Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Geometry of the Poincaré plot of RR intervals and its asymmetry in healthy adults

The geometry of the Poincaré plot of RR intervals is considered and its basic descriptors are defined in terms of the second moment of a distribution of points in a plane. One of the standard descriptors, SD1, is redefined and used to define two new descriptors, SD1UP and SD1DOWN, whose squares partition SD12 (the variance corresponding to short-term heart rate variability) into contributions from decelerations and accelerations of heart rate. It is shown that there is a visible and statistically highly significant asymmetry in the Poincaré plot, with the upper part, corresponding to decelerations of heart rate, larger than the lower part, which corresponds to accelerations. The effect is shown in one hundred 30 min long time series of RR intervals derived from the ECG recordings of 100 young (19–32 years old) and healthy adults. After shuffling the data to random order the asymmetry disappears, which shows that this is a genuine physiological phenomenon rather than an artefact of the method.
Hydromechanics of swimming propulsion. Part 1. Swimming of a two-dimensional flexible plate at variable forward speeds in an inviscid fluid

The most effective movements of swimming aquatic animals of almost all sizes appear to have the form of a transverse wave progressing along the body from head to tail. The main features of this undulatory mode of propulsion are discussed for the case of large Reynolds number, based on the principle of energy conservation. The general problem of a two-dimensional flexible plate, swimming at arbitrary, unsteady forward speeds, is solved by applying the linearized in viscid flow theory. The large-time asymptotic behaviour of an initial-value harmonic motion shows the decay of the transient terms. For a flexible plate starting with a constant acceleration from at rest, the small-time solution is evaluated and the initial optimum shape is determined for the maximum thrust under conditions of fixed power and negligible body recoil.
The Impact of Social Media on Conventional Journalism Practice in Nigeria: A Study of Journalists’ in Jalingo Metropolis

This study examines the impact of social media on journalism practice in Nigeria. It explores the extent to which social media has changed journalism practice in Nigeria with special reference to Journalists in Jalingo metropolis. The quantitative survey method was adopted for the study. The population is comprised of 293 Journalists in Jalingo metropolis registered under Nigerian Union of Journalists. The study employed Taro Yame’s formula to sample out 75 journalists. Questionnaires were used as the tool for data collection. The researcher administered questionnaires to 75 purposively selected Journalists, and 70 were duly answered and retrieved. Data gathered were analyzed with SPSS version 20 with devices such as frequency counts and simple percentages. Data analyzed were presented in tables. Findings revealed among other things that a considerable number of journalists in Jalingo metropolis are computer literate, and they have internet access at various levels. Findings also revealed that journalists in Jalingo metropolis go online very often and that they prefer Facebook to other forms of social media and this assist them in faster gathering and dissemination of news. The study recommends among other things that Journalists should conduct researches on the accessible online networking organizing apparatuses to check which one of them is more and solid, keeping in mind the end goal to guarantee the validity of sources.
Variation in allocation of time, water and energy in Hoopoe Larks from the Arabian Desert

1. Patterns of resource allocation in different times of the year can provide insights into the effects of simultaneous environmental constraints on reproduction and survival of desert birds. Field metabolic rate (FMR), water influx rate (WIR) and patterns of time allocation of Hoopoe Larks (Alaemon alaudipes Desfontaines) were investigated during spring, when larks were rearing offspring, and during summer, presumably the harshest time for desert birds, in the Arabian Desert. 2. FMR was 45% below allometric predictions in spring (1.83 times basal metabolic rate, BMR) and 58% below predictions in summer (1.37 times BMR). WIR was 37% lower than predicted during the nestling period and 55% lower than predicted during summer. 3. Activity patterns during spring and summer were bimodal, with birds foraging in the early morning and late afternoon and resting in the shade or attending the nest during midday. Foraging time was similar in spring (32.0% of total daytime) and summer (33.6% of total daytime), despite higher energy and water intakes for parents and offspring in spring, suggesting that food availability was higher in spring. The non-foraging time was entirely spent resting in summer, while in spring half of this time was allocated to caring for offspring and the other half to resting in the shade. Hoopoe Larks fed their offspring 55 times per day and shaded their chicks about 5 h per day to protect them from solar radiation. 4. High T(a)s combined with low and unpredictable food availability in deserts may constrain reproduction by limiting the amount of time, water and energy that parents can devote to rearing offspring.
The Use of Multimedia Material in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language and Pedagogical Implications

THE USE OF MULTIMEDIA MATERIAL IN TEACHING CHINESE AS A SECOND LANGUAGE AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS FEBRUARY 2013 ZHONGYUAN C. WILLIAMS, B.A., KANTO-GAKUIN UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professors Zhijun Wang, Enhua Zhang and Weijia Li The use of Multimedia materials has been widely accepted as an useful and effective tool in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Many studies and researchers have examined multimedia material’s effectiveness from a number of aspects, including four skills of language learning: listening, speaking, reading (including vocabulary comprehension) and writing. However, the effectiveness of multimedia material from the aspect of L2 grammar comprehension hasn’t been well explored. This study examines the effectiveness of multimedia material in teaching second language grammar comprehension among beginning and intermediate-level Chinese learners. In particular, it investigates the relative efficacy of three different modes used in teaching an important Chinese grammar, directional complements: text alone, text with a still picture and text with video clips. The study’s focal issue is to determine which mode or modes — text alone, text with still picture or text with dynamic video clip — is most effective in aiding grammar acquisition in both shortterm and long-term. The study employed an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test. The participants were 53 college students, beginning level Chinese language learners who had studied Chinese for a half year, and were naturally assigned to one of the three parallel groups. The three groups differed as to the use of the different mode used to present the teaching material: text-only, text-picture, and text-video. Analysis of the collected data yielded three main findings. First, learners who received textvideo material outperformed those who received text-picture; and learners who received text-
Mobile Messaging for Offline Social Interactions: A Large Field Experiment

While much research has examined the role of technology in moderating online user connections, how IT motivates offline interactions among users is much less understood. Using a randomized field experiment involving 80,000 participants, we study how mobile messaging can leverage recipients' social ties to encourage blood donation. There are three main findings: first, both behavior intervention (in the form of reminder message) and economic reward (in the form of individual or group reward) increase donations, but only the messages with group reward are effective in motivating more donors to donate with their friend(s); second, group reward tends to attract different types of donors, especially those who are traditionally less active in online social setting; and third, across all treatments, message recipients donate a greater amount of blood if their friends are present. Structural estimation further suggests that rewarding group donors is four times more cost-effective than rewarding individual donors. Based on the structural estimates, we perform policy simulations on the optimal design of mobile messaging. The method of combining structural model and randomized field experiment opens new frontiers for research on leveraging IT to mobilize a user's social network for social good.
The rationalization process of online game cheating behaviors

ABSTRACT Online deviant behaviors have been prevalent since the Internet became ubiquitous, but research in this field is relatively scarce. The present study investigates a unique deviant behavior in online video gaming communities – game cheating – to further understand the scope of online deviant social behaviors. This paper aims to uncover how game players actively create and negotiate new meanings of game cheating in online games. Six focus groups were conducted to explore the rationalization process for engaging in game cheating among players of different online video games. It was discovered that elements of intentionality, utility, core gaming goals, evolving gaming norm, and social ties to gaming communities serve as important rationalizing process to justify game cheating behaviors. Through the discovery of these mental schemas for online game cheating, the paper discusses how online deviant behaviors are connected with social life online and form a unique online culture.
A Low Voltage Controller for a Chaotic Micro Resonator

The performance of a chaotic micro resonator is improved by redesigning a quadratic controller reported in a previous study. The chaotic micro resonator is composed of an electrostatic actuator and a voltage regulator (controller). The actuator is made of cantilever beam electrode above a fixed electrode. The actuator voltage, and consequently the electrostatic force magnitude, is controlled to drive the cantilever beam oscillations into chaos by creating a bi-stable regime in the system response. The performance of the redesigned controller is improved such that the system input voltage is reduced. The voltage generated by the controller is halved and the controller gains are smaller, which reduces the power and gain demands on the analogue controller components. The static and dynamic responses of the chaotic oscillator are studied and the sizes of the basins of attraction are compared for the improved and the original quadratic controllers. The controller can be configured to create two potential wells. The excitation DC voltages can then be adjusted to control the size of the upper and lower wells and thereby the basins of attraction around the two stable equilibria. As a result, one can shape the chaotic attractor to meet desired criteria. The reported chaos is intermittent chaos located in the lower well and between the two potential wells. This study can be used to design a new generation of nonlinear oscillators targeting high resolution sensors.
Architectural core salvaging in a multi-core processor for hard-error tolerance

The incidence of hard errors in CPUs is a challenge for future multicore designs due to increasing total core area. Even if the location and nature of hard errors are known a priori, either at manufacture-time or in the field, cores with such errors must be disabled in the absence of hard-error tolerance. While caches, with their regular and repetitive structures, are easily covered against hard errors by providing spare arrays or spare lines, structures within a core are neither as regular nor as repetitive. Previous work has proposed microarchitectural core salvaging to exploit structural redundancy within a core and maintain functionality in the presence of hard errors. Unfortunately microarchitectural salvaging introduces complexity and may provide only limited coverage of core area against hard errors due to a lack of natural redundancy in the core. This paper makes a case for architectural core salvaging. We observe that even if some individual cores cannot execute certain operations, a CPU die can be instruction-set-architecture (ISA) compliant, that is execute all of the instructions required by its ISA, by exploiting natural cross-core redundancy. We propose using hardware to migrate offending threads to another core that can execute the operation. Architectural core salvaging can cover a large core area against faults, and be implemented by leveraging known techniques that minimize changes to the microarchitecture. We show it is possible to optimize architectural core salvaging such that the performance on a faulty die approaches that of a fault-free die--assuring significantly better performance than core disabling for many workloads and no worse performance than core disabling for the remainder.
BONDHOLDER LOSSES IN LEVERAGED BUYOUTS

Announcements of successful leveraged buyouts (LBOs) during January 1985 to April 1989 caused a significantly negative return on outstanding publicly traded nonconvertible bonds. Yet the average risk-adjusted debt holder losses are less than 7 percent of the average risk-adjusted equity holder gains. Bond losses are related to the pre-LBO rating, but only weakly to equity holder gains. We demonstrate that trader-quoted data from a major investment bank offers conclusions about the effects of LBOs on debt holders different from those drawn from commonly used matrix and exchange-based data (such as Standard & Poor's Bond Guide data). This has important implications for event studies involving debt instruments. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.
A General Factor of Brain White Matter Integrity Predicts Information Processing Speed in Healthy Older People

Human white matter integrity has been related to information processing speed, but it is unknown whether impaired integrity results from localized processes or is a general property shared across white matter tracts. Based on diffusion MRI scans of 132 healthy individuals with a narrow age range around 72 years, the integrity of eight major white matter tracts was quantified using probabilistic neighborhood tractography. Principal component analyses (PCAs) were conducted on the correlations between the eight tracts, separately for four tract-averaged integrity parameters: fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity, and radial and axial diffusivity. For all four parameters, the PCAs revealed a single general factor explaining ∼45% of the individual differences across all eight tracts. Individuals' scores on a general factor that captures the common variance in white matter integrity had significant associations with a general factor of information processing speed for fractional anisotropy (r = −0.24, p = 0.007) and radial diffusivity (r = 0.21, p = 0.016), but not with general intelligence or memory factors. Individual tracts showed no associations beyond what the common integrity factor explained. Just as different types of cognitive ability tests share much of their variance, these novel findings show that a substantial amount of variance in white matter integrity is shared between different tracts. Therefore, impaired cortical connection is substantially a global process affecting various major tracts simultaneously. Further studies should investigate whether these findings relate more to the role of tract integrity and information processing speed in nonpathological cognitive aging or in lifelong-stable processes.
Age discrimination within a P‐E fit paradigm: Maintaining fit with an active work style

In the context of work environment and within-person change, age discrimination represents a substantial and important challenge for mid- to late-career workers. This present research expands the current literature by examining age discrimination within a P-E fit paradigm. Utilizing the theory of work adjustment, we examined the effect of perceived age discrimination upon demands–abilities (D-A) fit and needs–supplies (N-S) fit in two, two-wave studies. Consistent with hypotheses, Study 1 (N = 1345) demonstrated that as individuals perceived increasing experiences of age discrimination, both D-A and N-S fit decreased over time. Study 2 (N = 665) included active work styles, defined as an individual's general level and pattern of workplace effort and activity, as a possible moderating variable of the relationship between age discrimination and D-A fit. As expected, the engagement of a highly active work style ameliorated the deleterious effects of age discrimination. Implications for future empirical research and possible workplace applications deriving from these studies are discussed. Practitioner points Age discrimination has a negative impact upon employees being able to maintain their fit with the work environment. An employee may minimize the impact of age discrimination by maintaining a highly active work style. Organizations need to facilitate a positive age diversity climate by actively challenging negative stereotypes through education and training programmes, and the enforcement of fair and just diversity policies.
Folate biosynthesis in higher plants: purification and molecular cloning of a bifunctional 6‐hydroxymethyl‐7,8‐dihydropterin pyrophosphokinase/7,8‐dihydropteroate synthase localized in mitochondria

In pea leaves, the synthesis of 7,8‐dihydropteroate, a primary step in folate synthesis, was only detected in mitochondria. This reaction is catalyzed by a bifunctional 6‐hydroxymethyl‐7,8‐dihydropterin pyrophosphokinase/7,8‐dihydropteroate synthase enzyme, which represented 0.04–0.06% of the matrix proteins. The enzyme had a native mol. wt of 280–300 kDa and was made up of identical subunits of 53 kDa. The reaction catalyzed by the 7,8‐dihydropteroate synthase domain of the protein was Mg2+‐dependent and behaved like a random bireactant system. The related cDNA contained an open reading frame of 1545 bp and the deduced amino acid sequence corresponded to a polypeptide of 515 residues with a calculated Mr of 56 454 Da. Comparison of the deduced amino acid sequence with the N‐terminal sequence of the purified protein indicated that the plant enzyme is synthesized with a putative mitochondrial transit peptide of 28 amino acids. The calculated Mr of the mature protein was 53 450 Da. Southern blot experiments suggested that a single‐copy gene codes for the enzyme. This result, together with the facts that the protein is synthesized with a mitochondrial transit peptide and that the activity was only detected in mitochondria, strongly supports the view that mitochondria is the major (unique? ) site of 7,8‐dihydropteroate synthesis in higher plant cells.
Temporal learning analytics visualizations for increasing awareness during assessment

Visual representations of student-generated trace data during learning activities help both students and instructors interpret them intuitively and perceive hidden aspects of these data quickly. In this paper, we elaborate on the visualization of temporal trace data during assessment. The goals of the study were twofold: a) to depict students’ engagement in the assessment procedure in terms of time spent and temporal factors associated with learning-specific characteristics, and b) to explore the factors that influence the teachers’ Behavioural Intention to use the proposed system as an information system and their perceptions of the effectiveness and acceptance of our approach. The proposed visualizations have been explored in a study with 32 Secondary Education teachers. We adopted a design-based research methodology and employed a survey instrument — based on the Learning Analytics Acceptance Model (LAAM) — in order to measure the expected impact of the proposed visualizations. The analysis of the findings indicates that a) temporal factors can be used for visualizing students’ behaviour during assessment, and b) the visualization of the temporal dimension of students’ behaviour increases teachers’ awareness of students’ progress, possible misconceptions (e.g., guessing the correct answer) and task difficulty.ResumenLas representaciones visuales de datos de trazas generados por el alumnado durante las actividades de aprendizaje ayudan tanto a los estudiantes como a los profesores a interpretarlos intuitivamente y a percibir con rapidez aspectos ocultos. En este trabajo, describimos la visualización de datos de trazas temporales durante la evaluación. El estudio tenía un doble objetivo: a) describir la implicación de los estudiantes en el proceso de evaluación en cuanto a tiempo invertido y factores temporales asociados con características concretas del aprendizaje, y b) explorar los factores que influyen en la intención comportamental del profesorado en cuanto a emplear el sistema propuesto como sistema de información y sus percepciones de la efectividad y la aceptación de nuestro enfoque. Las visualizaciones propuestas se han examinado en un estudio con 32 profesores de educación secundaria. Adoptamos una metodología de investigación basada en el diseño y utilizamos un instrumento de encuesta -basada en el modelo de aceptación del análisis del aprendizaje- para medir el impacto esperado de las visualizaciones propuestas. El análisis de los hallazgos indica que a) los factores temporales se pueden utilizar para visualizar el comportamiento de los estudiantes durante la evaluación, y b) la visualización de la dimensión temporal del comportamiento de los estudiantes aumenta el conocimiento del profesor respecto al progreso de los alumnos, posibles conceptos erróneos (por ejemplo, adivinar la respuesta correcta) y dificultad de la tarea.
Towards a better understanding of Burrows’s Delta in literary authorship attribution

Burrows’s Delta is the most established measure for stylometric difference in literary authorship attribution. Several improvements on the original Delta have been proposed. However, a recent empirical study showed that none of the proposed variants constitute a major improvement in terms of authorship attribution performance. With this paper, we try to improve our understanding of how and why these text distance measures work for authorship attribution. We evaluate the effects of standardization and vector normalization on the statistical distributions of features and the resulting text clustering quality. Furthermore, we explore supervised selection of discriminant words as a procedure for further improving authorship attribution.