Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading: Reassessing the term “interactive”

Throughout much of the ESL reading literature the use of the word interactive proliferates. Such a proliferation, however, has tended to obscure the importance that should be attributed to its more technical uses. The purpose of this chapter is to clarify relationships among the uses of the term interactive as it occurs in ESL reading research, first language reading research, and research on written texts. Later sections of this chapter will establish a distinction between the concepts “interactive process” and “interactive model” as they are used in reading research. Lastly, I will introduce a somewhat more exploratory use of the notion of interaction, that of “textual interaction,” as it is being developed in a number of research studies by Biber and Grabe. How productive these distinct conceptions of the word interactive become depends, in large part, on future research. Reading as an interactive process In the last ten years, the accepted theory of ESL reading has changed dramatically, from a serial (or bottom-up) model, to “reading as an interactive process. ” Widdowson (1979) has discussed reading in this light as the process of combining textual information with the information a reader brings to a text. In this view the reading process is not simply a matter of extracting information from the text. Rather, it is one in which the reading activates a range of knowledge in the reader's mind that he or she uses, and that, in turn, may be refined and extended by the new information supplied by the text.
An Evaluation of Bagging, Boosting, and Random Forests for Land-Cover Classification in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA

The iterative and convergent nature of ensemble learning algorithms provides potential for improving classification of complex landscapes. This study performs land-cover classification in a heterogeneous Massachusetts landscape by comparing three ensemble learning techniques (bagging, boosting, and random forests) and a non-ensemble learning algorithm (classification trees) using multiple criteria related to algorithm and training data characteristics. The ensemble learning algorithms had comparably high accuracy (Kappa range: 0.76-0.78), which was 11% higher than that of classification trees. Ensemble learning techniques were not influenced by calibration data variability, were robust to one-fifth calibration data noise, and insensitive to a 50% reduction in calibration data size.
Computer program BL2D for solving two-dimensional and axisymmetric boundary layers

This report presents the formulation, validation, and user's manual for the computer program BL2D. The program is a fourth-order-accurate solution scheme for solving two-dimensional or axisymmetric boundary layers in speed regimes that range from low subsonic to hypersonic Mach numbers. A basic implementation of the transition zone and turbulence modeling is also included. The code is a result of many improvements made to the program VGBLP, which is described in NASA TM-83207 (February 1982), and can effectively supersede it. The code BL2D is designed to be modular, user-friendly, and portable to any machine with a standard fortran77 compiler. The report contains the new formulation adopted and the details of its implementation. Five validation cases are presented. A detailed user's manual with the input format description and instructions for running the code is included. Adequate information is presented in the report to enable the user to modify or customize the code for specific applications.
The observatory on borderless higher education

L'Observatoire sur l'Enseignement Superieur sans frontiere, base au Royaume-Uni, a ete etabli en janvier 2002 pour suivre les developpements internationaux dans le domaine de l'enseignement electronique, de l'enseignement superieur transnational et des nouveaux acteurs de l'industrie de l'education (universites privees et commerciales), tous secteurs en pleine expansion. L'Observatoire produit des rapports, des notes et des analyses de l'actualite sur ces questions, accessibles en ligne.
The Introductory Statistics Course: A Ptolemaic Curriculum?

As we begin the 21st century, the introductory statistics course appears healthy, with its emphasis on real examples, data production, and graphics for exploration and assumption-checking. Without doubt this emphasis marks a major improvement over introductory courses of the 1960s, an improvement made possible by the vaunted “computer revolution. ” Nevertheless, I argue that despite broad acceptance and rapid growth in enrollments, the consensus curriculum is still an unwitting prisoner of history. What we teach is largely the technical machinery of numerical approximations based on the normal distribution and its many subsidiary cogs. This machinery was once necessary, because the conceptually simpler alternative based on permutations was computationally beyond our reach. Before computers statisticians had no choice. These days we have no excuse. Randomization-based inference makes a direct connection between data production and the logic of inference that deserves to be at the core of every introductory course. Technology allows us to do more with less: more ideas, less technique. We need to recognize that the computer revolution in statistics education is far from over.
Principles and practice of clinical electrophysiology of vision

This authoritative text is the only comprehensive reference available on electrophysiologic vision testing, offering both practical information on techniques and problems as well as basic physiology and anatomy, theoretical concepts, and clinical correlations. The second edition, of the widely used text, offers extensive new material and updated information: 65 of the 84 chapters are completely new, with the changes reflecting recent advances in the field. The book will continue to be an essential resource for practitioners and scholars from a range of disciplines within vision science. The contributions not only cover new information -- important material that is likely to become more important in the next decade -- but also offer a long-range perspective on the field and its remarkable development in the last century. After discussing the history and background of clinical electrophysiology, the book introduces the anatomy of the retina and principles of cell biology in the visual pathways at the molecular, physiological, and biochemical levels. It relates these new findings to the techniques and interpretations of clinical tests, including the electro-oculogram (EOG), electroretinogram (ERG), and visual evoked potentials (VEP), which are discussed in detail, as are equipment, data acquisition and analysis, principles and protocols for clinical testing, diseases and dysfunction, and animal testing. Notable additions for this edition include chapters on the origin of electroretinogram waveforms, multifocal techniques, testing in standard laboratory animals, recent advances in analysis of abnormalities in disease, and the applications of these techniques to the study of genetic abnormalities.
Distributed Competition in Directed Attention

Studies of attention suggest a model in which attention emerges from a parallel, distributed competition. The central purpose of this contribution is to explain the ndings of single cell recordings gained in two di erent experimental paradigms by taking into account feedback from successive stages. It is shown that the developed model can quantitatively obtain similar results as measured in the experiment.
The Value of a Library Catalog for Selecting Children's Picture Books

The aim of this study was to determine how parents select picture books for their children and which bibliographic data are important as they choose between different versions of the same title. Thirty-six parents of preschool children aged one to six years were interviewed and observed as they chose one version of the picture book Cinderella from among six bibliographic records and then selected from among six physical versions. Parents described the criteria and the reasons for their selections. The results indicate that the parents experienced difficulties using the library catalog and that the current bibliographic elements are inadequate.
Continuously adapting continuous Queries for Data Streams in Raincoat

In the last decade, the world wide web has grown from being a platform where users passively viewed content, to an active platform where the users themselves contributed with new content. With this came an explosion of available data that ventures could use to gain market advantage. Not only did the did the amount of available data grow massively, but also newly produced data started to arrive at immense speed. This spawned a new field of specialized computational framework being able to handle the change in the data paradigm. Now, one must be able to process the massive amount of incoming data within a reasonable response time, as well as be able to handle its high velocity. This spurred several ideas for processing fast data. One of these ideas uses SQL-like languages for processing fast data, taking advantage of the years of work on query optimization theory. In the fall of 2012, we proposed and implemented the prototype of Raincoat. Raincoat was developed to ease developers without any experience with distributed programming, providing a familiar interface which they could use to deploy stream filtering jobs to a Storm cluster. As the prototype did not include any query optimization techniques it does not meet the expected performance requirements. In this thesis we research optimization techniques for scaling Raincoat. We explore optimization techniques from different fields including traditional, distributed, parallel, streaming and adaptive query optimization. We propose an adaptive query optimizer, inspired by existing adaptive query optimizers. The focus of the optimizer lies in detecting when an optimization is needed and which optimization techniques that should be applied. In this thesis we explore the possibility of adaptively achieving better performance and scalability by carefully selecting the join order, select order, merging of selection operators, and applying intra-operator parallelism on operators. Based on our results from experiments on the different implemented optimizers, we demonstrate their applicability and their significant contribution in increasing the performance of a Raincoat query.
An Overview of Stochastic Approximation Monte Carlo

During the past few decades, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) has been widely used in Bayesian statistical inference and scientific computing. Its successes have proven it to be a very powerful and typically unique computational tool for analyzing data of complex structures. However, conventional MCMC algorithms often suffer from the local trap problem which renders the simulation ineffective. This paper provides an overview of the theory, variants, and applications for stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC), an advanced MCMC algorithm that is essentially immune to the local trap problem. WIREs Comput Stat 2014, 6:240–254. doi: 10.1002/wics.1305
Quantum processes: a novel optimization for quantum simulation

The simulation of quantum algorithms in classical computers demands high processingand storing capabilities. However, optimizations to reduce temporal and spatial complexities are promising and capable of improving the overall performance of simulators. The main contribution of this work consists in designing optimizations to describe quantum transformations using Quantum Processes and Partial Quantum Processes, as conceived in the qGM theoretical model. These processes, when computed on the VPE-qGM execution environment, reduce the execution time of the simulation. The performance evaluation of this proposal was carried out by benchmarks that include sequential simulation of quantum algorithms up to 24 qubits and instances of Grover's Algorithm. The results show improvements in the simulation of general, controled transformations since their execution time was significantly low, even for systems with several qubits. Furthermore, a solution based on GPU computing for dealing with transformations that still have a high simulation cost in the VPE-qGM is also discussed.
Desarrollo de un prototipo de tortilla funcional de maíz (Zea mays) y harina de grillo (Acheta domesticus), como fuente de proteína para dieta humana

El maiz es el alimento principal de la poblacion de Mexico y Centro America. Se consume tradicionalmente en forma de tortilla, pero no satisface las necesidades proteicas diarias por su deficiencia en proteinas, lisina y triptofano. El objetivo de este estudio es determinar el nivel de sustitucion de harina de maiz nixtamalizada por harina de grillo (Acheta domesticus), que optimice las caracteristicas fisicas y que aumente el contenido proteico en una tortilla. Esta optimizacion se realizo mediante un arreglo factorial 2k delineado por la metodologia de superficie respuesta de primer orden con cuatro puntos factoriales y un duplicado del punto central, siendo el porcentaje de harina de grillo y el tiempo de coccion las variables independientes. La elaboracion de las tortillas se realizo en la Planta de Innovacion de Alimentos (PIA). Los analisis fisicoquimicos se realizaron en el Laboratorio de Analisis de Alimentos (LAAZ) para analizar color, textura, y contenido proteico. Los resultados indican que el porcentaje de harina de grillo es la variable de mayor influencia en cuanto a fuerza de corte, elongacion, luminosidad y contenido de proteina. El punto optimo para la elaboracion de una tortilla funcional es con 20% de harina de grillo con un tiempo de coccion de 3.42 minutos, con un contenido proteico del 20.86% y un costo de formulacion de HNL 7.25. Se recomienda realizar otro estudio siguiendo la misma metodologia adicionando puntos axiales y realizar un analisis sensorial para conocer la aceptabilidad de las personas a esta nueva tortilla elaborada.
Determining the Number of Iterations for Monte Carlo Simulations of Weapon Effectiveness

Abstract : Many weapon effectiveness tools are implemented using a Monte Carlo simulation approach since closed form solutions are too mathematically intractable to compute. A question that usually arises in connection with such simulations is this: how many iterations of a particular Monte Carlo simulation are needed? This report proposed the probability-based approach to computing effectiveness measures for better feedback to the user regarding the relationship between the number of iterations executed and confidence measures associated with the result. (4 tables, 4 figures)
Designing Social Research: The Logic of Anticipation

List of Figures and Tables. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1 Preparing Research Designs. 2 Designing Social Research, 3 Research Questions and Purposes. 4 Strategies for Answering Research Questions. 5 Concepts, Theories, Hypotheses and Models. 6 Sources and Selection of Data. 7 Methods for Answering Research Questions: Data Gathering and Analysis. 8 Sample Research Designs. Postscript. Afterword. Appendix. References.
Homework Emotion Regulation Scale

The goal of the present investigation is to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Homework Emotion Regulation Scale (HERS) using 796 middle school students in China. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) supported the existence of two distinct yet related subscales for the HERS: Emotion Management and Cognitive Reappraisal. Concerning the concurrent and predictive validity evidence of the HERS, the results indicated that, consistent with theoretical expectations, Emotion Management and Cognitive Reappraisal were positively associated with mastery and performance orientation, desirable homework behaviors (e.g., completion), learning strategies (e.g., organization), and math homework grade reported by teachers at the end of school semester.
Domain-Specific Hierarchical Text Classification for Supporting Automated Environmental Compliance Checking

AbstractAutomated environmental compliance checking requires automated extraction of rules from environmental regulatory textual documents such as energy conservation codes and EPA regulations. Automated rule extraction requires complex text processing and analysis for information extraction and subsequent formalization of the extracted information into computer-processable rules. In the proposed automated compliance checking (ACC) approach, the text is first classified into predefined categories before information extraction (IE). The advantages are that irrelevant text will be filtered out during text classification (TC) and text with similar semantic meaning will be grouped, thereby improving the efficiency and accuracy of further IE and compliance reasoning (CR). The categories used for TC are predefined in a semantic TC topic hierarchy, and the classified text is subsequently used in semantic IE and semantic CR. This paper presents the proposed machine learning (ML)-based TC algorithm for classifying.
Multipath dispersion in optical wireless networks employing DH-PIM

The performance of DH-PIM is analysed in the presence of intersymbol interference. The ceiling bounce model is used to model the non-directed indoor optical wireless channel. The packet transmission rate, channel impulse response, eye diagram and optical power requirements versus normalised delay spread are presented. Results are compared with other modulation schemes. Compared with PPM and DPIM, DH-PIM offers higher transmission rate and requires marginally higher optical power when the severity of the multipath dispersion is low. However, in a severe dispersive wireless environments, it shows better performance compared with its counterparts.
The Strategies in Translating English Metaphors into Thai: A Case Study of the American Novel Percy Jackson

As metaphors are known as comparative language avoiding “like” or “as” in the sentences, they need special treatment in translation. Regarding comparisons, there are two different objectives: they may be known and unknown in the target language. The objectives become a translation problem according to different languages, cultures, attitudes and other aspects. This study aimed to investigate the translation techniques used for transferring live metaphors found in a novel into Thai, namely, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2005) and its translated version. The translation strategies were studied and analyzed. The analysis relied on the model of Newmark (1988) which proposed seven techniques for metaphor translation. The results of this research showed that the most frequently technique employed was the source metaphor that can be reproduced as the same image in target language, with a total of fifty-seven sentences out of one hundred thirty-six sentences. Additionally, there were also three techniques that were often applied: the metaphor can be translated as a simile by adding some meaning or translating a metaphor as a metaphor and plus some meaning or explanation and the metaphor can be deleted when it is redundant. It can be inferred that to maintain the native sense of language and prevent reader’s confusion, the translator provided the equivalent or same image in the target language. Therefore, the author avoided deleting the source image and instead converted it to literal language.
Dynamic population size in multiobjective evolutionary algorithms

The authors propose a new evolutionary approach to multiobjective optimization problems; the Dynamic Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm (DMOEA). In DMOEA, a population growing and population decline strategies are designed, and several important indicators are defined in order to determine the adaptive individual "killing" scheme. By examining the selected performance indicators of a test function, DMOEA is found to be effective in directing the population into an optimal population size, keeping the diversity of the individuals along the trade-off surface, tending to extend the Pareto front to new areas, and finding a well-approximated Pareto optimal front.
Developing English Language Curriculum for Online Delivery

The E-Language Learning (ELL) project is an ongoing collaborative effort between the US Department of Education and the Chinese (PRC) Ministry of Education. Its purpose is to develop a free, online language-learning opportunity for students in the two countries. Developers in the US are now in the process of creating a program to teach English to the Chinese, while the Chinese are simultaneously developing a program to teach Chinese to English speakers. The authors, who served as the English language development team for the US in the initial stage, describe the curriculum development process for the program, addressing issues in meeting the challenges of developing oral/aural proficiency in language using an online platform. These include making limited use of voice recognition technology for assessment, integrating cultural elements for the targeted audience, developing a program with optimal learning potential, and making the best possible use of technology that is both technically and financially feasible. The authors also include descriptions of clarifying learning goals and curriculum and providing means to track both in order to provide direction for program development, making careful research-based decisions to inform development, and providing careful and ongoing collaboration between technicians, content developers, and language educators.
Differing Ways that Computing Academics Understand Teaching.

This paper presents first results from a wide-ranging phenomenographic study of computing academics' understanding of teaching. These first results focus upon four areas: the role of lab practical sessions, the experience of teaching success, conceptions of motivating and engaging students, and the granularity of the teacher's focus. The findings are comparable with prior work on the understandings of academics in other disciplines. This study was started as part of a workshop on phenomenography. Most participants at the workshop received their first training in phenomenography. This paper summarises the structure of the workshop.
An efficient subcircuit extraction algorithm by resource management

To find subcircuits in a larger electronic circuit continues to be important in the test of VLSI computer-aided design and IC fabrication or verification. In this paper, an efficient approach to solve the subgraph isomorphism problem based on the resource management paradigm is transformed to extract subcircuits. By integrating several effective planning strategies with the concept of centered spanning tree for circuit decomposition and partition, the proposed approach minimizes the number of backtracks and eliminates the nonisomorphic subcircuits early during the tree and cotree matching process, so that the time wasted on unsuccessful matching is dramatically reduced. Thus, an average-case, near-linear time performance is achieved, even in cases where the circuit size is very large and the circuit structure is highly symmetric. Also, due to the graphic representation of circuits with preservation of the topological structure information, the shorted input circuits which are intractable to SubGemini can be recognized without difficulty.
How Multinational Corporations Use Information Technology to Manage Global Operations

ABSTRACT Despite a generally acknowledged importance of information technology (IT) in enabling global strategy and a broad understanding of the manner in which IT enhances coordination and reduces cost, few studies have focused precisely on how multinational corporations (MNCs) use IT to facilitate globalization. To address this gap in the literature, we conduct a case study across four large MNCs, and use primary data to develop predictive propositions on the characteristics of products, processes, and customers that impact the ways in which MNCs use IT to manage their global operations.