Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Koli Calling comes of age: an analysis

A detailed analysis of the full papers presented at the first six years of Koli Calling shows how the conference has matured over that time to become more research-oriented. While the first three years were dominated by papers proposing or reporting on classroom initiatives, the next three have seen a remarkable increase in the proportion of papers describing experimental and analytical research. This paper quantifies and explores that increase, and considers in addition the range of topics, contexts, and scopes of these six years of papers.
Increasing Reflective Writing and Goal Setting Skills on High Ability Sixth Grade Mathematics Students.

A practicum was developed and implemented to help identify, give direction to, and build self-motivation in high ability sixth-grade students attending a magnet school in a progressive, fast-growing southwestern school district. It was felt that students must be in the driver's seat for them to have ownership for working up to their potential. Goal setting would help direct students to focus on their educational and future desires. Reflective writing would provide students with a tool for self-assessment. Reflective thinking and writing would lead students to a greater sense of responsibility toward the goals they had set and to a greater understanding of their accomplishments resulting in self-motivation. The objectives for the practicum were for students to show a 207. increase in their goal accomplishment measured by student scoring through the use of a rubric and a 20% increase in ability to write reflectively measured by students and teacher scoring through the 'use of a rubric. Both objectives were met with the target group improving in both areas. Contains 16 references and 4 tables of data. Appendixes include goal setting forms and reflective thinking questions. (Author/RS) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made Ic from the original document. *********************************************************************** INCREASING REFLECTIVE WRITING AND GOAL SETTING SKILLS IN HIGH ABILITY SIXTH GRADE MATHEMATICS STUDENTS "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEE% GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC). U S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Unice 0 EducatIonal Resealcs and Irnprovernant EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) IVThis document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating il. 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy
Building Home Pages

This article provides a short succinct guide to building your first home page. It overviews the main HTML tags giving examples of their use, briefly discusses forms and clickable maps, as well as some of the new HTML 3.0 tags. pointers to sites which contain HTML editors, graphics, background, and music are included
Validation of the End-User Computing Satisfaction Instrument in Case Tool Environments

This article focuses on the psychometric stability of the end-user computing satisfaction (EUCS) instrument by Doll and Torkzadeh (9) when applied to end-users of typical CASE tool software packages and systems software applications. Using a survey of 190 users, this research provides evidence that the EUCS instrument is a valid and reliable measure in CASE applications. Given this evidence, managers and software product developers can confidently apply the instrument in the investigation of competing tools, features, and technologies in CASE tool settings.
Efficacy of pair programming in completing programming tasks

This report documents an experiment conducted at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), involving eight students (3 pairs and 2 individuals) completing a Collaborative Computing module. Their assignment was to develop a Lotus Notes prototype. All participants were given a questionnaire at the end of the task. This report also touches on the personal experience of the researcher who was also a participant in the experiment. The results of this study are mostly in line with similar studies conducted in the past. The study revealed that the quality of work done by pairs was either equal to or better than that of the individuals, despite having spent only half the amount of time on the task as the individual programmers.
Children's online processing of written language inferences from eye movements

This thesis reports seven experiments that investigated children's online processing of written language. A variety of visual and linguistic factors, for which there are well-documented effects in adults, were manipulated in order to examine children's and adults' eye movements as they read sentences containing these manipulations. Experiment 1 investigated saccadic targeting of long and short words and showed that adults and children are generally alike in where they target their initial saccade to a word, and how they use parafoveal word length information to skip words. It also showed that while the length of a word directly influences the eye movement behaviour of both adults and children during text reading, the magnitude of these effects is greater in children. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that reliable word frequency effects are observed in adults and children when age-appropriate texts are used to index frequency counts. Experiment 3 also showed that word frequency effects occur in children, even when the age at which words were acquired is held constant. In Experiment 4 lexical processing of semantically ambiguous words was examined and the data were suggestive of there being a cost associated with processing words with more than one meaning for older children. However, the effects were not robust in adults or younger children. Experiments 5 and 6 investigated syntactic parsing and showed that children are slightly delayed relative to adults in their detection of initial syntactic misanalysis, but that they appear to have a similar sentence-parsing mechanism in place as adults. Finally, Experiment 7 investigated thematic processing of anomalous and implausible sentences, and showed that while there is no difference in the time course of thematic anomaly detection in adults and children; children are delayed in their detection of thematic implausibility as compared to adults. Overall, the data show that adults and children appear to have similar rnechanisms in place for processing written language visually, lexically, syntactically and thematically. They also show that the magnitude of disruption associated with these effects is greater in children than in adults, that the time course of children's syntactic processing is slightly delayed relative to that of adults, and further, that children are delayed in the efficiency with which they are able to integrate pragmatic and real world knowledge into the discourse representation. The thesis also makes a number of methodological points that have implications for conducting future research with developmental populations.
Shearlets: Multiscale Analysis for Multivariate Data

Over the last20 years, multiscale methods and wavelets have revolutionized the field of applied mathematicsby providing an efficient means ofencoding isotropic phenomena. Directional multiscale systems, particularly shearlets,are now having the same dramatic impact on the encoding of multidimensional signals. Since its introduction about five years ago, the theory of shearlets has rapidly developed and gained wide recognitionasthe superior way of achievinga truly unified treatment in both a continuous and a digital setting. By now, it has reached maturity as a research field, with rich mathematics, efficient numerical methods, and various important applications.
Molto flessibili, poco sicuri: lavoro atipico e disuguaglianze nel mercato del lavoro italiano

Il mercato del lavoro italiano ha affrontato un intenso percorso di trasformazione negli ultimi quindici anni, nella direzione di una progressiva flessibilizzazione delle relazioni contrattuali. Le riforme sono intervenute “al margine”, riducendo i vincoli per l’assunzione di lavoratori con contratto a tempo determinato e introducendo nuove forme contrattuali “atipiche”, ma lasciando sostanzialmente inalterato il quadro delle tutele garantite ai dipendenti a tempo indeterminato. In assenza di interventi correttivi sul sistema degli ammortizzatori sociali, il quadro attuale sembra dunque aver contribuito ad accentuare le caratteristiche di dualita del mercato del lavoro. Il presente articolo si propone di fornire un’analisi delle molteplici disuguaglianze che emergono riguardo alla durata dei contratti di lavoro, raccogliendo considerazioni teoriche ed evidenze empiriche relative ai differenziali salariali e pensionistici, all’accesso alla formazione continua e alla probabilita di stabilizzazione degli occupati con contratti a tempo determinato. I risultati di questa analisi congiunta sembrano supportare l’ipotesi di un incremento della segmentazione del mercato del lavoro, in contrasto con quanto suggerito dal paradigma europeo della flexicurity.
Molecular dynamics simulation in arbitrary geometries for nanoscale fluid mechanics

Simulations of nanoscale systems where fluid mechanics plays an important role are required to help design and understand nano-devices and biological systems. A simulation method which hybridises molecular dynamics (MD) and continuum computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is demonstrated to be able to accurately represent the relevant physical phenomena and be computationally tractable. An MD code has been written to perform MD simulations in systems where the geometry is described by a mesh of unstructured arbitrary polyhedral cells that have been spatially decomposed into irregular portions for parallel processing. The MD code that has been developed may be used for simulations on its own, or may serve as the MD component of a hybrid method. The code has been implemented using OpenFOAM, an open source C++ CFD toolbox (www.openfoam.org). Two key enabling components are described in detail. 1) Parallel generation of initial configurations of molecules in arbitrary geometries. 2) Calculation of intermolecular pair forces, including between molecules that lie on mesh portions assigned to different, and possibly non-neighbouring processors. To calculate intermolecular forces, the spatial relationship of mesh cells is calculated once at the start of the simulation and only the molecules contained in cells that have part of their surface closer than a cut-off distance are required to interact. Interprocessor force calculations are carried out by creating local copies of molecules from other processors in a layer around the processor in question. The process of creating these copied molecules is described in detail. A case study of flow in a realistic nanoscale mixing channel, where the geometry is drawn and meshed using engineering CAD tools, is simulated to demonstrate the capabilities of the code for complex simulations.
The Structure and Dynamics of Information Sharing Networks

Information flows are produced, carried, and directed by information sharing networks. The evolution of the structure of such networks and the way information diffuses are affected by one another. This thesis studies structural features of information networks and their relationships with information diffusion. It starts with the robustness study of topological features when the datasets are sampled from networks that are rapidly evolving, as is the case in large-scale online blog networks. The features of blog networks are found to be stable upon aggregation with comprehensive data sets, even as individual network ties are highly intermittent. Another salient structural feature of such networks is that a small number of vertices play a disproportionately important role through their position and connectivity. In several online information networks studied in this thesis, one can construct subgraphs of vertices according to different importance measures, while consistently preserving their attributes such as connectivity and shortest paths in the original networks. In this thesis, we further show that a special set of edges, strong ties, percolate through online social networks. Networks of strong ties do not break up into isolated communities, nor are their average shortest paths lengthened significantly. After examining the structural features that will potentially affect the flow of information, this thesis further examines the actual relationship between structure and information diffusion. A thorough analysis based on citation networks indicates that information is less likely to flow across community boundaries, and a publication's citing across disciplines is tied to its subsequent impact. In the case of patents and natural science publications, those that are cited at least once are cited slightly more when they draw on research outside of their area. This thesis also studies information diffusion in online communities. We investigate the information diffusion curves that reveal the patterns of user behavior in joining groups, and analyze the feature factors associated with users or groups that influence such behavior. Bipartite Markov Random Field (BiMRF) models are built to help understand the relationships of these features, as well as the differences in their impact in different types of online forums.
Estimating the number of clusters in a data set via the gap statistic

We propose a method (the ‘gap statistic’) for estimating the number of clusters (groups) in a set of data. The technique uses the output of any clustering algorithm (e.g. K‐means or hierarchical), comparing the change in within‐cluster dispersion with that expected under an appropriate reference null distribution. Some theory is developed for the proposal and a simulation study shows that the gap statistic usually outperforms other methods that have been proposed in the literature.
Verifying object-oriented programs that use subtypes

Object-oriented programming languages like Smalltalk-80 have a generic invocation mechanism that allows code to work on instances of many different types. In this dissertation we show how to write formal specifications of functions that use generic invocation and give a logic for verifying applicative programs that use generic invocation. Our reasoning techniques formalize informal methods based on the use of subtypes. We give a formal definition of subtype relationships among immutable abstract types, including nondeterministic and incompletely specified types. This definition captures the intuition that each instance of a subtype behaves like some instance of that type's supertypes. We show how to write specifications of functions that use generic invocation by allowing instances of subtypes as arguments. We also simplify verification by separately checking that each expression's value is an instance of a subtype of the expression's type. Thesis Supervisor: William E. Weihl Title: Associate Professor of Computer Science
The Language of Shepherding-A Pattern Language for Shepherds and Sheep

A composition for a solderable silver article of manufacture as well as a method of bonding silver to a ceramic substrate which includes a total composition of silver, cadmium oxide, copper oxide, rhuthenium oxide and palladium. An initial mixture of between 1.0 - 6.0% by weight of the total composition of cadmium oxide and copper oxide is provided in a pre-determined weight ratios. The initial mixture is blended with between 1.0 - 8.0% of palladium powder and about 0.2 - 3.0% of rhuthenium oxide to form an intermediate mixture. Silver powder is then added to the intermediate mixture to form a total composition mixture. The total composition mixture is blended in an organic binder and applied to a ceramic substrate to form a pre-determined coating layer thickness. The coated ceramic article is introduced into an oven having an oxidizing atmosphere which is maintained within a temperature range of 900 DEG C to 950 DEG C. Copper oxide crystals impregnate the ceramic substrate and form a high strength bond between the silver layer and the ceramic substrate. The palladium in a combination with the rhuthenium oxide slows down scavenging of the silver when the coated ceramic substrate is soldered. The addition of the rhuthenium oxide has been found to allow a lower percentage of palladium to be added to the total composition than that which has been previously used while maintaining high solderability of the silver layer.
Examining the relationship between oral narrative ability and reading comprehension in children with mixed reading disability

Oral narrative ability has received increasing attention over the past three decades, and the importance of children’s oral narrative skills to academic achievement has been well established. Children with reading disabilities are known to demonstrate difficulties in the ability to produce and comprehend oral narratives (Roth & Spekman, 1986; Snyder & Downey, 1991). However, the nature of the relationship between oral narrative ability and reading comprehension performance in children with reading disability is not clear. The experiments reported in this thesis aim to address this issue. The following questions are asked: 1) Do deficits in oral narrative ability contribute to reading comprehension difficulties? and 2) What is the likely direction of the relationship between aspects of oral narrative ability and reading comprehension performance in children with reading disabilities? Fourteen children (aged between 6;4 and 7;8 at the initial assessment) with mixed reading disability (MRD: i.e., children who demonstrate both word recognition and listening comprehension deficits) participated in the study. Their oral narrative skills were compared to those of their chronological age-matched peers with typical development (TD) and their reading-age-matched peers with typical development (RMTD). The study consisted of three phases: 1) A longitudinal phase in which the children’s oral narrative performance was assessed on three occasions over a two-year period; 2) An intervention phase (using a nonequivalent pretest-posttest control group design) in which 10 children participated in an oral narrative intervention program that focused on enhancing children’s story structure knowledge; and 3) A follow-up assessment phase conducted eight months post-intervention. Oral narratives were elicited in a personal narrative context and in a story retelling context. Oral narrative production ability was analysed at macrostructure (story quality) and
Cooperation and learning in cooperative multiagent systems

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Examining Adoption Behavior of Mobile Government

M-government (MG), as a subset of E-government (EG), has expedited the dynamic nature of EG and also created certain channels which either are not available or would be problematic for EG. This has resulted in offering more dynamic and versatile methods for citizens to access certain government services. The objective of the current study is to address and posit the factors which can contribute to an understanding of citizen intention to adopt MG services. A model was used to capture citizen behavior in MG service adoption, and the results from this model are contrasted with adoption behavior for EG from a similar study. To that end, we have developed and validated a model entitled “citizen adoption behavior of MG” (CAB-MG).
Optical Wavefront Prediction with Reservoir Computing

Over the last four decades there has been considerable research in the improvement of imaging exo-atmospheric objects through air turbulence from ground-based instruments. Whilst such research was initially motivated for military purposes, the benefits to the astronomical community have been significant. A key topic in this research is isoplanatism. The isoplanatic angle is an angular limit that separates two point-source objects, where if independent measurements of wavefront perturbations were obtained from each source, the wavefront distortion would be considered equivalent. In classical adaptive optics, perturbations from a point-source reference, such as a bright, natural guide star, are used to partially negate perturbations distorting an image of a fainter, nearby science object. Various techniques, such as atmospheric tomography, maximum a posteriori (MAP), and parameterised modelling, have been used to estimate wavefront perturbations when the distortion function is spatially variant, i.e., angular separations exceed the isoplanatic angle, θ0, where θ0 ≈ 10 μrad for mild distortion at visual wavelengths. However, the effectiveness of such techniques is also dependent on knowledge a priori of turbulence profiles and configuration data. This dissertation describes a new method used to estimate the eigenvalues that comprise wavefront perturbations over a wide, spatial field. To help reduce dependency on prior knowledge for specific configurations, machine learning is used with a recurrent neural network trained using a posteriori wavefront ensembles from multiple point-source objects. Using a spatiotemporal framework for prediction, the eigenvalues, in terms of Zernike polynomials, are used to reconstruct the spatially-variant, point spread function (SVPSF) for image restoration. The overall requirement is to counter the adverse effects of atmospheric turbulence on the images of extended astronomical objects. The method outlined in this thesis combines optical wavefront sensing using multiple natural guide stars, with a reservoir-based, artificial neural network. The network is used to predict aberrations caused by atmospheric turbulence that degrade the images of faint science objects. v
A comparative study of tree - based models and their applications in modern nance

A comparative study of tree-based models and their applications in modern nance J.B. van Biljon Supervisor:Prof. E. Mare University of Pretoria Pretoria Thesis: MSc (Financial Engineering) May 2014 The Binomial option pricing model plays an integral role in modern nance due to its simplicity to implement and pedagogical value. There are two ways of extending the Binomial model on one source of underlying risk. The rst is to expand the number of possible states after each time step which results in the multinomial model. The second is to increase the number of sources of underlying risk. In this dissertation, the extension of the Binomial model in both cases is discussed. Numerical investigation is done to evaluate convergence patterns and computational intensity of a number of non-vanilla options. These include rainbow, basket and digital options, as well as convertible bonds. Theoretical and actual convergence is discussed and compared.