Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Can humans simulate talking like other humans? Comparing simulated clients to real customers in service inquiries

How authentic are inquiry calls made by simulated clients, or ‘mystery shoppers’, to service organizations, when compared to real callers? We analysed 48 simulated and 63 real inquiry calls to different veterinary practices in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The data were transcribed for conversation analysis, as well as coded for a variety of call categories including reason for the call, call outcome and turn design features. Analysis revealed systematic differences between real and simulated calls in terms of (1) reasons for the call, call outcome and call duration and (2) how callers refer to their pets in service requests and follow-up questions about their animal. Our qualitative analyses were supported with statistical summaries and tests. The findings reveal the limitations of mystery shopper methodology for the assessment of service provision. We also discuss the implications of the findings for the use of simulated encounters and the development of conversational agents.
Subjective and objective Bayesian statistics : principles, models, and applications

Preface. Preface to the First Edition. A Bayesian Hall of Fame. PART I: FOUNDATIONS AND PRINCIPLES. 1. Background. 2. A Bayesian Perspective on Probability. 3. The Likelihood Function. 4. Bayes' Theorem. 5. Prior Distributions. PART II: NUMERICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF THE BAYESIAN PARADIGM. 6. Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods (Siddhartha Chib). 7. Large Sample Posterior Distributions and Approximations. PART III: BAYESIAN STATISTICAL INFERENCE AND DECISION MAKING. 8. Bayesian Estimation. 9. Bayesian Hypothesis Testing. 10. Predictivism. 11. Bayesian Decision Making. PART IV: MODELS AND APPLICATIONS. 12. Bayesian Inference in the General Linear Model. 13. Model Averaging (Merlise Clyde). 14. Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling (Alan Zaslavsky). 15. Bayesian Factor Analysis. 16. Bayesian Inference in Classification and Discrimination. Description of Appendices. Appendix 1. Bayes, Thomas, (Hilary L. Seal). Appendix 2. Thomas Bayes. A Bibliographical Note (George A. Barnard). Appendix 3. Communication of Bayes' Essay to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (Richard Price). Appendix 4. An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances (Reverend Thomas Bayes). Appendix 5. Applications of Bayesian Statistical Science. Appendix 6. Selecting the Bayesian Hall of Fame. Appendix 7. Solutions to Selected Exercises. Bibliography. Subject Index. Author Index.
Trend Analyses of Critical Values Obtained for Overall Node Energy Savings Achievable in Ubicomp MANETs Using Location Aware Transmission

– MANET transmission strategies coupled with location-awareness is welcome in ubicomp [1-45] and hence remain good topics of research. The success of these strategies depend heavily on the correct protocol designs being adopted. Current research attempts assume present methods for protocol design as heuristic in nature [83] and hence not so suitable for “correct the first time implementations”. Optimisation methods for tuning parameters in middleware services and applications [84] is needed and suitability of traditional layered architecture in networking is also questioned [85] in terms of QoS and node densities. A further aim in this direction is to achieve realism in design and evaluation of wireless routing protocols [86]. This can be enhanced towards predictability in ubicomp. Achieving realism is a very long process since it will involve realism in each aspect concerned with ubicomp. Such an aspect was studied in a previous research [14] to assess the trend of energy savings achievable by sender node (SES) in Location-Aware MANET Transmission, followed by the study of trends for each SES parameter of equations [30]. To enhance the components towards realism in knowledge of these trends, in this paper, the next set of questions to be investigated is put forward as: “What are the observable critical values in SES trends? What are the trends of variation observable within each critical value for metric SES over varying node densities? ”
Achieving a Doctorate Through Mixed Methods Research

The journey of any doctorate is a challenging one. It constitutes a learning curve for postgraduate students towards becoming effective and fully independent academics. Through a concern for effective mentoring, the challenges of the doctoral effort have been well-documented. The particular issues a Ph.D. student may face when choosing a mixed methods design merits some further attention, however. Mixed-methods research is growing in popularity across academic domains and levels. Achieving a doctorate through a mixed methods study can be a very fruitful endeavour indeed. Excellent core handbooks, example studies and ongoing formalisation of the approach aid in delivering successful work. Yet the chosen methodological path may also bring up some specific hurdles. This paper aims to discuss some of those potential barriers as learning opportunities, and offer an initial discussion of the support systems. Specifically highlighted as potential challenges are the current ‘trendy’ nature of mixed methods research, the search for optimal design, the development of skills, domain loyalties and paradigm problems, specific difficulties in publishing, isolation threat and justification needs. For Ph.D. students, an understanding of these challenges is a first step towards overcoming them, and achieving conscious competence.
Connecting Rationality and Spirituality in Business Education

The paper argues that there is an imbalance in business, management and leadership education between providing abstract concepts and opportunities for personal growth. Connecting rationality and spirituality in higher education is necessary if we want to prepare students for the complexities and challenges of organisations. Kopatsy’s model of Intellectual Capital illustrates how crucial it is to cultivate right morality in society. Business education has a responsibility to provide safe environments and opportunities for students to connect their rational thoughts with their conscience and embody their “true self”. The paper gives an example of how introducing techniques from voice therapy and drama enable students to look beyond the rational. By engaging with the true self students discover dormant qualities in themselves and start moving towards their purpose, meaning, universal connectedness and spirituality.
An empirical analysis of the relationships among entrepreneurial orientation, organizational culture and firm performance

The objective of this dissertation was to empirically assess the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) to firm performance relationship and the potential influence of organizational culture (OC) . Specifically, OC was examined as a potential predictor of the degree of EO and as a potential moderator of the EO to performance relationship. Firm performance was assessed with the weighted average performance scale and 1997 year ending return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). The sample frame consisted of a national sample of bank presidents. The mailing list was purchased from Thomson Financial Publishing. A self-report questionnaire was mailed to a stratified random sample of 2,100 potential respondents. A total of 535 completed and usable questionnaires were returned. This represented a response rate of approximately 26 percent. Hypotheses positing an association between the degree of EO and performance and an association between OC and the degree of EO were tested. OC as a potential moderator of the EO to performance relationship was also tested. Multiple regression, multivariate analysis of variance, and moderated multiple regression were used in statistical analyses.
The prominence of gender information in on-line language processing

While social gender hierarchies and formal linguistic hierarchies are typically treated as distinct, the present work combines these theoretical notions offering a novel approach to the study of mechanisms underlying gender biases in language. Chapter 1.1 of the Introduction addresses the research on the on-line processing of gender information that is present in language. Chapter 1.2 introduces interdisciplinary aspects of the problem, relating the social cognitive notion of gender hierarchies to the linguistic and prominence hierarchies in language, and thus offers the theoretical grounding of the present research. Chapter 1.3 states the main research questions of this work and the research program. Chapter 1.4 provides the general information on the method and data analyses that were common for the reported experiments. The Overview of studies is based on a series of experiments and describes materials and main findings of Papers 1-5, as well as my contribution to each of them. The first study focuses on the recruitment of gender information for the resolution of anaphoric structures and is mainly discussed in terms of the time-course of gender processing in language. The next two studies focus on the implicit influences of gender cues in the interpretation of ambiguous structures in German and French and highlight the understanding of gender as a prominence feature and its cross-linguistic validity. The last two studies explore other representational formats of gender information and their influences. Finally, Conclusions summarize the main findings regarding explicit and implicit influences of gender information, the perspective on gender as a prominence feature, as well as limitations of the present studies and directions for future research.
The Reactor: A fast and sample-efficient Actor-Critic agent for Reinforcement Learning

In this work we present a new agent architecture, called Reactor, which combines multiple algorithmic and architectural contributions to produce an agent with higher sample-efficiency than Prioritized Dueling DQN (Wang et al., 2016) and Categorical DQN (Bellemare et al., 2017), while giving better run-time performance than A3C (Mnih et al., 2016). Our first contribution is a new policy evaluation algorithm called Distributional Retrace, which brings multi-step off-policy updates to the distributional reinforcement learning setting. The same approach can be used to convert several classes of multi-step policy evaluation algorithms designed for expected value evaluation into distributional ones. Next, we introduce the \b{eta}-leave-one-out policy gradient algorithm which improves the trade-off between variance and bias by using action values as a baseline. Our final algorithmic contribution is a new prioritized replay algorithm for sequences, which exploits the temporal locality of neighboring observations for more efficient replay prioritization. Using the Atari 2600 benchmarks, we show that each of these innovations contribute to both the sample efficiency and final agent performance. Finally, we demonstrate that Reactor reaches state-of-the-art performance after 200 million frames and less than a day of training.
Age-related changes in the relation between preschoolers’ anger and persistence

Although the functionalist perspective on emotional development posits that emotions serve adaptive functions, empirical tests of the role of anger mostly focus on how anger contributes to dysfunction. Developmentally, as children gain agency and skill at emotion regulation between the ages of 36 months and 48 months, their modulation of anger may facilitate its functional role for behavior. We examined this possibility through study of how 120 children’s anger and sadness were related to persistence during the transparent locked box task at ages 36 and 48 months. Using survival analyses, we examined how children’s anger and sadness were related to their giving up during the challenging task, and whether those relations were moderated by age. Using hidden Markov models (HMMs), we examined how children transitioned among anger, sadness, and on-task behavior states and whether those dynamics differed with age. Survival analysis revealed that age moderated the relation between anger and giving up. Greater anger was associated with greater likelihood of giving up earlier in the task at 36 months but with lower likelihood of giving up at 48 months. HMM analyses revealed that children were more likely to transition from a Calm/On-task to Calm/Off-task state at 36 months than at 48 months; that children were more likely to remain in an Anger/On-task state at 36 months than at 48 months; and that children were more likely to transition from Calm/On-task to Anger/On-task, and from Anger/On-task back to Calm/On-task at 48 months than at 36 months. Taken together, the findings suggest that anger appraisals may facilitate children in maintaining persistence, but that this functionality may develop with age.
Ego Resilience, Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy and Job Seeking Stress of Senior Nursing Students

This study examined the relationships among ego resilience, career decision-making self-efficacy and job-seeking stress of senior nursing students. Data was collected through self-reporting questionnaire to 175 nursing students 3rd and 4th grade. Stepwise multiple regression revealed grade, career decision-making self-efficacy, satisfaction on university life to be significant predictors of job-seeking stress. These variables accounted for 13.5% of job-seeking stress. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the job-seeking stress of senior nursing students through multidisciplinary intervention which strengthens career decision-making self-efficacy considering grade, satisfaction on university life.
How did the data extraction business model come to dominate? Changes in the web use ecosystem before mobiles surpassed personal computers

Abstract It is widely believed that the spread of data extraction technologies on the Internet has led to the erosion of traditional professional content providers and the transformation of the online media ecosystem. To investigate this shift in media ecology, we conduct relational analyses of actual user behavior, departing from existing research that primarily focuses on business institutions and designs of technology. We assess the prevalence of the data extraction business model by grouping websites along two architectural traits that afford data extraction – user content generation and curation – and analyzing how some website architectures get privileged in the web use ecosystem. Since data extraction is relational, we advocate a network measure to capture shared usage in addition to individual popularity of websites. Our analyses of world’s 850 most popular websites in 2009, 2011, and 2013 reveal that data extraction fostered a two-tier hierarchical web use ecosystem, marked by interdependence between professional content producers and data extractors. Our study thereby shows that the dynamics in play are more complicated than what is captured by explanations centered on either capabilities of platform giants or the decline of traditional journalism and media organizations.
Government public relations when trouble hits: exploring political dispositions, situational variables, and government–public relationships to predict communicative action of publics

ABSTRACT Government agencies may face a crisis due to their inappropriate responses to natural or man-made disasters. However, crisis communication in government public relations has not been extensively researched. This study aimed to explore a segmentation framework to predict the communicative action of citizens by using political dispositions, situational variables and organization–public relationships (OPRs). Ideology, voting history, trust, and problem recognition were significant factors to predict pro-government megaphoning, whereas referent criterion was a significant factor to predict anti-government megaphoning.
Late Positive Potential in Bipolar Disorder Reflecting Emotional Disorder: An Event-Related Potential Study

Introduction: Bipolar disorder (BD) is an emotional disorder characterized by emotional instability. This study aims to investigate whether emotional disorders affect the cortical processing that regulates emotional stimuli. Methods: This study uses a passive viewing paradigm to compare event-related potentials (ERPs) of 21 subjects with bipolar disorder (BD), 25 subjects with schizophrenia (SZ), and 25 normal subjects (HC). Results: In the frontal and parietal areas (1) the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude of BD was greater than that of SZ and HC, and there was no difference in terms of peak latency. (2) In the occipital area, the amplitude and latency of P300 of SZ and BD were significantly larger than HC, but there was no difference between SZ and BD. (3) The behavioral results demonstrated that BDs’ valence rating on both positive and negative stimuli were significantly higher than those of HC and SZ when viewing face images, while BDs’ arousal scores for positive stimuli were significantly lower than HC and SZ. BDs’ arousal score for negative stimuli was significantly higher than those of HC and SZ. When viewing non-face pictures, BDs’ positive valence rating on negative stimuli and arousal scores for positive stimuli were significantly higher than those of HC and SZ. Conclusion: Bipolar patients have complete early emotional recognition, and their emotional abnormalities exist in the late evaluation of emotional stimuli, mainly occurring in the frontal and parietal areas.
Social Networks and Health: New Developments in Diffusion, Online and Offline

The relationship between social networks and health encompasses everything from the flow of pathogens and information to the diffusion of beliefs and behaviors. This review addresses the vast and multidisciplinary literature that studies social networks as a structural determinant of health. In particular, we report on the current state of knowledge on how social contagion dynamics influence individual and collective health outcomes. We pay specific attention to research that leverages large-scale online data and social network experiments to empirically identify three broad classes of contagion processes: pathogenic diffusion, informational and belief diffusion, and behavioral diffusion. We conclude by identifying the need for more research on ( a) how multiple contagions interact within the same social network, ( b) how online social networks impact offline health, and ( c) the effectiveness of social network interventions for improving population health.
International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning A Scoping Review of Videoconferencing Systems in Higher EducationLearning Paradigms, Opportunities, and Challenges

Videoconferencing as a learning tool has been widely used among educators and learners in order to induce effective communication between learners and teachers or learners and their peers, especially when face-to-face means are not possible. Different types of videoconferencing platforms or systems have emerged for use in today’s higher education institutions. Previous research has focused on examining the potential of three different forms of videoconferencing systems: desktop videoconferencing (DVC), interactive videoconferencing (IVC), and Web videoconferencing (WVC). In this study, a review of the literature was conducted to increase the current knowledge regarding the use of these videoconferencing systems. A classification of the videoconferencing paradigms from the constructivism and cognitivism perspectives was provided. The summary of the results for these videoconferencing systems revealed specific learning opportunities, outcomes, and challenges for both learners and instructors. The results suggest that current policy and teaching strategies are not ready to provide an accessible and comprehensive learning experience in DVC and IVC. Relative to previously conducted studies regarding the use of videoconferencing in higher education, this study offers a broader consideration of relevant challenges that emerge when using certain videoconferencing systems in both learning and teaching situations.
An Effective Coverage Enhancing Algorithm in Directional Sensor Networks

Directional sensor network is composed of many directional sensor nodes. Unlike conventional sensors that always have an omni-angle of sensing range, directional sensors may have a limited angle of sensing range due to technical constraints or cost considerations. Area coverage problem is still an essential issue in directional sensor networks. In this paper, we study the area coverage problem in directional sensor networks. The problem is to maximize the area coverage of a randomly deployed directional sensor network. Each directional sensor can through rotating orientation to get better coverage in an interested region. We, therefore, propose a greedy algorithm to enhance the area coverage. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the previous proposed method in term of the coverage area. Keywords-directional sensors; coverage; greedy algorithms.
The Role of Stakeholder Engagement in the Measurement, Management, and Reporting of Intellectual Capital: A Qualitative Analysis on Integrated Reporting Practices

Purpose – Previous studies suggest that integrated reporting (IR) process is able to improve the measurement, management, and reporting of Intellectual Capital (IC) because it helps to develop internal awareness within the organization of the value creation mechanisms. The aim of this study is to understand how stakeholder engagement, which represents a crucial activity in the IR process, influences the measurement, management, and reporting of IC. We analyse this issue from a performative perspective by investigating how the stakeholder engagement process is realized in different business contexts and how it affects the internal awareness about IC, especially about relational capital, which includes the dimension of relationship with the external stakeholders.
A Review on Echolalia in Childhood Autism

Childhood autism is the syndrome that is characterized by permanent abnormalities in reciprocal social interaction, communication, and stereotypic behavior expressed by repetitive actions, movements or speech. Repetitive behaviors in language are represented by echolalia, which is divided into two categories, immediate or delayed. The purpose of this review article is to give a comprehensive view on the phenomenon of echolalia, its types and functions on the basis of investigations conducted by a number of foreign scientists. The author aspires to provide data in favor of the idea that echolalia is not just a meaningless repetition of other people’s words or phrases but it is an important means of communication of autistic children.
Identification of Identical Twins Using Multimodal Biometric

Biometrics is the science and technology of measuring and analyzing biological data of human body, extracting a feature set from the acquired data, and comparing this set against to the template set in the database. Reliable and accurate verification of people is extremely important in a number of business transactions as well as access to privileged information. The biometrics-based methods assume that the physical characteristics of an individual (as captured by a sensor) used for verification are sufficiently unique to distinguish one person from another. But the increase in twin births has created a requirement for biometric systems to accurately determine the identity of a person who has an identical twin. Identical twins recognition is a difficult task due to the existence of a high degree of correlation in overall facial appearance. In this paper Proposes a new concept of distinguish between identical twins using Multimodal biometric systems perform better than unimodal biometric systems and are popular even more complex also. For this researchers collected multiple biometric traits (like finger print, face, and Lip print) of 214 families of twins, the Experimental results prove to the ability of proposed method to recognize a pair of identical twins.