Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Loss of Loss Aversion: Paying Attention to Reference Points

We agree with Gal and Rucker (2018, in press) that loss aversion is not as firmly established as typically assumed. We affirm, however, the more general principle put forward within Prospect Theory (D. Kahneman & A. Tversky, 1979), which is that reference points increase people’s sensitivity to objective changes in value. We show how the literatures on counterfactual thought, social comparison, and goal pursuit are consistent with the notion that reference points increase sensitivity to change in value, while not being consistent with loss aversion. We then examine, within the framework of Regulatory Focus theory (E. T. Higgins, 1997, 1998), how different reference points combine with characteristics of the actor and the situation to give rise to loss aversion (more sensitivity to negative outcomes than to positive outcomes) as well as to the reverse pattern (more sensitivity to positive outcomes than to negative outcomes). Our review suggests that the status quo, even when used as a reference point, is not necessarily neutral. It also suggests that anchor points other than the status quo may serve as reference points and that people may use more than one reference point simultaneously. More generally, we call for a critical examination of the “bad is stronger than good” principle.
Programmatic Use of Molecular Xenomonitoring at the Level of Evaluation Units to Assess Persistence of Lymphatic Filariasis in Sri Lanka

Background Sri Lanka’s Anti Filariasis Campaign distributed 5 rounds of mass drug administration (MDA with DEC plus albendazole) to all endemic regions in the country from 2002–2006. Post-MDA surveillance results have generally been encouraging. However, recent studies have documented low level persistence of Wuchereria bancrofti in Galle district based on comprehensive surveys that include molecular xenomonitoring (MX, detection of filarial DNA in mosquitoes) results. The purposes of this study were to demonstrate the use of MX in large evaluation units (EUs) and to field test different mosquito sampling schemes. Methodology/Principal Findings Galle district (population 1.1 million) was divided into two EUs. These included a coastal EU with known persistent LF and an inland EU with little persistent LF. Mosquitoes were systematically sampled from ~300 trap locations in 30 randomly selected clusters (health administrative units) per EU. Approximately 28,000 Culex quinquefasciatus were collected with gravid traps and tested for filarial DNA by qPCR. 92/625 pools (14.7%) from the coastal EU and 8/583 pools (1.4%) from the inland EU were positive for filarial DNA. Maximum likelihood estimates (MLE) for filarial DNA rates were essentially the same when the same number of mosquito pools were collected and tested from 75, 150, or 300 trap sites (range 0.61–0.78% for the coastal EU and 0.04–0.07% for the inland EU). The ability to use a smaller number of trap sites reduces the cost and time required for mosquito sampling. Conclusions/Significance These results suggest there is widespread persistence of W. bancrofti infection in the coastal Galle EU 8 years after the last round of MDA in 2006, and this is consistent with other data from the district. This study has shown that MX can be used by national programs to assess and map the persistence of W. bancrofti at the level of large EUs in areas with Culex transmission.
RAKE reception with maximal-ratio and equal-gain combining for DS-CDMA systems in Nakagami fading

We study coherent binary direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems operating over frequency-selective Nakagami fading channels. In particular a performance comparison between maximal-ratio combining (MRC) and equal-gain combining (EGC) RAKE receivers is considered. For interference limited systems, perfect MRC RAKE receivers can accommodate about 5m/(5m-1) more users than EGC RAKE receivers, where m is the Nakagami fading parameter. MRC has a higher rate of improvement than EGC as the number of combined paths increases. However, imperfect or inaccurate channel fading estimation leads to serious degradation in the performance of MRC receivers and in that case EGC becomes superior to MRC.
Multidimensional Pixel Purity Index for Convex Hull Estimation and Endmember Extraction

One of the earliest endmember extraction algorithms employed in hyperspectral image processing is the pixel purity index (PPI) algorithm. This algorithm is still popular today but suffers from several drawbacks, such as a large computational cost. Many recent papers focus on improving the speed of the PPI algorithm with high-performance computing or combinatorial methods. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient way of calculating the PPI scores, based on the geometrical interpretation of the PPI sampling process. We first demonstrate the equivalence with Monte Carlo sampling of the polar cones of the convex hull of the data set. Next, we introduce a more efficient sampling method, where we use higher dimensional subspaces to sample these polar cones instead of 1-D skewers. The resulting algorithm can be used to quickly estimate the most important convex hull vertices of the data set, determine the corresponding PPI scores, and produce a list of endmember candidates. An unweighted version of this algorithm is introduced as well, which is simpler to implement, has a higher computational performance, and yields similar endmembers. If the subspace dimension is chosen to be one, both algorithms reduce to the PPI algorithm. We demonstrate the properties of these algorithms, such as convergence speed and accuracy, on artificial and real hyperspectral data and show that the results correspond to those obtained with PPI. The proposed algorithms, however, are up to three orders of magnitude faster and can generate representative PPI scores in less than a second on real hyperspectral data sets.
A study of conflict management style and employee’s job satisfaction at Karimun General Hospital (Indonesia)

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between supervisor’s conflict management style and job satisfaction among nurses at Karimun General Hospital (KGH), Indonesia. There are five conflict management styles, namely; integrating; obliging; dominating; avoiding; and compromising styles (Rahim 1983). This study uses Rahim organizational conflict inventory–II (ROCI-II) to determine the relationship between supervisors’ conflict management style and nurses’ job satisfaction. To measure job satisfaction, Spector’s (1997) job satisfaction survey (JJS) was used. There are nine indicators in JJS, namely, salary; promotion; supervision; additional profit; contingent reward; operating condition; co-worker; nature of work; communication. The population of this study is 181 nurses and midwife at KGH. Using a simple random sampling, 142 questionnaires were distributed. The findings indicated that the nurse’s job satisfaction is at a moderate level and, that the conflict management style mostly practiced by supervisors at KGH is dominating style. In addition, only two styles significantly influence the nurses’ job satisfaction, which are the obliging and compromising style. Meanwhile, integrating, dominating, and avoiding conflict management style do not significantly influence job satisfaction among nurses at KGH.
Plan coordination

Autonomous agents usually plan their actions. Sometimes agents can autonomously construct their plans and just benefit from cooperation, and sometimes they cannot even do without using resources from another. We distinguish two ways to facilitate cooperation by using each others resources. With service-based plan coordination agents offer resources they can produce for others. With request-based coordination agents are allowed to place requests for resources they need. These forms of coordination can be integrated in the plans, and be realized by adapting existing planning algorithms. All methods use a special model of the relevant state of the world and of possible actions. This model consists of predicates that are restricted to describe the properties of an available entity relevant for planning. Such a resource fact can be exchanged among plans more conveniently than sets of ordinary propositions as used by, e.g., STRIPS to describe a resource. Actions consume all resource facts that are given as a precondition, and produce the resource facts defined by the post-condition. One form of request-based coordination is when the plans of agents are coordinated after they have constructed their plans. This method, called plan merging is used for agents that are able to (first) create a valid plan on their own.
Friction coefficient estimation using an unscented Kalman filter

The friction coefficient between a railway wheel and rail surface is a crucial factor in maintaining high acceleration and braking performance of railway vehicles; therefore, monitoring this friction coefficient is important. Due to the difficulty in directly measuring the friction coefficient, the creep force or creepage, indirect methods using state observers are used more frequently. This paper presents an approach using an unscented kalman filter to estimate the creep force and creepage and the friction coefficient from traction motor behaviours. A scaled roller rig is designed and a series of experiments is carried out to evaluate the estimator performance.
Towards implementation of fault tolerant reversible circuits

Reversible computing is gaining importance in order to achieve low power consumption, high speed and packaging density in VLSI circuits. It has applications in various other fields such as quantum computing, nanotechnology, DNA computing, optical computing, cryptography and informatics. In order to achieve reliable circuits in reversible computing provision for fault tolerance is necessary. To achieve fault tolerance, the first stage is to identify occurrence of fault. To detect the occurrence, parity preserving technique has been reported in literature. This paper presents a new 4*4 parity preserving reversible logic gate PPTG (Parity Preserving Toffoli Gate) and its quantum realization. After that two new parity preserving implementations are presented in this paper. These implementations are used towards the development of fault tolerant reversible circuits. By which substitution becomes efficient and minimum in terms of constant inputs and garbage outputs. It permits us to use existing benchmarks preserving parity with only one additional circuit line.
An Improved Text Categorization Algorithm Based on VSM

With the advent of the information age, various kinds of information have been spread on the Internet. The amount of junk information affects people's lives seriously. In order to filter the harmful Web pages efficiently and effectively, we have suggested a novel text classification algorithm based on Vector Space Model in this paper. This algorithm has adopted the modularized processing mode to deal with Web pages. In addition, it has introduced the proportion of feature selection and improved the traditional Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency weighting method. Furthermore, the simulation of our algorithm and other existing work has been given. The comparison shows that our algorithm enjoying higher accuracy and classification precision, which achieves a better system performance and a better classifying effect.
ERP application development frameworks: Case study and evaluation

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software brings many benefits to an organization, but commercial software is expensive. Smaller organizations may prefer free and open source solutions but are faced with an enormous array of options from different vendors. One of the most difficult decisions to make is whether to develop software from scratch or to adopt a free and open source ERP framework. To answer this question, we evaluate one of the most popular enterprise software development frameworks, JBoss Seam, and one of the most popular open source frameworks for ERP development, Apache Open for Business. Using a simple real-world application integration problem involving an asset management system and an accounting system as a case study, we compare the frameworks along a number of dimensions. We find that the ERP framework, OFBiz, is the better choice for simple ERP development problems typically encountered in smaller enterprises.
Asymptotic statistics of mutual information for doubly correlated MIMO channels

In this paper, we derive the asymptotic statistics of mutual information for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Rayleigh-fading channels in the presence of spatial fading correlation at both the transmitter and the receiver. We first introduce a class of asymptotic linear spectral statistics, called correlants, for a structured correlation matrix. The mean and variance of MIMO mutual information are then expressed in terms of the correlants of spatial correlation matrices in the asymptotic regime where the number of transmit and receive antennas tends to infinity. In particular, using Szego's theorem on the asymptotic eigenvalue distribution of Toeplitz matrices, we give examples for special classes of correlation matrices with Toeplitz structure-exponential (or Kac-Murdock-Szego), tridiagonal, and constant (or intraclass ) correlation matrices.
Distinct psychological distress trajectories in RA: findings from an inception cohort

Objective: As with other chronic physical illness, rates of depressive disorder are high in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The aim of the current study was to identify distinct trajectories of psychological distress over 10-years in a cohort of RA patients recruited very early in the course of the disease. Methods: Psychological distress as measured by the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale total score was assessed annually in a subgroup of 784 patients enrolled in a multi-centre RA inception cohort (Early RA Study). A latent growth mixture modelling (GMM) approach was used to identify distinct psychological distress patterns. Results: Four distinct psychological distress trajectories were observed: low-stable (68%), high-stable (12%), high-decreasing (9%) and low-increasing (11%). Symptoms of pain, stiffness and functional impairment were significantly associated with levels of psychological distress at the time of diagnosis and after 3-years; serological markers of disease activity (ESR and CRP) were not. Conclusions: Although the majority of individuals developing RA experience little or no impact of the effects of the disease on their psychological well-being, a significant proportion experience high levels of distress at some point which may be related to their subjective appraisal of RA. Assessment and treatment of psychological distress should occur synchronously with somatic symptoms.
Subjective Assessment of Stress in HCI: A Study of the Valence-Arousal Scale using Skin Conductance

Thirty-one healthy participants performed five stressful HCI tasks (stimuli) while their skin conductance signals were monitored. The selected interaction tasks were most frequently listed as stressful by 15 interviewees, who were typical computer users. At the end of each task, participants expressed their perceived emotional experience using the dimensional Valence-Arousal (VA) rating space. The obtained VA ratings were used to define nine rectangular regions in the VA space, labeled as "stress". Next, five popular machine learning classifiers were employed to identify stress based on the associated skin conductance signals per tested region. Results showed sufficient cross-region stress recognition accuracy; L-SVM: Mean=62.3%, SD=9.3%. Our findings support that the VA scale may be used for stress self-assessments in the context of subtle interaction events, which are typically expected in most HCI tasks.
Variable Latency Caches for Nanoscale Processors

Variability is one of the important issues in nanoscale processors. Due to increasing importance of interconnect structures in submicron technologies, the physical location and phenomena such as coupling have an increasing impact on the latency of operations. Therefore, traditional view of rigid access latencies to components will result in suboptimal architectures. In this paper, we devise a cache architecture with variable access latency. Particularly, we a) develop a non-uniform access level 1 data-cache, b) study the impact of coupling and physical location on level 1 data cache access latencies, and c) develop and study an architecture where the variable latency cache can be accessed while the rest of the pipeline remains synchronous. To find the access latency with different input address transitions and environmental conditions, we first build a SPICE model at a 45nm technology for a cache similar to that of the level 1 data cache of the Intel Prescott architecture. Motivated by the large difference between the worst and best case latencies and the shape of the distribution curve, we change the cache architecture to allow variable latency accesses. Since the latency of the cache is not known at the time of instruction scheduling, we also modify the functional units with the addition of special queues that will temporarily store the dependent instructions and allow the data to be forwarded from the cache to the functional units correctly. Simulations based on SPEC2000 benchmarks show that our variable access latency cache structure can reduce the execution time by as much as 19.4% and 10.7% on average compared to a conventional cache architecture.
Nuclear Citizens Jury: From Local Deliberations to Transboundary and Transgenerational Legal Dilemmas

ABSTRACT South Australia is home to one of the world’s largest uranium mines for export, but does not participate in further stages of the nuclear fuel cycle. In 2016, the Government of South Australia held a series of public engagement activities about the possibility of nuclear waste storage in the state. Two citizens’ juries, collectively called the “Nuclear Citizens Jury,” were the centrepiece of the series. This paper investigates jury members’ perspectives on nuclear waste storage and the deliberative process. The Nuclear Citizens Jury was effective as a local deliberation process that offered learning opportunities, gave access to information and made decision-making transparent. However, the process did not result in consensus or consent. Rather, jury members highlighted concerns about the democratic representativeness of the process, Aboriginal and transgenerational consent and unresolved national dimensions. The Nuclear Citizens Jury underscored the need for deliberative processes to consider multiple geographies of law, representation, and consent.
CLOM: Counting label occurrence matrix for feature extraction in MR images

The general phenomenon for Image Classification is based on the Feature extraction mechanism. In every domain of image analysis, the classification accuracy is dependent on how better the feature set is generated which helps the machine to learn and predict the unknown sample class label. In this paper, a novel feature extraction mechanism is proposed and named as Counting Label Occurrence Matrix (CLOM). CLOM is based on the counting label of the gray level intensity values of an image and used to extract the textural features of an image for image classification. Four different orientations are used in CLOM for extracting features based on anticipated algorithm. Proposed feature extraction mechanism is dynamic in nature and is used in any domain of image processing and machine learning. CLOM algorithm is compared with some feature extraction algorithms like GLCM (gray level co-occurrence matrix) and Run length Matrix when CLOM is tested in medical domain for classification of brain tumor images. The experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm gives better accuracy than past algorithms when tested with classifiers like KNN and BPNN.
Image and Video Noise Reduction by Means of Sparse Representations in Highly Redundant Systems

We describe an image denoising/degrain algorithm based on sparse representation of images in a very redundant system. We call it the hornlet system. The high system redundancy does not allow to use the commonly accepted greedy algorithm with the direct sensing of the image with all basic functions and follow-up computing of approximations. Instead of this, we consider a 3-step procedure consisting of: 1) localization of places on the image where the approximation is required; 2) constructing supports of the approximating hornlets; 3) computing approximating hornlets. Our versions of those 3 steps are presented. At the same time, due to their relative independence, such algorithm (each separate step) can be easily transformed to fit various ideas of approximation. Parallel implementation on multicore GPUs was one of additional requirements to the designed algorithm.
A sparsity-distortion-optimized multiscale representation of geometry

This paper describes the construction of a new multiresolutional decomposition with applications to image compression. The proposed method designs sparsity-distortion-optimized orthonormal transforms applied in wavelet domain to arrive at a multiresolutional representation which we term the Sparse Multiresolutional Transform (SMT). Our optimization operates over sub-bands of given orientation and exploits the inter-scale and intra-scale dependencies of wavelet co-efficients over image singularities. The resulting SMT is substantially sparser than the wavelet transform and leads to compaction that can be exploited by well-known coefficient coders. Our construction deviates from the literature, which mainly focuses on model-based methods, by offering a data-driven optimization of wavelet representations. Simulation experiments show that the proposed method consistently offers better performance compared to the original wavelet-representation and can reach up to 1dB improvements within state-of-the-art coefficient coders.
The container contained: Biography and role as factors in managing stress for secondary head-teachers

This research explored the experiences of three secondary headteachers and the way in which role conception, informed by unconscious processes, functions as a mechanism for managing the stresses and demands of said role. The research was underpinned by a psychosocial framework and used an explicitly psychoanalytic epistemology. The research used semi-structured interviews to explore influential biographical factors, which were then explored using a psychoanalytic lens. This produced a series of themes used to thematically analyse their accounts of their jobs and the stresses and strains within it. The ensuing analysis revealed that the unconscious patterns, implicit in their narratives, influenced both role conception and the way they perceived and related to the organisations they led. In discussing these findings, links were made to relevant psychoanalytic and systems-psychodynamic theory; especially Bion's work on containment and alpha function, as well as Rice's seminal thinking about the way in which the unconscious influences role acquisition and task engagement. Further applications to both theories are suggested. A central argument is that working with school leaders has a systemic impact on schools and school populations, something well within the remit and consultative skill-set of Educational Psychologists. This research concludes that unconscious patterns and processes are involved in the management of stress and anxiety and that this is done through unconsciously "shaping" the way headteachers conceive of the role and the schools they lead.