Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Classification of Eye Fixation Related Potentials for Variable Stimulus Saliency

Objective: Electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking can possibly provide information about which items displayed on the screen are relevant for a person. Exploiting this implicit information promises to enhance various software applications. The specific problem addressed by the present study is that items shown in real applications are typically diverse. Accordingly, the saliency of information, which allows to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant items, varies. As a consequence, recognition can happen in foveal or in peripheral vision, i.e., either before or after the saccade to the item. Accordingly, neural processes related to recognition are expected to occur with a variable latency with respect to the eye movements. The aim was to investigate if relevance estimation based on EEG and eye tracking data is possible despite of the aforementioned variability. Approach:Sixteen subjects performed a search task where the target saliency was varied while the EEG was recorded and the unrestrained eye movements were tracked. Based on the acquired data, it was estimated which of the items displayed were targets and which were distractors in the search task. Results: Target prediction was possible also when the stimulus saliencies were mixed. Information contained in EEG and eye tracking data was found to be complementary and neural signals were captured despite of the unrestricted eye movements. The classification algorithm was able to cope with the experimentally induced variable timing of neural activity related to target recognition. Significance: It was demonstrated how EEG and eye tracking data can provide implicit information about the relevance of items on the screen for potential use in online applications.
MoMaF: the Mock Map Facility

We present the Mock Map Facility, a powerful tool for converting theoretical outputs of hierarchical galaxy formation models into catalogues of virtual observations. The general principle is straightforward: mock observing cones can be generated using semi-analytically post-processed snapshots of cosmological N-body simulations. These cones can then be projected to synthesize mock sky images. To this end, the paper describes in detail an efficient technique for creating such mock cones and images from the galaxies in cosmological simulations (galics) semi-analytic model, providing the reader with an accurate quantification of the artefacts it introduces at every step. We show that replication effects introduce a negative bias on the clustering signal – typically peaking at less than 10 per cent around the correlation length. We also thoroughly discuss how the clustering signal is affected by finite-volume effects, and show that it vanishes at scales larger than approximately one-tenth of the simulation box size. For the purpose of analysing our method, we show that number counts and redshift distributions obtained with galics/momaf compare well with K-band observations and the two-degree field galaxy redshift survey. Given finite-volume effects, we also show that the model can reproduce the automatic plate measuring machine angular correlation function. The momaf results discussed here are made publicly available to the astronomical community through a public data base. Moreover, a user-friendly Web interface (http://galics.iap.fr) allows any user to recover her/his own favourite galaxy samples through simple SQL queries. The flexibility of this tool should permit a variety of uses ranging from extensive comparisons between real observations and those predicted by hierarchical models of galaxy formation, to the preparation of observing strategies for deep surveys and tests of data processing pipelines.
Analysis of the Land Surface Temperature Scaling Problem: A Case Study of Airborne and Satellite Data over the Heihe Basin

Abstract: This study analyzed the scaling problem of land surface temperature (LST) data retrieved with the Temperature Emissivity Separation (TES) algorithm. We compiled a remotely sensed dataset that included Thermal Airborne Hyperspectral Imager (TASI) and satellite-based Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission Reflection (ASTER) data, which were acquired simultaneously. This dataset provided the range of spatial heterogeneities of land surface necessary for the study, which was quantified by the dispersion variance. The LST scaling problem was studied by comparing the remotely sensed LST products in two ways. First, the LST products calculated in the distributed method and the lumped method were compared. Second, the airborne and satellite-based LST products derived from the TES algorithm were compared. Four upscaling methods of LST were used in the process. A scaling correction methodology was developed based on the comparisons. The results showed that the scaling effect could be as large as 0.8 K when the spatial resolution of the TASI LST data was coarse. The scaling effect increases quickly with the spatial resolution until it reaches the characteristic scale of the landscape and is positively correlated with the spatial heterogeneity. The first two upscaling methods denoted as Methods 1–2 can upscale the LST more effectively when compared with the other two scaling methods (Methods 3–4). The scaling effect for the ASTER data is not notable. The comparison between the TASI and
The Loading Problem for Pyramidal Neural NetworksMarc

The Theory of Computational Complexity can be used as guideline to design artiicial neural networks. As an application, a class of polynomial architectures (architectures whose training can be accomplished in polynomial time) is found. This class, the m-(dlog 2 se) architectures, is deened from restrictions on networks (pyramidal architectures) whose learning process is proved to be NP-complete. Such an identiication is based on a formal analysis, not on ad hoc experiments. Therefore, this paper gives evidence that an understanding of the causes of the intractability in the connectionist learning will yield techniques to construct architectures upon which learning is \easy".
Empirical evaluation of hybrid opportunistic networks

In this paper, we study the utility of opportunistic communication systems with the co-existence of network infrastructure using three real experimental deployments. We study how some important performance metrics change with varying degrees of infrastructure and mobile nodes willing to participate in the opportunistic forwarding. In doing so, we observe phase transitions in the utility of infrastructure and opportunistic forwarding respectively at different points in the design space. We discuss the implications that this has for the design of future network deployments and how this observation can be used to improve network performance, while keeping cost at a minimum. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest scale of experimental evaluations of hybrid opportunistic networks. It provides empirical evaluations to the large body of theoretical work that has been done in the past and insights for future research.
Impacts of technology use on children

Children in the 21st century are avid users of technology - more so than generations past. This rise in use has led to much attention on the consequences of technology use, and how this impacts children’s brains and their socio-emotional, cognitive and physical development. Much of the research in these fields, especially brain-based research, is in its infancy. Furthermore, it often shows very small correlations between technology use and child outcomes; whether technology causes these outcomes is unclear, and small effect sizes bring questions about real-life implications for children. Despite these issues, policy-makers in various countries have set guidelines for technology use in children, which are often restriction-focused. This paper explores some of the literature on the effects of technology use on children in terms of their brain, cognitive, socio-emotional and physical development, and summarises what is clearly demonstrated in the literature. It also highlights where more quality research is needed to better understand the impact of technology on children, and support the development of effective, evidence-based guidelines.
Young women's negotiation of multiple fields of femininity and physicality in physical activity and Physical Education in an international school in Taiwan

Gender research over the past three decades has emphasised the socially constructed nature of experience in physical activity. Numerous studies have explored the influence of cultural, social, economic and political influences on young women’s understandings of their bodies, physical activity, sport and physical education, although this research is limited to a focus on the western context. As a New Zealand physical education teacher in an international school in Taiwan, I set out to investigate the physical activity experiences of young women attending this school and the associated implications for teaching physical education. My study involved a focus group and in-depth interviews with four young women. I adopted a Bourdieudian approach in my data analysis in order to investigate ways in which the young women negotiated norms, rules, practices and expectations of femininity and physicality within and across multiple fields. A significant presence of an ‘Asian mindset’ was highlighted, which presented a focus on academic achievement and traditional Taiwanese forms of appropriate femininity and physicality. Resulting valuation systems often conflicted with those present in the physical education class. The findings revealed young women negotiated these value systems through various means. Some chose to accept and embody these values limiting their engagement in physical education, while other young women were empowered to challenge them, enhancing their engagement in physical education. This study contributes to gender and physical education research as it offers a perspective of the diverse nature of young women’s experiences in physical activity within a non-western context.
Chapter 3 A Type Composition Logic for Generative Lexicon

Recent work in discourse semantics has focused on modeling the determinants of meaning for linguistic utterances beyond the level of a single clause. As more parameters of interpretation have been incorporated into our model of meaning, the assumption sregarding compositionality have become much more complex (cf. Groenendijk and Stokhof 1990; Kamp and Reyle 1993; Asher 1993; Asher and Lascarides 2003). Similarly, at the level of the clause, richer notions of composition and lexical structure have surfaced to explain the systematic variation in meaning involved in polysemies and polymorphisms (cf. Nunberg 1995; Moravcsik 1975; Pustejovsky 1995; Copestake and Briscoe 1995; Jackendoff 1997). This tradition in lexical semantics argues that we need a notion of composition for which, combining the meanings of two words may result in a change to those meanings themselves. We concentrate here on one problem in particular, that of copredication, where apparently incompatible types of predicates are applied to a single type of object. As argued in Nunberg (1995), Pustejovsky and Boguraev (1993), and Copestake and Briscoe (1995), to handle such cases some context-sensitive notion of composition is needed, which is not what one finds in the standard theory of
Precarity, gender and care in the neoliberal academy

This article examines the rise in precarious academic employment in Ireland as an outcome of the higher education restructuring following OECD, government initiatives and post-crisis austerity. Presenting the narratives of academic women at different career stages, we claim that a focus on care sheds new light on the debate on precarity. A more complete understanding of precarity should take account not only the contractual security but also affective relational security in the lives of employees. The intersectionality of paid work and care work lives was a dominant theme in our interviews among academic women. In a globalised academic market, premised on the care-free masculinised ideals of competitive performance, 24/7 work and geographical mobility, women who opt out of these norms, suffer labour-led contractual precarity and are over-represented in part-time and fixed-term positions. Women who comply with these organisational commands need to peripheralise their relational lives and experience care-led affective precarity.
Debt financing and the dynamics of agency costs

Chapter I introduces the research in this dissertation. In Chapter II, I build a model that links the partial liquidation pressed by debt obligations to the asymmetric information about the project quality and the agency costs of the borrower. Facing poor performance, the borrower in the model can sacrifice some future private benefit to generate cash by partial liquidation in order to fulfill his debt obligations. This action taken by the borrower can convince the lender of the long-term solvency of the firm. However, costly liquidations are inefficient, which is pertinent to the costs of business cycles during liquidity crunches. Chapter III conducts a new test of the predictions of agency cost theory, based on the idea that episodes of financial pressure create dynamic incentives for managers to behave efficiently. This study adopts a panel-data vector autoregressions framework, using a large panel of firms, to estimate the dynamic responses of agency costs to financial pressure shocks. The paper shows that these dynamic responses are consistent with the intertemporal substitution effect in managerial agency costs implied by the model in Chapter II. Tests on alternative hypotheses fail to reject the effects of financial pressure. The findings in Chapter III provide strong support to agency theories in the Corporate Finance literature. Chapter IV establishes the limiting distributions of orthogonalized and nonorthogonalized impulse response functions in panel vector autoregressions with a fixed time dimension. The autoregressive parameters are estimated using the GMM estimators and the error variance is estimated using an extended analysis-of- variance type estimator. We find that the GMM estimator of the autoregressive coefficients depends on the estimator of error variance. This asymptotic dependence leads to additional terms in the asymptotic variance of the orthogonalized impulse response functions that are not present in the time series literature. Simulation results show that the asymptotic distribution of the orthogonalized impulse response function that takes the dependence into account is more accurate than the one that does not
Microenvironment Carcinoma Cell Survival and Interaction with the Adjacent Regulates Mammary β − Transforming Growth Factor

Transforming growth factor (TGF)–B signaling has been associated with early tumor suppression and late tumor progression; however, many of the mechanisms that mediate these processes are not known. Using Cre/LoxP technology, with the whey acidic protein promoter driving transgenic expression of Cre recombinase (WAP-Cre), we have now ablated the type II TGF-B receptor (TBRII) expression specifically within mouse mammary alveolar progenitors. Transgenic expression of the polyoma virus middle T antigen, under control of the mouse mammary tumor virus enhancer/ promoter, was used to produce mammary tumors in the absence or presence of Cre (TBRII fl/fl);PY and TBRII , respectively). The loss of TGF-B signaling significantly decreased tumor latency and increased the rate of pulmonary metastasis. The loss of TGF-B signaling was significantly correlated with increased tumor size and enhanced carcinoma cell survival. In addition, we observed significant differences in stromal fibrovascular abundance and composition accompanied by increased recruitment of F4/80 cell populations in TBRII fl/fl);PY;WC mice when compared with TBRII fl/fl);PY controls. The recruitment of F4/80 cells correlated with increased expression of known inflammatory genes including Cxcl1, Cxcl5 , and Ptgs2 (cyclooxygenase-2). Notably, we also identified an enriched K5 dNp63 cell population in primary TBRII fl/fl);PY;WC tumors and corresponding pulmonary metastases, suggesting that loss of TGF-B signaling in this subset of carcinoma cells can contribute to metastasis. Together, our current results indicate that loss of TGF-B signaling in mammary alveolar progenitors may affect tumor initiation, progression, and metastasis through regulation of both intrinsic cell signaling and adjacent stromal-epithelial interactions in vivo . [Cancer Res 2008;68(6):1809–19]
Performance-Energy Considerations for Shared Cache Management in a Heterogeneous Multicore Processor

Heterogeneous multicore processors that integrate CPU cores and data-parallel accelerators such as graphic processing unit (GPU) cores onto the same die raise several new issues for sharing various on-chip resources. The shared last-level cache (LLC) is one of the most important shared resources due to its impact on performance. Accesses to the shared LLC in heterogeneous multicore processors can be dominated by the GPU due to the significantly higher number of concurrent threads supported by the architecture. Under current cache management policies, the CPU applications’ share of the LLC can be significantly reduced in the presence of competing GPU applications. For many CPU applications, a reduced share of the LLC could lead to significant performance degradation. On the contrary, GPU applications can tolerate increase in memory access latency when there is sufficient thread-level parallelism (TLP). In addition to the performance challenge, introduction of diverse cores onto the same die changes the energy consumption profile and, in turn, affects the energy efficiency of the processor. In this work, we propose heterogeneous LLC management (HeLM), a novel shared LLC management policy that takes advantage of the GPU’s tolerance for memory access latency. HeLM is able to throttle GPU LLC accesses and yield LLC space to cache-sensitive CPU applications. This throttling is achieved by allowing GPU accesses to bypass the LLC when an increase in memory access latency can be tolerated. The latency tolerance of a GPU application is determined by the availability of TLP, which is measured at runtime as the average number of threads that are available for issuing. For a baseline configuration with two CPU cores and four GPU cores, modeled after existing heterogeneous processor designs, HeLM outperforms least recently used (LRU) policy by 10.4%. Additionally, HeLM also outperforms competing policies. Our evaluations show that HeLM is able to sustain performance with varying core mix. In addition to the performance benefit, bypassing also reduces total accesses to the LLC, leading to a reduction in the energy consumption of the LLC module. However, LLC bypassing has the potential to increase off-chip bandwidth utilization and DRAM energy consumption. Our experiments show that HeLM exhibits better energy efficiency by reducing the ED2 by 18% over LRU while impacting only a 7% increase in off-chip bandwidth utilization.
Mitigation and Aggravation at Sentencing: Exploring Public Attitudes to Sentencing Factors in England and Wales

Book synopsis: This innovative volume explores a fundamental issue in the field of sentencing: the factors which make a sentence more or less severe. All sentencing systems allow courts discretion to consider mitigating and aggravating factors, and many legislatures have placed a number of such factors on a statutory footing. Yet many questions remain regarding the theory and practice of mitigation and aggravation. Drawing on legal and sociological perspectives and examining mitigation and aggravation in various jurisdictions, the essays provide practical illustrations of specific factors as well as theoretical justifications. After the foreword by Andrew von Hirsch, a number of contributors address broad conceptual issues raised at sentencing. These contributions are followed by several empirical chapters including an exploration of personal mitigation in English courts. The authors are leading scholars from a range of common law jurisdictions including England and Wales, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Techniques for the Dry Transfer of Epitaxial Graphene onto Arbitrary Substrates

Epitaxial graphene (EG) grown on the carbon-face of SiC has been shown to exhibit high carrier mobilities, in comparison to other growth techniques amenable to wafer-scale graphene fabrication. The transfer of large area (>mm2) graphene films to substrates amenable for specific applications is desirable. We demonstrate the dry transfer of EG from the C-face of 4H-SiC onto SiO2, GaN and Al2O3 substrates via two approaches using either 1) thermal release tape or 2) a spin-on, chemically-etchable dielectric. We will report on the impact that these transfer processes has upon the electrical properties of the transferred EG films.
Modeling transcriptional control in gene networks—methods, recent results, and future directions

Mathematical models are useful for providing a framework for integrating data and gaining insights into the static and dynamic behavior of complex biological systems such as networks of interacting genes. We review the dynamic behaviors expected from model gene networks incorporating common biochemical motifs, and we compare current methods for modeling genetic networks. A common modeling technique, based on simply modeling genes as ON—OFF switches, is readily implemented and allows rapid numerical simulations. However, this method may predict dynamic solutions that do not correspond to those seen when systems are modeled with a more detailed method using ordinary differential equations. Until now, the majority of gene network modeling studies have focused on determining the types of dynamics that can be generated by common biochemical motifs such as feedback loops or protein oligomerization. For example, these elements can generate multiple stable states for gene product concentrations, state-dependent responses to stimuli, circadian rhythms and other oscillations, and optimal stimulus frequencies for maximal transcription. In the future, as new experimental techniques increase the ease of characterization of genetic networks, qualitative modeling will need to be supplanted by quantitative models for specific systems.
Dynamical Phase Transition in a Driven Disordered Vortex Lattice.

Using Langevin dynamics, we have investigated the dynamics of vortices in a disordered two-dimensional superconductor subjected to a uniform driving current. The results provide direct numerical evidence for a dynamical phase transition between a plastic flow regime and a moving {open_quote}{open_quote}hexatic glass. {close_quote}{close_quote} The simulated current-voltage characteristics are in excellent agreement with recent transport measurements on amorphous Mo{sub 77}Ge{sub 23} thin film superconductors. {copyright} {ital 1996 The American Physical Society. }