Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How Powerful is the Evidence in Criminology? On Whether We Should Fear a Coming Crisis of Confidence

Abstract A crisis of confidence has struck the behavioral and social sciences. A key factor driving the crisis is the low levels of statistical power in many studies. Low power is problematic because it leads to increased rates of false-negative results, inflated false-discovery rates, and over-estimates of effect sizes. To determine whether these issues impact criminology, we computed estimates of statistical power by drawing 322 mean effect sizes and 271 average sample sizes from 81 meta-analyses. The results indicated criminological studies, on average, have a moderate level of power (mean = 0.605), but there is variability. This variability is observed across general studies as well as those designed to test interventions. Studies using macro-level data tend to have lower power than studies using individual-level data. To avoid a crisis of confidence, criminologists must not ignore statistical power and should be skeptical of large effects found in studies with small samples.
Path Planning Using Wave Front's Improvement Methods

In this paper, we compared several methods that utilized for improving performance and avoiding re-expansion wave in wave expansion algorithm. Wave re-expansion in big scale environments takes considerable amount of time and process. By the use of those it's been tried to prevent the re-expansion of the wave. One of this methods for an environment with moving and suddenly obstacles is used and three methods for an environment with suddenly obstacles. Furthermore, the simulation results reflects that how the methods has improved the wave expansion algorithm and we show the number of cells that compared or changed and length path from start to end and showed productivity toward another than which one is better than another.
Determinism Is Overrated: What Really Makes Multithreaded Programs Hard to Get Right and What Can Be Done About It

Our accelerating computational demand and the rise of multicore hardware have made parallel programs, especially shared-memory multithreaded programs, increasingly pervasive and critical. Yet, these programs remain extremely difficult to write, test, analyze, debug, and verify. Conventional wisdom has attributed these difficulties to nondeterminism, and researchers have recently dedicated much effort to bringing determinism into multithreading. In this paper, we argue that determinism is not as useful as commonly perceived: it is neither sufficient nor necessary for reliability. We present our view on why multithreaded programs are difficult to get right, describe a promising approach we call stable multithreading to dramatically improve reliability, and summarize our last four years' research on building and applying stable multithreading systems.
An Improved Method of Character Network Analysis for Literary Criticism: A Case Study of

As a computational approach to literary criticism, the method of character network analysis has attracted attention. The character network is composed of nodes as characters and links as relationship between characters, and has been used to analyze literary works systematically. However, there were limitations in that relationships between characters were so superficial that they could not reflect intimate relationships and quantitative data from the network were not interpreted in depth regarding meaning of literary works. In this study, we propose an improved method of character network analysis through a case study on the play <Hamlet>. First, we segmented the character network into a dialogue network focused on speaker-to-listener relationship and an opinion network focused on subject-to-object relationship. We analyzed these networks in various ways and discussed how analysis results could reflect structure and meaning of the work. Through these studies, we strived to find a way of organic and meaningful connection between literary criticism in humanities and network analysis in computer science.
New Insights into the Nature of Cerebellar-Dependent Eyeblink Conditioning Deficits in Schizophrenia: A Hierarchical Linear Modeling Approach

Evidence of cerebellar dysfunction in schizophrenia has mounted over the past several decades, emerging from neuroimaging, neuropathological, and behavioral studies. Consistent with these findings, cerebellar-dependent delay eyeblink conditioning (dEBC) deficits have been identified in schizophrenia. While repeated-measures analysis of variance is traditionally used to analyze dEBC data, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) more reliably describes change over time by accounting for the dependence in repeated-measures data. This analysis approach is well suited to dEBC data analysis because it has less restrictive assumptions and allows unequal variances. The current study examined dEBC measured with electromyography in a single-cue tone paradigm in an age-matched sample of schizophrenia participants and healthy controls (N = 56 per group) using HLM. Subjects participated in 90 trials (10 blocks) of dEBC, during which a 400 ms tone co-terminated with a 50 ms air puff delivered to the left eye. Each block also contained 1 tone-alone trial. The resulting block averages of dEBC data were fitted to a three-parameter logistic model in HLM, revealing significant differences between schizophrenia and control groups on asymptote and inflection point, but not slope. These findings suggest that while the learning rate is not significantly different compared to controls, associative learning begins to level off later and a lower ultimate level of associative learning is achieved in schizophrenia. Given the large sample size in the present study, HLM may provide a more nuanced and definitive analysis of differences between schizophrenia and controls on dEBC.
A rational model of preference learning and choice prediction by children

Young children demonstrate the ability to make inferences about the preferences of other agents based on their choices. However, there exists no overarching account of what children are doing when they learn about preferences or how they use that knowledge. We use a rational model of preference learning, drawing on ideas from economics and computer science, to explain the behavior of children in several recent experiments. Specifically, we show how a simple econometric model can be extended to capture two- to four-year-olds' use of statistical information in inferring preferences, and their generalization of these preferences.
Sequential Non-Stationary Noise Tracking Using Particle Filtering with Switching Dynamical System

This paper addresses a speech recognition problem in non-stationary noise environments: the estimation of noise sequences. To solve this problem, we present a particle filter-based sequential noise estimation method for the front-end processing of speech recognition. In the proposed method, the particle filter is defined by a dynamical system based on Polyak averaging and feedback. We also introduce a switching dynamical system into the particle filter to cope with the state transition characteristics of non-stationary noise. In the evaluation results, we observed that the proposed method improves speech recognition accuracy in the results of non-stationary noise environments by a noise compensation method with stationary noise assumptions
‘A taste of this lively language’: attitudes towards languages other than English in lonely planet phrasebooks

ABSTRACT This paper addresses language attitudes towards non-English, mostly non-Western, languages in the phrasebooks published by Lonely Planet for English-speaking travellers to multilingual regions of the Global South. Specifically, this paper examines attitudes towards the languages exemplified in Lonely Planet’s second edition of Africa: Phrasebook and Dictionary (2013), second edition of India: Phrasebook and Dictionary (2014), fourth edition of Pidgin: Phrasebook (2015), third edition of Hill Tribes (2008), second edition of South Pacific Phrasebook (2008), and third edition of Southeast Asia: Phrasebook and Dictionary (2013). In so doing, this research argues that the phrasebooks describe these languages and their speakers as exotic, monolithic, simplistic, and deterministic; and construct the traveller’s efforts to use these languages as acts of benevolence.
Web searches for learning. How language teachers search for online resources

Abstract – This paper discusses the results of a project investigating the use of web searching for professional purpose by language teachers of different school levels. The study focuses on language teachers’ actual practice: criteria for planning the web search, identifying and selecting resources, sharing and using them for their teaching practice. Resources (Open Educational Resources in particular) have been multiplying on the web, but finding specific resources is often difficult because they are not uniformly classified and organized on the net, and there are no user-friendly interface/tools that facilitate search. This research project aims at identifying best practices and developing guidelines for web searching in language teacher education. The research questions addressed are: How do (language) teachers search for resources on the Web? What categories of resources? What strategies do they adopt for selecting, assessing and sharing resources? We interviewed and recorded six expert teachers about their web searches for educational purposes; we video-recorded their web searching tasks while they were commenting on their online choices through think-aloud protocols. The results of data analysis show main trends in the strategies used by these expert teachers: personalization of the web searching process by accessing websites suggested by trusted colleagues offline or online; selecting trustworthy websites of well-known institutions; relevance of resources not created for educational purposes; need for adaptation and re-contextualization of resources; web searches for class activities as a reflection on teaching practice and personal development. Ultimately web searching is a heuristic process of personal and collective learning for professional purpose in a lifelong perspective.
Taxonomy of Individual Variations in Aesthetic Responses to Fractal Patterns

In two experiments, we investigate group and individual preferences in a range of different types of patterns with varying fractal-like scaling characteristics. In Experiment 1, we used 1/f filtered grayscale images as well as their thresholded (black and white) and edges only counterparts. Separate groups of observers viewed different types of images varying in slope of their amplitude spectra. Although with each image type, the groups exhibited the “universal” pattern of preference for intermediate amplitude spectrum slopes, we identified 4 distinct sub-groups in each case. Sub-group 1 exhibited a typical peak preference for intermediate amplitude spectrum slopes (“intermediate”; approx. 50%); sub-group 2 exhibited a linear increase in preference with increasing amplitude spectrum slope (“smooth”; approx. 20%), while sub-group 3 exhibited a linear decrease in preference as a function of the amplitude spectrum slope (“sharp”; approx. 20%). Sub-group 4 revealed no significant preference (“other”; approx. 10%). In Experiment 2, we extended the range of different image types and investigated preferences within the same observers. We replicate the results of our first experiment and show that individual participants exhibit stable patterns of preference across a wide range of image types. In both experiments, Q-mode factor analysis identified two principal factors that were able to explain more than 80% of interindividual variations in preference across all types of images, suggesting a highly similar dimensional structure of interindividual variations in preference for fractal-like scaling characteristics.
APMA 990: Final Project Surface Reconstruction

Many modern devices, such as laser range scanners, for acquiring digital representations of three dimensional object produce an output that can be interpreted as a collection of sample points in R. Surface reconstruction refers to the process of turning an unorganized set of points into a representation of the underlying continuous surface that these points are intended to describe. Digital representations of continuous surfaces take many forms, but they can be broadly classified into two categories: explicit and implicit. The canonical example of an explicit representation is a mesh which is a piecewise linear approximation of the original surface. Such a representation has the advantage that it is easy to manipulate local regions of the surface. For mesh data structures in particular there is a wide range of algorithms available for processing the data. In an implicit representation, the surface is described by a level set of some function φ : R → R; it is the representation used in level set methods. In computer graphics, level set representations have until recently been primarily limited to ’blobby’ or ’soft’ objects. With implicit surfaces objects can easily be deformed so that their topology or connectivity changes, but
Discovery of a cataclysmic variable with a sub-stellar companion

We nd that the ROSAT source 1RXS J105010.3-140431 is a cataclysmic variable with orbital period of 88.6 min and a spectrum closely resembling WZ Sge. In particular, emission lines are flanked by Stark-broadened absorption wings probably originating in the photosphere of a compact object. The Balmer absorption lines can be modeled by the spectrum of a DA white dwarf with 13 000 <T e < 24 000 K. The strong absorption lines allowed us to obtain direct radial velocities of the white dwarf using the cross-correlation technique. We nd an extremely low white dwarf radial velocity half amplitude, Kwd =4 1k m s 1 . This is consistent with the upper limit obtained from the H emission line wing K< 20 km s 1 . The corresponding mass function is incompatible with a main sequence secondary, but is compatible with a post orbital period minimum cataclysmic variable with a brown dwarf-like secondary. The formal solution gives a secondary mass of 10{20 Jovian masses. Doppler maps for the emission lines and the hypothesis of black-body emission indicate a steady state (T r 3=4 ) accretion disk mainly emitting in H and an optically thicker hotspot with a strong contribution to the higher order Balmer lines and He I 5875. As in other long cycle length dwarf novae, evidence for inner disk removal is found from the analysis of the emission lines.
Tamper-resistant replicated peer-to-peer storage using hierarchical signatures

Peer-to-peer-based file replication is a proven approach to provide cooperative robust backup for data: if one peer does not have a specific datum, another one might. If enough peers participate, the overall system can survive isolated failures. Applying this approach to distributed file integrity checking (or similar security-sensitive areas) requires that current and untampered information is distributed among the peers in such a way that a limited number of malicious peers cannot subvert or sabotage the overall system. This paper presents a mechanism to provide such tamper-resistant replicated storage in a decentralised peer-to-peer system where no component is trusted a priori. We present a system model for our mechanism, and discuss the threats and countermeasures used to detect tampering. We also give an analysis of various distribution strategies and their respective costs and benefits as observed in our research implementation.
Automated Software Debugging Using Hybrid Static/Dynamic Analysis

Title of dissertation: AUTOMATED SOFTWARE DEBUGGING USING HYBRID STATIC/DYNAMIC ANALYSIS Ethar Elsaka, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation directed by: Professor Atif Memon Department of Computer Science With the increasing complexity of today’s software, the software development process is becoming highly time and resource consuming. The increasing number of software configurations, input parameters, usage scenarios, supporting platforms, external dependencies, and versions plays an important role in expanding the costs of maintaining and repairing unforeseeable software faults. To repair software faults, developers spend considerable time in identifying the scenarios leading to those faults and root-causing the problems. While software debugging remains largely manual, it is not the case with software testing and verification. The goal of this research is to improve the software development process in general, and software debugging process in particular, by devising techniques and methods for automated software debugging, which leverage the advances in automatic test case generation and replay. In this research, novel algorithms are devised to discover faulty execution paths in programs by utilizing already existing software test cases, which can be either automatically or manually generated. The execution traces, or alternatively, the sequence covers of the failing test cases are extracted. Afterwards, commonalities between these test case sequence covers are extracted, processed, analyzed, and then presented to the developers in the form of subsequences that may be causing the fault. The hypothesis is that code sequences that are shared between a number of faulty test cases for the same reason resemble the faulty execution path, and hence, the search space for the faulty execution path can be narrowed down by using a large number of test cases. To achieve this goal, an efficient algorithm is implemented for finding common subsequences among a set of code sequence covers. Optimization techniques are devised to generate shorter and more logical sequence covers, and to select subsequences with high likelihood of containing the root cause among the set of all possible common subsequences. A hybrid static/dynamic analysis approach is designed to trace back the common subsequences from the end to the root cause. A debugging tool is created to enable developers to use the approach, and integrate it with an existing Integrated Development Environment. The tool is also integrated with the environment’s program editors so that developers can benefit from both the tool suggestions, and their source code counterparts. Finally, a comparison between the developed approach and the state-of-theart techniques shows that developers need only to inspect a small number of lines in order to find the root cause of the fault. Furthermore, experimental evaluation shows that the algorithm optimizations lead to better results in terms of both the algorithm running time and the output subsequence length. AUTOMATED SOFTWARE DEBUGGING USING HYBRID STATIC/DYNAMIC ANALYSIS
A CALIBRATION PROCEDURE USING TOPMODEL TO DETERMINE SUITABILITY FOR EVALUATING POTENTIAL CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECTS ON WATER YIELD 1

ABSTRACT: An evaluation was conducted on three forested upland watersheds in the northeastern U.S. to test the suitability of TOPMODEL for predicting water yield over a wide range of climatic scenarios. The analysis provides insight of the usefulness of TOPMODEL as a predictive tool for future assessments of potential long‐term changes in water yield as a result of changes in global climate. The evaluation was conducted by developing a calibration procedure to simulate a range of climatic extremes using historical temperature, precipitation, and streamfiow records for years having wet, average, and dry precipitation amounts from the Leading Ridge (Pennsylvania), Fernow (West Virginia), and Hubbard Brook (New Hampshire) Experimental Watersheds. This strategy was chosen to determine whether the model could be successfully calibrated over a broad range of soil moisture conditions with the assumption that this would be representative of the sensitivity necessary to predict changes in streamfiow under a variety of climate change scenarios. The model calibration was limited to a daily time step, yet performed reasonably well for each watershed. Model efficiency, a least squares measure of how well a model performs, averaged between 0.64 and 0.78. A simple test of the model whereby daily temperatures were increased by 1.7°C, resulted in annual water yield decreases of 4 to 15 percent on the three watersheds. Although these results makes the assumption that the model components adequately describe the system, this version of TOPMODEL is capable to predict water yield impacts given subtle changes in the temperature regime. This suggests that adequate representations of the effects of climate change on water yield for regional assessment purposes can be expected using the TOPMODEL concept.
Challenging Global Geographies of Power: Sending Children back to Nigeria from the United Kingdom for Education

Abstract West Africans have a long history of investing in their children's education by sending them to Britain. Yet, some young British-Nigerians are being sent to Nigeria for secondary education, going against a long historical grain. The movement of children from London to Nigeria is about the making of good subjects who possess particular cultural dispositions and behave in such a manner as to ensure educational success and the reproduction of middle-class subjectivities within neoliberal globalization. We maintain that this movement highlights the way in which global geographies of power—rooted in a colony-metropole divide—are being challenged and reconfigured, serving to provincialize the UK, through the educational choices that Nigerian parents make for their children. Such small acts disrupt imagined geographies and particular spatial and temporal configurations of progress and modernity, in which former colonial subjects have traveled to the metropole for education, while generating counter-narratives about Nigerian education, society, and economy. Yet, the methods used to instill new dispositions and habits in the contemporary Nigerian educational context are informed by the British educational colonial legacy of discipline through corporal punishment—physical punishment was central to the civilizing mission of British colonial educational policy. Consequently, the choice to send children to school in Nigeria and other African countries both challenges global geographies of power and illuminates the continued relevance of the colonial educational legacy and its disciplinary strategies, which are, in turn, part of the broader project of modernity itself.
An event-based middleware for the remote management of runtime hardware reconfiguration

A procedure to remotely control hardware reconfiguration at runtime is introduced in this paper. Low-level interactions are abstracted by a middleware service that can be called by requests issued by the user or by the underlying operating system. The dynamic loading of hardware modules is managed by a kernel reacting to user-defined events with a customizable scheduling strategy. The system has been designed in a flexible and portable way to support most common runtime reconfiguration approaches and operating systems. Interactions with the middleware are based on commands allowing custom composition and scheduling of hardware modules after deployment. The operation of the middleware is illustrated with the example of a remotely reconfigurable sensor node in a high-performance wireless sensor network.