Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The ability of multi-angle remote sensing observations to identify and distinguish mineral dust types : Part 1 . Optical models and retrievals of optically thick plumes

We present a systematic theoretical study of atmospheric mineral dust radiative properties, focusing on implications for multi-angle and multi-spectral remote sensing. We model optical properties of complex, non-spherical mineral dust mixtures in three visible-NIR satellite channels:0.550, 0.672 and0.866/mum, accounting for recent field and laboratory work data on mineral dust morphology and mineralogy. To model the optical properties of mineral dust we employ the Discrete Dipole Approximation technique for particles up to 2 μm diameter, and the T-matrix method for particles up to 12 μm. We investigate the impact of particle irregularity, composition, and size distribution on particle optical properties, and develop optical models for representative natural mineral dust composition-size-shape (CSS) types. Sensitivity studies with these models indicate that Multi-angle Imaging Spectro-Radiometer (MISR) data should be able to distinguish plate-like from grain-like dust particles, weakly from strongly absorbing compositional types, and mono-modal from bi-modal size distributions. Models containing grain-like, weakly absorbing, bi-modal distributions of dust particles were favored for optically thick Saharan and Asian dust plume examples, whereas strongly absorbing and plate-like particles were rejected. A sequel to this work will present detailed, systematic MISR sensitivity studies and analysis of more complex field cases using the optical models derived here.
An Experiment Examining the Effects of Transaction Scope and Accounting Equation Emphasis on Students Learning to Journalize

This study examines the learning effects of different methods that are used to teach transaction analysis and recording. In particular, we investigate whether student performance in journalizing transactions depends on the scope of transactions to which students are initially introduced and the extent to which students explicitly consider the effects of transactions on the accounting equation. Education research suggests that these differences in teaching methods represent different levels of instructional scaffolds, which can lead to different levels of performance when students journalize transactions. To test these effects, we conducted an experiment that randomly assigned students to one of six learning conditions that varied the scope of transactions (restricted versus expanded) and the requirement to document accounting equation effects (before or after each journal entry, or not at all). Analysis of student test scores indicates that student performance was greatest when they had initially learned from a restricted scope of transactions and had learned to document accounting equation effects when preparing each journal entry. The learning benefits from initially restricting the scope of transactions persisted when students analyzed an extended set of transactions more than a week after their initial training session. The learning benefits from requiring students to document accounting equation effects were not evident in these subsequent tests. Implications for accounting instructors and education researchers are discussed.
Are there cognitive benefits of code-switching in bilingual children? A longitudinal study

Abstract The current study explored bilingual parent and child code-switching patterns over time. Concurrent and predictive models of code-switching behaviour on executive function outcomes were also examined in a sample of 29 French–English bilinguals at 36 (Wave 1) and 61 (Wave 2) months of age. We investigated whether code-switching typology in a single-language context predicted executive function performance at each wave independently, and whether growth in code-switching frequency across waves predicted executive function performance at Wave 2. At both waves, parents and children participated in two free play sessions (in English and French), followed by a battery of executive function tasks administered in the dominant language. Results indicate more frequent code-switching from the non-dominant to the dominant language in children, and that children code-switch to fill lexical gaps. Results also suggest that less frequent code-switching in a single-language context is associated with better inhibitory control skills during the preschool period.
The Bright and Dark Side of Gossip for Cooperation in Groups

Recent experimental studies seem to concur that gossip is good for groups by showing that gossip stems from prosocial motives to protect group members from non-cooperators. Thus, these studies emphasize the “bright” side of gossip. However, scattered studies point to detrimental outcomes of gossip for individuals and groups, arguing that a “dark” side of gossip exists. To understand the implications of gossip for cooperation in groups, both the dark and bright side of gossip must be illuminated. We investigated both sides of gossip in two scenario studies. In Study 1 (N = 108), we confronted participants with a free-rider in their group and manipulated whether the gossip recipient was the free-rider’s potential victim or not. Participants showed a higher group protection motivation in response to gossip when imagining gossiping to a potential victim of a norm violator compared to a non-victim. They showed a higher emotion venting motivation when imagining gossiping to a non-victim compared to a potential victim. Both these gossip motives were related to an increased tendency to gossip. In Study 2 (N = 104), we manipulated whether participants were the targets or observers of gossip and whether the gossip was true or false. Results showed that targets of negative gossip intended to increase their work effort in the short run, but only when the gossip was true. Furthermore, gossip targets reported lower long-term cooperative intentions toward their workgroup regardless of gossip veracity. This paper demonstrates that gossip has both a “dark” and “bright” side and that situational factors and agent perspectives determine which side prevails.
Psychological Predictors of Bullying in Adolescents From Pluricultural Schools: A Transnational Study in Spain and Ecuador

This study aimed to analyze the levels of personal aggression and victimization, ethnic-cultural aggression and victimization, self-esteem, empathy, social skills and gender in adolescents as potential predictors of bullying in Spain and Ecuador. The wide pluricultural sample comprised secondary education students from both countries (N = 25,190, average age = 13.92, SD = 1.306; NSpain = 14,437; NEcuador = 10,753), who took part in the study by filling in a self-report. The results revealed that predictive models of bullying for both countries explain 50–70% of variance. A transnational predictive pattern of personal victimization can be observed based on the levels of ethnic-cultural victimization, ethnic-cultural aggression, personal aggression, self-deprecation, and affective empathy. A transnational predictive pattern of personal aggression is evidenced depending on the levels of ethnic-cultural aggression, personal victimization, self-deprecation, ethnic-cultural victimization, and the fact of being female. We concluded that bullying can largely be predicted by involvement in ethnic-cultural discrimination. These results are discussed, and educational inferences are drawn for prevention.
Soil Health Changes Over a 25-Year Chronosequence From Forest to Plantations in Rubber Tree (Hevea brasiliensis) Landscapes in Southern Côte d'Ivoire: Do Earthworms Play a Role?

The agro-ecological drawbacks of the spread of rubber tree plantations in Cote d’Ivoire since 1990’s are obvious even though they have not been properly investigated. They consist of biodiversity loss, land degradation and food insecurity, which have extended to the existing cocoa-led degraded areas whose rehabilitation has unfortunately not started. This situation increases not only the threat on soil health status but also undermines the capability of soils to deliver ecosystem services that are key to sustainable agricultural production. The current study took advantage of a chronosequence in rubber tree landscapes to assess soil health deterioration in general and possibly earthworm-mediated role in soil heath changes. The hypothesis underpinning the current study was that earthworms can contribute to mitigating soil health deterioration in rubber-dominated landscapes due to their key role in soil functioning. This study confirmed that the conversion of forest into rubber tree plantations has significantly impaired all soil biological, physical and chemical parameters at the beginning (7 years) of the chronosequence followed further by a restorative trend taking place beneath the plantations in, or after, 12 years. This is due to an enabling microenvironment caused by an improved SOC storage, increased aggregate stability, exchangeable K, total phosphorus concentration in aged rubber tree plantations and the development of geophageous mesohumic earthworms. However, this study failed to evidence a direct role of earthworms in soil health rehabilitation over time. Mesoscale studies along with the use of appropriate models could help unravel this “black box” and shed some light on the contribution of earthworms as key soil ecosystem engineers.
WIDGETS AND DIGITS: A STUDY OF NOVICE MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHERS ATTENDING TO MATHEMATICS IDENTITY IN PRACTICE

Title of Dissertation: WIDGETS AND DIGITS: A STUDY OF NOVICE MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHERS ATTENDING TO MATHEMATICS IDENTITY IN PRACTICE Toya Jones Frank, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation Directed By: Professor Lawrence Clark Department of Teaching and Learning, Planning and Leadership This is a study of novice middle-school mathematics teachers’ attention to mathematics identity guided by three primary goals: (a) to understand how they were conceptualizing mathematics identity, (b) to investigate how they attended to mathematics identity in practice, and (c) to glean an understanding of the forces that they saw as influential in attending to mathematics identity. I explored how these teachers conceptualized mathematics identity and attended to it across four dimensions: ability, importance, motivation, and the nature of mathematical tasks. I used a metaphor of interlocking gears to represent how these four dimensions were interrelated. While each practicing novice teacher (PNT) conceptualized mathematics identity differently, they all viewed it through an ability lens, meaning their attention to mathematics identity was predicated upon how they positioned students as mathematically competent or incompetent. I used qualitative methods to highlight the perspectives and practices of three PNTs novice teachers who participated in an alternative certification program that prepared teachers to teach in a district with a long, documented history of low student achievement. I used Engeström’s (1987, 1999, 2001) activity theory to explore how the elements of the teachers’ activity systems promoted or impeded their attention to mathematics identity. I highlighted salient themes across all PNTs in a cross-case analysis. The teachers in the study attended to mathematics identity in various ways. I categorized these tools in three ways: (a) attention to mathematics identity via instruction, (b) attention to mathematics identity via planning, and (c) an emergent sociopolitical stance. I used the cases to provide illustrative examples of what attending to mathematics identity in each category looked like in practice. Across all of the PNTs, the rules at multiple levels (classroom, school, and district) that governed their activity systems were similar in nature. Their test-driven (Valli, Croninger, Chambliss, Graeber, & Buese, 2008) contexts shaped instructional decisions. At the classroom level, classroom management also proved to be a force that either supported or impeded the PNTs’ attention to mathematics identity in practice. With the findings and analysis in mind, I present implications for teacher education, data collection, and theoretical considerations WIDGETS AND DIGITS: A STUDY OF NOVICE MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHERS ATTENDING TO MATHEMATICS IDENTITY IN PRACTICE by
Imaging Mass Cytometry and Single-Cell Genomics Reveal Differential Depletion and Repletion of B-Cell Populations Following Ofatumumab Treatment in Cynomolgus Monkeys

Ofatumumab is the first, fully human, anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody in Phase 3 development for multiple sclerosis (MS). The study focused on changes in lymphocyte subsets in blood and lymphoid tissues and on potential novel biomarkers as a result of anti-CD20 antibody action in Cynomolgus monkeys treated with human equivalent doses of subcutaneous (s.c.) ofatumumab on Days 0, 7, and 14. Axillary lymph nodes (LNs) and blood samples were collected at various time points until Day 90. Lymphocyte subsets were quantified by flow cytometry, while morphological and immune cell changes were assessed by imaging mass cytometry (IMC), immunohistochemistry (IHC), in situ hybridization (ISH), and transcriptome analyses using single-cell methodology. Ofatumumab treatment resulted in a potent and rapid reduction of B cells along with a simultaneous drop in CD20+ T cell counts. At Day 21, IHC revealed B-cell depletion in the perifollicular and interfollicular area of axillary LNs, while only the core of the germinal center was depleted of CD20+CD21+ cells. By Day 62, the perifollicular and interfollicular areas were abundantly infiltrated by CD21+ B cells and this distribution returned to the baseline cytoarchitecture by Day 90. By IMC CD20+CD3+CD8+ cells could be identified at the margin of the follicles, with a similar pattern of distribution at Day 21 and 90. Single-cell transcriptomics analysis showed that ofatumumab induced reversible changes in t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) defined B-cell subsets that may serve as biomarkers for drug action. In summary, low dose s.c. ofatumumab potently depletes both B cells and CD20+ T cells but apparently spares marginal zone (MZ) B cells in the spleen and LN. These findings add to our molecular and tissue-architectural understanding of ofatumumab treatment effects on B-cell subsets.
DeepBinDiff: Learning Program-Wide Code Representations for Binary Diffing

—Binary difﬁng analysis quantitatively measures the differences between two given binaries and produces ﬁne-grained basic block level matching. It has been widely used to enable different kinds of critical security analysis. However, all existing program analysis and machine learning based techniques suffer from low accuracy, poor scalability, coarse granularity, or require extensive labeled training data to function. In this paper, we pro-pose an unsupervised program-wide code representation learning technique to solve the problem. We rely on both the code semantic information and the program-wide control ﬂow information to generate basic block embeddings. Furthermore, we propose a k - hop greedy matching algorithm to ﬁnd the optimal difﬁng results using the generated block embeddings. We implement a prototype called D EEP B IN D IFF and evaluate its effectiveness and efﬁciency with a large number of binaries. The results show that our tool outperforms the state-of-the-art binary difﬁng tools by a large margin for both cross-version and cross-optimization-level difﬁng. A case study for OpenSSL using real-world vulnerabilities further demonstrates the usefulness of our system.
A Comparison of Context-sensitive Models for Lexical Substitution

Word embedding representations provide good estimates of word meaning and give state-of-the art performance in semantic tasks. Embedding approaches differ as to whether and how they account for the context surrounding a word. We present a comparison of different word and context representations on the task of proposing substitutes for a target word in context (lexical substitution). We also experiment with tuning contextualized word embeddings on a dataset of sense-specific instances for each target word. We show that powerful contextualized word representations, which give high performance in several semantics-related tasks, deal less well with the subtle in-context similarity relationships needed for substitution. This is better handled by models trained with this objective in mind, where the inter-dependence between word and context representations is explicitly modeled during training.
Towards Coreference for Literary Text: Analyzing Domain-Specific Phenomena

Coreference resolution is the task of grouping together references to the same discourse entity. Resolving coreference in literary texts could benefit a number of Digital Humanities (DH) tasks, such as analyzing the depiction of characters and/or their relations. Domain-dependent training data has shown to improve coreference resolution for many domains, e.g. the biomedical domain, as its properties differ significantly from news text or dialogue, on which automatic systems are typically trained. Literary texts could also benefit from corpora annotated with coreference. We therefore analyze the specific properties of coreference-related phenomena on a number of texts and give directions for the adaptation of annotation guidelines. As some of the adaptations have profound impact, we also present a new annotation tool for coreference, with a focus on enabling annotation of long texts with many discourse entities.
Dynamic typing for security protocols

Estabilishing a safe communication over an untrusted network, where malicious intruders try to trick honest principals, has long been a challenge and is still a delicate issue. Even when data in transit on the network are protected by cryptographic techniques and these are assumed to be a fully reliable building-block, an intruder can engage a number of potentially dangerous actions, notably, intercepting/replaying/forging messages, to break the intended protocol goals. As a matter of fact, the presence of hostile entities makes protocol design complex and often error prone, as shown by many attacks to long standing protocols reported in the literature. The goal of the research in this field is to provide programmers with effective and easy-to-use tools for verifying the safety of applications communicating over untrusted networks. This thesis goes towards this direction. We target authentication protocols, whose purpose is enabling two entities to achieve mutual and reliable agreement on some pieces of information, typically the identity of the other party, its presence, the origin of a message, its intended destination. We focus on these protocols for two main reasons. Authentication is the building block of several modern and widely used applications, like e-commerce and e-banking, and is difficult to verify as typically achieved by different message components, each one providing a part of the intended authentication guarantee. For instance, the secrecy of a key proves the identity of the owner, the freshness of some piece of code guarantees the recentness of the authentication request and so on. The approach here presented may be summarized as follows. Security protocols are modelled through ρ-spi calculus, a process calculus derived from Abadi and Gordon’s spi calculus. The next step is the development of a type-based static analysis reasoning about security at the language level, thus not involving any protocol execution. Types do not only check safety but also clarify the underlying protocol logic, formalize the role of message components and explain in which extent these contribute to achieve authentication. Thanks to type inference, the analysis is fully automated and does not require any expertise on the part of programmers. Furthermore, the static and compositional nature of the analysis makes it suitable to verify network systems composed of an unbounded number of components. From a technical point of view, the type system is dynamic as it relies on some additional information attached to ciphertexts, specifying the role of message components. The last part of this thesis compares dynamic versus static typing for authentication, pointing out relative merits and drawbacks and discussing some differences in terms of compositionality.
Beyond Word2Vec: Embedding Words and Phrases in Same Vector Space

Word embeddings are being used for several linguistic problems and NLP tasks. Improvements in solutions to such problems are great because of the recent break-throughs in vector representation of words and research in vector space models. However, vector embeddings of phrases keeping semantics intact with words has been challenging. We propose a novel methodology using Siamese deep neural networks to embed multi-word units and ﬁne-tune the current state-of-the-art word embed-dings keeping both in the same vector space. We show several semantic relations between words and phrases using the embeddings generated by our system and evaluate that the similarity of words and their corresponding paraphrases are maximized using the modiﬁed embeddings.
Distributed Robust PID Control For Leader Tracking in Uncertain Connected Ground Vehicles With V2V Communication Delay

The paper addresses the leader tracking problem for a platoon of connected autonomous vehicles in the presence of both homogeneous time-varying parameter uncertainties and vehicle-to-vehicle time-varying communication delay. To this aim, leveraging the multiagent systems (MAS) framework, a novel distributed robust proportional-integral-derivative control is proposed. The stability of the cohesive formation is analytically proved with a Lyapunov–Krasovskii approach by exploiting the descriptor transformation for time-delayed systems of neutral type. The delay-dependent robust stability conditions are expressed as a set of linear matrix inequalities allowing the proper tuning of the proportional, integral, and derivative actions implemented on each of the vehicles within the fleet. Extensive simulation analysis in different driving scenarios confirms the effectiveness of the theoretical derivation.
Two-Year Incidence and Associated Factors of Dry Eye Among Residents in Shanghai Communities With Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the 2-year incidence and associated factors of dry eye (DE) among community residents with type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM). METHODS For confirmed type 2 DM residents in the Xinjing community of Shanghai in China, 2 surveys on DE and related factors were performed in 2016 and 2018. The survey content included general information, subjective symptom questionnaires, tear-film break-up time test, Schirmer I test, corneal fluorescence staining (FL), slit-lamp examination, and examination of blood and urine samples. Symptoms of depression were evaluated using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale. Dry eye was diagnosed based on the diagnostic standards developed by the Asia Dry Eye Society in 2016. RESULTS The 2-year incidence of DE among 460 type 2 DM residents was 33.7% (95% confidence interval [CI]=29.6%-38.3%). The incidence of DE significantly increased with increasing age (P<0.01). The incidence among women (35.7%) was not statistically significant compared with that of men (31.0%). In the multivariate logistic regression model, age (odds ratio [OR]=1.03, 95% CI=1.01-1.06, P=0.04), corneal sensitivity (OR=0.97, 95% CI=0.94-0.99, P=0.03), and depressive symptom score (OR=1.04, 95% CI = 1.00-1.08, P=0.04) were associated factors for the incidence of DE. In the CES-D scale, two items, "I felt that everything I did was an effort" and "I felt sad," were significantly correlated with DE onset. CONCLUSION The incidence of DE among community residents with type 2 DM was high. Screening for DE among DM residents, especially residents with advanced age, corneal hypoesthesia, and depression, should be strengthened.