Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing conceptual understanding of mechanical advantage through the use of Lego robotic technology

Science educators advocate hands on experiences and the use of manipulatives as important for children's conceptual development. Consequently, the utilisation of Lego robotic technologies in teaching and learning has become more prevalent in school science classrooms. It is important to investigate their value as educational tools, particularly their role in helping children develop conceptual understanding of scientific principles. The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of robotic technology with elementary age children, specifically focusing on the children's conceptual development concerning gear function and mechanical advantage. Our results indicate the robot sessions helped develop the students' understanding of gear function in relation to direction of turning, relative speed, and number of revolutions. However, when we examine the children's understanding around the concept of mechanical advantage, we still see the majority of children unable to provide an accurate explanation. The children had difficulty explaining the reasons underpinning their gear arrangement choices for making their robots fast or powerful. The results suggest that providing students with physical experiences is not enough for students to "discover" the relationship of gears to a vehicle's power and speed. A guided inquiry instructional approach is important during the early stages of developing a conceptual understanding of mechanical advantage.
Solid state disk controller apparatus

A solid state disk controller apparatus, comprising: a first port; a second port, having a plurality of channels; central processing unit, connected to the CPU bus; a buffer memory configured to store a transmission from a second port to the first port and data from the second port to the first port transmission; buffer controller / arbiter block, connected to the CPU bus, and configured to control the buffer memory based on the control of the central processing unit of the read and write operations; first data transmission block, the data connection between the first port and the buffer controller / arbiter block and configured to bypass the CPU bus to transfer / storage / read from the buffer memory; and a second data transmission block connected between the second port and the buffer controller / arbiter block and configured to bypass the CPU bus to transmit / store data to / read from the buffer memory.
Face modeling for face recognition in the wild.

FACE MODELING FOR DIFFERENT FACE UNDERSTANDING APPLICATIONS Eslam AbdelFattah Mostafa April 13, 2015 Face understanding is considered one of the most important topics in computer vision field since the face is a rich source of information in social interaction. Not only does the face provide information about the identity of people, but also of their membership in broad demographic categories (including sex, race, and age), and about their current emotional state. Facial landmarks extraction is the corner stone in the success of different facial analyses and understanding applications. In this dissertation, a novel facial modeling is designed for facial landmarks detection in unconstrained real life environment from different image modalities including infra-red and visible images. In the proposed facial landmarks detector, a part based model is incorporated with holistic face information. In the part based model, the face is modeled by the appearance of different face part(e.g., right eye, left eye, left eyebrow, nose, mouth) and their geometric relation. The appearance is described by a novel feature referred to as pixel difference feature. This representation is three times faster than the state-of-art in feature representation. On the other hand, to model the geometric relation between the face parts, the complex Bingham distribution is adapted from the statistical community into computer vision for modeling the geometric relationship between the facial elements. The global information is incorporated with the local part model using a regression model. The model results outperform the state-of-art in detecting facial landmarks. The proposed facial landmark detector
Consistent initial conditions of nonlinear networks with switches

In the analysis of switched networks discontinuity of network variables and the presence of impulsive voltages and currents at the switching instants are often encountered. A theory for obtaining consistent initial conditions of electrical networks containing ideal switches and impulsive sources is proposed. The method is based on charge and flux conservation, and requires the solution of three one-element-kind networks. It is applicable immediately to networks with linear resistors, linear controlled sources, and linear or nonlinear capacitors and inductors. >
Behind Left and Right. The meaning of left-right orientation in Europe

El concepto de izquierda-derecha se considera un factor facilitador de la comunicacion y la orientacion en el mundo de la politica. Tiene una larga tradicion en Europa debido a su capacidad de absorber diferentes asociaciones a lo largo del tiempo. Sin embargo, esta naturaleza dinamica del concepto requiere revisiones periodicas para asegurar que persiste una conceptualizacion comun. Esta tesis se centra en reasignar lo que significa la orientacion izquierda-derecha. Normalmente, se mide pidiendo a la gente que se situe en una escala senalada en sus extremos como ? izquierda? y ? derecha? El primer analisis empirico de esta tesis muestra que esta medida es comparable entre los grupos y paises. A continuacion, se considera la relacion entre las preferencias tematicas de los individuos y su orientacion izquierda-derecha. El segundo analisis empirico muestra que esta relacion esta condicionada por la importancia que las personas asignan a cada tema. El analisis final demuestra que lo que explica la orientacion izquierda-derecha depende de factores individuales y contextuales. Esto implica, que para entender la orientacion izquierda-derecha, no es suficiente identificar que tiene un impacto en la posicion de una persona, sino que tambien hay que dar cuenta de los factores que preven la variacion entre individuos. Dada esta complejidad, mi conclusion es que el concepto izquierda-derecha corre el riesgo de convertirse en demasiado complicado para servir como herramienta analitica y arrojar luz sobre las actitudes y el comportamiento politico.
Comparing users' perspectives of in‐person and virtual reference

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare user perspectives on visits to in‐person and virtual reference services conducted by participants in the Library Visit Study, an ongoing research project.Design/methodology/approach – This paper compares satisfaction rates, identifies staff behaviours that influence user satisfaction, and suggests how both face‐to‐face and virtual reference can be improved. Since 1990, participants in the Library Visit Study have been MLIS students who ask questions at in‐person and virtual reference desks, and report on their experiences. In addition to these accounts, students complete questionnaires on their experiences. Level of satisfaction with the in‐person or virtual transactions, based on the “willingness to return” criterion, are computed. Satisfaction is compared with other factors such as correctness of answers and friendliness of library staff. Underlying problems that influence satisfaction are identified. Findings – Data from 261 in‐person and 85 virtual ref.
Conditions That Facilitate the Implementation of Educational Technology Innovations

AbstractEight conditions that facilitate the adoption, implementation, and institutionalization of educational technology innovations are described and applications to the transfer of portable software are suggested. The conditions: dissatisfaction with the status quo, knowledge and skills, resources, time, rewards, participation, commitment, and leadership. Potential outcomes for using the conditions to review the likely level of portability of an educational software product in terms of its implementation in local sites are suggested.
Typo-Squatting: The Curse'' of Popularity

Typo-squatting is the practice of registering a domain name with the intent to confuse it with the name of a trademark or a famous other domain name. In this paper we study typo-squatting from a statistical point of view. We introduce the concepts of syntactic and visual neighbourhoods of a domain name as the sets of all other domain names which are, respectively, syntactically or visually similar to the original domain. The results of our preliminary experiments on the '. co.uk' registry show a strong correlation between the popularity of a domain name and the size of its syntactical and visual neighbourhoods. This suggests the size of the neighbourhood can be used as a reliable indicator for the likelihood of being typo-squatted. We conclude the paper with a brief discussion of the implications of our work in the field of online digital identities.
Pattern Recognition Based on Straight Line Segments

A very common way to represent objects in Pattern Recognition is to extract their features and normalize them into vectors in the space Rd. With the objects being represented by points in the space Rd, the distance among them is an intuitive way to compare their similarities and differences and it is used in the most methods in Pattern Recognition. For instance, one of the first and intuitive method in Pattern Recognition that uses this idea is the k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN). After that, many other methods have emerged using distances, such as Condensed Nearest Neighbor (CNN) (Hart, 1968), Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) (Kohonen et al., 1988), Nearest Feature Line (NFL) (Li & Lu, 1999), and a new method called Straight Line Segments (SLS) which takes advantage of some good caracteriscs of LVQ and NFL with low computational complexity (lower than Support Vector Machines) (Ribeiro & Hashimoto, 2006; 2008). This chapter gives a brief discussion about the mentioned methods and details about the SLS method. The next section discusses about the k-NN, CNN, LVQ and NFL methods which are related to the SLS method; Section 3 shows in details the SLS method; Section 4 presents the experimental results using the SLS method; and finally, Section 5 gives the conclusions about the SLS method and presents some future perspectives.
Keeping free-edited textual and graphical views of information consistent

Multi-view editing is useful in many situations where users of a software application want to see and interact with different representations of the same information. This paper describes a new approach to keeping free-edited multiple textual and graphical views of information consistent. Descriptions of changes to information items are displayed in various ways in the multiple views of these items. Users can request an editing tool to automatically apply changes to a view, select a change to make from a range of possible changes, or manually implement changes to maintain view consistency. Semantic errors, user-defined changes and hierarchical changes can be represented, and this technique also supports flexible view consistency for cooperative work systems. Experience with this technique in several diverse multi-view editing environments is described.
Web-based OERs in Computer Networks

Learning and teaching processes are continually changing. Therefore, the design of learning technologies has gained the interest ofeducators and educational institutions from secondary school level to higher education. This paper describes the successful use ineducation of social learning technologies and virtual laboratories designed by the authors, as well as videos developed by thestudents. These tools, combined with other open educational resources that are based on a blended-learning methodology, havebeen employed to teach the subject of Computer Networks. We have not only verified that the application of Open EducationalResources (OERs) into the learning process leads to a significantly improvement of the assessments, but also that the combinationof several OERs enhances their effectiveness. These results are supported first by a study of both students’ opinion and students’behaviour over five academic years, and, secondly, by a correlation analysis between the use of OERs and the grades obtained bystudents.
Access, Usage and Citation Metrics: What Function for Digital Libraries and Repositories in Research Evaluation?

The growth and increasing complexity of global science poses a grand challenge to scientists: how to best organise the worldwide evaluation of research programmes and peers? For the 21st century we need not just information on science, but also meta-level scientific information that is delivered to the digital workbench of every researcher. Access, usage and citation metrics will be a major information service that researchers will need on an everyday basis to handle the complexity of science.Scientometrics has been built on centralised commercial databases of high functionality but restricted scope, mainly providing information that may be used for research assessment. Enter digital libraries and repositories: can they collect reliable metadata at the source, ensure universal metric coverage and defray costs? This systematic appraisal of the future role of digital libraries and repositories for metric research evaluation proceeds by investigating the practical inadequacies of current metric evaluation before defining the scope for libraries and repositories as new players. Subsequently, the notion of metrics as research information services is developed. Finally, the future relationship between a) libraries and repositories and b) metrics databases, commercial or non-commercial, is addressed.Services reviewed include Leiden Ranking, Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, Ranking Web of Repositories, COUNTER, MESUR, Harzing Publish or Perish, Hirsch Index, CiteSeer, Citebase, SPIRES, SSRN CiteReader, RePEc LogEc and CitEc, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar.
Approximate transmit covariance optimization of MIMO systems with covariance feedback

The data rate of a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication link can be improved if knowledge about the channel statistics is exploited at the transmitter. However, many realistic system scenarios require computationally prohibitive Monte Carlo methods in order to optimize the transmit covariance for maximization of the exact mutual information. This paper instead considers an approximative approach to maximize the performance of a communication link where covariance feedback is available at the transmitter. The algorithm presented is based on an asymptotic expression of the mutual information that allows correlation of both transmit and receive side of the system. From simulations we demonstrate significant gain over beamforming and pure diversity schemes in many realistic system scenarios.
Perceptually driven simulation

This dissertation describes, implements and analyzes a comprehensive system for perceptually-driven virtual reality simulation, based on algorithms which dynamically adjust level of detail (LOD) for entity simulation in order to maximize simulation realism as perceived by the viewer. First we review related work in simulation LOD, and describe the weaknesses of the analogy that has traditionally been drawn between simulation LOD and graphical LOD. We describe the process of “perceptual criticality modeling” for quantitatively estimating the relative importance of different entities in maintaining perceived realism and predicting the consequences of LOD transitions on perceived realism. We present heuristic cognitive models of human perception, memory, and attention to perform this modeling. We then propose the “LOD Trader”, a framework for perceptually driven LOD selection and an online approximation algorithm for efficiently identifying useful LOD transitions. We then describe “alibi generation”, a method of retroactively elaborating a human agent’s behavior to maintain its realism under prolonged scrutiny from the viewer, and discuss its integration into a heterogeneous perceptually driven simulation. We then present the “Marketplace” simulation system and describe how perceptually driven simulation techniques were used to maximize perceived realism, and evaluate their success in doing so. Finally, we summarize the dissertation work performed and its expected contributions to real-time modeling and simulation environments.
A Preliminary Investigation of Online Education, Online Students, and their Learning Outcomes

Online education is a form of teaching and learning that takes place via a computer and communication networks (Kearsley 1997). The Internet and its related technologies provide an additional option for students to take classes virtually anytime and anywhere. This study reports a quasi-experimental comparison of learning outcomes between a group of on-campus students and a group of on-line students. Both groups took the same course conducted by the same instructor during the same semester. They received the same set of assignments, quizzes, and examinations. This study has found that students who attend an on-line section has better overall grade than those who attend an on-campus section. It appears that students can successfully learn the course's fundamental concept in the on-line environmental setting.
A PRMA integrated voice and data system with data steal into voice (DSV) technique

Integrated voice and data systems with packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) have been studied in previous research. The access delay of voice packets, which may result in packet dropping, is the main problem of such systems. The authors apply DSV (data steal into voice) technique to PRMA integrated voice and data systems and propose a modified PRMA scheme called PRMA-DSV. For voice terminals, the PRMA-DSV system always looks like a speech-only PRMA system no matter how heavy the data traffic is. Thus, the PRMA-DSV system has the minimum value of average delay of voice packets in PRMA-type integrated voice and data systems. Since one uses the efficient signals to control the transmission of data packets, the delay performance of data messages is also improved. An approximate Markov analysis is presented to evaluate the throughput and delay performance of the system. Some numerical examples are given in the paper. <<ETX>>
The incredible rainbow spitting chicken: teaching traditional programming skills through games programming

Introductory programming courses must provide sound instruction in basic programming skills while still maintaining a high level of student engagement. At Otago Polytechnic we have recently introduced a second year programming course that teaches traditional core topics in the context of "games programming". While building a variety of computer game applications, students study algorithm design, complex data structures, recursion and class architecture. Early experiences with the course have shown it to be both effective and enjoyable. In this paper we present the rationale and structure of the course, and describe some of the course materials.
Frequency-response masking approach for the synthesis of sharp linear phase digital filters

If each delay element of a linear phase low-pass digital filter is replaced by M delay elements, an (M + 1) -band filter is produced. The transition-width of this (M + 1) -band filter is 1/M that of the prototype low-pass filter. A complementary filter can be obtained by subtracting the output of the (M + 1) -band filter from a suitably delayed version of the input. The complementary filter is an (M + 1) -band filter whose passbands and stopbands are the stopbands and passbands, respectively, of the original (M + 1) -band filter. If the frequency responses of the original ( M + 1) -band filter and its complementary filter are properly masked and recombined, narrow transition-band filter can be obtained. This technique can be used to design sharp low-pass, high-pass, bandpass, and bandstop filters with arbitrary passband bandwidth.
Expertise in Problem Solving.

Abstract : It has become increasingly clear in recent years that the quality of domain-specific knowledge is the main determinant of expertise in that domain. This paper begins with an examination of the shift from consideration of general, domain-independent skills and procedures, in both cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, to the study of the knowledge base. Next, the empirical findings and theoretical models of other researchers in physics problem solving are detailed and summarized. Then our own work is presented, consisting of eight empirical studies. These studies show, in general, the importance of differences in the knowledge bases of experts and novices to their problem solving success. More specifically, they show that it is difficult to use protocols of problem solving episodes to illuminate the differences in the knowledge bases of experts and novices, that experts and novices perceive the problem themselves differently, i.e., novices respond to the surface features of a problem while experts respond to its deep structure, that less successful novices, at least, have deficiencies in their declarative knowledge of physics, that novices tend to lack knowledge of when to use certain physics knowledge, and that deficiencies in knowledge appear to prevent novices at times from making key inferences necessary for solving problems. Finally, these results and their implications for theories of intelligence, are discussed. (Author)
Using genetic programming to learn predictive models from spatio-temporal data

This thesis describes a novel technique for learning predictive models from nondeterministic spatio-temporal data. The prediction models are represented as a production system, which requires two parts: a set of production rules, and a conflict resolver. The production rules model different, typically independent, aspects of the spatio-temporal data. The conflict resolver is used to decide which sub-set of enabled production rules should be fired to produce a prediction. The conflict resolver in this thesis can probabilistically decide which set of production rules to fire, and allows the system to predict in non-deterministic situations. The predictive models are learnt by a novel technique called Spatio-Temporal Genetic Programming (STGP). STGP has been compared against the following methods: an Inductive Logic Programming system (Progol), Stochastic Logic Programs, Neural Networks, Bayesian Networks and C4.5, on learning the rules of card games, and predicting a person’s course through a network of CCTV cameras. This thesis also describes the incorporation of qualitative temporal relations within these methods. Allen’s intervals [1], plus a set of four novel temporal state relations, which relate temporal intervals to the current time are used. The methods are evaluated on the card game Uno, and predicting a person’s course through a network of CCTV cameras. This work is then extended to allow the methods to use qualitative spatial relations. The methods are evaluated on predicting a person’s course through a network of CCTV cameras, aircraft turnarounds, and the game of Tic Tac Toe. Finally, an adaptive bloat control method is shown. This looks at adapting the amount of bloat control used during a run of STGP, based on the ratio of the fitness of the current best predictive model to the initial fitness of the best predictive model.