Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Not There Yet: Lessons Learned on the Journey to Inclusion in the Republic of Serbia

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to better understand the gaps between policy and practice in inclusive education for the Republic of Serbia. The study compared the academic achievement in Mathematics of comparable students with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) in the fifth and sixth grade who attend typical elementary schools and special schools. A total of 249 students participated in the study. All students were either 11 or 12 years old at the time of the study and were matched by ability, based on local educational and psychological assessments. Results indicated that students with mild intellectual disabilities who attend special schools scored significantly higher on mathematics achievements in comparison to their peers with similar disabilities in regular schools. Although the aim of the Republic of Serbia’s new education policy focuses on inclusion, preliminary research indicates that students may be integrated (not included) and that regular classroom practice may not be supporting students with disabilities. A closer look at strategies that appear successful in special schools (such as adapted teaching strategies, work in small groups of students, and continuous individualised support of teachers) may provide instructional insights for newly included students in Serbia.
The positive consequences of being negative: The perception of a critical reviewer

This study was a partial replication and extension of the work of Amabile (1983). She tested the assumption that only pessimism sounds profound; optimism sounds superficial. She demonstrated that negative valuations of intellectual products (book reviews) were perceived as more intelligent than positive evaluations. In this study, 100 participants were asked to read and rate four book reviews which were counter-balanced as either positive or negative. They were then required to rate the reviewer, the book and the author on eight bi-polar scales. There was a highly significant effect on all ratings of the reviewer, the book and the author when comparing positive versus negative reviews. Compared to reviewers who gave positive evaluations, negative reviewers were seen as having less literary expertise, less competence and less intelligence. This contradicts Amabile's study. Possible explanations for the significant differences between the two similar studies are explored.
Verifying safety properties of Lustre programs: An SMT-based approach

An important problem in hardware and software design is ensuring a designed system is error-free. Even small errors in a computer system can have disastrous consequences to a project, sometimes costing large amounts of money to correct, or even leading to unexpected and catastrophic system failure. There are a number of steps one can take to eliminate as many errors as possible. We focus on a set of techniques known as formal methods that are used in computer science to help ensure correct system behavior. In order to minimize the potential for human error and to reduce the time and expertise needed, we seek to use techniques that are highly automatable. We focus on one such approach, an inductive variation of model checking that can be used to verify formally the invariance of properties or produce counterexamples. One class of systems of particular interest for verification are reactive systems. This is a class of systems that continuously react to their environment in a timely manner. Reactive systems are pervasive in everyday life, ranging from simple thermostats to the controls of nuclear power plants. As a representative language to describe these systems, we look at an established specification and programming language, Lustre. We have developed a set of techniques based on inductive reasoning and Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) that are automatically able to prove invariant properties of systems described in Lustre. These techniques involve the translation
An Examination of Risk Factors and Dangerousness associated with Firesetters

The main issue addressed within this thesis was the exploration of risk factors and dangerousness associated with firesetters. Research surrounding firesetters is sparse, and of poor quality. As a result, the risk assessment process offered to firesetters in clinical practice lacks empirical evidence. Two research studies and a systematic review provide a series of novel contributions to the field of firesetting. Study 1 identified several dynamic risk factors that were able to predict female mentally disordered firesetters. Study 2 examined conceptualizations of firesetting dangerousness. Finally, this thesis puts forward the first universal empirically based conceptualization of firesetting dangerousness. The resultant term represents a multifactorial consideration of three domains. These include: (1) motive/intent of the individual firesetter, (2) the context within which the fire has been set and (3) cognitions of the individual firesetter. More practically these are referred to as the why, what, and where/when considerations of firesetting. The combined impact of all three domains, provides a universal conceptualization of firesetting dangerousness which can be used to quantify dangerousness levels for incidents of firesetting. This thesis concludes with a discussion of the clinical application of this novel information, and how it can be used to improve rehabilitation processes.
Collaboration and Networked Technology

AbstractThis article reports details of the implementation and results of an investigation into the use of the World Wide Web as a teaching tool in Computing Studies Methods (educational technology) at the University of Sydney (SU) and in Computer Literacy at the University of Adelaide (AU). Using the Web to learn about topics in educational technology, courses at both universities undertook a restructuring of content and delivery to examine the viability of the Web as a medium for collaborative learning through browsing, indexing, and publication. A student-centered delivery was negotiated at both SU and AU, with course leaders and laboratory demonstrators acting as facilitators. Students at SU were graduates with computer science training studying teaching methodology in Computing Studies, while those at AU were first-year students without computer science training studying Computer Literacy. At each university, students worked both individually and cooperatively in small groups to produce projects on a.
An algorithm for integrated structure and control design with variance bounds

This paper presents an approach to integrate structure and control design. The objective of the problem is to find: (i) the optimal values of the structure parameters, e.g. stiffness, damping ratios, and actuator location parameters, etc.; (ii) an optimal stabilizing state feedback controller such that the active control energy is minimized subject to: (a) the prespecified RMS constraints on the outputs, and (b) the constraints on structure parameters. The algorithm is given in terms of LMIs, and the convergence is guaranteed. The solution is optimal in the "local sense". An example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.
Evaluation of Frictional Forces between Different Aesthetic Brackets and Arch Wires during Leveling and Alignment

Aims: To compare the frictional forces between different types of aesthetic brackets and Nickel Titanium (NiTi) arch wires during leveling and alignment stage of orthodontic treatment. Materials and Methods: The sample of the study included three types of ceramic brackets: active self–ligating, monocrystalline and polycrystalline with metal slot in combination with 0.014” and 0.016” NiTi arch wires. The friction setup includes a custom–designed model with three nonleveled and nonaligned brackets. All tests were carried out in a dry state on a digital tensile testing machine. The data were analyzed using the descriptive and inferential statistical tests at (p<0.05) significance level. Results: The results demonstrated that there were statistically significant differences between the studied groups of brackets and arch wires (p<0.05). Conclusions: The combination of the active self–ligating ceramic bracket with 0.014” NiTi arch wire has the least frictional force in the leveling and alignment stage as well as the ceramic bracket with metal slot is a good alternative to solve the problem of friction.
A corpus study of variation in written Chinese

Abstract The present paper reports on the findings of a preliminary study of written Chinese, using the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC, McEnery & Xiao 2004). The first part of the paper introduces the stylistic features, and briefly describes the distributional patterns of these features across the selected written registers. Then, using a multi-feature, multi-dimensional framework (Biber 1988) and the data reduction method of correspondence analysis, three dimensions are identified and interpreted. The study reveals extensive linguistic variation across written Chinese registers, thus complementing previous observations about stylistic differences between spoken and written Chinese. Finally, issues concerning feature selection and dimension interpretation are discussed.
Estimating Primary Demand in Bike-sharing Systems

We consider the problem of estimating the primary (first-choice) demand in a bike-sharing system. Such estimates are crucial for various operational decisions, such as the allocation and rebalancing of bikes to meet demand over a planning horizon. A key challenge in estimating the demand is to account for the choice substitution effect, where a commuter may substitute a trip for close alternatives when the first-choice location for picking up or returning a bike is not available. In this paper, we propose a method for estimating the primary demand using a rank-based demand model. The model accounts for choice substitutions by treating each observed trip as the best available option in a latent ranking over origin-destination (OD) pairs. To solve the high-dimensional estimation problem that arises from the combinatorial growth of origindestination rankings, we propose algorithms that (i) find sparse representations of the model parameters efficiently, and (ii) restrict station substitutions spatially according to the bike-sharing network. We prove consistency results of the model and develop efficient, first-order methods based on difference of convex (DCP) programming. Our approach is tractable on a city scale, which we demonstrate on a bike-sharing system in the Boston metropolitan area. Experimental evaluations on both simulated and real-world data sets show that our method can significantly reduce biases in ridership prediction and primary demand estimation, which results in increased ridership when used as inputs to an operational model for bike allocation.
A Feature Aggregation Convolutional Neural Network for Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Remote sensing scene classification (RSSC) refers to inferring semantic labels based on the content of the remote sensing scenes. Recently, most works take the pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) as the feature extractor to build a scene representation for RSSC. The activations in different layers of CNN (named intermediate features) contain different spatial and semantic information. Recent works demonstrate that aggregating intermediate features into a scene representation can significantly improve the classification accuracy for RSSC. However, the intermediate features are aggregated by some unsupervised feature encoding methods (e.g., Bag-of-Visual-Words). Little attention has been paid to explore the information of semantic labels for the feature aggregation. In this paper, in order to explore the semantic label information, an end-to-end feature aggregation CNN (FACNN) is proposed to learn a scene representation for RSSC. In FACNN, a supervised convolutional features’ encoding module and a progressive aggregation strategy are proposed to leverage the semantic label information to aggregate the intermediate features. The FACNN integrates the feature learning, feature aggregation, and classifier into a unified end-to-end framework for joint training. In FACNN, the scene representation is learned by considering the information of semantic labels, which can result in better performance for RSSC. Extensive experiments on AID, UC-Merged, and WHU-RS19 databases demonstrate that FACNN performs better than several state-of-the-art methods.
Predicting Sets and Lists: Theory and Practice

Abstract : Increasingly, real world problems require multiple predictions while traditional supervised learning techniques focus on making a single best prediction. For instance in advertisement placement on the web, a list of advertisements is placed on a page with the objective of maximizing click-through rate on that list. In this work, we build an efficient framework for making sets or lists of predictions where the objective is to optimize any utility function which is (monotone) submodular over a list of predictions. Other examples of tasks where multiple predictions are important include: grasp selection in robotic manipulation where the robot arm must evaluate a list of grasps with the aim of finding a successful grasp, as early on in the list as possible and trajectory selection for mobile ground robots where given the computational time limits, the task is to select a list of trajectories from a much larger set of feasible trajectories for minimizing expected cost of traversal. In computer vision tasks like frame-to-frame target tracking in video, multiple hypotheses about the target location and pose must be considered by the tracking algorithm. For each of these cases, we optimize for the content and order of the list of predictions. Crucially-- and in contrast with existing work on list prediction --our approach to predicting lists is based on very simple reductions of the problem of predicting lists to a series of simple classification/regression tasks. This provides powerful flexibility to use any existing prediction method while ensuring rigorous guarantees on prediction performance. We analyze these meta-algorithms for list prediction in both the online, no-regret and generalization settings. Furthermore we extend the methods to make multiple predictions in structured output domains where even a single prediction is a combinatorial object, e.g. , challenging vision tasks like semantic scene labeling and monocular pose estimation.
Weakening of the Teleconnection From El Niño–Southern Oscillation to the Arctic Stratosphere Over the Past Few Decades: What Can Be Learned From Subseasonal Forecast Models?

While a connection between the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Northern Hemisphere wintertime stratospheric polar vortex appears robust in observational studies focusing on the period before 1979 and in many modeling studies, this connection is not evident over the past few decades. In this study, the factors that have led to the disappearance of the ENSO‐vortex relationship are assessed by comparing this relationship in observational data and in operational subseasonal forecasting models over the past few decades. For reforecasts initialized in December, the models simulate a significantly weaker vortex during El Niño than La Niña (LN) as occurred before 1979, but no such effect was observed to have occurred. The apparent cause of this is the eastern European and western Siberian height anomalies present during ENSO. The observed LN events were associated with persistent ridging over eastern Europe as compared to El Niño. Although the Subseasonal‐to‐Seasonal models are initialized with this ridge, the ridge quickly dissipates. As ridging over this region enhances wave flux entering the stratosphere, the net effect is no robust stratospheric response to ENSO in the observations despite a North Pacific teleconnection that would, in isolation, lead to less wave flux for LN. The anomalies in the eastern European sector in response to ENSO likely reflect unforced internal atmospheric variability.
Theory and Methods of Strength Assessment of Earth Dams

General information on aftermath, behavior and damage analysis of earth dams under severe earthquakes is given in the monograph. Different models of soil are analyzed and the possibility of the use of hereditary model of viscous-elasticity for the description of rheological and dissipative properties of soil is shown. Mathematical statement and the methods of solution of the problems for earth dams with account of linear and non-linear elastic, viscous-elastic, elastic-plastic and water saturation properties of soil are considered with account of finite strain under different static and dynamic effects using plane, cross and spatial models of the structure. Criteria for the assessment of strength reliability of earth dams are given. The monograph is intended for the masters, post-graduate students, scientific researchers and specialists who work in the field of mechanics of deformable rigid body, structural mechanics, hydro-technical and seismic engineering; it may be helpful for engineers and designers who work in projecting and engineering of hydro-technical structures of soil material.
Perception of coda voicing: glottalisation, vowel duration, and silence

Recent research from Australian English has shown that glottalisation of vowels preceding coda stops results in increased perception of coda voicelessness. However, the addition of glottalisation results in a shorter portion of the vowel being modally voiced, raising the question of whether listeners may parse glottalisation as belonging to the coda rather than the preceding vowel. If so, listeners would perceive a shorter preceding vowel duration therefore increasing the perception of coda voicelessness. This study thus compared listeners' coda voicing responses for words containing glottalised vowels with words containing vowels in which glottalisation was replaced with silence. The results suggest that both glottalisation and shorter vowel duration/longer coda closure duration result in increased voiceless percepts, but that listeners respond differently to these two conditions. The findings indicate that listeners are sensitive to glottalisation and utilise this as a cue to coda voicing rather than simply perceiving shorter modally voiced vowels.
Gamma-ray burst prompt emission: new insights into spectral characterization

The origin of gamma-ray burst (GRB) prompt emission is a debated issue, strictly connected to fundamental open problems such as jet composition, energy dissipation and radiation mechanisms. The radiative processes responsible for the prompt radiation are remaining uncertain. The typical observed prompt emission spectrum in the νFν representation consists of two power-laws smoothly connected at a peak energy. Its non-thermal spectral shape calls for synchrotron or inverse Compton radiation, but the hardness characterizing the low-energy part of the spectra is inconsistent with these processes. The unestablished nature of the prompt radiation has strong repercussions on our understanding of the GRB phenomenon, preventing us from constraining macroand micro-physical properties of the source. While the prompt emission is usually observed only between 10 and 103 keV, in this thesis I extend the energy range for prompt studies down to soft X-rays for those cases where Swift/XRT (0.3-10 keV) started observations during the prompt phase (34 GRBs). My analysis revealed for the first time that prompt spectra often (∼ 65%) display spectral break at a few keV. Below the break, the spectrum is well described by a power-law with hard photon index (-2/3). The overall shape is consistent with synchrotron radiation, where the break energy corresponds to the cooling break. I added, when available, simultaneous optical observations, providing an additional and independent test on the presence of the low-energy break. In the synchrotron scenario, the small ratio between peak energy and cooling energy points toward a moderately-fast cooling regime. In a simple scenario where electrons are accelerated only once, this regime implies weak magnetic fields (< 10-100 G in the fluid comoving frame). In alternative scenarios, these strong constraints on the magnetic field can be relaxed by invoking almost balanced electron cooling and heating rates and/or multiple acceleration in magnetic reconnection islands.
The Logarithmic Law of the Wall in Flows over Mobile Lattice-Arranged Granular Beds

The purpose of the present paper is to provide further insights on the definition of the parameters of the log-law in open-channel flows with rough mobile granular beds. Emphasis is placed in the study of flows over cohesionless granular beds composed of monosized spherical particles in simple lattice arrangements. Potentially influencing factors such as grain size distribution, grain shape and density or cohesion are not addressed in this study. This allows for a preliminary discussion of the amount of complexity needed to obtain the log-law features observed in more realistic open-channel flows. Data collection included instantaneous streamwise and bed-normal flow velocities, acquired with a two-dimensional and two-component (2D2C) Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) system. The issue of the non uniqueness of the definition of the parameters of the log-law is addressed by testing several hypotheses. In what concerns the von Kármán parameter, κ , it is considered as flow-independent or flow-dependent (a fitting parameter). As for the geometric roughness scale, k s , it results from a best fit procedure or is computed from a roughness function. In the latter case, the parameter B is imposed as 8.5 or is calculated from the best fit estimate. The analysis of the results reveals that a flow dependent von Kármán parameter, lower than the constant κ = 0.40 , should be preferred. Forcing κ = 0.40 leads to non-physical values of k s and would imply extending the inner layer up about 50% of the flow depth which is physically difficult to explain. Considering a flow dependent von Kármán parameter allows for coherent explanations for the values of the remaining parameters (the geometric roughness scale k s , the displacement height Δ , the roughness height z 0 ). In particular, for the same transport rate, the roughness height obtained in a natural sediment bed is much greater than in the case of bed made of monosized glass spheres, underlining the influence of the bed surface complexity (texture and self-organized bed forms, in the water-worked cases) on the definition of the log-law parameters.