Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
questionnaires: systematic review Increasing response rates to postal

Objective To identify methods to increase response to postal questionnaires. Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials of any method to influence response to postal questionnaires. Studies reviewed 292 randomised controlled trials including 258 315 participants Intervention reviewed 75 strategies for influencing response to postal questionnaires. Main outcome measure The proportion of completed or partially completed questionnaires returned. Results The odds of response were more than doubled when a monetary incentive was used (odds ratio 2.02; 95% confidence interval 1.79 to 2.27) and almost doubled when incentives were not conditional on response (1.71; 1.29 to 2.26). Response was more likely when short questionnaires were used (1.86; 1.55 to 2.24). Personalised questionnaires and letters increased response (1.16; 1.06 to 1.28), as did the use of coloured ink (1.39; 1.16 to 1.67). The odds of response were more than doubled when the questionnaires were sent by recorded delivery (2.21; 1.51 to 3.25) and increased when stamped return envelopes were used (1.26; 1.13 to 1.41) and questionnaires were sent by first class post (1.12; 1.02 to 1.23). Contacting participants before sending questionnaires increased response (1.54; 1.24 to 1.92), as did follow up contact (1.44; 1.22 to 1.70) and providing non›respondents with a second copy of the questionnaire (1.41; 1.02 to 1.94). Questionnaires designed to be of more interest to participants were more likely to be returned (2.44; 1.99 to 3.01), but questionnaires containing questions of a sensitive nature were less likely to be returned (0.92; 0.87 to 0.98). Questionnaires originating from universities were more likely to be returned than were questionnaires from other sources,
An Architecture for Mining Massive Web Logs with Experiments

We introduce an experimental web log mining architecture with advanced storage and data mining components. The aim of the system is to give a flexible base for web usage mining of large scale Internet sites. We present experiments over logs of the largest Hungarian Web portal [origo] (www.origo.hu) that among others provides online news and magazines, community pages, software downloads, free email as well as a search engine. The portal has a size of over 130,000 pages and receives 6,500,000 HTML hits on a typical workday, producing 2.5 GB of raw server logs that remains a size of 400 MB per day even after cleaning and preprocessing, thus overrunning the storage space capabilities of typical commercial systems. As the results of our experiments over the [origo] site we present certain distributions related to the number of hits and sessions, some of which is somewhat surprising and different from an expected simple power law distribution. The problem of the too many and redundant frequent sequences of web log data is investigated. We describe our method to characterize user navigation patterns by comparing with choices of a memoryless Markov process. Finally we demonstrate the effectiveness of our clustering technique based on a mixture of singular value decomposition and refined heuristics.
Teaching a Phonological Awareness Skill With the Time-Delay System in a Mainstream Setting: A Single-Subject Research Study

Abstract The present study focused on instruction in identifying the 1st sounds of different words. We taught this phonological awareness skill in a mainstream classroom through an evidence-based strategy of time delay to a student with severe intellectual and developmental disability. We implemented the time-delay strategy within a single-subject design and a multiple baseline across 3 different sets. Results indicated that the student learned to identify the initial letter sound of the words taught once the intervention ended and across the maintenance period. Contributions and limitations of the study are presented, and future research and practical implications are discussed.
Customer-Supplier Integration in the Italian High Precision Air Conditioning Industry

Integration between customer and supplier is one of the important concepts in supply chain management. Both in theoretical and empirical contributions, it is shown that integrative practices improve supplier relations performance. By analyzing 9 case studies of customer-supplier relationships in the Italian high precision air conditioning industry, this paper investigates what suppliers and customers do in order to integrate their operations across the supply chain. It articulates customersupplier integration (CSI) practices into four areas: three specific business processes – new product development, logistics, and pricing – and the more general customer-supplier knowledge transfer. This paper proposes a framework and develops propositions regarding the influence of the value impact of goods purchased from each supplier and of the degree of purchasing goods customization on the characteristics of customer-supplier integration.
Collaborative Consumption for Mobile Broadband: A Quantitative Study

Mobile broadband is predominantly priced following tiered plans that involve a certain prepaid emph{commit volume} and additional metered volume priced at a higher emph{penalty rate}. An individual's demand, however, may vary wildly from month to month and thus users inevitably purchase packages that are either too small or too large for their needs. By collaborating in predefined closed (eg, family) or open groups (eg, through tethering) users can reduce both the amount of paid-but-left-unused capacity or the high penalty rates. In this paper we present a quantitative study of collaborative consumption using data from 40K mobile subscribers and tariffs from ten operators around the world. We show that small 2-person family plans offer modest expected savings in the range of 3% to 14%, whereas getting more substantial savings requires rather impractically large groups of approximately 10 people or more. Going over to open groups, where users can freely trade their data capacity, we characterize the impact of the secondary market price on the user costs and the operator revenues, and show that Telcos might be better off to embrace secondary markets (eg, let them integrate with billing), and thus have some control on, as opposed to letting them operate unsupervised through tethering. The latter may severely harm the revenues of a Telco, in an uncontrolled manner, especially in densely populated areas.
Evaluation of Spatial Reuse in Wireless Multi-hop Networks

In wireless multi-hop networks, the spatial reuse determines the number of simultaneous connections allowed in a given region. It has a strong influence on the throughput and delay characteristics of the network and is thus an important metric in performance evaluation. This paper presents an analytic model for the spatial reuse in a wireless multi-hop network with a random access MAC protocol that uses a fair scheduler to accomplish collision avoidance. We employ a purely probabilistic model to derive the closed form solution for the achievable throughput. Using our model we are able to show the maximum saturation throughput obtainable as a function of the node density.
The TREC 2006 Terabyte Track

TREC 2006 is the third year for the track. The track was introduced as part of TREC 2004, with a single adhoc retrieval task. For TREC 2005, the track was expanded with two optional tasks: a named page finding task and an efficiency task. These three tasks were continued in 2006, with 20 groups submitting runs to the adhoc retrieval task, 11 groups submitting runs to the named page finding task, and 8 groups submitting runs to the efficiency task. This report provides an overview of each task, summarizes the results, and outlines directions for the future. Further background information on the development of the track can be found in the 2004 and 2005 track reports [4, 5].
Gender Differences in Attitude Toward Students with Disabilities Among Primary Students in Jakarta

This research aims to compare the differences in attitude towards students with disabilities between boys and girls in primary inclusive school in Jakarta. This study employed a quantitative approach study and cross-sectional design. A total of 266 regular students (147 boys and 149 girls), aged 9 -13 years old, from five different inclusive public schools across Jakarta and Depok have participated in this study. Students’ attitude toward students with disabilities was measured with ChedokeMcMaster Attitudes toward Children with Handicaps (CATCH) and adapted in the Bahasa version. It consists of 18 items and it has good internal reliability Cronbach’s alpha . 77. The data were analyzed by using Independence Samples t-test. The result showed that there was no significant difference in attitude toward the students with disabilities between boys and girls (t(264)=1.921, p=0.056). It means that there is no difference of attitude towards students with disabilities among girls and boys in primary students in Jakarta. In general, most students are indicated with neutral attitudes toward students with disabilities. Hence, the findings of this study help to change the faulty perception that boys have a more negative attitude toward students with disabilities compared to girls. Keywords—gender, attitudes, disabilities, inclusive education,
Cost effective physical register sharing

Sharing a physical register between several instructions is needed to implement several microarchitectural optimizations. However, register sharing requires modifications to the register reclaiming process: Committing a single instruction does not guarantee that the physical register allocated to the previous mapping of its architectural destination register is free-able anymore. Consequently, a form of register reference counting must be implemented. While such mechanisms (e.g., dependency matrix, per register counters) have been described in the literature, we argue that they either require too much storage, or that they lengthen branch misprediction recovery by requiring sequential rollback. As an alternative, we present the Inflight Shared Register Buffer (ISRB), a new structure for register reference counting. The ISRB has low storage overhead and lends itself to checkpoint-based recovery schemes, therefore allowing fast recovery on pipeline flushes. We illustrate our scheme with Move Elimination (short-circuiting moves) and an implementation of Speculative Memory Bypassing (short-circuiting store-load pairs) that makes use of a TAGE-like predictor to identify memory dependencies. We show that the whole potential of these two mechanisms can be achieved with a small register tracking structure.
Building classification models from imbalanced fraud detection data / Terence Yong Koon Beh, Swee Chuan Tan and Hwee Theng Yeo

Many real-world data sets exhibit imbalanced class distributions in which almost all instances are assigned to one class and far fewer instances to a smaller, yet usually interesting class. Building classification models from such imbalanced data sets is a relatively new challenge in the machine learning and data mining community because many traditional classification algorithms assume similar proportions of majority and minority classes. When the data is imbalanced, these algorithms generate models that achieve good classification accuracy for the majority class, but poor accuracy for the minority class. This paper reports our experience in applying data balancing techniques to develop a classifier for an imbalanced real-world fraud detection data set. We evaluated the models generated from seven classification algorithms with two simple data balancing techniques. Despite many ideas floating in the literature to tackle the imbalanced issue, our study shows the simplest data balancing technique is all that is required to significantly improve the accuracy in identifying the primary class of interest (i.e., the minority class) in all the seven algorithms tested. Our results also show that precision and recall are useful and effective measures for evaluating models created from artificially balanced data. Hence, we advise data mining practitioners to try simple data balancing first before exploring more sophisticated techniques to tackle the class imbalance problem.
Evolution of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Under Selection and Weak Recombination

To predict emergence of drug resistance in patients undergoing antiretroviral therapy, we study accumulation of preexisting beneficial alleles in a haploid population of N genomes. The factors included in the model are selection with the coefficient s and recombination with the small rate per genome r (r ≪ s\batchmode \documentclass[fleqn,10pt,legalpaper]{article} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amsmath} \pagestyle{empty} \begin{document} \(\sqrt{\overline{\mathit{k}}}\) \end{document}, where k̅ is the average number of less-fit loci per genome). Mutation events are neglected. To describe evolution at a large number of linked loci, we generalize the analytic method we developed recently for an asexual population. We show that the distribution of genomes over the deleterious allele number moves in time as a “solitary wave” that is quasi-deterministic in the middle (on the average) but has stochastic edges. We arrive at a single-locus expression for the average accumulation rate, in which the effects of linkage, recombination, and random drift are all accounted for by the effective selection coefficient s ln\batchmode \documentclass[fleqn,10pt,legalpaper]{article} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amsmath} \pagestyle{empty} \begin{document} \(\left(\mathit{Nr}\right)\) \end{document}/ln\batchmode \documentclass[fleqn,10pt,legalpaper]{article} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amsmath} \pagestyle{empty} \begin{document} \(\left(\mathit{Ns}^{2}\overline{\mathit{k}}/\mathit{r}\right)\) \end{document}. At large N, the effective selection coefficient approaches the single-locus value s. Below the critical size Nc ∼ 1/r, a population eventually becomes a clone, recombination cannot produce new sequences, and virus evolution stops. Taking into account finite mutation rate predicts a small, finite rate of evolution at N < Nc. We verify the accuracy of the results analytically and by Monte Carlo simulation. On the basis of our findings, we predict that partial depletion of the HIV population by combined anti-retroviral therapy can suppress emergence of drug-resistant strains.
Content-centric networking: is that a solution for upcoming vehicular networks?

In this paper we propose an innovative networking architecture for content retrieval and distribution in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), that leverages the recently proposed Content-Centric Networking (CCN) paradigm. It is based on named contents instead of IP addresses, and seems an attractive opportunity to handle the dynamic, short-lived and intermittent connectivity typical of VANETs. Achieved results show that the proposed architecture significantly outperforms the legacy TCP/IP protocol suite, thus confirming the potentialities of content-centric as a promising networking solution for upcoming VANETs.
Contextual factors for suppier and customer integration on product performance

The beneficial impacts of supplier and customer integration are widely acknowledged in new product development. Despite this, prior empirical studies have not adequately addressed what integration processes lead an organization to achieve better product performance, nor which contextual factors for such integration are. This paper examines the impact of environmental (i.e. market certainty) and internal (i.e. internally integrated product development) factors on key supplier and customer integration processes (i.e. information sharing and product co-development with supplier and customer respectively) and in turn testifies the impact of them on product innovativeness and product performance.
A tool for catching back your preferred videos from physical collages

Images and videos are easy to create by inexperienced users with intuitive devices like smartphones. We propose a system which enables users to extract panoramas from videos for the creation of collages which can be printed. Single frames used for panoramas are indexed on the basis of SURF features. As a result users can make a photo with the smartphone from a panorama within the printed collage or zoom into the digital version of a collage to select an area of interest and retrieve the related video using the SURF features index. Moreover users can pick a photo from a location where a video was previously recorded and retrieve a related video as well. Our approach supports the maintenance of a large number of videos.
SVM Ensemble Model for Investment Prediction

paper analyses the usage of SVM Ensemble for Investment service. Objective of this work is to construct a model for investment prediction. Ensemble learning is a machine-learning paradigm where multiple models are trained to solve the problem. In this paper, a detailed study of SVM ensemble is done. An insurance dataset obtained from UCI knowledge discovery in Databases Archive was taken. The AdaBoost, multiclassifier SVM Ensemble was created and tested with the insurance dataset. From this work, the SVM Ensemble produces better accuracy than other ensembles. The knowledge flow of SVM ensemble model was created using Weka tool. This model helps the user to predict the best policy for investment Keywords SVM Ensemble, AdaBoost, Multiclassifier, Accuracy, ROC.
Quasar Image Shifts Resulting from Gravitational Microlensing

Gravitational microlensing of quasars by stars in external galaxies can introduce fluctuations in the centroid of the "pointlike" macroimages. The induced shifts are extremely small, on microarcsecond scales, below the limits of current optical observations. However, such shifts will become measurable with the proposed Space Interferometry Mission, due to fly in 2005. The degree of the centroid shifts and their application as probes of both quasar structure and the stellar mass function in the lensing galaxy are discussed.
High Level Synthesis Based Hardware Accelerator Design for Processing SQL Queries

About three exabytes of data is created and stored in databases each day, and this number is doubling approximately every forty months. Querying this enormous amount of data has been a challenge and new methods have been actively researched. In this paper, we present hardware accelerators which are designed to speed up database analytics for in-memory databases. Unlike traditional hardware accelerator designs, our hardware accelerators are composed using High Level Synthesis (HLS), which enables high level descriptions of functionality such as data filtering, sorting, equijoins to be targeted directly into RTL. We have simulated TPC-H benchmark queries using Xilinx Vivado HLS managed in our custom simulation software framework. Our results have demonstrated the capabilities of HLS in database acceleration domain; such that the 200MHz FPGA accelerator can provide two orders of magnitude performance improvement compared to PostgreSQL based full software implementation running on a modern multicore system.
Attachment to inanimate objects and early childcare: A twin study

Extensive non-maternal childcare plays an important role in children’s development. This study examined a potential coping mechanism for dealing with daily separation from caregivers involved in childcare experience – children’s development of attachments toward inanimate objects. We employed the twin design to estimate relative environmental and genetic contributions to the presence of object attachment, and assess whether childcare explains some of the environmental variation in this developmental phenomenon. Mothers reported about 1122 3-year-old twin pairs. Variation in object attachment was accounted for by heritability (48%) and shared environment (48%), with childcare quantity accounting for 2.2% of the shared environment effect. Children who spent half-days in childcare were significantly less likely to attach to objects relative to children who attended full-day childcare.
Testing backtesting : an evaluation of the Basle guidelines for backtesting internal risk management models of banks

Internal risk management models and downside-risk measures such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) play an important role in contemporary banking practice. VaR measures the maximum loss born by a bank or other financial institution over a certain time period and given a certain level of confidence. Following the Basle guidelines for bank supervision, many supervisory institutions require banks to use such models and to report VaR measures on a regular basis. Capital requirements for the bank are then directly related to its reported VaR figure. In principle, following the Basle guidelines based on the internal models approach, banks are allowed to design their own risk management models for computing their VaR. This raises the question whether banks have any impetus to come up with correct models in the sense that the VaR predicted by the model matches the true VaR. This question is addressed in the present paper. In our model, banks assign negative utility to required capital reserves due to opportunity costs. Using a stylized representation of the Basle guidelines for backtesting internal risk models, we investigate whether banks are inclined to choose overly prudent or overly risky internal models. We check the robustness of the result by varying the planning horizon of the bank and the degree of fat-tailedness of the bank’s asset and liability portfolio. It generally turns out that banks have a strong incentive to use internal models that underestimate the true VaR of the bank’s portfolio. Monetary penalties should be set substantially higher by supervisory institutions to realize a closer match between reported and actual VaR.
Confrontation of MOdified Newtonian Dynamics with the rotation curves of early-type disc galaxies

We extend the MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) analysis to a sample of 17 high surface brightness, early-type disc galaxies with rotation curves derived from a combination of 21-cm H-I line observations and optical spectroscopic data. A number of these galaxies have asymptotic rotation velocities between 250 and 350 km s(-1) making them among the most massive systems (in terms of baryonic mass) considered in the context of MOND. We find that the general MOND prediction for such galaxies - a rotation curve which gradually declines to the asymptotic value - is confirmed, and in most cases the MOND rotation curve, determined from the mean radial light and gas distribution, agrees in detail with the observed rotation curve. In the few cases where MOND appears not to work well, the discrepancies can generally be understood in terms of various observational errors - such as incorrect orientation angles and/or distances - or of unmodelled physical effects - such as non-circular motions. The implied mass-to-light ratios for the stellar disc and bulge constrain the MOND interpolating function; the form recently suggested by Zhao & Famaey yields more sensible values than the one traditionally used in MOND determinations of galaxy rotation curves.
ON A SHAPE OF AXISYMMETRIC RIGID SHELL MOVING IN DEFORMABLE MEDIUM AND HAVING MINIMAL MASS AND RESISTANCE FORCE

Отыскание формы оболочки вращения минимальной массы и сопротивления рассматривается как задача многокритериальной (многоцелевой) оптимизации. Полная сила сопротивления и масса материала оболочки принимаются в качестве компонент минимизируемого векторного критерия. Форма осесимметричной оболочки играет роль искомой переменной проектирования. Аналитические исследования оптимального решения проводятся с использованием вариационного анализа. Получено точное решение сформулированной многоцелевой задачи оптимизации. Приводятся найденные Паретофронт и величины оптимизируемых функционалов в зависимости от параметров задачи.