Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The place of religion in public schools : a geographical analysis of U. S. and Canadian case law

This thesis assesses the role that spatial distinctions and understandings of geographical context make to U.S. and Canadian case law concerning religion in public schools. It focuses on the ways in which three concepts public/private, individual/collective, and place influenced and informed judicial decision-making in 22 leading cases. In a series of rulings since 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court has determined that government-directed religious practices have no place in public schools, primarily on the grounds that religion is a uniquely private concern. In addition, a majority of the Court has determined that peer pressure and the disciplinary atmosphere of the school make religious exercises and instruction coercive, even when they are formally voluntary. Since the adoption of the Charter in 1982, Canadian courts have also struck down long-standing traditions of Christian religious exercises in public schools. Their main concern has been to safeguard the individual against collective pressures, emanating from within the community and the school, to conform to majoritarian beliefs. While some religious parents object to secular public education, this has been framed as a matter of uncoerced private conviction, for which the state has no responsibility. Canadian and U.S. courts have also considered whether religious concerns may influence public school curricula. In general, they have determined that government is required to advance secular knowledge through its education system, as opposed to the faith-based perspectives. Such rulings remain deeply controversial, reflecting a broader cultural schism over the role of religion in public life, and the scale at which decisions about education policy should be made. Court rulings are as much concerned with this conflict as they are with strictly legal principles, and often focus on mapping out social spaces, and the boundaries that distinguish them. The law respecting the place of religion in public schools is, then, a fundamentally geographical project, which has not only restructured the spaces of state education, but has relied upon spatial concepts and distinctions to make sense of the issues at stake. 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less. ' 'The question is, ' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things. ' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master that's all. ' Lewis Carroll Through the Looking-Glass. As to freedom of conscience, I meddle with no man's conscience; but if you mean by that, liberty to celebrate the Mass, I would have you understand that in no place where the power of the Parliament of England prevails shall that be permitted. Oliver Cromwell Letterfor the Undeceiving o f the Deluded People ofireland.
Constantly Connected: What are the Biggest Challenges to Communication?

Social media (SM) are websites and applications which allow individuals to engage in social networking (Stevenson, 2010). This allows for friends and family to stay connected (Gemmill & Peterson, 2006), thus changing the dynamics of communication between people. However, little has been documented on the effect SM use has had on face-to-face communication. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted with university students to explore how the use of SM has changed face-to-face communication. Additionally, whether the Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) impacted on social interaction, and how university students’ understanding of this phenomenon was also explored. Findings from this study show that SM use has varying effects on face-to-face communication ranging from an effect on the relationship between individuals in the conversation, to an effect in the context of a social situation. This led to identification of a social etiquette for using SM in face-to-face communication. Links to social constructionist theory, as well as FoMO, were also identified in this research. Further research into the effect of FoMO on face-to-face communication and how SM use influences face-to-face communication skills would be beneficial.
Changing Waters: Trends in Central Appalachian Streamflow in the Presence of Mountaintop Mining

• Baseflow: Baseflow is the water in a stream that is not directly associated with a specific precipitation events (i.e., event runoff). It is usually comprised of groundwater flow and slower shallow subsurface flow components including soil water drainage. • Drainage area/catchment/watershed: A watershed is the geographic area that contributes water to the same single point in a river or stream. In this paper, I use the terms drainage area, catchment, and watershed synonymously. • Flow duration curves (FDCs): FDCs show exceedance probabilities for all runoff values observed in a watershed. They help us visualize the flow regime of a stream. The 95 th percentile, for example, is the runoff value that is exceeded 95% of the time (usually a low baseflow value), while the 5 th percentile is the runoff value that is only exceeded 5% of the time. • Flow regime: Flow regime describes the seasonal pattern of streamflow in a certain river (Kundzewicz & Robson, 2000). • Hydrograph: A graph of stream discharge over time past a specific point (cross section) in the stream. • Hyetograph: A graph of the amount of rainfall over time in a particular place (e.g., at a precipitation gage). • Runoff ratio: The ratio of amount of runoff from an area divided by the amount of precipitation (RR = Q/P) in a stream. This ratio describes the amount of precipitation that leaves the watershed via the stream. • Stationarity: The assumption that all natural processes occur at the same rate as in the past, i.e., no changes/trends over time (Milly et al., 2008). 4 • Streamflow/runoff: Streamflow is the amount of water leaving the watershed over time past a stream gauge. • Stream gauges are measuring devices in streams that can record water height. Water height can be converted to a flux and then to area-normalized runoff in millimeters (by dividing a water flux (e.g., m 3 /s) by the watershed area). Executive Summary Mountaintop mining (MTM) became popular in the 1970s in Central Appalachia and today remains the dominant form of coal mining in the region (Ross et al., 2016). Approximately 6-7% of the Appalachian Coalfield Region in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee is covered by mountaintop mining operations (Lindberg et. al, 2011). MTM involves stripping mountain surfaces by up to 300 vertical meters of rock material (" overburden ") to gain access to thin coal seams (Lindberg et al., …
Algorithm 8xx: AMD, an approximate minimum degree ordering algorithm

AMD is a set of routines that implements the approximate minimum degree ordering algorithm to permute sparse matrices prior to numerical factorization. There are versions written in both C and Fortran 77. A MATLAB interface is included. Categories and Subject Descriptors: G.1. 3 [Numerical Analysis]: Numerical Linear Al-gebra – linear systems (direct methods), sparse and very large systems G.4 [Mathematics of Computing]: Mathematical Software – algorithm analysis, eﬃciency General terms: Algorithms, Experimentation, Performance.
Light following & obstacle avoiding robot using autonomous & android based manual controller

In this work, we have presented a robot, which is compact, autonomous and fully functional. It is a proposed model which can be used in such an environment, which may be vulnerable and risky to human being. It has three types of functions. Those are light following, obstacle detection and controlling from an android device through bluetooth module. A mobile robot having a control unit integrating the processing and the main sensor functionalities into an android device is described and demonstrated in this paper.
High-Level Fault Tolerance in Distributed

We have been developing high-level checkpoint and restart methods for Dome (Distributed Object Migration Environment), a C++ library of data-parallel objects that are automatically distributed using PVM. There are several levels of programming abstraction at which fault tolerance mechanisms can be designed: high-level, where the checkpoint and restart are built into our C++ objects, but the program structure is severly constrained; high-level with preprocessing, where a preprocessor inserts extra C++ statements into the code to facilitate checkpoint and restart; and low-level, where periodically an interrupt causes a memory image to be written out. Because we consider porta-bility (both of our libraries and of the checkpoints they produce) to be an important goal, we focus on the higher-level checkpointing methods. In addition, we describe an implementation of high-level checkpointing, demonstrate it on multiple architectures, and show that it is eecient enough to provide good expected run times with low overhead, even in the case of frequent failures.
The Metaphorical Perceptions of Teacher Candidates on the Concept of “Web 2.0 Technology”

A metaphor is the expression of a concept or a phenomenon by a person by using analogy in the sense that s/he perceives. This study was conducted for the purpose of finding the mental images (i.e. the metaphors) which social studies teacher candidates have on Web 2.0 technology. The study group consisted of 77 social science teacher candidates. The raw data, which were obtained from each of the participants by completing the “ Web2.0 technology is like . , because . ” statement, were analyzed by employing both quantitative and qualitative data analysis techniques. The participants of the study produced 72 valid metaphors for Web 2.0 Technology. These metaphors were then examined in terms of their common features and were collected under 43 metaphors and 10 conceptual categories. According to the results of the present study, the social science teacher candidates explained Web 2.0 technology as a toolbox that contains everything in it, reflective, has the characteristic of changing, entertaining, octopus, interesting, a robot which can perform every task, canvas and informative. As a result of the present study, the metaphors that were produced by the social studies teacher candidates might be used in the process of explaining Web 2.0 concept.
Type I Interferon Reaction to Viral Infection in Interferon-Competent, Immortalized Cell Lines from the African Fruit Bat Eidolon helvum

Bats harbor several highly pathogenic zoonotic viruses including Rabies, Marburg, and henipaviruses, without overt clinical symptoms in the animals. It has been suspected that bats might have evolved particularly effective mechanisms to suppress viral replication. Here, we investigated interferon (IFN) response, -induction, -secretion and -signaling in epithelial-like cells of the relevant and abundant African fruit bat species, Eidolon helvum (E. helvum). Immortalized cell lines were generated; their potential to induce and react on IFN was confirmed, and biological assays were adapted to application in bat cell cultures, enabling comparison of landmark IFN properties with that of common mammalian cell lines. E. helvum cells were fully capable of reacting to viral and artificial IFN stimuli. E. helvum cells showed highest IFN mRNA induction, highly productive IFN protein secretion, and evidence of efficient IFN stimulated gene induction. In an Alphavirus infection model, O'nyong-nyong virus exhibited strong IFN induction but evaded the IFN response by translational rather than transcriptional shutoff, similar to other Alphavirus infections. These novel IFN-competent cell lines will allow comparative research on zoonotic, bat-borne viruses in order to model mechanisms of viral maintenance and emergence in bat reservoirs.
Gaze Pattern Variations among Men When Assessing Female Attractiveness

Pilot data from eye-tracking research suggest that each male participant has his own gaze pattern, usefully regarded as an individual difference, when viewing female targets whom they are rating for attractiveness. Gaze patterns appear to be consistent within a given male participant across a variety of target models, and these individual differences may override characteristics of the model in determining fixation points, body region focus, and other eye-tracker variables. The goal of the present study was to elucidate these variations of gaze pattern by assessing the extent to which systematic “types” of gaze patterns exist among a group of male participants. Latent class analysis was used to place 60 men into groups based on their gaze pattern. A two-cluster solution produced the most interpretable analysis, and groups formed by this clustering were significantly different from each other on variables of interest. Cross validation of this solution across three additional female models resulted in some support for generalization, though exceptions were noted.
Gene Expression Data Classification Using Discriminatively Regularized Sparse Subspace Learning

—Sparse representation which can represent high dimensional data effectively has been successfully used in computer vision and pattern recognition problems. However, it doesn’t consider the label information of data samples. To overcome this limitation, we develop a novel dimensionality reduction algorithm namely dscriminatively regularized sparse subspace learning(DR-SSL) in this paper. The proposed DR-SSL algorithm can not only make use of the sparse representation to model the data, but also can effective employ the label information to guide the procedure of dimensionality reduction. In addition,the presented algorithm can effectively deal with the out-of-sample problem.The experiments on gene-expression data sets show that the proposed algorithm is an effective tool for dimensionality reduction and gene-expression data classiﬁcation.
Organization Appetite for Research: An Integrative Research Definition and Audit Framework to Evaluate Corporate Practice towards Research

Organizational culture can be defined as the intermixture between values, visions, language, behaviors and beliefs that shape an entity’s unique operating environment. Although the personality of a business may be difficult to articulate, it can have a huge impact on how members of an organization deal with each other, customers and other stakeholders. A good organizational structure facilitates attainment of objectives through proper coordination of all activities. Recently, practitioners and academics aim to identify type of culture before starting a project. Accepting and conducting research is a project by itself, in which, many organizations have a flexible appetite to conduct research to help their objectives. This paper demonstrates the identification of appropriate frameworks to prepare an audit of the organizational culture towards research informed decision-making and management, which means that the paper will analyze definitions of what research means before conducting the organizational research-culture audit to understand the research appetite of the organization.
Temporin L: antimicrobial, haemolytic and cytotoxic activities, and effects on membrane permeabilization in lipid vesicles.

The temporins are a family of small, linear antibiotic peptides with intriguing biological properties. We investigated the antibacterial, haemolytic and cytotoxic activities of temporin L (FVQWFSKFLGRIL-NH2), isolated from the skin of the European red frog Rana temporaria. The peptide displayed the highest activity of temporins studied to date, against both human erythrocytes and bacterial and fungal strains. At variance with other known temporins, which are mainly active against Gram-positive bacteria, temporin L was also active against Gram-negative strains such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa A.T. C.C. 15692 and Escherichia coli D21 at concentrations comparable with those that are microbiocidal to Gram-positive bacteria. In addition, temporin L was cytotoxic to three different human tumour cell lines (Hut-78, K-562 and U-937), causing a necrosis-like cell death, although sensitivity to the peptide varied markedly with the specific cell line tested. A study of the interaction of temporin L with liposomes of different lipid compositions revealed that the peptide causes perturbation of bilayer integrity of both neutral and negatively charged membranes, as revealed by the release of a vesicle-encapsulated fluorescent marker, and that the action of the peptide is modulated to some extent by membrane lipid composition. In particular, the presence of negatively charged lipids in the model bilayer inhibits the lytic power of temporin L. We also show that the release of fluorescent markers caused by temporin L is size-dependent and that the peptide does not have a detergent-like effect on the membrane, suggesting that perturbation of bilayer organization takes place on a local scale, i.e. through the formation of pore-like openings.
Time-varying parametric modelling and time-dependent spectral characterisation with applications to EEG signals using multiwavelets

A new time-varying autoregressive (TVAR) modelling approach is proposed for non-stationary signal processing and analysis, with application to EEG data modelling and power spectral estimation. In the new parametric modelling framework, the time-dependent coefficients of the TVAR model are represented using a novel multiwavelet decomposition scheme. The time-varying modelling problem is then reduced to regression selection and parameter estimation, which can be effectively resolved by using a forward orthogonal regression algorithm. Two examples, one for an artificial signal and another for an EEG signal, are given to show the effectiveness and applicability of the new TVAR modelling method.
A French Human Reference Corpus for Multi-Document Summarization and Sentence Compression

This paper presents two corpora produced within the RPM2 project: a multi-document summarization corpus and a sentence compression corpus. Both corpora are in French. The first one is the only one we know in this language. It contains 20 topics with 20 documents each. A first set of 10 documents per topic is summarized and then the second set is used to produce an update summarization (new information). 4 annotators were involved and produced a total of 160 abstracts. The second corpus contains all the sentences of the first one. 4 annotators were asked to compress the 8432 sentences. This is the biggest corpus of compressed sentences we know, whatever the language. The paper provides some figures in order to compare the different annotators: compression rates, number of tokens per sentence, percentage of tokens kept according to their POS, position of dropped tokens in the sentence compression phase, etc. These figures show important differences from an annotator to the other. Another point is the different strategies of compression used according to the length of the sentence.
Quantum topological phase transition at the microscopic level

We study a quantum phase transition between a phase which is topologically ordered and one which is not. We focus on a spin model, an extension of the toric code, for which we obtain the exact ground state for all values of the coupling constant that takes the system across the phase transition. We compute the entanglement and the topological entropy of the system as a function of this coupling constant and show that the topological entropy remains constant all the way up to the critical point and jumps to zero beyond it. Despite the jump in the topological entropy, the transition is second order as detected via local observables.
A survey of synchronization methods for parallel computers

An examination is given of how traditional synchronization methods influence the design of MIMD (multiple-instruction multiple-data-stream) multiprocessors. She provides an overview of MIMD multiprocessing and goes on to discuss semaphore-based implementations (Ultracomputers, Cedar, and the Sequent Balance/21000), monitor-based implementations (the HM/sup 2/p) and implementations based on message-passing (HEP, the BBN Butterfly and the Transputer). <<ETX>>
Analysis and Design of Botnet Detection System

Botnet-based attacking is becoming one of the most serious threats on the Internet. Lots of approaches have been proposed to detect the presence of botnet. However, most of them just focus on offline detection methods by tracking the historical network traffic, which is not suitable for real-time and general detection. In this paper, we propose a new technique that can detect the botnet activities in an online fashion, which is also independent of the botnet structure. The experimental evaluations show that this approach can achieve online botnet detection efficiently.
Cortico-cortical communication dynamics

In principle, cortico-cortical communication dynamics is simple: neurons in one cortical area communicate by sending action potentials that release glutamate and excite their target neurons in other cortical areas. In practice, knowledge about cortico-cortical communication dynamics is minute. One reason is that no current technique can capture the fast spatio-temporal cortico-cortical evolution of action potential transmission and membrane conductances with sufficient spatial resolution. A combination of optogenetics and monosynaptic tracing with virus can reveal the spatio-temporal cortico-cortical dynamics of specific neurons and their targets, but does not reveal how the dynamics evolves under natural conditions. Spontaneous ongoing action potentials also spread across cortical areas and are difficult to separate from structured evoked and intrinsic brain activity such as thinking. At a certain state of evolution, the dynamics may engage larger populations of neurons to drive the brain to decisions, percepts and behaviors. For example, successfully evolving dynamics to sensory transients can appear at the mesoscopic scale revealing how the transient is perceived. As a consequence of these methodological and conceptual difficulties, studies in this field comprise a wide range of computational models, large-scale measurements (e.g., by MEG, EEG), and a combination of invasive measurements in animal experiments. Further obstacles and challenges of studying cortico-cortical communication dynamics are outlined in this critical review.
Portfolio management with cost model using multi objective genetic algorithms

報告番号: ; 学位授与年月日: 2007-09-28; 学位の種別: 修士; 学位の種類: 修士(科学) ; 学位記番号: 修創域第2336号 ; 研究科・専攻: 新領域創成科学研究科基盤情報学専攻
Three Essays on Taxation, Growth and Consumption

OF THE DISSERTATION THREE ESSAYS ON TAXATION, GROWTH AND CONSUMPTION by Yi Ding Florida International University, 2014 Miami, Florida Professor Cem Karayalcin, Major Professor The purpose of this dissertation is to examine three distributional issues in macroeconomics. First I explore the effects fiscal federalism on economic growth across regions in China. Using the comprehensive official data set of China for 31 regions from 1952 until 1999, I investigate a number of indicators used by the literature to measure federalism and find robust support for only one such measure: the ratio of local total revenue to local tax revenue. Using a difference-in-difference approach and exploiting the two-year gap in the implementation of a tax reform across different regions of China, I also identify a positive relationship between fiscal federalism and regional economic growth. The second paper hypothesizes that an inequitable distribution of income negatively affects the rule of law in resource-rich economies and provides robust evidence in support of this hypothesis. By investigating a data set that contains 193 countries and using econometric methodologies such as the fixed effects estimator and the generalized method of moments estimator, I find that resource-abundance improves the quality of institutions, as long as income and wealth disparity remains below a certain threshold. When inequality moves beyond this threshold, the positive effects of the resource-abundance level on institutions diminish quickly and turn negative eventually. This paper, thus, provides robust evidence about the endogeneity of