Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Renormalizable acausal theories of classical gravity coupled with interacting quantum fields

We prove the renormalizability of various theories of classical gravity coupled with interacting quantum fields. The models contain vertices with dimensionalities greater than 4, a finite number of matter operators and a finite or reduced number of independent couplings. An interesting class of models is obtained from ordinary power-counting renormalizable theories, letting the couplings depend on the scalar curvature R of spacetime. The divergences are removed without introducing higher derivative kinetic terms in the gravitational sector. The metric tensor has a non-trivial running, even if it is not quantized. The results are proved applying a certain map that converts classical instabilities, due to higher derivatives, into classical violations of causality, whose effects become observable at sufficiently high energies. We study acausal Einstein–Yang–Mills theory with an R-dependent gauge coupling in detail. We derive all-order formulae for the beta functions of the dimensionality-six gravitational vertices induced by renormalization, such as RRμνρσRμνρσ. Such beta functions are related to the trace-anomaly coefficients of the matter subsector.
A Study on Study Habits and Academic Performance of Students

Study habits contribute significantly in the development of knowledge and perceptual capacities. Study habits tell a person that how much he will learn and how far he wants to go, and how much he wants to earn. These all could be decided with the help of one? s study habits, throughout the life. Therefore it is assumed that study habits are correlates of scholastic or academic achievement. In this study, the association between study habits and academic performance of students is examined. Sample of 270 students were taken from two colleges Govt. Allama Iqbal College for Women, Sialkot and Govt. Technical College for boys, Sialkot. The association between study habits and academic performance was checked by using chi-square test. The results showed that there is significant relationship between study habits and academic performance of the students.
The Logic of Exact Covers: Completeness and Uniform Interpolation

We show that all (not necessarily normal or monotone) modal logics that can be axiomatised in rank-1 have the interpolation property, and that in fact interpolation is uniform if the logics just have finitely many modal operators. As immediate applications, we obtain previously unknown interpolation theorems for a range of modal logics, containing probabilistic and graded modal logic, alternating temporal logic and some variants of conditional logic. Technically, this is achieved by translating to and from a new (coalgebraic) logic introduced in this paper, the logic of exact covers. It is interpreted over coalgebrasfor an endofunctor on the category of sets that also directly determines the syntax. Apart from closure under bisimulation quantifiers (and hence interpolation), we also provide a complete tableaux calculus and establish both the Hennessy-Milner and the small model property for this logic.
The relation between short-term memory and vocabulary skills in Greek children with cochlear implants: The role of hearing experience

Weak performance in short-term memory (STM) in children with cochlear implants (CI) may have an impact on vocabulary development. Vocabulary, phonological STM (non-word repetition), phonological/verbal STM (digit span) and rapid naming measures were administered to 15 Greek-speaking children with CI (ages 4;6–8;6) and to chronological age (CA) and younger controls with normal hearing (NH). The children with CI exhibited lower performance in all tasks compared to CA controls but lagged behind only in phonological STM tasks in comparison to younger NH controls. For children with CI, vocabulary correlated with phonological STM, while for younger NH controls it correlated with all the cognitive measures used. The present results showed that children with CI demonstrate age-matched rapid naming skills, a slower development in vocabulary acquisition rates and developmental lags in their phonological STM skills, suggesting an overall atypical pattern of development. The results also suggest a relationship between these skills which needs to be explored further.
Evidence-Based Clinical Recommendations for the Administration of the Sequential Motion Rates Task

The sequential motion rates (SMR) task, that involves rapid and accurate repetitions of a syllable sequence, /pataka/, is a commonly used evaluation tool for oro-motor abilities. Although the SMR is a well-known tool, some aspects of its administration protocol are unspecified. We address the following factors and their role in the SMR protocol: (a) selecting the appropriate stimulus for the client—nonword, real word or both, (b) the necessity of a practice round, (c) using visual feedback, (d) using language-specific performance rate norms, and (e) the implications for using different measurements (time-based, rate-based). We also provide rate norms for Hebrew-speaking clients and a pair of simple equations for transforming data from time-based units (seconds) to rate-based units (syllables/s). These recommendations can be considered in the clinical assessment process and may be integrated into the speech-language pathologists’ practice, allowing for a more accurate and cost-effective evaluation procedure.
States and standardisation: constructing the co-ethnic migrant story in Germany

ABSTRACT This article addresses the standardisation of stories about diaspora return (also called ‘co-ethnic migration’ or ‘repatriation’). Using the concept of ‘standards’, the author analyses how the German state distributes certain texts about diaspora history over others, forming a legible and homogenous narrative of co-ethnic migrant identity. The article is based on a critical discourse analysis of texts relating to Russian–German history and analysis of biographical narratives of co-ethnic Germans residing in Germany. The study identifies mechanisms by which states homogenise narratives, and to understand which co-ethnic history and identity constructions are reproduced by the state, and which are silenced. This approach enriches the study of diasporas in two ways: first, it sheds light on how states govern diaspora members who have migrated ‘back’ to their ‘origin’ countries; second, it departs from the state-centric approach prevalent in the study of diaspora governance by focusing on stories told by diaspora members.
High‐conflict parents in mediation: An analysis of dialogues and sources to conflict

A significant proportion of parents in mediation present destructive and escalating conflicts. In a naturalistic study of sessions with high conflict couples, we observed dialogues with frequent interruptions, rapidly shifting subjects, and emotional attacks. A systematic search revealed eight distinct sources of conflict that interfered with the mediation process: Two related to the breakup, four regarding differing concerns of care for the child and two mainly about the contextual conditions for childcare arrangements. The article describes these sources of conflicts in a format that could increase the capacity of mediators to recognize and address them during the process of mediation.
Free Currency Markets, Financial Crises and the Growth Debacle : Is There a Causal Relationship?

The paper develops an alternative hypothesis that attributes collateral responsibility for the recent spate of financial crises to a basic flaw of the architecture of the international financial system, free markets for foreign exchange. A valid positional distinction between reserve/ hard and soft currencies, based on reputation, accounts for the systematic substitution of the former currencies for a country’s soft currency in liquid asset holdings. The result of this “asymmetric reputation” in an environment of free currency markets is the systematic devaluation of soft currencies. Moreover, bubbles, devaluations and financial crises, far from being self-correcting monetary phenomena, can lead to sharp contractions in the economy through the misallocation of resources in competitive devaluation trade, as opposed to comparative advantage trade. In a case that is parallel to asymmetric information and incomplete credit markets, the appropriate policy intervention in asymmetric-reputation driven incomplete currency markets is maintaining mildly repressed exchange rates. The operational definition of “mild” is imposing restrictions on currency substitution, whether it is home-grown or it is the result of foreign financial capital taking short positions on the local currency. JEL Classification: F31, F41, G15
Borrowing Constraints, Entrepreneurial Risks, and the Wealth Distribution in a Heterogeneous Agent Model

This paper deals with credit market imperfections and idiosyncratic risks in a two–sector heterogeneous agent dynamic general equilibrium model of occupational choice. We focus especially on the effects of tightening financial constraints on macroeconomic performance, entrepreneurial risk–taking, and social mobility. Contrary to many models in the literature, our comparative static results cover the entire range of borrowing constraints, from complete markets to a perfectly constrained economy. In our baseline model, we find substantial gains in output, welfare, and wealth equality associated with relaxing the constraints, but argue that it might also prove worthwhile to examine the marginal gains from credit market improvements. Interestingly, the amount of entrepreneurial activity and social mobility increases if borrowing constraints become more tight. These results can be attributed to the general equilibrium nature of our approach, where optimal firm sizes and the demand for credit are determined endogenously. The comparative static results on the entrepreneurship rate and social mobility respond sensitively to a change in income persistence.
A Rationale for the Integration of Critical Thinking Skills in EFL/ESL Instruction

Critical thinking has become a high priority in almost every institution and educational system around the world, particularly since the second half of the 20th century. Developing the learners’ critical thinking skills has become an educational ideal that schools strive to achieve. There is a tacit consensus about the importance of incorporating critical thinking in education and ample literature has been written about it although there are different approaches to how this should be done. Integrating critical thinking skills in language instruction, however is a less explored area, especially when it comes to justifying this process. The main purpose of this paper is to present a rational for the inclusion of critical thinking skills in language teaching with reference to EFL and ESL. Five categories of reasons are suggested to support the implementation of critical thinking skills in the language classroom. The first is philosophical reasons related to the connection between language and thought. The second is cognitive and metacognitive reasons dealing with how critical thinking skills influence and are influenced by processes such as memory, comprehension and metacognition. The third is pedagogical reasons related the fact that many modern language teaching methods and techniques today require the learner to engage in problem solving, evaluation and decision making. The last are socio-economic reasons linked to the requirements of the job market.
Iron Deficiency Stimulated Some Enzymes Activity , Lipid Peroxidation and Free Radicals Production in Borage officinalis Induced in vitro

Iron deficiency is one of the most important factors affecting growth and yield. Utilizing tissue culture technique to study the response of plant to Fe-stress was suggested as a rapid and simple method. Fe-deficiency was explored by cultivating shoots of Borage plantlets on MS media with 27.8, 13.0, 0.0 mg/L FeSO4. Results showed that, severe Fe-deficiency induced yellowing and typical iron deficiency symptoms. Chlorophyll was also inhibited. The response of antioxidant enzymes, such as catalase (CAT) and ascorbate peroxidase (APX) to iron stress was also examined. CAT and APX activities declined by 49.3% and 56.6% in young Fe-deficient leaves respectively. Whereas the content of glutathione increased by 28.9% compared to control treatment. Enhancement in lipid peroxidation was also more evident under severe Fe-deficiency. Iron stress also induced several changes in CAT and peroxidase (POD) isozyme profiles and enhanced their activities, especially those of POD. Using electron spin resonance (ESR) showed that, severe Fe-deficiency markedly increased level of free radicals formation.
Experimental Study of Internet Stabil-ity and Wide-Area Backbone Failures

In this paper, we describe an experimental study of Internet stability and the origins of failure in Internet protocol backbones. The stability of end-to-end Internet paths is dependent both on the underlying telecommunication switching system, as well as the higher level software and hardware components speci c to the Internet's packet-switched forwarding and routing architecture. Although a number of earlier studies have examined failures in the public telecommunication system, little attention has been given to the characterization of Internet stability. Our paper analyzes Internet failures from three di erent perspectives. We rst examine several recent major Internet failures and their probable origins. These empirical observations illustrate the complexity of the Internet and show that unlike commercial transaction systems, the interactions of the underlying components of the Internet are poorly understood. Next, our examination focuses on the stability of paths between Internet Service Providers. Our analysis is based on the experimental instrumentation of key portions of the Internet infrastructure. Speci cally, we logged all of the routing control tra c at ve of the largest U.S. Internet exchange points over a three year period. This study of network reachability information found unexpectedly high levels of path uctuation and an aggregate low mean time between failures for individual Internet paths. These results point to a high level of instability in the global Internet backbone. While our study of the Internet backbone identi es major trends in the level of path instability between di erent service providers, these results do not characterize failures inside the network of service provider. The nal portion of our paper focuses on a case study of the network failures observed in a large regional Internet backbone. This examination of the internal stability of a network includes twelve months of operational failure logs and a review of the internal routing communication data collected between regional backbone routers. We characterize the type and frequency of failures in twenty categories, and describe the failure properties of the regional backbone as a whole. Supported by National Science Foundation Grant NCR-971017, and gifts from both Intel and Hewlett Packard.
A Glimpse into the World of Integrative and Mobilizable Elements in Streptococci Reveals an Unexpected Diversity and Novel Families of Mobilization Proteins

Recent analyses of bacterial genomes have shown that integrated elements that transfer by conjugation play an essential role in horizontal gene transfer. Among these elements, the integrative and mobilizable elements (IMEs) are known to encode their own excision and integration machinery, and to carry all the sequences or genes necessary to hijack the mating pore of a conjugative element for their own transfer. However, knowledge of their prevalence and diversity is still severely lacking. In this work, an extensive analysis of 124 genomes from 27 species of Streptococcus reveals 144 IMEs. These IMEs encode either tyrosine or serine integrases. The identification of IME boundaries shows that 141 are specifically integrated in 17 target sites. The IME-encoded relaxases belong to nine superfamilies, among which four are previously unknown in any mobilizable or conjugative element. A total of 118 IMEs are found to encode a non-canonical relaxase related to rolling circle replication initiators (belonging to the four novel families or to MobT). Surprisingly, among these, 83 encode a TcpA protein (i.e., a non-canonical coupling protein (CP) that is more closely related to FtsK than VirD4) that was not previously known to be encoded by mobilizable elements. Phylogenetic analyses reveal not only many integration/excision module replacements but also losses, acquisitions or replacements of TcpA genes between IMEs. This glimpse into the still poorly known world of IMEs reveals that mobilizable elements have a very high prevalence. Their diversity is even greater than expected, with most encoding a CP and/or a non-canonical relaxase.
Scores Assigned by Inexpert EFL Raters to Different Quality EFL Compositions, and the Raters' Decision-Making Behaviors.

The aim of this study is to examine the variability in and reliability of scores assigned to different quality EFL compositions by EFL instructors and their rating behaviors. Using a mixed research design, quantitative data were collected from EFL instructors’ ratings of 30 compositions of three different qualities using a holistic scoring rubric. Qualitatively, think-aloud protocol data were collected concretely from a sub-sample of raters. The generalizability theory (G-theory) approach was used to analyze the quantitative data. The results showed that the raters mostly deviated while giving scores to very low level and mid-range compositions, but that they were more consistent while rating very high-level compositions. The reliability of the ratings of high quality papers (e.g. g: .87 and phi: .79 respectively) was higher than the coefficients obtained for mid-range and low quality compositions. This result indicated that more reliable ratings could be obtained in the rating of high quality papers. The think-aloud protocol analysis indicated that the raters attended differently to different aspects of these three level compositions. Implications are given from performance assessment practice perspectives.
Homological Quantum Field Theory

We show that the space of chains of smooth maps from spheres into a fixed compact oriented manifold has a natural structure of a transversal $d$-algebra. We construct a structure of transversal 1-category on the space of chains of maps from a suspension space $S(Y)$, with certain boundary restrictions, into a fixed compact oriented manifold. We define homological quantum field theories \HL and construct several examples of such structures. Our definition is based on the notions of string topology of Chas and Sullivan, and homotopy quantum field theories of Turaev.
City Research Online

It has been argued that functional diversity might be a plausible means of claiming independence of failures between two versions of a system. We present a model of functional diversity, in the spirit of earlier models of diversity such as those of Eckhardt and Lee, and Hughes. In terms of the model, we show that claims for independence between functionally diverse systems seem rather unrealistic. Instead, it seems likely that functionally diverse systems will exhibit positively correlated failures, and thus will be less reliable than an assumption of independence would suggest. The result does not, of course, suggest that functional diversity is not worthwhile; instead, it places upon the evaluator of such a system the onus to estimate the degree of dependence so as to evaluate the reliability of the system.
Spatio-Temporal Parsing in Spatial Hypermedia

Spatial hypertext represents associations between chunks of information by spatial or visual attributes (such as proximity, color, shape, etc.). This supports expressing information structures implicitly and in an intuitive way. However, automatic recognition of such informal, implicitly encoded structures by a machine (a so-called spatial parser) is still a challenge. Conventional parsers are conceptually restricted by their underlying source of information. Due to this limitation there are various possible structures that cannot be recognized properly, as the machine has no means to detect them. This inevitably limits both the quality of parser output and hence parser performance. In this paper we show that considering temporal aspects in spatial parser design will lead to significant increase in parsing accuracy, detection of richer structures and thus higher parser performance. We call machines that consider such spatial and temporal information spatio-temporal parsers. For the purpose of providing evidence, parsers for recognizing spatial, visual, and temporal object relations have been implemented and tested in a series of user surveys. One aim was to find out how "close" the machine interpretetation of structures get to human interpretation. It turned out that in none of the test cases pure spatial or visual parser could outperform the spatio-temporal parser. Instead, the spatio-temporal parser was able to compensate limitations of conventional parsers. Furthermore, we have statistically tested parsing accuracy. The results indicate a non-trivial effect that is recognizable by humans. This shows that spatio-temporal parsers produce output that is significantly closer to what knowledge workers intend to express compared to traditional spatial parsers.
Detecting Pedestrians by Learning Shapelet Features

I introduce in this paper a method of detecting pedestrians, presented by Payam Sabzmeydani and Greg Mori [1]. Local gradient information is used for the classification task and the results are 14 percentage points lower (at 10−6 FPPW, false positive per window) than a previous state of the art detector of Dalal and Triggs [2]. During the explanations I will often draw a comparison to a composition of Andreas Opelt, Axel Pinz and Andrew Zisserman [4]. There are several similarities but Andreas Opelt has also the ability to locate the object in an image. This could be a big advantage to have this information for real time applications.
Measuring Quality in Online Education: A Meta-synthesis

ABSTRACT This article presents a meta-synthesis review of quality of online education (QOE) measurement approaches. In order to survey the existing body of knowledge, a qualitative method was employed to investigate what quality of online education is comprised of and how the concept has been measured through the literature. To achieve this, a total of 112 publications between 2000 and 2017 were analyzed. Results indicate that QOE factors are mostly focused on OE resources, input, and processes through this literature. There is a lack of evidence for output- and outcome-oriented approaches for quality factors identification and measurement. Most approaches focus on students’ views, with faculty and administrators’ views having less attention and very little focus on designers, employers, and clients. The lack of an integrated view of QOE not only in its definition but also in its measurement approaches is a key issue.