Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cultural Determinants of Learning Style Preferences

We investigate the relationship between cultural values and the learning style preferences of students of business administration. By linking Kolb's (1984) model of learning style preferences to the cultural values of learners we develop hypotheses that are tested against data collected from 939 individuals studying at universities in Germany, the UK, the USA, Russia, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, China, and the United Arab Emirates. Our findings show that learning style preferences vary with individuals' cultural values. We also find that study level, exchange student status, and gender are related to individuals' learning style preferences. The results are of importance to researchers and practitioners interested in the learning process of individuals from different cultural backgrounds.
Corporate Criminal Law and Organization Incentives: A Managerial Perspective

Corporate criminal liability puts a serious challenge to the economic theory of enforcement. Are corporate crimes different from other crimes? Are these crimes best deterred by punishing individuals, punishing corporations, or both? What is optimal structure of sanctions? Should corporate liability be criminal or civil? This paper has two major contributions to the literature. First, it provides a common analytical framework to most results presented and largely discussed in the field. In second place, by making use of the framework, we provide new insights into how corporations should be punished for the offenses committed by their employees.
A quantitative study of Java software buildability

Researchers, students and practitioners often encounter a situation when the build process of a third-party software system fails. In this paper, we aim to confirm this observation present mainly as anecdotal evidence so far. Using a virtual environment simulating a programmer's one, we try to fully automatically build target archives from the source code of over 7,200 open source Java projects. We found that more than 38% of builds ended in failure. Build log analysis reveals the largest portion of errors are dependency-related. We also conduct an association study of factors affecting build success.
Tenascin expression and distribution in pulmonary and pleural fibrotic disorders

Fibrotic pulmonary and pleural disorders represent a group of intrathoracic disorders with different etiologies and prognoses. A prominent part of both pulmonary and pleural fibrotic disorders remains etiologically unknown. An essential feature for all these disorders is an increase and disarray of many extracellular matrix proteins which take part in the remodeling of the fibrotic tissue. Further, the injury in pulmonary as well as in pleural fibrosis occurs often at the border between the epithelial or mesothelial and the mesenchymal cells breaking the epithelial basement membrane. Tenascin is an oligomeric matrix glycoprotein of the extracellular matrix. The best known isoforms are tenascin -C, -X, -R, -Y and -W. Tenascin-C is synthesized during embryonic development, expressed in a variety of tumors, being absent or scantily expressed in most adult tissues. The function of tenascin-C is still unclear. In lung, tenascin-C has been shown to be expressed in fetal lung during branching morphogenesis, benign and malignant lung tumors, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, sarcoidosis and asthma. The aim of the present study was to study tenascin-C (later called tenascin) expression in various types of pulmonary fibrosis such as usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP), desquamative interstitial pneumonia (DIP), nonspecific interstitial pneumonia (NSIP), bronchiolitis obliterans organizing pneumonia (BOOP), sarcoidosis and extrinsic allergic alveolitis as well as in fibrotic and inflammatory disorders of the pleura of different etiologies. Further, the aims were to compare the accumulation of tenascin with the prognosis in UIP, to confirm the immunohistochemical findings in UIP by Western blotting and immunoelectron miscroscopic (immuno-EM) studies, to investigate which cells synthesize tenascin in UIP and in pleural fibrosis by mRNA in situ hybridization, and to determine whether epithelial lining fluid (ELF) and serum tenascin concentration are increased in patients with UIP, sarcoidosis and extrinsic allergic alveolitis. Tenascin was shown to be increased by immunohistochemical studies in all types of pulmonary and pleural fibrotic disorders included in the study. In UIP, increased tenascin expression was associated with a shortened survival time of the patients. In immuno-EM, labeling for tenascin was seen within type II pneumocytes. UIP cases showed reactivity for a polypeptide of Mr ≈ 200 000 by Western blotting. Myofibroblasts and type II pneumocytes were mainly shown to synthesize tenascin in UIP. Also in pleural fibrosis myofibroblasts, and in addition possibly mesothelial cells, were observed to be responsible for its synthesis. ELF and serum tenascin concentrations were increased in UIP, sarcoidosis and extrinsic allergic alveolitis. In conclusion, tenascin expression is increased in pulmonary and pleural fibrotic disorders, especially in newly formed fibrosis. In UIP, tenascin is actively synthesized at the sites of recent epithelial injury, suggesting that it plays an important role in the fibrogenesis in the lung.
Automatic test program generation: a case study

Design validation is a critical step in the development of present-day microprocessors, and some authors suggest that up to 60% of the design cost is attributable to this activity. Of the numerous activities performed in different stages of the design flow and at different levels of abstraction, we focus on simulation-based design validation performed at the behavioral register-transfer level. Designers typically write assertions inside hardware description language (HDL) models and run extensive simulations to increase confidence in device correctness. Simulation results can also be useful in comparing the HDL model against higher-level references or instruction set simulators. Microprocessor validation has become more difficult since the adoption of pipelined architectures, mainly because you can't evaluate the behavior of a pipelined microprocessor by considering one instruction at a time; a pipeline's behavior depends on a sequence of instructions and all their operands.
Generalized Kähler geometry and manifest Script N = (2,2) supersymmetric nonlinear sigma-models

Generalized complex geometry is a new mathematical framework that is useful for describing the target space of = (2,2) nonlinear sigma-models. The most direct relation is obtained at the = (1,1) level when the sigma model is formulated with an additional auxiliary spinorial field. We revive a formulation in terms of = (2,2) semi-(anti)chiral multiplets where such auxiliary fields are naturally present. The underlying generalized complex structures are shown to commute (unlike the corresponding ordinary complex structures) and describe a Generalized Kahler geometry. The metric, B-field and generalized complex structures are all determined in terms of a potential K.
Estimation of frame independent and enhancement components for speech communication over packet networks

In this paper, we describe a new approach to cope with packet loss in speech coders. The idea is to split the information present in each speech packet into two components, one to independently decode the given speech frame and one to enhance it by exploiting inter-frame dependencies. The scheme is based on sparse linear prediction and a redefinition of the analysis-by-synthesis process. We present Mean Opinion Scores for the presented coder with different degrees of packet loss and show that it performs similarly to frame dependent coders for low packet loss probability and similarly to frame independent coders for high packet loss probability. We also present ideas on how to make the coder work synergistically with the channel loss estimate.
Interactive Image Completion with Direction Empirical Mode

An interactive image completion method is proposed based on Direction Empirical Mode Decomposition (DEMD). Blocked area or area with loss of information in a target image is completed with DEMD combined with texture synthesis in an interactive way. The target image is decomposed by DEMD into levels of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) images, while the user is allowed to indicate the structural image edge to recover in the unknown image regions. For each level of IMF image, first the target image patches along user-specified curves in the unknown region are completed. Then the remaining target image patches are prioritized to complete according to image gradient feature. The target image patches are completed based on the combination frequency feature values from DEMD and the texture synthesis. Finally, levels of completed IMF images are compounded into the result image. Experiments prove that the proposed algorithm is not only able to recover the damaged structural and texture information of large scale, but also completely blocked image structures.
Selecting Actions and Making Decisions : Lessons from AI Planning

Humans encounter a huge variety of problems which they must solve using general methods. Even simple problems, however, become computationally hard for general solvers if the structure of the problems is not recognized and exploited. Work in Artificial Intelligence Planning and Problem Solving has encountered a similar difficulty, leading in recent years to the development of well-founded and empirically tested techniques for recognizing and exploiting structure, focusing the search for solutions in certain cases, and bypassing the need to search in others. These techniques include the automatic derivation of heuristic functions, the use of limited but effective forms of inference, and the compilation of domains, all of which enable a general problem solver to ‘adapt’ automatically to the task at hand. In this paper, I present the ideas underlying these new techniques, and argue for their relevance to models of natural intelligent behavior as well. The paper is not a review of AI Planning – a diverse field with a long history – but a personal appraisal of some recent key developments and their potential bearing on accounts of action selection in humans and animals.
Speeding up rao-blackwellized particle filter SLAM with a multithreaded architecture

In this work we explore multiprocessor computer architectures to propose an effective method for solving the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Problem. The proposed method makes use of multithreading to parallelize a Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter approach. By applying the method in common computers found in robots, it is shown that a significant gain in efficiency can be obtained. Furthermore, the parallel method enables us to raise the number of particles up to values that would not be possible in a single threaded solution, thus gaining in localization precision and map accuracy. In order to analyze SLAM results, frequently used datasets by the robotics community were used, and a benchmarking metric was applied.
Changes in Brain Functioning From Infancy to Early Childhood: Evidence From EEG Power and Coherence During Working Memory Tasks

Using measures of EEG power and coherence with a longitudinal sample, the goal of this study was to examine developmental changes in brain electrical activity during higher order cognitive processing at infancy and early childhood. Infants were recruited at 8 months of age and performed an infant working-memory task based on a looking version of the A-not-B task. At age 4.5 years, one half of the original sample returned for a follow-up visit and were assessed with age-appropriate working-memory tasks. At infancy, working memory was associated with changes in EEG power from baseline to task across the entire scalp, whereas in early childhood, working memory was associated with changes in EEG power from baseline to task at medial frontal only. Similar results were found for the EEG coherence data. At infancy, working memory was associated with changes in EEG coherence from baseline to task across all electrode pairs and by 4.5 years of age, EEG coherence changed from baseline to working-memory task at the medial frontal/posterior temporal pairs and the medial frontal/occipital pairs. These EEG power and coherence longitudinal data suggest that brain electrical activity is widespread during infant cognitive processing and that it becomes more localized during early childhood. These findings may yield insight into qualitative changes in cortical functioning from the infant to the early childhood time periods, adjustments that may be indicative of developmental changes in brain specialization for higher order processes.
Teaching Note—Teaching Student Interviewing Competencies Through Second Life

ABSTRACT A prototype standardized client was created and programmed to respond to students in the 3D virtual world of Second Life. This automaton, called a chatbot, was repeatedly interviewed by beginning MSW students in a practice course as a learning exercise. Initial results were positive and suggest the use of simulated clients in virtual worlds as learning objects is worth further development and evaluation.
Fine‐scale population genetic structure in a fission–fusion society

Nonrandom patterns of mating and dispersal create fine‐scale genetic structure in natural populations — especially of social mammals — with important evolutionary and conservation genetic consequences. Such structure is well‐characterized for typical mammalian societies; that is, societies where social group composition is stable, dispersal is male‐biased, and males form permanent breeding associations in just one or a few social groups over the course of their lives. However, genetic structure is not well understood for social mammals that differ from this pattern, including elephants. In elephant societies, social groups fission and fuse, and males never form permanent breeding associations with female groups. Here, we combine 33 years of behavioural observations with genetic information for 545 African elephants (Loxodonta africana), to investigate how mating and dispersal behaviours structure genetic variation between social groups and across age classes. We found that, like most social mammals, female matrilocality in elephants creates co‐ancestry within core social groups and significant genetic differentiation between groups (ΦST = 0.058). However, unlike typical social mammals, male elephants do not bias reproduction towards a limited subset of social groups, and instead breed randomly across the population. As a result, reproductively dominant males mediate gene flow between core groups, which creates cohorts of similar‐aged paternal relatives across the population. Because poaching tends to eliminate the oldest elephants from populations, illegal hunting and poaching are likely to erode fine‐scale genetic structure. We discuss our results and their evolutionary and conservation genetic implications in the context of other social mammals.
YA4-H! Youth Advocates for Health Teens as Teachers

Although the research literature speaks to the necessity of having a high-quality training curriculum for teens as teachers (TAT) programs, there are very few TAT training curricula available to practitioners. This review provides practitioners with a preview of the Youth Advocates for Health (YA4-H! ) TAT training curriculum. The YA4-H! TAT training curriculum exposes teens to several domains necessary to teach younger youth effectively, such as getting to know their audience, preparing to teach, teaching tips and tools, reflection and evaluation time, and recruitment strategies to help practitioners select youth to teach. Drawing from published research including Lee and Murdock’s (2001) work on best practices for preparing teen teachers to teach, this review presents an overview of the lesson categories included in the YA4-H! TAT training curriculum.
Say 'aaaaa' - Interactive vowel practice for second language learning

This paper reports on a system created to help language students learn the vowel inventory of Swedish. Formants are tracked, and a 3D ball moves over a vowel-chart canvas in real time. Target spheres are placed at the target values of vowels, and the students’ task is to get the target spheres. A calibration process of capturing data from three cardinal vowels is used to normalize the effects of different size vocal tract, thus making it possible for people to use the program, regardless of age, size, or gender. A third formant is used in addition to the first and second formant, to distinguish the difference between two Swedish vowels.
Reifying wildcards in Java using the EGO approach

Providing runtime information about generic types---that is, reifying generics---is a challenging problem studied in several research papers in the last years. However, the quest for finding effective and efficient solutions specifically targeted to the Java programming language is still open. In particular, the new mechanism of wildcards introduced in Java 5.0 significantly complicates the overall semantics of generics: its reification aspects are currently unexplored and pose serious implementation issues. In this paper we analyse such issues and study how they have been supported in the context of the EGO compiler. EGO is an approach for efficiently supporting runtime generics at compile-time in Java: synthetic code is automatically added to the source code by the compiler, so as to create generic runtime type information on a by-need basis, store it into object instances, and retrieve it when necessary in type-dependent operations. We show how the design of EGO has been completely and successfully extended to represent wildcard types, and how we deal with subtle issues concerning subtyping, capture conversion and wildcards capture in method calls.
Brain areas involved in scene rotation task: A fMRI study

When human perceivers compare two visual scenes presented from different viewpoints, recognition time increases with the rotation angle between them. We used fMRI to determine the brain areas involved in the scene rotation task. During the task, activation was observed in V1/V2, fusiform gyri, occipito-parietal cortices, and lateral prefrontal cortex. Moreover, ventral posterior insular cortices and anterior cingulate cortex were deactivated. Activation patterns of the areas were different. As the angle of rotation increased, volume of activation in V1/V2, right fusiform gyrus, right-occipito-parietal cortices and lateral prefrontal cortices increased, but level of activation did not. In left occipito-parietal cortices and anterior cingulate cortices, both volume and level was increased. In the insula, both volume and level were not changed over the rotation conditions, showing constant deactivation.
Dimensioning Transport Networks for VPNs over Capacities with Stepwise Costs

The virtual private network (VPN) services have become widespread and many of research activities aim to provide efficient methods for VPN design. However, only a few discrete bandwidths at different prices are available resulting in stepwise capacity cost functions (CCFs). Although numerous general heuristics are proposed for VPN design, they cannot deal with stepwise CCFs. This paper proposes a three step heuristic: first it "smooths" the stepwise CCFs, then it solves the modified problem using simulated allocation and finally it rounds either up or down the capacity steps via rerouting some of the traffic demands. As a reference we present the integer linear program (ILP) formulation of the considered problem and we also use a three-phase heuristic where we first smooth the stepwise CCF, then we configure the VPN (by e.g., simulated allocation) and then we round up the capacity values. We conduct simulations to evaluate the proposed methods and we show that enabling rerouting instead of always rounding up significantly increases performance. In the last section we illustrate the applicability of the method on a case study
Broadcasting in Networks of Unknown Topology in the Presence of Swamping

In this paper, we address the problem of broadcasting in a wireless network under a novel communication model: the {\em swamping} communication model. In this model, nodes communicate only with those nodes at geometric distance greater than $s$ and at most $r$ from them. Communication between nearby nodes under this model can be very time consuming, as the length of the path between two nodes within distance $s$ is only bounded above by the diameter $D$, in many cases. For the $n$-node lattice networks, we present algorithms of optimal time complexity, respectively $O(n/r + r/(r-s))$ for the lattice line and $O(\sqrt{n}/r + r/(r-s))$ for the two-dimensional lattice. We also consider networks of unknown topology of diameter $D$ and of a parameter $g$ ({\em granularity}). More specifically, we consider networks with $\gamma$ the minimum distance between any two nodes and $g = 1/\gamma$. We present broadcast algorithms for networks of nodes placed on the line and on the plane with respective time complexities $O(D/l + g^2)$ and $O(Dg/l + g^4)$, where $l \in \Theta(\max\{(1-s),\gamma\})$.
Online visual motion estimation using FastSLAM with SIFT features

This paper describes a technique to estimate the 3D motion of a vehicle using odometric sensors and a stereo camera. The algorithm falls into the category of simultaneous localization and mapping as a large database of visual landmarks is created. The algorithm has been field tested online on a rover traversing loose terrain in the presence of obstacles. The resulting position estimation errors are between 0.5% and 4% of distance travelled, a significant improvement over odometry alone.