Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prepaid and Promised Incentives in Web Surveys

Prepaid monetary incentives consistently exert the largest positive effect on response rates in mail surveys. For web-based surveys, it has not been possible to administer monetary incentives via the Internet in advance. Recently, several new web-based services have been introduced that can transfer money to people online. Does this really have the same positive effect on response rates as shown in traditional mail surveys? The authors investigated this question experimentally in the context of a web-based survey among members of a professional association in Virginia. The results indicate that prepaid incentives in web surveys seem to have no advantages concerning the willingness to participate, actual completion rates, and the share of incomplete response patterns when compared with postpaid incentives. Furthermore, postpaid incentives show no advantages over no incentives. Finally, compared to no incentives, prize draws increase completion rates and also reduce various incomplete participation patterns.
How many cows are there in a herd? A look at notional number in Spanish subject-verb agreement.

The issue of whether or not there is a difference. between notional number (number in thought) and grammatical number (number in language) is relevant when studying subject­ verb agreement. One way this can be done is by examining the errors that normally occur in speech. By studying deviations in verb agreement, something can be learned about the ways in which speakers create and produce utterances. The purpose of the present work is to evaluate what agreement errors can reveal about head subjects of sentences and about how subject-verb agreement is computed by monolingual Spanish speakers. Do they produce agreement errors when faced with collective nouns, which are grammatically singular but notionally plural? The data indicate that during the agreement process, monolingual Spanish speakers neither compute subject-verb agreement purely notionally nor purely syntactically. A one-way ANOVA points to an interaction between notional and grammatical number.
A nondeterministic temporal planning model for gener narratives with continuous change in interactive storyte

In this paper, we propose a temporal planning model for real-time generation of narratives in Interactive Storytelling systems. The model takes into account continuous branched time and the specification of constraints defined as temporal formulae over dramatic properties of the narrative (e.g. joy or tension). In order to address real-time generation, dramatic properties are modeled as varying linearly and events go through a preprocessing stage. As proof of concept, the model is incorporated into an existing storytelling system, LOGTELL, which provides a way to logically specify genres; allows user interaction to influence events in the unrolling narrative; and dramatizes the story in a 3D computer graphics world. To illustrate the generation of narratives, we present a simple narrative example in the Swords and Dragons genre.
Motion compensation for airborne SAR based on inertial data, RDM and GPS

Two new motion compensation methods for airborne SAR are presented. Both methods are based on the evaluation of acceleration data measured by an Attitude and Heading Reference System (AHRS). The motion compensation algorithms were developed for the Experimental SAR System (E-SAR) of DLR which operates in L/C/X-Band. It is installed in a small Dornier Do-228 turboprop aircraft. Due to atmospheric turbulences and instabilities of the aircraft a highly accurate motion compensation becomes necessary to obtain high quality SAR images. The first method is furthermore based on results obtained by the Reflectivity Displacement Method (RDM). The RDM was developed by DLR and evaluates the radar raw data of the SAR sensor. The RDM provides a very accurate estimate of the forward velocity of the sensor which usually cannot be calculated by an inertial system with the required accuracy. Bias and drift components of the inertial data are eliminated by filtering. Residual systematic position errors are negligible for most applications and a high resolution SAR image can be generated. The advantages of this signal processing method are its robustness and its autonomy. The second method is based on the combination of inertial data and GPS position data. The GPS measurements are used to compensate the bias and drift components of the inertial data. Thus the actual position of the sensor can be estimated very accurately which guarantees a geometrically consistent high resolution SAR image. This signal processing method combines the absolute accuracy of GPS position measurements respectively its long term stability with the high bandwidth and data rate of the inertial measurements. In practice this method also turned out to be very robust. <<ETX>>
Auto-consistent environment for measurement software development

In a measurement environment, the user will repeatedly change some of the measurement settings and will want to view the results. Developers of elaborate measurement systems are often puzzled as to whether the generated results correspond to the latest settings. Data consistency in a measurement system means that displayed results will always conform to the latest settings. This paper suggests that automatic data consistency is an underestimated feature of dataflow environments. If only a few of the settings are modified each time, it is unreasonable to repeat operations that do not depend on the changed settings. A demand-driven execution scheme is presented in which data tokens are tagged with their time of calculation. This scheme avoids redundant operations without programmer intervention. This is an important concern when some real-time constraints are to be met, because the operations in complex measurement systems can be very time-consuming. When the developer must handle these two issues programmatically, their combination often results in unmanageable programs.
Analysis of Student Performance in Programming Subjects of an In-house Exit Exam

This paper analyzes the performance of students in Computer Science (CS) and Computer Information Systems (CIS) in the programming subjects (Principles of Programming I & II and Data Structures) of an in-house exit exam given in years 2003-2006. The student performance was measured in seventeen different categories of computer programming. The data for each category was colleted based on student responses to questions related to that particular category. The data was analyzed with respect to whether a student was majoring in CS or CIS, and with respect to whether a student was a male or female. The analysis of data showed that students majoring in CS generally performed better than CIS students in most categories of computer programming. Additionally, both male and female students performed approximately at the same level. The results of the assessment analysis will be used to identify the problem areas and make necessary adjustments to both curriculum and teaching strategies in order to improve and enhance the long-term knowledge retention of students in computer programming subjects.
Why should researchers report the confidence interval in modern research

Medical research aims, mainly, at estimating the effect of an intervention or exposure in a certain population. For decades researchers relied on the p-value to report whether this effect is true (significant) or just has happened by chance (insignificant). In the last decade, many international journals do not accept manuscripts for publication if testing for significance was based only on the p-value. Calculating a confidence interval (CI) for every variable measured became a mandatory pre-requisite in modern research. But why should researchers measure the confidence interval and what benefit do we get from the confidence interval over the p-value? For every intervention or exposure studied an important question arises; what is the exact effect (true effect) of the intervention or exposure in the population? If a precise answer to this question is to be sought, researchers have to study the whole population. Something that is almost always both impossible and inappropriate. To work around this; researchers draw a sample from the population and study the effect of the intervention or exposure on this sample versus another control sample then calculate an estimate of the likely effect of the intervention or exposure in the population.
Multiobjective scheduling for IC sort and test with a simulation testbed

In manufacturing environments such as an integrated circuit (IC) sort and test floor, typically more than one objective, such as cycle time and on-time delivery, needs to be simultaneously considered. With multiple objectives, a good solution is called Pareto optimal if it is not inferior to any other feasible solutions in terms of all objectives. The Pareto boundary is the set of all Pareto optimal solutions, which indicates the tradeoff of all good solutions. In this paper, a multiobjective model for IC sort and test is formulated, based upon the current information at any given instant. An approximate Pareto boundary can then be found using the Lagrangian relaxation method for the model. New algorithms are used to solve the dual problem and obtain feasible solutions from the associated subproblem solutions. The impact of the new scheduling approach on performance is illustrated through numerical examples by comparing it with corresponding single-objective problems and various heuristic dispatching rules. Its performance in dynamic and stochastic environments for real world applications is evaluated by using a simulation testbed. Simulation results definitely indicate a high potential for our approach.
Graduate Students Syntactical Errors in Writing Thesis

This study deals with the graduate students syntactical errors in writing thesis. This study uses a qualitative design in which the data are taken from the sentences of thesis. The data are collected and described using surface strategy taxonomy proposed by Dulay, Burt, and Krashen. The errors found are classified into syntactical errors based on Politzer and Romirez model as a guideline. The researcher applies randomly technique to get a representative sample; there are 6 theses as the sample. The analysis found that there are four types of syntactical errors which used; they are Omision 156, Addition 46, Misformation 114 and Misordering 19. So, the most dominant type of syntactical errors made in graduate students thesis is omission. It is hoped that the result of this study is useful to everyone who wants to study about syntactical errors.
Recognition of Hand Gestures Observed by Depth Cameras

We focus on gesture recognition based on 3D information in the form of a point cloud of the observed scene. A descriptor of the scene is built on the basis of a Viewpoint Feature Histogram (VFH). To increase the distinctiveness of the descriptor the scene is divided into smaller 3D cells and VFH is calculated for each of them. A verification of the method on publicly available Polish and American sign language datasets containing dynamic gestures as well as hand postures acquired by a time-of-flight (ToF) camera or Kinect is presented. Results of cross-validation test are given. Hand postures are recognized using a nearest neighbour classifier with city-block distance. For dynamic gestures two types of classifiers are applied: (i) the nearest neighbour technique with dynamic time warping and (ii) hidden Markov models. The results confirm the usefulness of our approach.
Flipping The Classroom: What We Know And What We Don t Know.

Flipped classroom is an element of blended learning and it is the reverse of the traditional classroom. The students do not listen to the lectures delivered in the classroom but outside the classroom through online video lecture. The teachers record themselves explaining the subject or get videos from free website such as Youtube to share with students to be watched outside the class. The flipped classroom has several advantages; students become more motivated and confident while discussing in the classroom because they have prepared by watching video lectures before coming to class, the classroom activities become more student-centered rather than teacher-centered because the teachers just act as facilitators. However, some disadvantages are also found in the flipped classroom It is a new model of learning and not all teachers and students are ready to apply it. This paper will briefly explain the use of flipped classroom as a new model of teaching-learning activity.
Micromachined thermally based CMOS microsensors

An integrated circuit (IC) approach to thermal microsensors is presented. The focus is on thermal sensors with on-chip bias and signal conditioning circuits made by industrial complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) IC technology in combination with post-CMOS micromachining or deposition techniques. CMOS materials and physical effects pertinent to thermal sensors are summarized together with basic structures used for microheaters, thermistors, thermocouples, thermal isolation, and heat sinks. As examples of sensors using temperature measurement, we present micromachined CMOS radiation sensors and thermal converters. Examples for sensors based on thermal actuation include thermal flow and pressure sensors, as well as thermally excited microresonators for position and chemical sensing. We also address sensors for the characterization of process-dependent thermal properties of CMOS materials, such as thermal conductivity, Seebeck coefficient, and heat capacity, whose knowledge is indispensable for thermal sensor design. Last, two complete packaged microsystems-a thermoelectric air-flow sensor and a thermoelectric infrared intrusion detector-are reported as demonstrators.
Visual servoing with redundant features

This paper presents how the control performance of the visual servo system is improved by utilizing the redundant features. We use the minimum singular value of the image Jacobian as a measure of the control accuracy (sensitivity) and we show that the sensitivity is strictly decreased by increasing the number of redundant features. Effectiveness of the control scheme with redundant features are verified by real time experiments on a PUMA 560 manipulator.
Listening Comprehension Technology: Building the Bridge from Analog to Digital.

Listening comprehension has had a long and ever-evolving history. Within the last 100 years, we have seen it progress from analog phonograph recordings, through the audiotape era, and into the digital realm. Questions arise as to how this evolution has proceeded, what pitfalls and accomplishments we have experienced, and where we might envision aural comprehension technology and its support of second language acquisition in the future. This article addresses the history of listening comprehension technology, presents numerous questions and answers (as they stand today) with regard to the benefits of modern listening comprehension technology, and offers suggestions as to how we can better ensure success with digital technologies and aural comprehension in the future.
Proceedings of the Eleventh ESSLLI Student Session

Standard Arabic (SA) is an extremely rich natural language that has unfortunately received very little interest within computational linguistics literature. We propose in this paper to explore this fertile ground and show the first steps towards the formalization of Arabic syntax and semantics by means of MultiModal Categorial Grammars. We will particularly focus on the analysis of some phenomena related to nominal sentences construction in SA using relevant packages of lexically anchored structural rules.
Through Put Analysis of Various Encryption Algorithms

In today’s world of networks, communication without security is not reliable. Encryption Algorithm provides the security to the users in the network the main goal of this research is to provide the fair performance comparison of various Encryption Algorithms at different text data packets. This paper presents the comparison of various Algorithms or different text file sizes to evaluate the average speed of Encryption and Decryption process. Experimental results in visual basic language shows the superiority of blowfish Algorithm over the other Algorithm in terms of throughput.
Stylebook for the Tubingen Treebank of Written German (TuBa-D/Z)

This stylebook is an updated version of Telljohann et al. (2006). It describes the design principles and the annotation scheme for the German treebank TüBa-D/Z developed by the Division of Computational Linguistics (Lehrstuhl Prof. Hinrichs) at the Department of Linguistics (Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft – SfS) of the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. The guidelines focus on the syntactic annotation of written language data taken from the German newspaper ’die tageszeitung’ (taz). The unannotated taz newspaper material was taken from the Science CD (Wissenschafts-CD) of ’die tageszeitung’ (taz) that can be licensed from contrapress media GmbH (http://shop.taz.de/index.php? cat=c18_taz-Archiv.html). At present, the treebank comprises 45,200 sentences. The newspaper material is taken from the taz editions from 1992 July 10, 11, 13, 14 1995 October 14, 16, 17 1999 April 30, May 3 – 7 The average sentence length is 17.6 words and the total number of tokens currently amounts to 794,079. The TüBa-D/Z treebank is still under development. Thus, the number of annotated sentences will increase over time. Periodic data updates and accompanying updates of this stylebook will be made available at: http://www.sfs. uni-tuebingen.de/en/de_tuebadz. shtml Please consult this website in order to ensure that you are using the most recent and most complete version of the treebank. The annotation scheme for the TüBa-D/Z treebank is derived from the verbmobil treebank for spoken German, developed earlier (1997–2000) by the Division of Computational Linguistics of the SfS (Hinrichs et al. 2000). The TüBa-D/Z annotation scheme has been extended along various dimensions to accommodate the characteristics of written texts. In order to ensure the reusability of the data, a surface-oriented annotation scheme has been adopted that is inspired by the notion of topological fields and is enriched by a level of predicate-argument structure. The linguistic inventory used in the treebank annotation is based on a minimal set of assumptions that are uncontroversial among major syntactic theories. In this sense it is an attempt at theory-neutrality.
Combating Fossilization through Feedback: Does it Work?

This pseudo-longitudinal study adopted typical-error and corrective feedback approaches to investigating interlanguage fossilization. The errors in the argumentative essays of 76 Iranian EFL learners within and across three proficiency levels were identified and classified using the model proposed by Gass and Selinker (1994). The learners were first provided with implicit and then explicit feedback to see if the two feedback types would improve written production, and if there were errors that persisted. The results indicated that word choice, plural, word form and article “the” were the most frequent types of errors, with word choice topping the list. The results also showed that, although providing learners with feedback could lead to a reduction in errors, explicit feedback was a more effective strategy. However, the t-test results demonstrated that the short-term impact of feedback could not be sustained over time, a finding congruent with those of Truscott (2007) who questioned the efficacy of error correction. Moreover, the findings revealed that the error categories of pronoun, word order, passive and
Simulation of traffic flow system and control using fuzzy logic

Fuzzy control can be used to control traffic problems. The traffic problem consists of coming and going lane, junction, traffic jam and traffic light. In this study, fuzzy control has three inputs. The first input is average traffic density while the green light is on. The second input is average traffic density while the red light is on. The third input is time of variation. There are three membership functions which show traffic density for the red and green lights. These are low, medium, high. Red light, green light and time of variation are defined in terms of the second; this assumption is chosen because the theory of the problem and the rule table can be easily established. As shown in this study, the purpose of choosing fuzzy control is that it achieves better performances in terms of traffic flow.
Enhancing students’ vocabulary knowledge using the Facebook environment

This study investigates the effectiveness of using Facebook in enhancing vocabulary knowledge among Community College students. Thirty-three (33) Community College students are exposed to the use of Facebook as an environment of learning and enhancing their English vocabulary. They are given a pre-test and a post-test and the findings indicate that students perform significantly better in the post-test compared to the pre-test. It appears that Facebook could be considered as a supplementary learning environment or learning platform or a learning tool; with meaningful and engaging activities that require students to collaborate, network and functions as a community of practice, particularly for introverted students with low proficiency levels and have low self-esteem.
Hector - A Hierarchically Structured

Hector is a shared-memory multiprocessor with a hierarchical interconnection structure that has three important advantages. First, it uses only short transmission lines and allows implementations with simple, modular hardware. This makes it scalable to match the needs of tomorrow’s high speed microprocessors. Second, the cost and the overall bandwidth of the structure grow linearly with the number of processing modules. This makes Hector expandable to moderate sizes of up to 256 PMs, yet allows small-scale systems at a low cost. Finally, the cost of a memory access grows incrementally with the distance between the processor and memory location. This allows single threaded applications, applications with a small degree of parallelism, and applications with a high degree of locality in their memory accesses to exploit the low cost of localized memory accesses.