Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Coalgebraic Decision Procedure for WS1S

Weak monadic second-order logic of one successor (WS1S) is a simple and natural formalism to specify regular properties. WS1S is decidable, although the decision procedure's complexity is non-elementary. Typically, decision procedures for WS1S exploit the logic-automaton connection, i.e. they escape the simple and natural formalism by translating formulas into equally expressive regular structures such as finite automata, regular expressions, or games. In this work, we devise a coalgebraic decision procedure for WS1S that stays within the logical world by directly operating on formulas. The key operation is the derivative of a formula, modeled after Brzozowski's derivatives of regular expressions. The presented decision procedure has been formalized and proved correct in the interactive proof assistant Isabelle.
Willing and Social Work Participation: Socio-cultural Rationalisation in Industrial Organisation

In this thesis I interrogate the possibility of 'willing and social' work participation in industrial organisation. I draw on Habermas's (1976, 1979, 1984 & 1987) work to synthesise marxist and weberian ideas, and to derive a socio -cultural or cultural Marxist perspective on Capitalism. From this position I highlight the limitations of social action in theories of organisation and work. Moreover, I theoretically derive a model of work participation that acknowledges broader orientations to work. I interrogate that model of work participation in a study of four dominant forms of industrial organisation. Those organisations are SEQEB the South East Queensland Energy Board, Eagle Boy Pizzas in Queensland, the New South Sugar Milling Cooperative Ltd, and Budge -Ellis Staff Co-operative. Gathering data for this study involved both primary and secondary research. I used a comparative and longitudinal field research approach, unstructured interviews with an interview guide, and the collection of documents recommended by interviewees. I interviewed people working in the organisations and relevant government agencies. My research involved travel in Queensland and New South Wales, Australia. Ultimately, I produce a sociologically informed model for the establishment of 'willing and social' work participation. I conclude work participation exists within the context of capitalism, and social relations - either formally free or free; that work participation is directly influenced by rational configurations of the world of work comprising economic, political and social worldviews; and I argue the dominance of a worldview depends on whether the political action premises of buffering and shoring successfully neutralise competing worldviews; and whether the moral dictums or espoused values of work are prescribed or invoked and result in the exploitation or deployment of internal values. My thesis points in the direction of further work on co-operative forms of organisation and work and their commonweal ideologies. In particular, my findings demonstrate a crowding out of co-operative forms and ideologies, not only by capitalist forms but also by trade union collectives. The type of research I suggest has the potential to increase the legitimation of co-operative forms of organisation. Although, the Australian co-operative movement has many achievements there remains the problem of establishing a socially progressive rationality that makes practical or operational sense to people at work. The emancipator ideal of willing and social work participation is intended to epitomise the goals of the enlightenment project, and to lead in that direction.
Uses and Challenges for Network Datasets

Network datasets are necessary for many types of network research. While there has been significant discussion about specific datasets, there has been less about the overall state of network data collection. The goal of this paper is to explore the research questions facing the Internet today, the datasets needed to answer those questions, and the challenges to using those datasets. We suggest several practices that have proven important in use of current data sets, and open challenges to improve use of network data.
The Effect of the Coriolis Force on Kelvin-Helmholtz-driven Mixing in Protoplanetary Disks

We study the stability of protoplanetary disks with vertical velocity gradients in their equilibrium rotation rates; such gradients are expected to develop when dust settles into the midplane. Using a linear stability analysis of a simple three-layer model, we show that the onset of instability occurs at a larger value of the Richardson number, and therefore for a thicker layer, when the effects of Coriolis forces are included. This analysis also shows that even-symmetry (midplane crossing) modes develop faster than odd-symmetry ones. These conclusions are corroborated by a large number of nonlinear numerical simulations with two different parameterized prescriptions for the initial (continuous) dust distributions. Based on these numerical experiments, the Richardson number required for marginal stability is more than an order of magnitude larger than the traditional value. The dominant modes that grow have horizontal wavelengths of several initial dust scale heights and in nonlinear stages mix solids fairly homogeneously over a comparable vertical range. We conclude that gravitational instability may be more difficult to achieve than previously thought and that the vertical distribution of matter within the dust layer is likely globally, rather than locally, determined.
Distributed precoding for MISO interference channels with channel mean feedback: Algorithms and analysis

This work focuses on the design and analysis of distributed stochastic precoding algorithms for multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channels, where each transmitter is provided with mean information of its intended channel and that of interfering channels. Unlike in cases where exact channel gains are known as in most existing works, here generalrank precoding is required for optimality instead of the rank-one beamforming. An efficient algorithm for the distributed implementation of the Nash equilibrium precoding is first proposed. A sufficient condition for this algorithm to converge to the unique equilibrium is derived for the two-user case based on stochastic ordering, and is valid for a wide range of system parameters. To improve the sum-rate performance under medium to strong interference, a pricing-based algorithm is also provided and its convergence analyzed. The two algorithms are compared in terms of sum-rate and system overhead.
Variable Annuities Versus Mutual Funds: A Monte Carlo Analysis of the Options

This paper quantifies the impact of return uncertainty when measuring the relative benefits of mutual funds versus variable annuities by calculating the certainty equivalents of utility. This paper points out that the possibility of an investment loss endows the holder of the mutual fund with a 'real option' to harvest those losses and this 'real option' has value and must be factored into any decision in advance. Our main practical observation is that although we find that low-cost Variable Annuities are indeed superior to low-cost Mutual Funds for investors with a long time horizon, the critical threshold is at least 10 years for typical levels of risk aversion. If, however, we ignore the embedded options, the erroneous break-even horizon drops to 5 years. The stochasticity increases the break-even horizon.
Clinical Comparison of Distal Pancreatectomy with or without Splenectomy: A Meta-Analysis

Objective A distal pancreatectomy has routinely been used for removing benign/borderline malignant tumors of the body and tail of the pancreas; however, controversy exists whether or not the spleen should be saved. Therefore, we conducted this meta-analysis for comparing the clinical outcomes of patients who underwent distal pancreatectomy with or without splenectomy. Methods A literature research from the databases of Medline, Embase, and Cochrane library was performed to evaluate and compare the clinical outcomes between spleen-preserving distal pancreatectomy (SPDP) and distal pancreatectomy with splenectomy (DPS). Pooled odds ratio (OR) and weighted mean difference (WMD) with 95% confidence interval (95% CI) were calculated using fixed-effects or random-effects models. Results Eleven non-randomized controlled studies involving 897 patients were selected to satisfy the inclusion criteria; 355 patients underwent SPDP and 542 patients underwent DPS. Compared with DPS, SPDP required a shorter hospital stay (WMD = 1.16, 95% CI = −2.00 to −0.31, P = 0.007), and had a lower incidence of intra-abdominal abscesses (OR = 0.48, 95% CI = 0.27 to 0.83, P = 0.009). In addition, spleen infarctions occurred in SPDP, most of which involved use of the Warshaw method for preserving the spleen. There were no differences between the SPDP and DPS groups with respect to operative time, operative blood loss, requirement for blood transfusion, pancreatic fistulas, thromboses, post-operative bleeding, wound infections and re-operation rates. Conclusion SPDP should be performed due to the benefits of the immune system and quick post-operative recovery. It is also essential to preserve the splenic artery and vein. Large randomized controlled trials are further needed to verify the results of this meta-analysis.
Interactive, Internet Delivery of Visualization via Structured Prerendered Multiresolution Imagery

We present a novel approach for latency-tolerant delivery of visualization and rendering results, where client-side frame rate display performance is independent of source data set size, image size, visualization technique, or rendering complexity. Our approach delivers prerendered multiresolution images to a remote user as they navigate through different viewpoints, visualization parameters, or rendering parameters. We employ demand-driven tiled multiresolution image streaming and prefetching to efficiently utilize available bandwidth while providing the maximum resolution a user can perceive from a given viewpoint. Since image data is the only input to our system, our approach is generally applicable to all visualization and graphics rendering applications capable of generating v in an ordered fashion. In our implementation, a normal Web server provides on-demand images to a remote custom client application, which uses client-pull to obtain and cache only those images required to fulfill the interaction needs. The main contributions of this work are 1) an architecture for latency-tolerant remote delivery of precomputed imagery suitable for use with any visualization or rendering application capable of producing images in an ordered fashion; and 2) a performance study showing the impact of diverse network environments and different tunable system parameters on end-to-end system performance in terms of deliverable frames per second.
Pilot Contamination Mitigation for Wideband Massive MMO: Number of Cells vs Multipath

This paper proposes novel joint channel estimation and beamforming approach for multicell wideband massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. Using our channel estimation and beamforming approach, we determine the number of cells $N_c$ that can utilize the same time and frequency resource while mitigating the effect of pilot contamination. The proposed approach exploits the multipath characteristics of wideband channels. Specifically, when the channel has $L$ multipath taps, it is shown that $N_c\leq L$ cells can reliably estimate the channels of their user equipments (UEs) and perform beamforming while mitigating the effect of pilot contamination. For example, in a long term evolution (LTE) channel environment having delay spread $T_d=4.69\mu$ second and channel bandwidth $B=2.5$MHz, we have found that $L=18$ cells can use this band. In practice, $T_d$ is constant for a particular environment and carrier frequency, and hence $L$ increases as the bandwidth increases. The proposed channel estimation and beamforming design is linear, simple to implement and significantly outperforms the existing designs, and is validated by extensive simulations.
Improving Chinese SRL with Heterogeneous Annotations

Previous studies on Chinese semantic role labeling (SRL) have concentrated on single semantically annotated corpus. But the training data of single corpus is often limited. Meanwhile, there usually exists other semantically annotated corpora for Chinese SRL scattered across different annotation frameworks. Data sparsity remains a bottleneck. This situation calls for larger training datasets, or effective approaches which can take advantage of highly heterogeneous data. In these papers, we focus mainly on the latter, that is, to improve Chinese SRL by using heterogeneous corpora together. We propose a novel progressive learning model which augments the Progressive Neural Network with Gated Recurrent Adapters. The model can accommodate heterogeneous inputs and effectively transfer knowledge between them. We also release a new corpus, Chinese SemBank, for Chinese SRL. Experiments on CPB 1.0 show that ours model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Three essays on information transmission in asymmetric information games

This dissertation consists of three chapters where we study information transmission in various environments.The first chapter analyzes the effect of the presence of an uninformed sender on the information transmission between an informed sender and the receiver. The sender is uninformed with a positive probability and it is not verifiable whether she is informed or not. In almost all equilibria, the uninformed sender pools with a subset of types of the informed sender. We show that there exists an equilibrium in which the informed sender's cheap talk message conveys more precise information and the informed sender is better off by the presence of the uninformed sender.In the second chapter, a buyer is uncertain of information on product qualities. We introduce a variable that generates social value of information, which is buyer's action such as the usage and maintenance of a product after purchase. If the buyer is concerned about his action, the seller has more incentive to reveal product information. Furthermore, more information is revealed as the variance of the quality is larger or as the average quality is lower. In this model, the certification cost is increasing in the sense that a better certificate is more costly. Then, there are multiple equilibria and the least level of revelation is ex ante Pareto optimal.In the third chapter, we study firms' voluntary disclosure in an oligopoly market for differentiated products in which firms are allowed to advertise a rival's product as well as their own product. We show that full information is revealed by a high quality firm's comparative advertisement, where the advertisement on the rival's product is negative. Moreover, full revelation is the unique equilibrium outcome. The results imply that by allowing for negative advertisement on rivals' products, a society can increase consumers' welfare without mandatory disclosure laws.
A comparison of diabetes education administered through telemedicine versus in person.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether diabetes education can be provided as effectively through telemedicine technology as through in-person encounters with diabetes nurse and nutrition educators. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A total of 56 adults with diabetes were randomized to receive diabetes education in person (control group) or via telemedicine (telemedicine group) and were followed prospectively. The education consisted of three consultative visits with diabetes nurse and nutrition educators. The in-person and telemedicine groups were compared using measures of glycemic control (HbA(1c)) and questionnaires to assess patient satisfaction and psychosocial functioning as related to diabetes. Outcome measures were obtained at baseline, immediately after the completion of diabetes education, and 3 months after the third educational visit. RESULTS Patient satisfaction was high in the telemedicine group. Problem Areas in Diabetes scale scores improved significantly with diabetes education (adjusted P < 0.05, before vs. immediately after education and 3 months after education), and the attainment of behavior-change goals did not differ between groups. With diabetes education, HbA(1c) improved from 8.6 +/- 1.8% at baseline to 7.8 +/- 1.5% immediately after education and 7.8 +/- 1.8% 3 months after the third educational visit (unadjusted P < 0.001, P = 0.089 adjusted for BMI and age), with similar changes observed in the telemedicine and in-person groups. CONCLUSIONS Diabetes education via telemedicine and in person was equally effective in improving glycemic control, and both methods were well accepted by patients. Reduced diabetes-related stress was observed in both groups. These data suggest that telemedicine can be successfully used to provide diabetes education to patients.
Occasional Paper 87 On the Effects of Legal and Cultural Institutions on Corporate Social Disclosures by Banks Dr

Recent studies have articulated the dearth of cross-country investigation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) disclosure behaviours in the broader CSR discourse. The impacts of national institutional frameworks on CSR disclosure behaviours also remain under-researched. Consequently, this study examines the impact of legal origin and culture on CSR disclosures by large banks in fourteen Western European countries. It finds that country’s legal origin and culture affect disclosure behaviours of banks. Surprisingly, banks in civil law origin countries make more employee and shareholders social disclosures than banks in both Common law and Scandinavian countries. Banks in high uncertainty avoidance cultures make more social disclosures than banks in low uncertainty avoidance cultures, but no relationship is found between CSR disclosure and individualism/collectivism cultural dimensions. The study finds support for institutional theory, and highlights the importance of cross-country studies in expanding the current CSR dialogue.
Neural Representations of Natural and Scrambled Movies Progressively Change from Rat Striate to Temporal Cortex

In recent years, the rodent has come forward as a candidate model for investigating higher level visual abilities such as object vision. This view has been backed up substantially by evidence from behavioral studies that show rats can be trained to express visual object recognition and categorization capabilities. However, almost no studies have investigated the functional properties of rodent extrastriate visual cortex using stimuli that target object vision, leaving a gap compared with the primate literature. Therefore, we recorded single-neuron responses along a proposed ventral pathway in rat visual cortex to investigate hallmarks of primate neural object representations such as preference for intact versus scrambled stimuli and category-selectivity. We presented natural movies containing a rat or no rat as well as their phase-scrambled versions. Population analyses showed increased dissociation in representations of natural versus scrambled stimuli along the targeted stream, but without a clear preference for natural stimuli. Along the measured cortical hierarchy the neural response seemed to be driven increasingly by features that are not V1-like and destroyed by phase-scrambling. However, there was no evidence for category selectivity for the rat versus nonrat distinction. Together, these findings provide insights about differences and commonalities between rodent and primate visual cortex.
A Text Localization Algorithm in Color Image via New Projection Profile

Text data in image present useful information for automatic annotation, indexing and structuring of images. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically localize horizontally texts appearing in color and complex images. First, an edge detection method using a wavelet transform is used to finding text in image. Second, the image is binarized. Third, a new filter is applying for removing disperses pixels and non text area. After that, a new projection profile is applying for estimating text regions. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a much higher accuracy than existing methods. The advantage of this algorithm is low computation for finding text.
Choosing between Small, Likely Rewards and Large, Unlikely Rewards Activates Inferior and Orbital Prefrontal Cortex

Patients sustaining lesions of the orbital prefrontal cortex (PFC) exhibit marked impairments in the performance of laboratory-based gambling, or risk-taking, tasks, suggesting that this part of the human PFC contributes to decision-making cognition. However, to date, little is known about the particular regions of the orbital cortex that participate in this function. In the present study, eight healthy volunteers were scanned, using H2150 PET technology, while performing a novel computerized risk-taking task. The task involved predicting which of two mutually exclusive outcomes would occur, but critically, the larger reward (and penalty) was associated with choice of the least likely outcome, whereas the smallest reward (and penalty) was associated with choice of the most likely outcome. Resolving these “conflicting” decisions was associated with three distinct foci of regional cerebral blood flow increase within the right inferior and orbital PFC: laterally, in the anterior part of the middle frontal gyrus [Brodmann area 10 (BA 10)], medially, in the orbital gyrus (BA 11), and posteriorly, in the anterior portion of the inferior frontal gyrus (BA 47). By contrast, increases in the degree of conflict inherent in these decisions was associated with only limited changes in activity within orbital PFC and the anterior cingulate cortex. These results suggest that decision making recruits neural activity from multiple regions of the inferior PFC that receive information from a diverse set of cortical and limbic inputs, and that the contribution of the orbitofrontal regions may involve processing changes in reward-related information.
Signal Processing for Passive Radar Using OFDM Waveforms

Passive radar is a concept where illuminators of opportunity are used in a multistatic radar setup. New digital signals, like digital audio/video broadcast (DAB/DVB), are excellent candidates for this scheme, as they are widely available, can be easily decoded to acquire the noise-free signal, and employ orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM). Multicarrier transmission schemes like OFDM use block channel equalization in the frequency domain, efficiently implemented as a fast Fourier transform, and these channel estimates can directly be used to identify targets based on Fourier analysis across subsequent blocks. In this paper, we derive the exact matched filter formulation for passive radar using OFDM waveforms. We then show that the current approach using Fourier analysis across block channel estimates is equivalent to the matched filter, based on a piecewise constant assumption on the Doppler-induced phase rotation in the time domain. We next present high-resolution algorithms based on the same assumption: first we implement MUSIC as a 2-D spectral estimator using spatial smoothing; then we use the new concept of compressed sensing to identify targets. We compare the new algorithms and the current approach using numerical simulation and experimental data recorded from a DAB network in Germany.
Accessibility of sign language services to the deaf in tertiary education institutions: a case of the University of Zambia and Zambia Institute of special education

iv DEDICATIONS. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. vi LIST OF TABLES . xi LIST OF FIGURES. xii LIST OF APPENDICES . xiii ACRONYMS . xiv CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1 Overview . 1 1.2 Background . 1 1.3. Statement of the problem . 8 1.4 Purpose of the Study . 9 1.5 Objectives . 9 1.6 Research questions . 9 1.7 Significance of the study . 10 1.8 Delimitations . 10 1.9 Limitations of the study . 10 1.10 Conceptual Framework . 10 1.11 Definition of key terms . 12 1.12 Summary . 12