily rest-activity patterns in euthymic, medication-naïve bipolar phenotype individuals. The Mood Disorder Questionnaire was used to identify 19 bipolar phenotype individuals and 21 controls. Participants wore an Actiwatch-L for 2 weeks to assess their sleep behaviour and circadian rest-activity rhythmicity. Bipolar phenotype individuals had increased movement during sleep, as assessed by the fragmentation index, greater activity levels during their least active 5 h (2 am–7 am), and lower circadian relative amplitude compared to controls. Higher activity levels during sleep affecting circadian amplitude in young adults with the bipolar phenotype may be associated with vulnerability for developing mood disorder.
SystemML's Optimizer: Plan Generation for Large-Scale Machine Learning Programs

SystemML enables declarative, large-scale machine learning (ML) via a high-level language with R-like syntax. Data scientists use this language to express their ML algorithms with full flexibility but without the need to hand-tune distributed runtime execution plans and system configurations. These ML programs are dynamically compiled and optimized based on data and cluster characteristics using ruleand cost-based optimization techniques. The compiler automatically generates hybrid runtime execution plans ranging from in-memory, single node execution to distributed MapReduce (MR) computation and data access. This paper describes the SystemML optimizer, its compilation chain, and selected optimization phases for generating efficient execution plans.
Skyrme-Maxwell solitons in 2+1 dimensions.

A gauged (2+1)-dimensional version of the Skyrme model is investigated. The gauge group is U(1) and the dynamics of the associated gauge potential is governed by a Maxwell term. In this model there are topologically stable soliton solutions carrying magnetic flux which is not topologically quantized. The properties of static, rotationally symmetric solitons of degree one and two are discussed in detail. It is shown that the electric field of such solutions is necessarily zero. The solitons{close_quote} shape, mass, and magnetic flux depend on the U(1) coupling constant, and this dependence is studied numerically from very weak to very strong coupling. {copyright} {ital 1996 The American Physical Society. }
Note on a cross‐cultural test of Gilligan's ethic of care1

One hundred and twenty students from both Brazil and Norway were tested with Skoe's Ethic of Care Interview (ECI), which is a test of Gilligan's hypothesized gender‐related ethic of care. Subjects were also tested with Bem's Sex Role Inventory and Triandis's Test of Cultural Orientations. The ECI was shown to be related neither to gender nor to sex‐role concepts, and lower ECI scores from the Brazilian sample could be related to their higher collectivism scores on Triandis's test. The results suggest that Gilligan's ethic of care, as tested by the ECI, is not gender‐related and may be culture specific.
Doing Feminist Conversation Analysis

This article argues for, and offers empirical demonstration of, the value of conversation analysis (CA) for feminist research. It counters three key criticisms of CA as anti-feminist: the alleged incompatibility of CA’s social theory with feminism; the purported difficulty of reconciling analysts’ and participants’ concerns; and CA’s apparent obsession with the minutiae of talk rather than socio-political reality. It demonstrates the potential of CA for advances in lesbian/feminist research through two examples: developing a feminist approach to date rape and sexual refusal; and an ongoing CA study of talk in which people ‘come out’ as lesbian, gay, bisexual or as having (had) same-sex sexual experiences. These examples are used to illustrate that it is precisely the features of CA criticized as anti-feminist which can be used productively in doing feminist conversation analysis.
An unbiased offline evaluation of contextual bandit algorithms with generalized linear models

Contextual bandit algorithms have become popular tools in online recommendation and advertising systems. Offline evaluation of the effectiveness of new algorithms in these applications is critical for protecting online user experiences but very challenging due to their "partial-label" nature. A common practice is to create a simulator which simulates the online environment for the problem at hand and then run an algorithm against this simulator. However, creating the simulator itself is often difficult and modeling bias is usually unavoidably introduced. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we review a recently proposed offline evaluation technique. Different from simulator-based approaches, the method is completely data-driven, is easy to adapt to different applications, and more importantly, provides provably unbiased evaluations. We argue for the wide use of this technique as standard practice when comparing bandit algorithms in real-life problems. Second, as an application of this technique, we compare and validate a number of new algorithms based on generalized linear models. Experiments using real Yahoo! data suggest substantial improvement over algorithms with linear models when the rewards are binary.
Estimation of Disability Weights in the General Population of South Korea Using a Paired Comparison

We estimated the disability weights in the South Korean population by using a paired comparison-only model wherein ‘full health’ and ‘being dead’ were included as anchor points, without resorting to a cardinal method, such as person trade-off. The study was conducted via 2 types of survey: a household survey involving computer-assisted face-to-face interviews and a web-based survey (similar to that of the GBD 2010 disability weight study). With regard to the valuation methods, paired comparison, visual analogue scale (VAS), and standard gamble (SG) were used in the household survey, whereas paired comparison and population health equivalence (PHE) were used in the web-based survey. Accordingly, we described a total of 258 health states, with ‘full health’ and ‘being dead’ designated as anchor points. In the analysis, 4 models were considered: a paired comparison-only model; hybrid model between paired comparison and PHE; VAS model; and SG model. A total of 2,728 and 3,188 individuals participated in the household and web-based survey, respectively. The Pearson correlation coefficients of the disability weights of health states between the GBD 2010 study and the current models were 0.802 for Model 2, 0.796 for Model 1, 0.681 for Model 3, and 0.574 for Model 4 (all P-values<0.001). The discrimination of values according to health state severity was most suitable in Model 1. Based on these results, the paired comparison-only model was selected as the best model for estimating disability weights in South Korea, and for maintaining simplicity in the analysis. Thus, disability weights can be more easily estimated by using paired comparison alone, with ‘full health’ and ‘being dead’ as one of the health states. As noted in our study, we believe that additional evidence regarding the universality of disability weight can be observed by using a simplified methodology of estimating disability weights.
From Socialism to Social Democracy

Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory in Brazil’s 2002 presidential election brought to power Latin America’s largest leftist party, the Workers’Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores [PT]). The PTwon because it moved to the center, and voters regarded this shift as credible. The party’s transformation is puzzling, because political scientists do not expect strategic flexibility in “mass bureaucratic” parties, which the PT resembles. Although exogenous factors are important, the key to understanding the party’s strategic adaptation lies with its internal institutions, which generate substantial leadership accountability. The weight of pragmatists in the rank and file grew in the 1990s following the party’s success in subnational executive elections and its consequent need to demonstrate results in office. These rank-and-file members could influence the party’s direction because of the party’s internally democratic institutions. The PT’s transformation reveals that strategic flexibility can emerge in mass parties even when the leadership lacks autonomy.
The effect of treatment on pregnancy among couples with unexplained infertility.

Our objective was to determine the effect of treatment on the likelihood of pregnancy among couples with unexplained infertility. We used a nonrandomized, prospective, multicentered cohort analytic study, with mean follow-up time of 14.5 months (range, 0.5-46 months). The subjects were 470 couples who attended infertility clinics affiliated with medical schools in Canada, in whom no abnormality was found after investigation. They were drawn from a total of 2,106 couples registered from April 1, 1984 to March 31, 1987. Of these, 130 couples were selected for treatment at the discretion of the care givers; 340 couples were not treated. Selection for treatment resulted in imbalance between the groups: the treated couples had a longer mean duration of infertility (48 vs. 36 months), and were more likely to have had a laparoscopy as part of the investigation (72% vs. 48%). No specific protocol of treatment was used. Treatments most commonly used were clomiphene (87); gonadotropins (31); intrauterine insemination (20); IVF or GIFT (16); bromocriptine (12); 43 couples had two treatments, and 11 had three treatments. The only important determinants of treatment (logistic regression) were time under observation and laparoscopy status. Duration of infertility was only a minor determinant of treatment. Crude, unadjusted pregnancy rates were 25% for the treated group and 34% for the untreated group. The early occurrence of pregnancy in the untreated couples accounted for much of this difference. After adjustment for baseline differences between the groups and times to and under treatment with proportional hazards analysis, the cumulative probability of pregnancy is 2.0 (95% CI 1.3 to 3.1) times as high with treatment. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
ERROR-CORRECTING OUTPUT CODING FOR TEXT CLASSIFICATION

This paper applies error-correcting output coding (ECOC) to the task of document categorization. ECOC, of recent vintage in the AI literature, is a method for decomposing a multiway classification problem into many binary classification tasks, and then combining the results of the subtasks into a hypothesized solution to the original problem. There has been much recent interest in the machine learning community about algorithms which integrate “advice” from many subordinate predictors into a single classifier, and error-correcting output coding is one such technique. We provide experimental results on several real-world datasets, extracted from the Internet, which demonstrate that ECOC can offer significant improvements in accuracy over conventional classification algorithms.
An Analysis of the Discourse and Actions of Reading Conferences With English Learners: A Situated Perspective

In this article the author shares examples of reading conferences with 10 English learners over the course of a semester. The reading conferences are conducted by four monolingual, European-American teachers at a primary school in the Southeastern United States. Sociocultural and identity theories are used as a theoretical frame for the research study. Observations of the reading conferences reveal several themes inhibiting the literacy learning of English learners: lack of self-correction opportunities, unbalanced instruction, metalanguage, text difficulty, and book levels. In addition, the conferences with English learners are compared to native-speaking students in a cross-case analysis. Transcripts illustrate the complex factors affecting the learning and identity formation process for English learners. The author offers suggestions for reframing reading conferences with English learners.
Efficiency of projectional editing: a controlled experiment

Projectional editors are editors where a user's editing actions directly change the abstract syntax tree without using a parser. They promise essentially unrestricted language com position as well as flexible notations, which supports aligning languages with their respective domain and constitutes an essential ingredient of model-driven development. Such editors have existed since the 1980s and gained widespread attention with the Intentional Programming paradigm, which used projectional editing at its core. However, despite the benefits, programming still mainly relies on editing textual code, where projectional editors imply a very different -- typically perceived as worse -- editing experience, often seen as the main challenge prohibiting their widespread adoption. We present an experiment of code-editing activities in a projectional editor, conducted with 19 graduate computer-science students and industrial developers. We investigate the effects of projectional editing on editing efficiency, editing strategies, and error rates -- each of which we also compare to conventional, parser-based editing. We observe that editing is efficient for basic-editing tasks, but that editing strategies and typical errors differ. More complex tasks require substantial experience and a better understanding of the abstract-syntax-tree structure -- then, projectional editing is also efficient. We also witness a tradeoff between fewer typing mistakes and an increased complexity of code editing.
Ionotropic NMDA Receptor Signaling Is Required for the Induction of Long-Term Depression in the Mouse Hippocampal CA1 Region

Previous studies have provided strong support for the notion that NMDAR-mediated increases in postsynaptic Ca2+ have a crucial role in the induction of long-term depression (LTD). This view has recently been challenged, however, by findings suggesting that LTD induction is instead attributable to an ion channel-independent, metabotropic form of NMDAR signaling. Thus, to explore the role of ionotropic versus metabotropic NMDAR signaling in LTD, we examined the effects of varying extracellular Ca2+ levels or blocking NMDAR channel ion fluxes with MK-801 on LTD and NMDAR signaling in the mouse hippocampal CA1 region. We find that the induction of LTD in the adult hippocampus is highly sensitive to extracellular Ca2+ levels and that MK-801 blocks NMDAR-dependent LTD in the hippocampus of both adult and immature mice. Moreover, MK-801 inhibits NMDAR-mediated activation of p38-MAPK and dephosphorylation of AMPAR GluA1 subunits at sites implicated in LTD. Thus, our results indicate that the induction of LTD in the hippocampal CA1 region is dependent on ionotropic, rather than metabotropic, NMDAR signaling.
INVESTIGATING THE VALUE OF SECTION SCORES FOR THE TOEFL iBT® TEST

This study investigates the value of reporting the reading, listening, speaking, and writing section scores for the TOEFL iBT® test, focusing on 4 related aspects of the psychometric quality of the TOEFL iBT section scores: reliability of the section scores, dimensionality of the test, presence of distinct score profiles, and the section scores' generalizability for norm-referenced decisions as well as the dependability of criterion-referenced decisions for international student admission. Four operational TOEFL iBT test forms were analyzed for all examinees as well as for 3 native language (L1) groups (Arabic, Korean, and Spanish). Haberman's (2008) subscore analysis suggested that the speaking section score had added value due to its relative distinctness from the other modalities. Consistent with the subscore analysis results, a series of exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) indicated the possibility of the presence of 2 correlated factors—a reading/listening/writing factor and a speaking factor. In contrast, the CFAs conducted separately for the 3 L1 groups as well as a multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) identified a correlated 4-factor model with reading, listening, speaking, and writing factors as the best representation of the structure of the entire test for all examinees as well as for the 3 L1 groups. Reliability of the observed section scores for norm-referenced score interpretations and the dependability of classification decisions made based on different cut scores were generally satisfactory while they were also found to be relatively low in some circumstances. Based on the mixed results concerning the value-added information the TOEFL iBT section scores provide, recommendations for future research directions and some key issues of consideration for high-stakes decision making based on the section scores were summarized.
Learning outcomes and dropout intentions: an analytical model for Spanish universities

The dropout rate among Spanish university students is very high compared to the European mean, creating a pressing need for the introduction of policies and programmes aimed at increasing rates of persistence. In this article, we study this problem by combining students’ perceived learning outcomes with their dropout intentions, and we propose a research model that considers subjective factors that might impact this decision. The model is estimated for two degree courses: Business Administration and Nursing. The estimation method uses structural equations based on the partial least squares algorithm. This allows the construction of indices for the variables of interest, enabling us to make comparisons between courses and over time. To reduce dropout intentions, efforts need to be focused on obtaining better cognitive outcomes, as well as on achieving a higher level of student satisfaction with their university experience.
Electronic Structure and Magnetism of Mn-Doped ZnO Nanowires

The geometric structures, electronic and magnetic properties of Mn-doped ZnO nanowires were investigated using density functional theory. The results indicated that all the calculated energy differences were negative, and the energy of the ground state was 0.229 eV lower than ferromagnetic coupling, which show higher stability in antiferromagnetic coupling. The calculated results indicated that obvious spin splitting phenomenon occurred near the Femi level. The Zn atoms on the inner layer of ZnO nanowires are easily substituted by Mn atoms along the [0001] direction. It was also shown that the Mn2+-O2−-Mn2+ magnetic coupling formed by intermediate O atom was proved to be caused by orbital hybridization between Mn 3d and O 2p states. The magnetic moments were mainly attributed to the unpaired Mn 3d orbitals, but not relevant with doping position of Mn atoms. Moreover, the optical properties of Mn-doped ZnO nanowires exhibited a novel blue-shifted optical absorption and enhanced ultraviolet-light emission. The above results show that the Mn-doped ZnO nanowires are a new type of magneto-optical materials with great promise.
A Survey of Data Center Network Architectures

Large-scale data centers form the core infrastructure support for the ever expanding cloud based services. Thus the performance and dependability characteristics of data centers will have significant impact on the scalability of these services. In particular, the data center network needs to be agile and reconfigurable in order to respond quickly to ever changing application demands and service requirements. Significant research work has been done on designing the data center network topologies in order to improve the performance of data centers. In this paper, we present a survey of data center network designs and topologies that have published recently. We start with a discussion on various representative data center network topologies, and compare them with respect to several properties in order to highlight their advantages and disadvantages. Thereafter, we discuss several routing protocols designed for these topologies, and compare them based on various criteria: the basic algorithms to establish connections, the techniques used to gain better performance and the mechanisms for faulttolerance. A good understanding of the state-of-the-art in data center networks would enable the design of future architectures in order to improve performance and dependability of data centers.
Fast and accurate traffic matrix measurement using adaptive cardinality counting

Traffic matrix (TM) can be used to detect, identify, and trace network anomaly caused by DDoS attacks and worm outbreaks. To detect network anomaly as early as possible, we need to obtain TM in a fast and accurate manner. Many existing TM estimation techniques are found not sufficient for this purpose due to their high overhead or low accuracy. We propose a cardinality-based TM measurement approach with an adaptive counting algorithm to produce both packetlevel and flow-level TM, which is well-suited for TM-based anomaly detection on a network basis. Our results show that the approach can obtain TM in almost real-time (once very 10 seconds) with low average relative error (less than 5%). Our approach has low processing, storage and communication overhead, e.g. software implementation can support OC-192 line speed. It can also be implemented in a passive mode and deployed incrementally without changing current routing infrastructure.
CAN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS SUCCESSFULLY EXPLAIN THE CONTENT OF MEDIA AND JOURNALISTIC PRACTICE?

It is argued here that textual analysis of media accounts requires the study of the social structures from which competing ideological explanations develop. A comparison of the methods of the Glasgow University Media Group with the work of Norman Fairclough and Teun van Dijk shows that discourse analysis which remains text-based has problems in its ability to show: (1) the origins of competing discourses and how they relate to different social interests, (2) the diversity of social accounts compared to what is present (and absent) in a specific text, (3) the impact of external factors such as professional media practice on the manner in which the discourses are represented, and (4) what the text actually means to different parts of the audience. There are other problems with “text only” analyses in relation to (1) the accuracy of representations, (2) the significance of texts to our own audience, and (3) the question of how rhetoric “belongs to” or is used by different social interests. To overcome these problems requires a method which analyses processes of production, content, reception and circulation of social meaning simultaneously.