Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Can bilinguals use language cues to restrict lexical access to the target language

Robert J. Hartsuiker, Eva Van Assche, Evelyne Lagrou, & Wouter Duyck Ghent University There is considerable evidence that bilingual readers activate lexical candidates from both their languages (language non-selective lexical access), even when the language context does not require this. But most of these studies investigated word recognition in isolation (e.g., in lexical decision experiments). This chapter asks whether language nonselective access generalizes to more contextualized language use, for example when words are part of meaningful sentences, or when words are spoken aloud and so reveal information about the word’s language. We discuss four sets of studies that have addressed this issue. The perhaps surprising conclusion that emerges from this work is that bilinguals do not seem to exploit potentially useful cues that could strongly restrict the number of lexical candidates. Lexical access, it seems, is profoundly language nonselective. We will discuss the implications for theories of bilingual word recognition, in particular Dijkstra and Van Heuven’s (2002) BIA+ model.
A Learning Analytics Tool for Usability Assessment in Moodle Environments

The use of analytics technologies is increasingly successful in the e-learning domain. In this paper, we propose a novel model aiming at evaluating usability of interfaces adopted by Learning Management Systems and Massive Open Online Courses platforms based on the comparison between desktop and mobile versions, using specific native indicators. The indicators obtained from log files typically tracked by the e-learning platforms are defined as comparable scores. Then, to put the model into practice, we implemented it into Moodle LMS as a preliminary case study. This contribution promises to reduce both time and cost for quality assessment of user interfaces in the e-learning domain, while ensuring adaptability to different platforms.
RECENT ADVANCES TOWARDS SOLVING ELECTROMAGNETIC PROBLEMS IN COMMERCIAL FINITE ELEMENT SOFTWARE PACKAGE ABAQUS

There is a growing trend in both academia and industry towards carrying out realistic multiphysics simulations that account for coupling among different fields such as stress-displacement, thermal, electromagnetism, etc. This paper describes some recent work to implement capabilities for solving electromagnetic field problems in the commercial finite element software package, Abaqus, which augment the well-established capabilities (in Abaqus) to solve stress-displacement, thermal, and coupled thermo-mechanical problems. The specific class of coupled problems described in this paper is known as eddy current problems. Eddy currents are generated in a metal workpiece when it is placed within a timevarying magnetic field. Joule heating arises when the energy dissipated by the eddy currents flowing through the workpiece is converted into thermal energy. This heating mechanism is usually referred to as induction heating. The time-varying magnetic field is usually generated by a coil that carries either a known amount of total current or an unknown amount of current under a known potential (voltage) difference. The electric and magnetic fields are governed by Maxwell s equations describing electromagnetic phenomena. The formulation is based on the low-frequency assumption, which neglects the displacement current term in Ampere s law. The time-harmonic eddy current analysis procedure is based on the assumption that a time-harmonic excitation with a certain frequency results in a timeharmonic electromagnetic response with the same frequency everywhere in the domain. The transient eddy current analysis does not make any such assumption.The eddy current analysis provides output, such as Joule heat dissipation or magnetic body force intensity, that can be transferred to drive a subsequent heat transfer, coupled temperature-displacement, or stress/displacement analysis. This allows for modeling the interactions of the electromagnetic fields with thermal and/or mechanical fields in a sequentially coupled manner. The electromagnetic elements use an element edge-based interpolation of the fields instead of the standard node-based interpolation. The paper presents the theoretical formulation, outlines some of the unique challenges associated with solving electromagnetic field problems, and shows a few examples utilizing the new capabilities.
Capturing the Computational Thinking of Families with Young Children in Out-of-School Environments

For the past two decades, researchers and educators have been interested in integrating engineering into K-12 learning experiences. More recently, computational thinking (CT) has gained increased attention in K-12 engineering education. Computational thinking is broader than programming and coding. Some describe computational thinking as crucial to engineering problem solving and critical to engineering habits of mind like systems thinking. However, few studies have explored how computational thinking is exhibited by children, and CT competencies for children have not been consistently defined. Hence developing and implementing effective CT-related activities for children can be difficult. Therefore, exploring what computational thinking looks like for children is critical. Children can engage in, and learn to engage in computational thinking in both formal and informal settings. In this study, we are interested in exploring what computational thinking might look like in settings that approximate children’s everyday experiences. More specifically, in order to investigate what computational thinking looks like when enacted by young children, we are interested in observing children and their family members engaging in open-ended engineering activities that are play-based. To accomplish this, we observed and video-recorded 5-8 year-old children and their families creating different structures together using large foam blocks that are out for free play at a science center. Based on our observations and analysis of the video-recordings, in this paper we report on the computational thinking practices and competencies children and families demonstrated while engaged in engineering play. Our findings can provide information needed to create a framework for promoting computational thinking in young children in informal settings.
Accuracy, Speed and Robustness of Policy Function Iteration

Policy function iteration methods for solving and analyzing dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models are powerful from a theoretical and computational perspective. Despite obvious theoretical appeal, significant startup costs and a reliance on grid-based methods have limited the use of policy function iteration as a solution algorithm. We reduce these costs by providing a user-friendly suite of MATLAB functions that introduce multi-core processing and Fortran via MATLAB’s executable function. Within the class of policy function iteration methods, we advocate using time iteration with linear interpolation. We examine a canonical real business cycle model and a new Keynesian model that features regime switching in policy parameters, Epstein–Zin preferences, and monetary policy that occasionally hits the zero-lower bound on the nominal interest rate to highlight the attractiveness of our methodology. We compare our advocated approach to other familiar iteration and approximation methods, highlighting the tradeoffs between accuracy, speed and robustness.
Understanding the implications of augmented reality out of context in engineering education

Educating building design and construction students about sustainability is critical to the development of a future workforce that is capable of making a positive impact on future sustainable buildings. Prior research has leveraged emerging computing technologies to remove some of the educational hurdles that are common among new engineering students, related to visualization and design assessment. In this prior work, an augmented reality (AR) based simulation game, called ecoCampus, was developed to allow students to design an exterior wall for an existing building on their campus to improve sustainable performance. After users created designs in ecoCampus, they were able to view a virtual mock-up of their design at full-scale with AR and then assess the performance of that concept using the basic simulation game interface. Using this technological approach to design, students were able to resist the tendency toward design fixation as compared to students who were not provided with the computerized ecoCampus interface. This paper further explores the AR component of ecoCampus to understand how students’ learning is affected when the design activity is completed out of the context of the physical building. In this work, students who used ecoCampus to design a new exterior wall concept for an existing building did so in a lab space where they were not able to physically explore the existing building for which they were designing the concept. Instead, they could only view the existing building through a single photograph that was projected on a screen. Students completed the same assessments as prior student cohorts and were allotted the same amount of time. After analyzing the collected data it was observed that, while students still employed beneficial design behaviours as compared to prior cohorts using paper-based design strategies, the process that they employed to arrive at their final design concept included fewer considerations of different design alternatives than students who used ecoCampus in the existing building. This suggests that there may be additional value in using AR in the physical context of a space for building design and assessment learning tasks, especially when design creativity is advantageous.
The Effective Use of Laboratories in Undergraduate Courses

The current status of laboratory-based teaching is reviewed, and found to be in decline. It is argued that in educational terms, this trend is undesirable and threatens the quality of engineering courses. The effectiveness of laboratory work can be assured by adopting an appropriate methodology, and an attempt has been made to identify its key elements. A class currently operating at Strathclyde is described as a case study. It is concluded that laboratories are at present under-used and under-valued but, if exploited imaginatively, they can make a major contribution to engineering education.
The rhetorical organization of the Textbook genre across disciplines: A ‘colony-in-loops’?

This article identifies and describes the rhetorical organization of the Textbook genre, based on a corpus-based approach and on part of PUCV-2006 Corpus of Academic Spanish. This subcorpus includes 126 textbooks collected from four scientific disciplines at undergraduate university programmes: Social Work, Psychology, Construction Engineering and Industrial Chemistry. In order to fulfil the goals, the article determines and describes the communicative purposes of each of the moves and steps identified, and gives examples from the four disciplinary domains. A new macro-level to fully account for the analysis is introduced and justified, which turned out to be essential for a better description of an extensive textual unit as these texts are (200,000 words). This is named as macro-move. The main findings reveal a well-organized organization directed towards educational instruction. The genre fundamental nucleus is formed by the macro-move Conceptualization and Exercising, which is repeated as many times as the contents are displayed. By the end of the article, the question appearing in the title is answered and arguments are offered to explain why the genre’s rhetorical organization is described as a ‘colony-in-loops’.
Prosodic processing in the first year of life: An ERP study

From early months of life prosody has a prominent contribution to segmentation: prosodic boundaries overlap with syntactic ones and facilitate the extraction of syntactic regularities both at word and at phrase level. Therefore, the long-term representation of rhythmic features of the native language, especially the stress templates derived from regularities are assumed to play a particular role in pre-lexical processing. We examined the nature of early stress representation in a language with a fixed stress pattern in an electrophysiological experiment (acoustic passive odd-ball paradigm, 10 month-olds: 28 infants; 6 month-olds: 21 infants, 400 items, deviant: p=20%) using bi-syllabic Hungarian pseudo-words to follow how prosodic features contribute to processing saliency and how word stress templates based on regularities may emerge. We used legally and illegally stressed stimulus both in standard and deviant positions in separate conditions. In the legal standard condition two mismatch responses (MMRs) temporally synchronized to each syllable could be recorded. On the contrary, in the illegal standard condition no significant response was found. It seems that language environment influences the processing of speech prosody and the MMR correlates of word stress processing are related both to saliency and to stress templates emerging during the first year of life.
Facebook Applications to Promote Academic Engagement: Student's Attitudes towards the Use of Facebook as a Learning Tool

The aim of this study is to investigate highereducation student’s attitude toward the use of Facebook, as one of the social media tool, to enhance their education. This study was conducted on college students at one of the Jordanian higher educational institution. The number of participants of this study was forty five students who were enrolled in Computer Educational course. This course is either a graduation requirement for all elementary education major students or as an elective course for other student’s non-computer majors. We noticed that each student has created a Facebook Page to use for the class purposes and other page(s) for their own personal needs. The result of the study showed that the Facebook site is a useful tool to deliver course materials and support learning. Students have showed their acceptance of this media to communicate with others and to find course materials and references. Most participants felt motivated and enjoyed going through the course when using the Facebook site.
Discovering and Leveraging Visual Structure for Large-Scale Recognation

Our visual world is extraordinarily varied and complex, but despite its richness, the space of visual data may not be that astronomically large. We live in a well-structured, predictable world, where cars almost always drive on roads, sky is always above the ground, and so on. As humans, the ability to learn this structure from prior experiences is essential to our visual perception. In fact, we effortlessly (and often unconsciously) employ this structure for perceiving and responding to our surroundings; a feat that still eludes our computational systems. In this dissertation, we propose to discover and harness this structure to improve large-scale visual recognition systems. In Part I, we present supervised recognition algorithms that can leverage these underlying regularities in our visual world. We propose effective models for object recognition that incorporate top-down contextual feedback and models that can leverage geometric-structure of objects. We also develop supervised learning and inference methods that exploit the structure offered by visual data and by a wide range of recognition tasks. These supervised systems, limited by our ability to collect annotations, are confined to curated datasets. Therefore, in Part II, we propose to overcome this limitation by automatically discovering structure in large amounts of visual data and incorporating it as constraints in large-scale semi-supervised learning algorithms to improve visual recognition systems.
Analysis of decoding error probability for finite length LDPC codes

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are linear codes defined by sparse parity check matrices. Due to the sparseness of the parity check matrices, LDPC codes are efficiently decoded by the belief propagation (BP) decoder. It is known that non-binary LDPC codes can outperform binary ones. However, the decoding complexity grows with the size of non-binary alphabets. Hence, there is a trade-off between performance and complexity. In this dissertation, we focus on both binary and non-binary LDPC codes. We analyze the decoding error probability for finite length LDPC codes under BP decoding. The curve of the decoding error probability for finite length LDPC codes, as a function of channel error probability, is divided into two regions called waterfall region and error floor region. We analyze the decoding error probability in the waterfall region for binary LDPC codes and in the error floor region for non-binary LDPC codes. The main results of this dissertation are summarized as follows: • We analyze the decoding erasure probabilities of waterfall regions for binary LDPC codes over binary erasure channels (BECs) without any assumptions by analytically solving the covariance evolution. • We propose a method to lower the decoding error rates in the error floors of non-binary LDPC codes defined over Galois field and general linear group transmitted over the BEC, the memoryless binary-input output-symmetric (MBIOS) channel and q-ary memoryless symmetric (q-MS) channel. Simulation results show that the decoding error rates of the codes designed by the proposed method outperform those of the codes designed by the conventional method proposed by Poulliat et al. • We give lower bounds of decoding error rates in the error floor regions for non-binary LDPC codes over the BEC, MBIOS channel and q-MS channel. Simulation results show that those lower bounds are tight. Moreover, we show that the decoding error rates for non-binary LDPC codes defined over general linear group have same decoding performance in the error floor regions with that for non-binary LDPC codes defined over Galois field. Furthermore, we show that this tight lower bound monotonically decreases, as the order of Galois field of non-binary LDPC code increases in the BEC and binary additive white Gaussian noise channel. iii • We derive the weight distribution of the decoding error patterns in the BP decoder for non-binary LDPC codes defined over general linear group transmitted over the BEC.
The effectiveness of texting to enhance academic vocabulary learning: English language learners’ perspective

ABSTRACT This study examined university undergraduate English language learners’ (ELLs) perspectives on an intervention, Word Matters, that aimed to enhance functional academic vocabulary learning critical to their cognitive academic language proficiency development (Cummins, 1989), a challenge faced by many ELLs in English-medium universities. This intervention provided undergraduate ELLs with instructional support of their vocabulary learning through the use of texting. It focused on their acquisition of academic and low-frequency words that appeared in the readings assigned by two content-based English for academic purposes (EAP) courses required for ELLs at a large Canadian university. The intervention was aligned with the lesson plans of the courses. Data in this study were collected from follow-up interviews (n = 10) and a post-treatment survey (n = 40) from a total of 48 students who participated in the intervention. The results revealed students’ overall positive experience with the intervention, the feasibility of the intervention design and its effectiveness in supporting ELLs’ vocabulary learning. The findings, students’ suggestions for improving the intervention, and directions for future research are discussed.
Study and Analysis of The Team Structures on Development Processes

In recent years open source software has seen magnificent success as it produces high quality software at lower cost than the traditional commercial development. Open source proves itself highly suited, both as software product and as development methodology. This paper investigates the benefits as well as the limitations of the open source development and makes an effort to discuss the open source project community structure in relation to the organizational community structure. The focus of this paper is to examine the inner workings of the development process of successful and mature Apache and Mozilla foundation and provide the analysis of the role hierarchy, role migration, development community size, work distribution, problem reports and code ownership through comparative case studies of Apache and Mozilla.
Pitch perception and signal processing in electric hearing (Tonhöhenwahrnehmung und Signalverarbeitung bei elektrischem Hören)

A study comprised of six hearing experiments was conducted in order to investigate parameters to influence the pitch perception elicited by direct electric stimulation of the auditory nerve. In addition, a new stimulation strategy for the cochlear implant COMBI 40+ (MED-EL, Innsbruck, Austria) was developed and tested. The results derived from a total number of 16 subjects reveal a dominating influence of the place of stimulation in contrast to the rate of stimulation on pitch perception. It was shown that the electrode distance of 2.4 mm for this device is sufficient to allow discriminable electrodes in pitch along the whole array. The influence of stimulation rate on pitch is limited to pulse rates up to about 300 pps. Within this range, the just noticeable change of pitch elicited by pulse rate as well as modulation rate amounts to about 25% of the base rate. In addition it was observed that the sound quality increases with increasing pulse rate up to about 566 pps independent of electrode location. Subjects with residual hearing at the non-implanted ear revealed that the pitch elicited by the most apical electrode depends on the insertion depth of the array and is linearly increasing with electrode location (40 Hz/mm). The results of the hearing experiments were implemented to modify the well known CIS strategy. The new development (termed RateCIS) was designed in order to increase the amount of transmitted spectral information, thus the number of effective channels. Six electrodes were selected to switch adaptively between a high stimulation rate (1515 pps) and a low stimulation rate (252 pps). A test of the RateCIS strategy showed that results for speech recognition are comparable to the CIS strategy. The RateCIS strategy was subjectively preferred by some of the subjects although the majority preferred the CIS strategy for speech recognition and sound quality. Concerning the recognition and appraisal of music however, the RateCIS strategy was preferred by the majority of subjects. Regarding the fact, that the tests were conducted during one day without time for adaptation to the new signal processing, the RateCIS strategy could serve as an interesting option especially for music appraisal.
Individual Adaptation of Information Technology

This paper explores factors related to user adaptation of information technology (IT). We propose a predictive model of individual-level IT adaptation by integrating adaptation-specific constructs from the technology acceptance model and adaptive structuration theory. The hypothesized model is empirically validated using data collected from a study of MyYahoo web portal usage. Our findings suggest that (1) the key determinants of adaptation behavior are adaptation usefulness, ease of adaptation, and IT adaptability, (2) the outcome of adaptation is enhanced IT usage, and (3) the effect of IT adaptation on usage is moderated by users' extent of work adaptation.