Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Business Process Management, Models, Techniques, and Empirical Studies

Design of Business Processes. - Techniques for Modelling Workflows and their Support of Reuse. - Modeling Processes and Workflows by Business Rules. - Guidelines of Business Process Modeling. - A Knowledge-Based Approach for Designing Robust Business Processes. - The "Organized Activity" Foundation for Business Processes and Their Management. - Evaluation of Generic Process Design Patterns: An Experimental Study. - Management-Oriented Models of Business Processes. - Formalisms and Analysis. - Validation of Process Models by Construction of Process Nets. - Modeling, Simulation and Analysis of Business Processes. - Using Formal Analysis Techniques in Business Process Redesign. - Workflow Verification: Finding Control-Flow Errors Using Petri-Net-Based Techniques. - Compositional modeling and verification of workflow processes. - A Workflow Change is a Workflow. - Improving Flexibility of workflow Management Systems. - Inter-operability of Workflow Applications: Local Criteria for Global Soundness. - Object Oriented Petri Nets in Business Process Modeling. - Systems and Applications. - Information Gathering and Process Modeling in a Petri Net Based Approach. - Why Modellers Wreck Workflow Innovations. - The Effects of Workflow Systems on Organizations: A Qualitative Study. - On the Practical Relevance of an Integrated Workflow Management System - Results of an Empirical Study. - Configurable Business Objects for Building Evolving Enterprise Models and Applications. - Workflow Management between Formal Theory and Pragmatic Approaches. - Documentary Petri Nets: A Modeling Representation for Electronic Trade Procedures. - ARIS Architecture and Reference Models for Business Process Management.
External and internal factors which predict teachers' computer usage in k--12 classrooms

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationships between demographic, external support variables, computer proficiency, teachers' perceptions towards using computers and actual usage of computers at the elementary, middle and high school. The demographic variables included: gender, age, teacher's level of education, teaching experience, subjects taught, teacher's computer experience and previous training. The external support variables included: teachers' having the necessary software on their computer at school, having adequate technical and administrative support. The population of this study was one hundred sixteen full-time teachers in Michigan charter schools. A path analysis was used to determine significant predictors that impacted teachers' total usage of computers. The study revealed that teachers using computers for enhancement activities and teachers' computer proficiency levels showed significant factors within the path analysis. The study also revealed that teachers using computer for student integration activities showed no variance, because the majority of the students were using computers less than 15 per week. The study found significant correlations between teachers' amount of computer usage of enhancement activities and the following variables: teachers' computer experience, having the necessary having on their computer at school and administrative support. The study found significant correlations between teacher's level of computer proficiency and the following variables: teachers' computer experience, age and having the necessary software of their computer at school. The researcher concludes that additional research should be done with non-charter schools and with technology-rich school districts to further examine these specific factors that influence computer usage within K–12 classrooms.
Photographic Analysis of Macro- Aand Micro-Aesthetic Appearance in a Sample of Iraqi Adults With Class I Normal Occlusion

Background: Generally, the facial esthetics depends on the esthetic appearance of the maxillary anterior teeth. The purposes of this study were to analyse the macro-aesthetic appearance of the face and the micro-aesthetic appearance of the maxillary anterior teeth to establish the normative values for class I normal occlusion and to detect possible gender differences. Materials and methods: The sample consisted of 120 Iraqi adults (60 males and 60 females) aged (18-23) years. Each individual was clinically examined, then with cephalostat based head position, extraoral and intraoral photographs were taken for each subject. The facial and dental measurements were measured using AutoCad program 2014. Descriptive statistics was obtained for the measured variables for both genders and independent samples t-test was performed to evaluate the genders difference. Results and conclusions: The results showed that there is a highly significant gender difference in most of the measured variables regarding the macro-aesthetic appearance, since the males have a larger facial dimensions than females, while for the micro-aesthetic appearance, there is a non-significant gender difference in most of the measured variables, that means the proportions of maxillary anterior teeth does not affected by gender difference.
"I Know This Is Supposed to Be More Like the Real World, but . . .": Student Perceptions of a PBL Implementation in an Undergraduate Materials Science Course.

This qualitative case study examines the initial implementation of a problem-based version of an undergraduate course in materials science for the purpose of identifying areas of improvement to the curriculum prior to a planned second implementation. The course was designed around problems that students work in small teams to solve under the guidance of facilitators, with early sequence problems designed to foster the problem-solving skills required to succeed in the course. This report describes students’ impressions of and experiences in the course as they worked to solve the final problem at the end of the semester and compares those impressions, where applicable, to impressions gathered after they had completed the first problem near the beginning of the semester. Using grounded theory techniques to analyze the data, six central themes emerged from the implementation: course structure, facilitation roles, student roles, group processes, coconstruction, and resources. Implications for practice and potential instructional design solutions that may aid in future implementations are discussed.
Modelling context in automatic speech recognition

Speech is at the core of human communication. Speaking and listing comes so natural to us that we do not have to think about it at all. The underlying cognitive processes are very rapid and almost completely subconscious. It is hard, if not impossible not to understand speech. For computers on the other hand, recognising speech is a daunting task. It has to deal with a large number of different voices "influenced, among other things, by emotion, moods and fatigue" the acoustic properties of different environments, dialects, a huge vocabulary and an unlimited creativity of speakers to combine words and to break the rules of grammar. Almost all existing automatic speech recognisers use statistics over speech sounds "what is the probability that a piece of audio is an a-sound" and statistics over word combinations to deal with this complexity. The results of those systems are impressive but unfortunately not good enough for most applications of speech recognition. This thesis proposes to put context information in the models of speech recognition to achieve better recognition results. Context is defined as knowledge of the speaker, such as gender and dialect, knowledge of the conversation and knowledge of the world. The influence of each of those categories is investigated using data analysis and case studies and new models for speech recognition are defined. In particular, a model that dynamically adapts the vocabulary of the recogniser to the topic of a conversation, which it can automatically determine, is presented.
Reading comprehension strategies : theories, interventions, and technologies

Contents: D.S. McNamara, Preface. Part I: Theories of Text Comprehension: The Importance of Reading Strategies to Theoretical Foundations of Reading Comprehension. A.C. Graesser, An Introduction to Strategic Reading Comprehension. P. Kendeou, P. van den Broek, M.J. White, J. Lynch, Comprehension in Preschool and Early Elementary Children: Skill Development and Strategy Interventions. J. Oakhill, K. Cain, Issues of Causality in Children's Reading Comprehension. M.R. Vitale, N.R. Romance, A Knowledge-Based Framework for Unifying Content-Area Reading Comprehension and Reading Comprehension Strategies. Part II: Using Assessment to Guide Reading Interventions. J.P. Magliano, K. Millis, Y. Ozuru, D.S. McNamara, A Multidimensional Framework to Evaluate Reading Assessment Tools. A. VanderVeen, K. Huff, M. Gierl, D.S. McNamara, M. Louwerse, A. Graesser, Developing and Validating Instructionally Relevant Reading Competency Profiles Measured by the Critical Reading Section of the SAT. Part III: Reading Comprehension Strategy Interventions. D. Fuchs, L.S. Fuchs, Increasing Strategic Reading Comprehension With Peer-Assisted Learning Activities. J.P. Williams, Literacy in the Curriculum: Integrating Text Structure and Content Area Instruction. A.M. Glenberg, B. Jaworski, M. Rischal, J. Levin, What Brains Are For: Action, Meaning, and Reading Comprehension. J.T. Guthrie, A. Taboada, C.S. Coddington, Engagement Practices for Strategy Learning in Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction. A. King, Beyond Literal Comprehension: A Strategy to Promote Deep Understanding of Text. Part IV: Automated Interventions to Improve Reading Comprehension Strategies. M.C. Johnson-Glenberg, Web-Based Reading Comprehension Instruction: Three Studies of 3D-Readers. N. Yuill, Visiting Joke City: How Can Talking About Jokes Foster Metalinguistic Awareness in Poor Comprehenders? B.J.F. Meyer, K. Wijekumar, A Web-Based Tutoring System for the Structure Strategy: Theoretical Background, Design, and Findings. D. Caccamise, M. Franzke, A. Eckhoff, E. Kintsch, W. Kintsch, Guided Practice in Technology-Based Summary Writing. D.S. McNamara, T. O'Reilly, M. Rowe, C. Boonthum, I. Levinstein, iSTART: A Web-Based Tutor That Teaches Self-Explanation and Metacognitive Reading Strategies. B. Dalton, C.P. Proctor, Reading as Thinking: Integrating Strategy Instruction in a Universally Designed Digital Literacy Environment. A.S. Palincsar, R.J. Spiro, L. Kucan, S.J. Magnusson, B. Collins, S. Hapgood, A. Ramchandran, N. DeFrance, A. Gelpi-Lomangino, Research to Practice: Designing a Hypermedia Environment to Support Elementary Teachers' Learning of Robust Comprehension Instruction. Part V: Conclusion. D.S. McNamara, Y. Ozuru, R. Best, T. O'Reilly, The 4-Pronged Comprehension Strategy Framework.
Technology for Africa

This article provides a synopsis of a two-year experiment in the use of interactive video for the upgrading of black teachers of secondary school mathematics. The courseware was written locally and the experiment has proved highly successful, not only for the quantified educational improvement, but for the solution to so many nonquantifiables that the use of this technology promises.
SCIENTIFIC OUTPUT OF CROATIAN UNIVERSITIES: COMPARISON WITH NEIGHBOURING COUNTRIES

We compared the Croatian research output with the neighboring countries and the Croatian universities with the largest Slovenian, Hungarian, and Serbian universities. As far as papers listed by Social Science Citation Index are concerned, since 2000 the University of Zagreb exhibits best results in social sciences compared to the competing universities, that is not the case in “hard” sciences. For the last 12 years, only the University of Ljubljana has shown better results in total research output than the University of Zagreb. The difference in research output between the University of Zagreb and the rest of the Croatian universities has been constantly decreasing. As a case study we compare research output at Faculty of Civil Engeenering on different Croatian universities. By analyzing European countries, we show a functional dependence between the gross domestic product (GDP) and the research output. From this fit we conclude that the Croatian science exhibits research output as expected for the given level of GDP.
Swim velocity profile identification by using a modified differential evolution method associated with RBF Neural Network

High level sports require a steady intensification of training in order to raise the athletes' performance. With the purpose of support swimmers and coaches new biomechanical analysis are been performed, becoming one of the most studied areas in swimming. By using technology resources, significant results related to performance improvements are being achieved. Specific analysis of the movements, strength, velocity and projection allow identifying relevant points that directly impact athletes' results. In this context, this work uses a Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBF-NN) with training combining the Gustafson-Kessel clustering method and the proposed Modified Differential Evolution (MDE) in order to perform the swimmer velocity profile identification. The main idea is to obtain the dynamic of the velocity profile and to use it to improve the athletes' swim style. Differential Evolution (DE) is an evolutionary algorithm that uses a rather greedy and less stochastic approach to solve problems when compared to other evolutionary methods [1]. However, to achieve good performance with DE, the tuning of control parameters is essential as its performance is sensitive to the choice of the mutation and crossover settings. On the other hand, the RBF-NN is a powerful approach for nonlinear identification. This paper combines the two strategies described above proposing a modified DE algorithm based on the association of a sinusoidal signal and chaotic sequences generated by logistic map for the mutation factor tuning. By using data collected from breaststroke and crawl swim style of an elite female swimmer, the validity and the accuracy of the RBF-NN model have been tested by simulations. Results reveal that it is feasible to establish a good model to represent data experimental related to swimming field. Identification results show that MDE outperforms both other tested classical DE approaches for training RBF-NNs in terms of solution quality.
Nonlinear prediction of speech signals using memory neuron networks

The authors present a feed-forward neural network architecture that can be used for nonlinear autoregressive prediction of multivariate time-series. It uses specialized neurons (called memory neurons) to store past activations of the network in an efficient fashion. The network learns to be a nonlinear predictor of the appropriate order to model temporal waveforms of speech signals. Arrays of such networks can be used to build real-time classifiers of speech sounds. Experiments where memory-neuron networks are trained to predict speech waveforms and sequences of spectral frames are described. Performance of the network for prediction of time-series with minimal a priori assumptions of its statistical properties is shown to be better than linear autoregressive models. <<ETX>>
Politics, Evidence and the New Aid Agenda

A positive-displacement machine for compressible media has a positive displacement body that is retained on a disk-like rotor, which is eccentrically drivable relative to the housing, in such a manner that each of its points executes a circular motion during operation. To that end, an eccentric disk is disposed on a drive shaft, and the rotor is supported on this disk by means of an oil-lubricated bearing. The lubricating oil is delivered and removed to and from the side remote from the drive side of the drive shaft, and the separation of the oil inflow from the oil return flow is effected in the housing by a slide bearing which has one oil chamber each on both ends. The separation of the oil streams is effected by an indentation that does not extend over the entire length of the slide bearing. Through this indentation, the slide bearing is likewise supplied with oil. The indentation connects the oil inflow bore in the housing with the oil chamber.
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS OF TEST DIMENSIONALITY FOR ITEM RESPONSE THEORY CALIBRATION OF THE MEDICAL COLLEGE ADMISSION TEST

A novel packet switch architecture is disclosed. The packet switch utilizes internal queuing (i.e. recirculation loops) and output queuing (i.e. multiple paths to each destination) to provide a packet switch which offers superior performance in comparison to a packet switch which utilizes either of these queuing strategies alone. The combination of recirculation and output queues have complimentary effects. The output queuing reduces the number of recirculation loops needed and recirculation reduces the bandwidth requirements for an output buffered switch.
Low Voltage, Low Power VLSI Subsystems

Designers developing the low voltage, low power chips that enable small, portable devices, face a very particular set of challenges. This monograph details cutting-edge design techniques for the low power circuitry required by the many new miniaturized business and consumer products driving the electronics market. Table of contents Chapter 1: Low-Power CMOS VLSI Design Chapter 2: Circuit Techniques for Low-Power Design Chapter 3: Low-Voltage Low-Power Adders Chapter 4: Low-Voltage Low-Power Multipliers Chapter 5: Low-Voltage Low-Power Read-Only Memories Chapter 6: Low-Voltage Low-Power Static Random-Access Memories Chapter 7: Low-Voltage Low-Power Dynamic Random-Access Chapter 8: Large Low-Power VLSI System Design and Applications Index
Exact validation of genetic evaluation software

Since 1995, Interbull provides international predicted breeding values on the scale of each participating country using national genetic evaluation results. Input data quality constitutes a crucial issue in international genetic evaluations, as results from complex genetic and statistical analyses depend on it. Therefore, Interbull confers a great importance to the monitoring and the validation of input data (Fikse, 2004): data included into international evaluations are assumed to fulfil a number of stringent criteria. The consistency of evaluations is assessed by the comparison of breeding values from consecutive evaluations to identify changes larger than excepted based on statistical properties of breeding values (Klei et al., 2002). Genetic trends are estimated to check that national breeding values are unbiased (Boichard et al., 2002). Diversity and complexity of methods used in the various countries to analyze different traits has led to a situation in which adoption of new methods of validation of national data and/or models is necessary. One research project identified by Interbull in 2002 is the development of a general simulation tool to validate national genetic evaluation systems, and especially the development of a simulation environment to test breeding value prediction software. With this aim, a program was developed from a strategy described by R. Thompson (1997) to simulate data with known breeding values and phenotypes for a single trait animal model (Täubert et al., 2002), in such a way that BLUP solutions for breeding values should be equal to the simulated ones. This strategy was extended to a multiple trait animal model (WenschDorendorf et al., 2005). The latter algorithm requires that all animals, including males, have performance and that animals from the base generation belong to a “dummy” class of fixed effect.
In search of Healthy Ageing: the willingness of older adults to receive vaccination

De vergrijzing zorgt voor een steeds ouder wordende populatie. Vaccinatie tegen verschillende infectieziekten zou een bijdrage kunnen leveren aan gezond ouder worden. Op dit moment wordt in de meeste Europese landen, waaronder Nederland, alleen griepvaccinatie aangeboden aan ouderen. Onze studie toont aan dat vaccinatie tegen pneumokokkenziekten, gordelroos en kinkhoest ook een bijdrage kunnen leveren aan gezond ouder worden. De belangrijkste redenen voor 50-plussers om vaccinatie te accepteren zijn: een hoge kans op het krijgen van de infectieziekte, een hoge kans om te overlijden aan de infectieziekte en een goede werking van het vaccin. Persoonlijke factoren beinvloeden deze voorkeuren. Wij schatten dat ongeveer 68% van de 50-plussers vaccinatie tegen pneumokokkenziekte zou accepteren, 58% zou gordelroosvaccinatie accepteren en 54% zou kinkhoestvaccinatie accepteren. Voor personen tussen de 50 en de 65 jaar liggen deze percentages lager, voor personen ouder dan 65 jaar liggen deze percentages juist hoger. De huisarts speelt een belangrijke rol als adviseur van de 50-plussers. Huisartsen zijn meer bereid om vaccinatie aan te bieden wanneer er bij de patient sprake is van co-morbiditeit. Daarnaast zijn huisartsen bereidt om tegen pneumokokken te vaccineren. Op basis van onze resultaten zou vaccinatie tegen pneumokokkenziekte het eerst in aanmerking komen en de hoogste vaccinatiegraad behalen. Het is van groot belang dat de informatievoorziening rondom nieuwe vaccinaties afgestemd wordt op het vaccin en de persoon die het vaccin ontvangt. Op deze manier kan de hoogste acceptatiegraad bereikt worden en daarmee een bijdrage leveren aan het gezond ouder worden.
The phonology of present—day Cantonese

This thesis describes the phonology of present-day Cantonese. In addition to tone, onset and rime, the thesis also covers realization, variation, casual speech and intonation. A separate chapter considers the syllable as a whole. With sympathetic understanding, the thesis reviews previous work on the subject. In doing so, it tries to provide principled answers to the questions how and why Cantonese phonologies differ. In its own treatment of the subject, it benefits from indigenous Chinese phonology, classical phonemics, Firthian prosodic phonology, SPE phonology, and autosegmental phonology, as well as European structuralism, while dismissing the time-honoured principle of unilinear phoneme-size segmentation as inappropriate for Cantonese. The mora is introduced into the organization of Cantonese sounds. The descriptive device of autosegmental phonology enables us to consider morae as "autosegments", thereby capturing a number of regularities which are otherwise difficult to characterize elegantly. Another innovation in the thesis is the idea of "coercion", a process whereby uncanonical phonetic forms, which arise as the output of casual speech processes, are replaced by canonical forms. The mora, coercion, and autosegmental representations together account for a good deal of lower-level regularities, especially in casual, connected speech. They also contribute to understanding the discrepancies among different phonologies of Cantonese. By enabling a dynamic and holistic view of the organization of Cantonese sounds, they cast light on the static and fragmentary nature of many prevailing views on the subject.
Nexus: An interoperability layer for parallel and distributed computer systems

Nexus is a set of services that can be used to implement various task-parallel languages, data-parallel languages, and message-passing libraries. Nexus is designed to permit the efficient portable implementation of individual parallel programming systems and the interoperability of programs developed with different tools. Nexus supports lightweight threading and active message technology, allowing integration of message passing and threads.