Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A STUDY OF COLLEGE STUDENTS' ACCURACY IN MEASUREMENT ESTIMATION: THE U.S. CUSTOMARY UNITS VS. THE METRIC SYSTEM

This study examines how accurate college students are in measurement estimation. It expands on the current research and compares students’ skills to estimate using the U.S. customary system and the metric system. The study compares college students from various countries and various STEM and non-STEM majors. The purpose of this study is to identify which group of students performed the best, whether it was international students compared to American students or if it was STEM majors compared to non-STEM majors. This study also compared students’ skills in different types of measurement estimation and to address the areas in which students performed the best. During the study, students completed a 16-question assessment containing different types of measurement estimation problems, including lengths, volumes, and temperature, using both the customary units and the metric system. Students were not allowed to use rulers or any devices to help improve their accuracy. For the volume and weight/mass problems, students were able to see actual containers filled with water to estimate the amount and weight. Students then had to complete a demographic survey of major, country they were raised in, and which units they were most comfortable using. Later in the survey, students had to rate each question based on their confidence level of their accuracy. The results showed that there was no statistical significance in scores and country of origin and also no statistical significance in scores and college major.
Türkiyeâde Neden Yabancı Dil (İngilizce) Öğretemiyoruz ve Neden Öğrencilerimiz İletişim Kurabilecek Düzeyde İngilizce Öğrenemiyor

Ne yapmak gerekiyor? Oncelikle ogretmenlerimizin mutlaka anadil ve ikinci dil ogrenim sureclerini iyi bilmesi gerekiyor. Rod Ellis (1988) ‘in dil ogrenimiyle ilgili slogan gibi bir sozu vardir; “rotayi degistiremezsiniz ancak ogrenme hizini artirabilirsiniz. ” Bu su demektir: Ingilizce ogretmeni ogrencilerin dil ogrenim surecinde baslangic duzeyinden en ileri duzeye kadar hangi asamalardan gececegini bilmelidir. Yoksa bu konudan haberdar olmayan bir ogretmenin durumu acemi bir ciftci gibi Ekim ayinda ektigi bugdayin cimlenmesini beklemeden Mart ayinda tarlayi bir daha surerek ekin ekmesine benzer. Tam cimlenmek uzere olan ekini yok eder, zarara ugratir ve bosu bosuna masrafa girer. Oysa usta bir ciftci bilir ki bugday ancak Mart sonu veya Nisan basinda cimlenir ve hava kosullarini goz onunde bulundurarak sabirla tohumlarin cimlenmesini bekler. Dil ogretim sureci de boyledir. Ogretmen bugun ogrettigi bir kurali ogrenciden hemen yarin dogru bir sekilde kullanmasini ve uretmesini beklemez. Ogretmen her ogrencinin bir ara dil surecinden gececegini ve bu surecte ne tur hatalar yapacagini bilir ve tipki bir anne gibi ogrencinin uretimlerindeki hatalarini hos gorur ve onlara insancil ve olusturmaci
Radio occultation techniques for probing the ionosphere

GPS radio occultation measurements establish the basis for a new remote sensing technique for vertical profile information on the electron density of the entire ionosphere from satellite orbit heights down to the bottomside. No other profiling technique such as vertical sounding or incoherent scatter, unifies vertical profiling through the entire ionosphere with global coverage. Inversion methods are described both for vertical profiling as well as for tree dimensional electron density reconstructions of the ionosphere. In three dimensional electron density reconstructions using signals from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), the Ionospheric Radio Occultation (IRO) measurements provide vertical information which is complementary to the information obtained by ground based measurements. Assessment of achievable accuracy and spatial resolution are addressed by simulation studies. IRO measurements have been carried out onboard the German CHAMP satellite since 11 April 2001 on a routine basis. Assuming a spherically layered ionosphere, up to about 150 Electron Density Profiles (EDPs) per day are retrieved within a latency of 3 h. Validation results obtained by using independent data sources are reported. The validation with vertical sounding data in mid-latitudes indicates a small positive bias in the plasma frequency of up to about 0.5 MHz throughout the entire profile. Averages of the numerous EDPs show wellknown ionospheric phenomena such as the equatorial anomaly, the winter anomaly and the expansion of the profile with increasing solar energy input. It is concluded that CHAMP-IRO measurements have the potential to establish global data sets of vertical electron density profiles for developing and improving global ionospheric models and to provide operational space weather information.
Linux Socket Programming

From the Publisher: This book teaches readers how to program Linux sockets, and gives them everything they need to know to make programs communicate effetively over networks. It presents a comprehensive discussion of all relevant topics including: writing programs compatible with both Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and IPv6, raw sockets, User Datagram Protocol (UDP), broadcasting /multicasting, server internals, and more, plus a section covering Posix threads. It provides thorough coverage of programming with the TCP, UDP, and IP protocols, as well as lower-level raw sockets. The myriad of function calls, data structures, and options associated with the APIs are explained with well-chosen diagrams and tables. After reading this book, the reader will be able to: Differentiate basic datagrams vs. streaming sockets. Differentiate unicast, broadcast, and multicast sockets. Write socket-based network programs. Write portable code for various OS'. Implement client-server and peer communications Increase network throughput using "connectionless" communications Manage asynchronous I/O, I/O and multiple sockets. Use signals, threading and processes to manage socket connections. Understand new socket technologies like Mbone and 6bone. Understand Remote Procedure Calls and how to implement them. Understand the different socket addressing types.
Data Structures and Algorithms Using C#: Frontmatter

Preliminaries 1. Collections 2. Arrays and arraylists 3. Basic sorting algorithms 4. Basic searching algorithms 5. Stacks and queues 6. The bitarray class 7. Strings, the string class and the stringbuilder class 8. Pattern matching and text processing 9. Building dictionaries - the dictionarybase class and the sortedlist class 10. Hashing and the hashtable class 11. Linked lists 12. Binary trees and binary search trees 13. Sets 14. Advanced sorting algorithms 15. Advanced data structures and algorithms for searching 16. Graphs and graph algorithms 17. Advanced algorithms.
NURSING UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS ’ MOTIVATION IN THE USE OF INFORMATION

Objectives: To measure nursing undergraduate students’ motivation in the use of information and communication technologies in distance education and to evaluate the interference of personal characteristics in motivation for the use of these technologies. Method: A quantitative cross-sectional study was carried out with the use of the scale of evaluation of motivation factors regarding the integration of information and communication technologies for education (EMITICEEchelle de motivation lor de l’intégration des technologies de l’information et des communications dans l’enseignement). Descriptive and inferential analyses were carried out. Results: The sample of 188 undergraduate nursing students presented low mean motivation, with a mean score of 77.49 (±25.57). The lack of motivation in the use of information and communication technologies was evident and more significant among women. Conclusion: In general, higher motivation was found in widowed or separated students, and in those enrolled in the fifth or eighth semesters.
The Hybrid Online Model: Good Practice

18 The growth in online education in American colleges and universities continues at an astounding rate. The International Data Corporation predicts that by 2005, 90 percent of all higher education institutions will have e-learning programs.1 E-learning is a subset of distance learning that uses audio, video, and computer delivery modes. Distance learning, which can be described as any learning setting where faculty and students are physically separated, encompasses a broad category that spans a range from low-tech correspondence courses through high-tech delivery options. E-learning provides nontraditional adult students, who are juggling full-time employment and family responsibilities, an opportunity to leverage the new technologies of the Internet to achieve the skills they need to stay competitive in an increasingly digital job market. Colleges and universities are responding to pressures from a range of forces to move into the delivery of courses via online methods. Many institutions find it difficult to enter the distance learning arena because of resource constraints or restrictive mission statements. This critical connection to mission has been emphasized by accrediting organizations that evaluate the relevance of the distance learning program to the institution’s mission during the accreditation review.2 Baldwin-Wallace College, a small liberal arts college in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, developed and implemented a successful hybrid online model that serves institutional needs and also follows the paradigm of “The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education”3 developed almost 20 years ago, updated specifically to target the new communication and information technologies being used in higher education.4 The hybrid online model employs the best characteristics of online education and the interactivity that typically characterizes face-to-face classroom instruction.
Multigrid and Krylov Solvers for Large Scale Finite Element Groundwater Flow Simulations on Distributed Memory Parallel Platforms

In this report we present parallel solvers for large linear systems arising from the finite-element discretization of the three-dimensional steady-state groundwater flow problem. Our solvers are based on multigrid and Krylov subspace methods. The parallel implementation is based on a domain decomposition strategy with explicit message passing using NX and MPI libraries. We have tested our parallel implementations on the Intel Paragon XP/S 150 supercomputer using up to 1024 parallel processors and on other parallel platforms such as SGI/Power Challenge Array, Cray/SGI Origin 2000, Convex Exemplar SPP-1200, and IBM SP using up to 64 processors. We show that multigrid can be a scalable algorithm on distributed memory machines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of parallel multigrid based solvers by solving problems requiring more than 70 million nodes in less than a minute. This is more than 25 times faster than the diagonal preconditioned conjugate gradient method which is one of the more popular methods for large sparse linear systems. Our results also show that multigrid as a stand alone solver works best for problems with smooth coefficients, but for rough coefficients it is best used as a preconditioner for a Krylov subspace method such as the conjugate gradient method. We show that even for extremely heterogeneous systems the multigrid pre-conditioned conjugate gradient method is at least 10 times faster than the diagonally preconditioned conjugate gradient method.
O ct 2 00 7 Endogenous versus Exogenous Origins of Diseases

Many illnesses are associated with an alteration of the immu ne system homeostasis due to any combination of factors, including exogenous bacteri al insult, endogenous breakdown (e.g., development of a disease that results in immuno suppr ession), or an exogenous hit like surgery that simultaneously alters immune responsiveness and provides access to bacteria, or genetic disorder. We conjecture that, as a consequence of th co-evolution of the immune system of individuals with the ecology of pathogens, the hom e stasis of the immune system requires the influx of pathogens. This allows the immune syst em to keep the ever present pathogens under control and to react and adjust fast to burst s of infections. We construct the simplest and most general system of rate equations which describes the dynamics of five compartments: healthy cells, altered cells, adaptive and i n ate immune cells, and pathogens. We study four regimes obtained with or without auto-immune d isorder and with or without spontaneous proliferation of infected cells. For each of th e four regimes, the phase space is always characterized by four basic coexisting stationar y structurally stable states. Over all regimes, we find that seven different states are naturall y described by the model: (i) strong healthy immune system, (ii) healthy organism with ev an scent immune cells, (iii) chronic infections, (iv) strong infections, (v) cancer, (v i) critically ill state and (vii) death. Our description provides a natural framework for describin g the relationships and transitions between these seven states. The analysis of stability condi ti s demonstrates that these seven states depend on the balance between the robustness of the im mune system and the influx of pathogens. In particular, the healthy state A is found to exi st only under the influence of a sufficiently large pathogen flux, which suggests that health is not the absence of pathogens, but rather a strong ability to find balance by counteracting a y pathogen attack.
3D hand tracking.

The hand is often considered as one of the most natural and intuitive interaction modalities for human-to-human interaction. In human-computer interaction (HCI), proper 3D hand tracking is the first step in developing a more intuitive HCI system which can be used in applications such as gesture recognition, virtual object manipulation and gaming. However, accurate 3D hand tracking, remains a challenging problem due to the hand’s deformation, appearance similarity, high inter-finger occlusion and complex articulated motion. Further, 3D hand tracking is also interesting from a theoretical point of view as it deals with three major areas of computer vision- segmentation (of hand), detection (of hand parts), and tracking (of hand). This thesis proposes a region-based skin color detection technique, a model-based and an appearance-based 3D hand tracking techniques to bring the human-computer interaction applications one step closer. All techniques are briefly described below. Skin color provides a powerful cue for complex computer vision applications. Although skin color detection has been an active research area for decades, the mainstream technology is based on individual pixels. This thesis presents a new region-based technique for skin color detection which outperforms the current state-of-the-art pixel-based skin color detection technique on the popular Compaq dataset (Jones & Rehg 2002). The proposed technique achieves 91.17% true positive rate with 13.12% false negative rate on the Compaq dataset tested over approximately 14,000 web images. Hand tracking is not a trivial task as it requires tracking of 27 degreesof- freedom of hand. Hand deformation, self occlusion, appearance similarity and irregular motion are major problems that make 3D hand tracking a very challenging task. This thesis proposes a model-based 3D hand tracking technique, which is improved by using proposed depth-foreground-background ii feature, palm deformation module and context cue. However, the major problem of model-based techniques is, they are computationally expensive. This can be overcome by discriminative techniques as described below. Discriminative techniques (for example random forest) are good for hand part detection, however they fail due to sensor noise and high interfinger occlusion. Additionally, these techniques have difficulties in modelling kinematic or temporal constraints. Although model-based descriptive (for example Markov Random Field) or generative (for example Hidden Markov Model) techniques utilize kinematic and temporal constraints well, they are computationally expensive and hardly recover from tracking failure. This thesis presents a unified framework for 3D hand tracking, using the best of both methodologies, which out performs the current state-of-the-art 3D hand tracking techniques. The proposed 3D hand tracking techniques in this thesis can be used to extract accurate hand movement features and enable complex human machine interaction such as gaming and virtual object manipulation.
Low-rank and sparse reconstruction in dynamic magnetic resonance imaging via proximal splitting methods

Dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) consists of collecting multiple MR images in time, resulting in a spatio-temporal signal. However, MRI intrinsically suffers from long acquisition times due to various constraints. This limits the full potential of dynamic MR imaging, such as obtaining high spatial and temporal resolutions which are crucial to observe dynamic phenomena. This dissertation addresses the problem of the reconstruction of dynamic MR images from a limited amount of samples arising from a nuclear magnetic resonance experiment. The term limited can be explained by the approach taken in this thesis to speed up scan time, which is based on violating the Nyquist criterion by skipping measurements that would be normally acquired in a standard MRI procedure. The resulting problem can be classified in the general framework of linear ill-posed inverse problems. This thesis shows how low-dimensional signal models, specifically lowrank and sparsity, can help in the reconstruction of dynamic images from partial measurements. The use of these models are justified by significant developments in signal recovery techniques from partial data that have emerged in recent years in signal processing. The major contributions of this thesis are the development and characterisation of fast and efficient computational tools using convex low-rank and sparse constraints via proximal gradient methods, the development and characterisation of a novel joint reconstruction–separation method via the low-rank plus sparse matrix decomposition technique, and the development and characterisation of low-rank based recovery methods in the context of dynamic parallel MRI. Finally, an additional contribution of this thesis is to formulate the various MR image reconstruction problems in the context of convex optimisation to develop algorithms based on proximal splitting methods.
Attribute-Based Classification with Label-Embedding

Attributes are an intermediate representation whose purpose is to enable parameter sharing between classes, a must when training data is scarce. We propose to view attribute-based image classification as a label-embedding problem: each class is embedded in the space of attribute vectors. We introduce a function which measures the compatibility between an image and a label embedding. The parameters of this function are learned on a training set of labeled samples to ensure that, given an image, the correct class has a higher compatibility than the incorrect ones. Experimental results on two standard image classification datasets are presented, resp. on the Animals With Attributes and on Caltech-UCSD-Birds datasets.
Pottery Typology versus Technological Choices: An Early Neolithic Case Study from Banat (Romania)

During 2003-2006 a project on the Starcevo-Cris pottery was carriedout at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UK). Theaim of the project was to shed more light on the Neolithisation process ofthe Balkan Peninsula. The methods employed to answer this question werescientific analysis of ceramics and fired clay objects, and radiocarbon datingof samples, from 20 early Neolithic sites in Serbia, Romania, and Slavonia.The ceramic analyses were carried out in order to define possibleroutes of trade/exchange in the early Neolithic and the manufacturingprocess of fired clay objects. The radiocarbon dating was required to definean absolute chronology for the early Neolithic in this region and to identifypossible routes for the spread of the Neolithic (Biagi P., Spataro M., 2005;Biagi et al., 2005).
Population dynamics of a mutualistic interaction between the sponge Haliclona caerulea and the red alga Jania adherens

A population of the association between the haplosclerid sponge Haliclona caerulea and the red algae Jania adherens was studied in the Bay of Mazatlan (east tropical Pacific Ocean, Mex- ico), along a spatial gradient (from 1 to 5 m depth) and over time (from February 2001 to September 2003). No clear seasonality was found in the abundance (from 0.5 to 17 ind. 25 m -2 ), volume (from 741 to 7241 cm 3 25 m -2 ), recruitment (up to 9 new ind. 25 m 2 mo -1 ) and mortality (50% loss mo -1 average). The population was capable of recovering after 50% of the specimens were lost; abundance and volume recovered after 7 and 17 mo, respectively. Recruitment was determined in part by asexual propagation through fragmentation, and the relationship with abundance suggested that the popula- tion was self-sustaining. Seasonality was only evident in the sexual reproduction of the sponge, which occurred when water temperature increased: from May to September in 2001, from March to July in 2002, and from April to October in 2003. An important feature was that axial conceptacles of J. adherens living in association with the sponge were never found. The association was permanent over time and the interaction affected the abundance, survival and distribution of the 2 partners in the association. J. adherens was found growing independently in the intertidal zone, which is out of the range of distribution for the association, but we did not find any evidence of sponge living in iso- lation, although in association it is one of the dominant members of the shallow rocky ecosystem in the Bay of Mazatlan. The association was very highly specific; other coralline algae such as Amphi- roa spp. were found in the same habitat, but H. caerulea only associated with Amphiroa spp. in less than 3% of the samples studied. The advantages for J. adherens can be deduced from the fact that it spreads and persists below 1 m thanks to its association with the sponge. The sponge benefits from the fact that it can persist and colonize shallower zones by living in association with the alga. Thus, we conclude that this association is mutualistic.
Evaluation of usability and user experience of an m-learning environment, custom-designed for a tertiary educational context

Undergraduate software engineering learners are often required to participate in problem-based learning (PBL) and team-based project work. Assessment of information communication and technology (ICT) project deliverables contributes a major portion of the course mark. Collaboration and communication are supported to some extent by mobile hand-held devices, yet are limited by the digital divide created from not all learners having access to smartphone devices and mobile Internet connectivity. This study describes the findings of a mobile learning and digital divide (MLDD) survey undertaken by the primary researcher as part of an ICT4D 2.0 project. The survey investigated the nature and extent of the digital divide between software engineering learners on two Western Cape campuses of the same tertiary education institution. A survey questionnaire synthesised for this purpose was administered to 35 fulltime software engineering learners in March 2012. Survey findings indicate the nature and extent of the digital divide between learners enrolled for the same course on the same campus and between learners at the two different campuses. Although survey findings indicate positive learner attitudes to and perception of an mlearning solution to the digital divide, challenges associated with extending a face-to-face classroom experience to a blended mobile technology environment materialised. Study results indicate that whilst mobile technology does offer digital divide reduction