Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The learning experience with electronic museum guides.

Within the contextual model of learning framework, the authors conducted a study with electronic handheld guides at the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, the Netherlands). This study investigated the influence that limiting users' freedom of choice and control by facilitated mediation of others has on users' learning experiences. The different levels of control were implemented on the ubiNext museum guide system. The level of users' control had no significant influence on the amount of art the participants talked about. However, in the curator recommendation mode, the participants had a more passive attitude. The different handheld devices did not perform better than the paper guide. As the paper guide did not require any troubleshooting, it can even be considered a better solution. However, the handheld devices could not be used to their full potential as audio and video data were not present. Museums increasingly acknowledge the need to provide ade- quate educational services to their visitors. The times of self- sufficient egalitarian arrogance, in which visitors were left alone with undecipherable art objects, are, one hopes, over. To guide museums' educational efforts, first theoretical frameworks became available. The contextual model of learning framework is among the most renowned (Falk & Dierking, 2000). It distinguishes 11 key factors that influence visitors' learning experiences: Motiva- tion and Expectations (Factor 1), Interest (Factor 2), Prior Knowl- edge and Experience (Factor 3), Choice and Control (Factor 4), Within-Group Sociocultural Mediation (Factor 5), Facilitated Me- diation by Others (Factor 6), Culture (Factor 7), Advance Prepa- ration (Factor 8), Setting (Factor 9), Design (Factor 10), and Subsequent Reinforcing Events and Experiences (Factor 11). Three of these factors are of special interest to this study. Factor 3 (Prior Knowledge and Experience) deals with the widely known fact (Roschelle, 1995) that people who have prior knowledge and experience with art objects are better able to create meaning from new ones. Factor 4 (Choice and Control) refers to a situation in which individuals can exercise choice over what, how, when, and with whom they learn and feel in control of their own learning. It has been shown that children prefer to visit museums with their fam- ilies, compared with school trips, because they have more control over the experience (Griffin, 1996; Griffin, 1998; Jensen, 1994). Factor 6 (Facilitated Mediation by Others) describes a situation in which people perceived to be knowledgeable, such as teachers and parents, facilitate the learning experience. This classic sce- nario has a long cultural history and, if done right, can be very supportive.
Wideband high-impedance surface reflector for low-profile high-gain UHF antenna

A novel low-profile high-gain UHF antenna for Digital Television (DTV) is presented using an appropriately designed wideband High-Impedance Surface (HIS) reflector. The proposed design is an improvement of the structure presented in previous work. The effect of an air gap between the HIS substrate and its back ground plane is investigated in an effort to produce a high-gain, low-profile and lightweight structure. Low-cost substrates are employed in the design, rigid PVC for the antenna and foamed PVC for the artificial ground plane. PVC substrate is ecologic, recyclable, long lasting and cheap. A microstrip-fed monopole mounted on the proposed HIS reflects effectively in-phase field over a bandwidth of about 56%. Hence, significant enhancement in antenna gain has been achieved, around 7 dBi peak gain with respect to the simple monopole. The overall structure is very compact (total height is 0.098λ). Details of the proposed antenna design and simulation results are described.
Design of good constellations for single-subcarrier intensity-modulated optical systems

We address the problem of constellation design for single-subcarrier intensity-modulated direct-detected optical systems. We seek to design constellations that minimize the average electrical power, average optical power and peak optical power for a given minimum Euclidean distance between constellation points. The constellation design is formulated as a nonconvex optimization problem with a convex cost function, nonconvex quadratic constraints and second-order cone constraints. It is shown that this problem can be approximated by a second-order cone programming (SOCP) problem. We propose an iterative procedure in which the SOCP approximation is refined in each iteration. The new constellations are compared to the state-of-the-art constellations in terms of power efficiency. Our 32- and 64-point constellations outperform the corresponding QAM-based and face-centered cubic lattice constellations.
Two Trackers Are Better than One: Information about the Co-actor's Actions and Performance Scores Contribute to the Collective Benefit in a Joint Visuospatial Task

When humans collaborate, they often distribute task demands in order to reach a higher performance compared to performing the same task alone (i.e., a collective benefit). Here, we tested to what extent receiving information about the actions of a co-actor, performance scores, or receiving both types of information impacts the collective benefit in a collaborative multiple object tracking task. In a between-subject design, pairs of individuals jointly tracked a subset of target objects among several moving distractor objects on a computer screen for a 100 trials. At the end of a trial, pairs received performance scores (Experiment 1), information about their partner's target selections (Experiment 2), or both types of information (Experiment 3). In all experiments, the performance of the pair exceeded the individual performances and the simulated performance of two independent individuals combined. Initially, when receiving both types of information (Experiment 3), pairs achieved the highest performance and divided task demands most efficiently compared to the other two experiments. Over time, performances and the ability to divide task demands for pairs receiving a single type of information converged with those receiving both, suggesting that pairs' coordination strategies become equally effective over time across experiments. However, pairs' performances never reached a theoretical limit of performance in all experiments. For distributing task demands, members of a pair predominantly used a left-right division of labor strategy (i.e., the leftmost targets were tracked by one co-actor while the rightmost targets were tracked by the other co-actor). Overall, findings of the present study suggest that receiving information about actions of a co-actor, performance scores, or receiving both enables pairs to devise effective division of labor strategies in a collaborative visuospatial task. However, when pairs had both types of information available, the formation of division of labor strategies was facilitated, indicating that pairs benefited the most from having both types of information available (i.e., actions about the co-actor and performance scores). Findings are applicable to circumstances in which humans need to perform collaborative visuospatial tasks that are time-critical and/or only allow a very limited exchange of information between co-actors.
Ancillary Service to the Grid Through Control of Fans in Commercial Building HVAC Systems

The thermal storage potential in commercial buildings is an enormous resource for providing various ancillary services to the grid. In this paper, we show how fans in Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems of commercial buildings alone can provide substantial frequency regulation service, with little change in their indoor environments. A feedforward architecture is proposed to control the fan power consumption to track a regulation signal. The proposed control scheme is then tested through simulations based on a calibrated high fidelity non-linear model of a building. Model parameters are identified from data collected in Pugh Hall, a commercial building located on the University of Florida campus. For the HVAC system under consideration, numerical experiments demonstrate how up to 15% of the rated fan power can be deployed for regulation purpose while having little effect on the building indoor temperature. The regulation signal that can be successfully tracked is constrained in the frequency band [1/τ0,1/τ1], where τ0 ≈ 3 minutes and τ1 ≈ 8 seconds. Our results indicate that fans in existing commercial buildings in the U.S. can provide about 70% of the current national regulation reserve requirements in the aforementioned frequency band. A unique advantage of the proposed control scheme is that assessing the value of the ancillary service provided is trivial, which is in stark contrast to many demand-response programs.
ON THE PROCESSING OF NOVEL ROOT+SUFFIX COMBINATIONS

New words are constantly entering language. When a new word is formed by the combination of existing morphemes, it is expected to follow languagespecific structural patterns called selectional restrictions. If a new word follows these restrictions, then it can be considered to be morphologically legal, and if it violates these restrictions, then it can be said to be morphologically illegal. For example, in English, the derivational suffix -ify combines with nouns to form verbs, as in classify (class+ify). While not attested in English, a word like bird+ ify should be morphologically possible, because it does not violate the selectional restrictions governing the use of the suffix –ify. However, the form bird+ment violates the selectional restrictions of the suffix –ment, which combines with verbs to form nouns with a general meaning of ‘state’ or ‘action,’ and does not typically combine with nouns. If selectional restrictions play a role in word formation, one would expect novel words following selectional restrictions to be more acceptable to native speakers than morphological illegal pseudowords. There is evidence that derivational suffixes have mental representations beyond their occurrences in derived words. Reid and Marslen-Wilson (2003) reported a suffix-suffix interference effect when participants were presented with different suffixes attached to the same stem in a prime-target pair. This is taken as evidence that suffixes have independent representations in the mental lexicon. Hay (2001) demonstrated that the relative frequencies of the base, affix, and derived form of a word can influence whether the complex derived form will be decomposed. This requires that the base and suffix that make up a derived form interact, which in turn suggests that suffixes themselves have their own representations in the mental lexicon and accompanying statistical properties that are worthy of consideration. The interactions of roots and affixes have not been fully explored. In the following series of experiments, selectional restrictions and family size were both considered as possible influences on the processing of novel root+suffix combinations in English.
Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent Neural Networks can be trained to produce sequences of tokens given some input, as exemplified by recent results in machine translation and image captioning. The current approach to training them consists of maximizing the likelihood of each token in the sequence given the current (recurrent) state and the previous token. At inference, the unknown previous token is then replaced by a token generated by the model itself. This discrepancy between training and inference can yield errors that can accumulate quickly along the generated sequence. We propose a curriculum learning strategy to gently change the training process from a fully guided scheme using the true previous token, towards a less guided scheme which mostly uses the generated token instead. Experiments on several sequence prediction tasks show that this approach yields significant improvements. Moreover, it was used succesfully in our winning entry to the MSCOCO image captioning challenge, 2015.
Effect of Different Configurations of Mechanical Aerators on Oxygen Transfer and Aeration Efficiency with respect to Power Consumption

(cid:3) Abstract — This paper examines the use of mechanical aerator for oxidation-ditch process. The rotor, which controls the aeration, is the main component of the aeration process. Therefore, the objective of this study is to find out the variations in overall oxygen transfer coefficient (K L a) and aeration efficiency (AE) for different configurations of aerator by varying the parameters viz. speed of aerator, depth of immersion, blade tip angles so as to yield higher values of K L a and AE. Six different configurations of aerator were developed and fabricated in the laboratory and were tested for above-mentioned parameters. The curved blade rotor (CBR) emerged as a potential aerator with blade tip angle of 47°. The mathematical models are developed for predicting the behaviour of CBR w.r. t k L a and power. In laboratory studies, the optimum value of K L a and AE were observed to be 10.33 h -1 and 2.269 kg O 2 / kWh.
DogSim: A state chart simulator for Domotic Environments

Smart Homes and Domotic Environments are promising to revolutionize the daily human life providing users with increased care, adaptability and safety. However, to fully exploit their potential, in everyday life, suitable design and verification tools must be available, allowing architects and designers to correctly implement their ideas and to verify the effects of designed policies on real world environments. This paper describes DogSim: a framework and API for automatic generation of state chart simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. DogSim has been tested on the model of a 6-room flat equipped with 95 devices. Results show that the approach is feasible and that can easily address realistic home scenarios.
The Genetic Architecture of Ecological Specialization: Correlated Gene Effects on Host Use and Habitat Choice in Pea Aphids

Genetic correlations among phenotypic characters result when two traits are influenced by the same genes or sets of genes. By reducing the degree to which traits in two environments can evolve independently (e.g., Lande 1979; Via and Lande 1985), such correlations are likely to play a central role in both the evolution of ecological specialization and in its link to speciation. For example, negative genetic correlations between fitness traits in different environments (i.e., genetic trade‐offs) are thought to influence the evolution of specialization, while positive genetic correlations between performance and characters influencing assortative mating can accelerate the evolution of reproductive isolation between ecologically specialized populations. We first discuss how the genetic architecture of a suite of traits may affect the evolutionary role of genetic correlations among them and review how the mechanisms of correlations can be analyzed using quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping. We then consider the implications of such data for understanding the evolution of specialization and its link to speciation. We illustrate this approach with a QTL analysis of key characters in two races of pea aphids that are highly specialized on different host plants and partially reproductively isolated. Our results suggest that antagonism among QTL effects on performance in the two environments leads to a genetic trade‐off in this system. We also found evidence for parallel QTL effects on host‐plant acceptance and fecundity on the accepted host, which could produce assortative mating. These results suggest that the genetic architecture of traits associated with host use may have played a central role in the evolution of specialization and reproductive isolation in pea aphids.
The dopamine D2 receptor gene, perceived parental support, and adolescent loneliness: longitudinal evidence for gene-environment interactions.

BACKGROUND Loneliness is a common problem in adolescence. Earlier research focused on genes within the serotonin and oxytocin systems, but no studies have examined the role of dopamine-related genes in loneliness. In the present study, we focused on the dopamine D2 receptor gene (DRD2). METHODS Associations among the DRD2, sex, parental support, and loneliness were examined in a longitudinal study spanning five annual waves (N = 307). RESULTS Using Latent Growth Curve Modeling, DRD2 genotype was not directly related to loneliness. Interactions were found between parental support and DRD2 genotype, showing that adolescents with the A2A2 genotype who perceived little support from their parents had the highest baseline levels of loneliness. Adolescents with an A1 allele were not susceptible to the rewarding effect of parental support. CONCLUSIONS The present study is the first to examine the role of the DRD2 genotype in loneliness. Our results contribute to a further understanding of the environmental and genetic basis of loneliness in adolescence.
Super ENSO and Global Climate Oscillations at Millennial Time Scales

The late Pleistocene history of seawater temperature and salinity variability in the western tropical Pacific warm pool is reconstructed from oxygen isotope (δ18O) and magnesium/calcium composition of planktonic foraminifera. Differentiating the calcite δ18O record into components of temperature and local water δ18O reveals a dominant salinity signal that varied in accord with Dansgaard/Oeschger cycles over Greenland. Salinities were higher at times of high-latitude cooling and were lower during interstadials. The pattern and magnitude of the salinity variations imply shifts in the tropical Pacific ocean/atmosphere system analogous to modern El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). El Niño conditions correlate with stadials at high latitudes, whereas La Niña conditions correlate with interstadials. Millennial-scale shifts in atmospheric convection away from the western tropical Pacific may explain many paleo-observations, including lower atmospheric CO2, N2O, and CH4 during stadials and patterns of extratropical ocean variability that have tropical source functions that are negatively correlated with El Niño.
The Use of Heart Rate Variability in Assessing Precompetitive Stress in High-Standard Judo Athletes

Abstract The objective of this study is to examine the sensitivity to and changes in heart rate variability (HRV) in stressful situations before judo competitions and to observe the differences among judo athletes according to their competitive standards in both official and unofficial competitions. 24 (10 male and 14 female) national- and international-standard athletes were evaluated. Each participant answered the Revised Competitive State Anxiety Inventory (CSAI-2R) and their HRV was recorded both during an official and unofficial competition. The MANOVA showed significant main effects of the athlete’s standard and the type of competition in CSAI-2R, in HRV time domain, in HRV frequency domain and in HRV nonlinear analysis (p<0.05). International-standard judo athletes have lower somatic anxiety, cognitive anxiety, heart rate and low-high frequency ratio than national-standard athletes (p<0.05). International-standard athletes have a higher confidence, mean RR interval, standard deviation of RR, square root of the mean squared difference of successive RR intervals, number of consecutive RR that differ by more than 5 ms, short-term variability, long-term variability, long-range scaling exponents and short-range scaling exponent than national-standard judo athletes. In conclusion, international-standard athletes show less pre-competitive anxiety than the national-standard athletes and HRV analysis is sensitive to changes in pre-competitive anxiety.
D1‐class dopamine receptors influence cocaine‐induced persistent expression of Fos‐related proteins in striatum

CHRONIC intermittent exposure to psychomotor stimulants induces in the striatum the expression of Fos- related proteins (Fras) that persist after the end of drug treatment. We carried out experiments to determine whether such Fras (‘chronic Fras’) require dopamine D1-class receptor function for their persistent expression in the striatum. We chronically administered cocaine to rats in a behavioral sensitization protocol and blocked D1- class receptors with SCH23390 before a final cocaine challenge. Western blotting and immunohistochemical analyses indicate that Fras persistently expressed in response to chronic treatment include proteins of two types: those that have become independent of D1-class dopamine receptor activation and those that remain dependent on D1-class receptors for their expression following drug challenge.
Interventional treatment for acute ischaemic stroke in an 86-year-old

An 86-year-old lady presented to the accident and emergency department with a 90 min history of receptive and expressive dysphasia. There were no motor symptoms or visual symptoms reported. A partial anterior circulation stroke was diagnosed. On examination, she had a National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale of 6. CT angiography showed an occlusive thrombus within the left internal carotid artery extending into the left M1 segment of the middle cerebral artery and the proximal A1 segment of the anterior cerebral artery. Intra-arterial thrombectomy was preformed. Full recovery was achieved.
Assessment of Macular Thickness in Healthy Eyes Using Cirrus HD-OCT: A Cross-Sectional Study

We aimed to determine normal macular thickness using Cirrus high definition optical coherence tomography. In this cross-sectional survey, 112 subjects were selected using random sampling from the Rasht telephone directory. All subjects underwent complete eye examinations. Both eyes of each patient were evaluated. The creation of a macular thickness map using a macular cube 512 × 128 combo was optional. The average thickness of the retina was determined in 9 Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) regions. To assess reproducibility and system reliability, the thickness of the retina was measured up to 5 times in 10 healthy subjects. The coefficient of variation was then calculated for each individual. The coefficient of variation of macular thickness within 1 mm of the center was 0.15 - 1.33%. The means and standard deviations of central subfield thickness (CST), macular thickness (MT), and macular volume (MV) were 245.44 ± 20.39 µm, 277.9 ± 12.0 µm, and 9.98 ± 0.43 mm3, respectively. The mean CST (P < 0.0001), MT (P = 0.038), and MV (P = 0.030) were significantly higher in men than in women. In addition, regardless of age or sex, macular thickness increased when moving from within 1 mm of the center to 3 mm and 6 mm away from the center, so that the upper 3 mm (S3) was the thickest region, and the temporal 6 mm (T6) was the thinnest region in the ETDRS regions. The mean MT of healthy subjects was 280.67 ± 12.79 µm in men and 276.63 ± 11.61 µm in women. Therefore, the macula is significantly thicker in men than in women (P = 0.038).
Abstract interpretation by dynamic partitioning

Abstract The essential part of abstract interpretation is to build a machine-representable abstract domain expressing interesting properties about the possible states reached by a program at runtime. Many techniques have been developed which assume that one knows in advance the class of properties that are of interest. There are cases however when there are no a priori indications about the 'best' abstract properties to use. We introduce a new framework that enables non-unique representations of abstract program properties to be used, and expose a method, called dynamic partitioning, that allows the dynamic determination of interesting abstract domains using data structures built over simpler domains. Finally, we show how dynamic partitioning can be used to compute non-trivial approximations of functions over infinite domains and give an application to the computation of minimal function graphs.