Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Tutorial Design Process Applied to an Introductory Materials Engineering Course

We apply a “tutorial design process”, which has proven to be successful for a number of physics topics, to design curricular materials or “tutorials” aimed at improving student understanding of important concepts in a university-level introductory materials science and engineering course. The process involves the identifi cation of instructional goals, the identifi cation of specifi c student diffi culties, the iterative design of interactive tutorials, the implementation of interactive group-work recitations, and assessment. The project, which involved over 1000 students, included extensive interviewing, testing, and iterative classroom implementation over a period of three years. Here we report on some of the identifi ed student diffi culties, several of the tutorials designed to address the diffi culties, and the results of the implementation. The project has yielded 9 fi eld-tested 48 minute tutorials in which students work together in small groups on the tutorials in the presence of teaching assistants who assess and facilitate student progress. To determine the learning outcome, we analyzed fi nal exam scores and found that, even accounting for the fact that slightly “better” students tended to attend recitations more often, there was a signifi cant valued-added effect of the recitations on fi nal exam performance. These results suggest that these recitation methods and materials are effective in teaching students the diffi cult and important conceptual materials which they were designed to address. Furthermore, since this process was initially designed for physics courses yet is also successful for an engineering course, this implies that this process may be successful for a wide range of STEM courses.
Finite volume effects in B K with improved staggered fermions

We extend our recent unquenched (${N}_{f}=2+1$ flavor) calculation of ${B}_{K}$ using improved staggered fermions by including in the fits the finite volume shift predicted by one-loop staggered chiral perturbation theory. The net result is to lower the result in the continuum limit by 0.6%. This shift is slightly smaller than our previous estimate of finite volume effects based on a direct comparison between different volumes.
Matrix Genetics and Algebraic Properties of the Multi-Level System of Genetic Alphabets

The article is devoted to algebraic properties of the multi-level system of molecular-genetic alphabets. It leads to help solve the problem of algebraic unity of inherited information systems in living matter. These algebraic properties are revealed by means of Kronecker families of matrix forms of a presentation of molecular-genetic alphabets. A family of genetic (8x8)-matrices shows unexpected connections of the genetic system with Rademacher and Walsh functions and with special Hadamard matrices which are well-known in theory of noise-immunity coding and digital communication. Decompositions of such genetic (8x8)-matrices on the basis of the known principle of dyadic-shifts lead to sets of 8 sparse matrices. Each of these sets is closed in relation to multiplication and defines a special algebra of 8-dimensional hypercomplex numbers. Mathematical aspects of these 8-dimensional algebras are presented in connection with metric vector spaces, the sequency theory by Harmuth and some methods of spectral analysis. The diversity of known dialects of the genetic code can be analyzed from the viewpoint of these algebras. Our results are discussed taking into account the important role of dyadic shifts, hypercomplex numbers and Hadamard matrices in mathematics, informatics, theoretical physics, etc. These results testify that living matter has a profound algebraic essence which is interconnected with 8-dimensional vector spaces. In our opinion these results lead to a new way of knowledge of living matter in the field of algebraic biology and its mathematical modeling. The idea of a biological meaning of Kronecker multiplication of matrices is based on the structure of Punnett squares in the field of Mendelian genetics. The author believes that the Mendelian laws of independent inheritance of traits have revealed just the tip of an algebraic iceberg of informational structure of living matter and that matrix genetics has contributed to the next steps to disclose this important iceberg.
ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks

We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5% and 17.0%, respectively, which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overfitting in the fully connected layers we employed a recently developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% achieved by the second-best entry.
Task complexity and linguistic performance in L2 writing and speaking: the effect of mode

The chapter discusses the question to what extent the effect of task complexity on linguistic performance in L2 writing and speaking is influenced by the mode in which the tasks have to be performed (oral versus written). The majority of studies which have been conducted so far in the framework of either the Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan, 1998; Skehan & Foster, 2001) or the Multiple Attentional Resources Model (Robinson, 1995, 2007, this volume) concern oral task performance. While some studies have also looked at the effect of task complexity on the written production of L2 learners, there are no studies to our knowledge in which the effect of task complexity on linguistic performance in relation to mode has been investigated. For that reason a study was set up where two tasks of different task complexity, which already had been submitted to L2 learners in the writing mode, were presented to a group of L2 learners as speaking tasks. The participants in the oral mode were 44 learners of Italian as a second language, with Dutch as their mother tongue. Their performance was compared with that of another group of 91 Italian L2 learners with Dutch L1 who had performed the same tasks in the written mode. Scores on a cloze test were used as a measure of the general level of L2 proficiency of the learners. Our results demonstrate that both in the oral and the written mode task complexity mainly seems to affect accuracy, in particular with respect to lexical errors. We did not observe an interaction of task type and proficiency level, either in the written or in the oral mode.
Quality in Product Reviews: What Technical Communicators Should Know

Purpose: Measuring the quality of product reviews via helpfulness votes is problematic for several reasons. I delineate the components of product review quality in order to assist technical communicators who manage their organizations' user-generated content in identifying quality content and in helping reviewers produce quality content. Method/Corpus: I analyze results from secondary research on product reviews and discuss six important components of review quality. I focus most attention on five components of review quality that technical communicators can assess-informativeness, valance, credibility, conformity, and readability-and briefly describe a sixth component-user characteristics. I also exemplify these components, drawing from a corpus of 8,973 product reviews gathered in 2013 from a variety of retail and review websites. Results: Based on this analysis, I recommend strategies that technical communicators can use (1) to identify these components of review quality, (2) to develop a rich data set from which they can glean consumer wants and needs as well as trends related to their organizations' products, and (3) to help reviewers write better reviews. Conclusions: As the amount of user-generated content grows, the need to learn from it and the need to improve it grow. By using their knowledge and skills in new ways, technical communicators who manage and develop product reviews can stay relevant and necessary as organizations rely more and more heavily on user-generated content.
Adaptive feedback, identification and complexity: an overview

Two recent developments are surveyed, which are pointing the way towards an input-output theory of H/sup /spl infin//-l/sup 1/ adaptive feedback. The problems involve: (1) feedback performance (exact) optimization under large plant uncertainty (the two-disc problem of H/sup /spl infin//); and (2) optimally fast identification in H/sup /spl infin//. The two problems result in adaptive algorithms for slowly varying data in H/sup /spl infin//-l/sup 1/. At a conceptual level, these results motivate a general input-output theory linking identification, adaptation, and control learning. In such a theory, the definition of adaptation is based on system performance under uncertainty, and is independent of internal structure, presence or absence of variable parameters, or even feedback. <<ETX>>
Between Extreme Rejection and Cautious Acceptance

RFID (radio frequency identification) is one of the most important technologies underlying ambient intelligence. It will enable myriad information services on retailers' shop floors and after sale. However, embedding chips in everyday products has stirred a considerable debate about people's privacy. So far it is unclear what the attitudes toward privacy in ambient intelligence are and whether they will affect the reputation of the retailer and acceptance of RFID-based information services. This article presents two empirical studies with 642 participants who saw an introductory film and subsequently evaluated the technology and potential privacy protection mechanisms. Results show that people are moderately privacy aware and that their privacy awareness is negatively related to their acceptance of the service. A group of “extreme rejecters” is identified, which hold highly negative attitudes toward RFID and significantly bias group means. The characteristics of this group are explored and privacy protection measures are evaluated.
IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS AND THEIR TEACHERS' PREFERENCES FOR ORAL ERROR CORRECTION

This study aimed at investigating oral error correction preferences of Iranian EFL learners, and the degree of teachers' awareness of them. To this end, one hundred and fifty language learners ( males and females) from intermediate and advanced levels of instruction and different ages (15-45), studying at five language institutes took part in this study. As a further step, fifty teachers were asked for cooperation. This article discusses the findings of a questionnaire that utilized 5-point Likert-scales, and investigated 1) students' preferences for "how", "when", "who", "which", and "should" of correcting oral errors; and 2) teachers' awareness of these preferences. The results showed that students had generally positive attitudes toward teacher correction of oral errors. They also liked immediate correction of pronunciation errors and delayed correction of grammatical er- rors the results also indicated a preference for teacher correction and self-correction of errors over peer correction. Furthermore, they preferred correcting pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary errors over other types of errors. The teachers were aware of the students' preferences of some cas- es, but unaware in some other.
Iconicity: From sign to system in human communication and language

This paper explores the role of iconicity in spoken language and other human communication systems. First, we concentrate on graphical and gestural communication and show how semantically motivated iconic signs play an important role in creating such communication systems from scratch. We then consider how iconic signs tend to become simplified and symbolic as the communication system matures and argue that this process is driven by repeated interactive use of the signs. We then consider evidence for iconicity at the level of the system in graphical communication and finally draw comparisons between iconicity in graphical and gestural communication systems and in spoken language.
Revealing Differences in Legibility Between Typefaces Using Psychophysical Techniques: Implications for Glance Time and Cognitive Processing

This study adapts classical vision science techniques to an investigation of the relative legibility of two different typefaces across two different polarity (color) conditions. Participants performed a simple yes/no lexical decision task, with task difficulty controlled by an adaptive staircase in four typeface/polarity conditions. Stimulus duration thresholds (minimum time on screen needed for accurate reading) were sensitive to differences between both typefaces and polarities, with a humanist style typeface showing a legibility advantage compared to a square grotesque style typeface, and positive polarity text (black on white) showing a legibility advantage compared to negative polarity text (white on black). Legibility thresholds were found to increase with age. As expected, reaction time measures were not sensitive to differences in typeface or polarity, but they did reveal cognitive processing differences between correct and incorrect responses, as well as differences in processing words and pseudowords. There was also some evidence that switching to a new typeface and/or polarity may incur a quantifiable “task switching cost”. This study is broadly consistent with MIT’s previous effort to assess the impact of typestyle on interface demand in a simulated driving environment. We believe that this simplified, resource efficient methodology of assessing legibility differences can be adapted to investigate a wide array of questions relevant to typographic and graphic design in automotive as well as other interfaces.
Comparison of solution strategies for multibody dynamics equations

In the last decades, several different formalisms have been proposed in the literature in order to simulate the dynamics of multibody systems. First, the choice of the coordinates leads to very different formalisms. The set of constraint equations appears very different in complexity or in size depending on whether either relative, natural or reference point Cartesian coordinates are adopted. Second, once such a choice has been made, different solution strategies can be followed. It seems that formalisms based on redundant coordinates are often used in commercial software, whereas those based on a minimum number of coordinates are usually preferred in real‐time computations.
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ZPD-WISE EXPLICIT/IMPLICIT EXPERT PEERS AND CO-EQUALS' SCAFFOLDING IN ILP DEVELOPMENT

Socioculturally oriented developmental I nterlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) studies have just recently drawn the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers' attention, and the role of concepts like peer scaffolding, and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in ILP development are among rich areas in need of attention. The present study investigates the significance of the effect of expert peers' ZPDwise, co-equal peers' ZPD-insensitive and teacher fronted ZPD-insensitive scaffolding on EFL learners' pragmatic development. The number of students who participated in this study was 85 of which 27 were male and the rest were female. They were organized into three experimental and one control groups. The subjects in the experimental groups were given either explicit ZPD-wise or implicit ZPD
From dependent learning to learner autonomy through web based teaching

This paper discusses results of a pilot study conducted over three acade mic years at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. With a sample of around 400 students, web based teaching was introduced to the common core module ‘Foundations in Language Learning’ for all first year students re gistered for a modern language. The module comprises of an introduction to Linguistics an d Computer Applications in Language Learning. During the relevant three academic years gradual introduction of web based learning resulted in a remarkable inc rease in student performance at the examinations and a major shift from the traditiona l teacher-dependent learning to learner autonomy.
Distributed Forwarding in Multiuser Multihop Wireless Networks

This thesis is concerned with physical layer signal processing and fundamental performance limits in wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multihop networks. Such networks consist of a stage of source antennas, one or several stages of relay antennas and a stage of destination antennas. Signals traverse all these stages (one at a time) from source to destination antennas on the same physical channel. The schemes proposed in this work aim for transferring performance gains that are well known to be enabled by multiple transmit and receive antennas in point-to-point channels to this more general topology. Particular interest is on • capacity scaling in the number of antennas per stage, • spatial multiplexing and diversity gain. Besides the topology (i) the amount of cooperation among antennas within a stage and (ii) the channel state information (CSI) that is accessible by the individual antennas must be specified in order to fully characterize a network configuration. In the special case that all antennas in the network possess the full CSI of their preceding hop each, and cooperation within stages is unconstrained, the above mentioned transfer is trivial: transmission can be decoupled into independent point-to-point MIMO transmissions, i.e., code-words are decoded and re-encoded in each stage (decode & forward). This thesis focuses on two selected network configurations that should not be decoupled in such fashion, since this straightforward approach does not suffice for realizing the desired multiple-antenna gains. Both these network configurations share the property that both cooperation among relay antennas and among source antennas is fully disabled as far as the exchange of information about the transmit signals is concerned. The first considered configuration allows for full cooperation among antennas in the destination stage and assumes the relay antennas to possess the full CSI of the MIMO channel corresponding to the preceding hop each. The setting is referred to as multihop multiple access channel in this work. The simplest approach that comes to mind for
Absolute Stability of Nonlinear Systems of Automatic Control

The problem of absolute stability of an ? indirect control? system with a single nonlineartiy ia investlgated by using a method which differs from the second method of Lyapunov. The main condition of the obtained criterion of absolute stability is expressed in terms of the transfer function of the system linear part. It is also shown that by fonning the standard Lyapunov function -? a quadratic form plus the integral of the nonlinearity? It is not possible In the case considered here to obtain a wider stability domain than the one obtained from the presented criterion. Graphical criteria of absolute continuinty are also given by means of the phase-amplitude characteristic or by what is known as ? the modified phase-amplitude characteristic? of the system linear part.
A Neural Network Approach to Real-Time Trajectory Generation *

A neural network approach is proposed for real-time trajectory generation with collision free in an environment with varying obstacles and moving target. This biologically inspired neural network is topologically organised. The dynamics of each neuron is characterised by a shunting equation or an additive equation. Each neuron has only local connections, and the optimal trajectories are generated without any explicitly optimising cost functions and without learning. Therefore the model is computationally eficient. The stability of the network is analytically proved using a Lyapunou function candidate. As examples, the proposed neural network is applied to trajectory formation for a mobile robot in solving maze-type problems, dynamically trucking moving target, and avoiding varying obstacle. The eficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated through simulation and comparison studies.
Applying the Task-Technology Fit Model to WWW-based Procurement: Conceptualization and Measurement

This research examines the application of the tasktechnology fit (TTF) model to World Wide Web (WWW) usage for electronic commerce (EC) purposes. Conducted from corporate buyers’ perspective, this study assesses the extent to which Internet websites in general support the procurement process. The model suggests that a better fit between the tasks required during the procurement process and Internet websites’ functionalities leads to a higher level of WWW usage, which then leads to an improved performance for users. All relevant constructs are discussed. Scales used to measure them are then developed. Data collected from 110 corporate buyers from over 100 organizations operating in a wide range of industries helped assess the validity and reliability of the scales needed to test the soundness of the model. This paper presents the results from instrument validation. 1. Theoretical background
Finite Reynolds number effects in fluid mixtures : an investigation using numerical simulation methods

The scaling theory of the spinodal decomposition of a symmetric binary fluid mixture in the inertial region has been reviewed, and extended by considering energy balance, as well as the momentum balance described by the Navier-Stokes equation (NSE). The prediction for the asymptotic growth rate of the size of the separating fluid domains is ~ £ 2 ' 3 , as in simple scaling theory, but the ratio of the nonlinear to viscous terms in the NSE (the Reynolds number) is predicted to remain finite. This is due to the viscous term remaining important to the system dynamics, in contrast to simple scaling theory where the viscous term is assumed to be negligible. Spinodal decomposition in binary fluid mixtures has been successfully simulated using a lattice-Boltzmann method. The simulation results were combined using a characteristic length and time obtained from the physical parameters (density, viscosity, interfacial tension) to scale the domain size, the resulting single scaling plot covers five decades of length and eight of time from the viscous hydrodynamic region (linear scaling) through a broad crossover region to the inertial region. This is a larger range than all previous results combined, and the first unambiguous simulation results for the inertial region. Both the order parameter and the fluid velocity in the spinodal system have been analysed in detail. The order parameter shows good scaling behaviour (collapse of the structure factor) while various velocity-related quantities, such as the dissipation rate, were found not to scale. A comparison of the relative magnitude of the terms in the NSE confirmed that the results include simulation of the inertial region where the inertial terms dominate the dynamics. Careful analysis of the growth rate due to diffusion also allowed this to be discounted from making a significant contribution to the hydrodynamic coarsening under observation in this study. The persistence behaviour of the spinodal system has been studied, although the order parameter data are not sufficient for a precise determination to be made of the value of the persistence exponent. It was possible to show that the persistence behaviour follows a power law decay (as opposed to exponential) and to show that there is some dependence on the domain growth exponent (linear/^ 2 / 3 ).