Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Football U.: Spectator Sports in the Life of the American University

The Big Ten . the SEC . the Final Four . sometimes it seems that American higher education is more about sports than studies. Not so, says this well-researched, evenhanded study of athletics in university life. Sports--particularly football--play a key role in defining institutions that might otherwise be indistinguishable and are an indispensable tool in building a sense of community on campus, as well as an important factor in mustering alumni and political support.While abuses exist, the "football school" is not only a legitimate member of the academic community but an inevitable one as well--and football provides much-needed identity at every level from the local to the national scale. Pointing out that universities compete as much academically as athletically, J. Douglas Toma argues that fielding a winning sports team is a quick, effective way to win recognition and that doing so pays dividends across the board, by raising public awareness (thereby making a school more attractive to potential students and faculty) and by creating a wider constituency of "fans" whose loyalties pay off in increased contributions and appropriations that support academic programs as well. He notes that universities like Harvard and Yale, now eclipsed on the gridiron, were "football powers" in the era when America's westward expansion spawned new schools unable to challenge older institutions academically but able to win acclaim through sports. This fosters a campus and alumni culture based on "football Saturday"--a bonding experience that helped forge a larger community whose support, both personal and financial, has become integral to the life of the institution.Football U. brings welcome impartiality to a subject all too often riven by controversy, pitting football boosters against critics who complain that academic achievement takes second place to athletic success. But as a tool for creating "brand awareness" as well as local loyalty and widespread support, high-profile athletic programs meet a variety of institutional needs in ways no other aspect of university life can. This, Toma observes, is a two-edged sword, for even as it fosters collegiality, it discourages reform when the pendulum swings too far in the direction of athletic dominance. Nevertheless, Football U. is here to stay.J. Douglas Toma is Director and Senior Fellow, The Executive Doctorate and Penn Center for Higher Education Management, the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education.
Does Improved Local Supply of Schooling Enhance Intergenerational Mobility in Education? Evidence from Jordan

This paper examines the effect of increased local supply of schooling on intergenerational mobility in education in Jordan. We use a unique data set that links individual data on own schooling and parents’ schooling for adults, from a household survey, with the annual supply of schools in the sub-district of birth, from a school census. We identify the effect by exploiting the variation in the supply of basic and secondary public schools across cohorts and sub-districts of birth in Jordan, controlling for both cohort and sub-district of birth fixed effects. School availability is determined based on the number of sex-appropriate public schools in the individual’s sub-district of birth at the time the individual was ready to start that schooling stage. Our findings show that the local availability of basic public schools does in fact increase intergenerational mobility in education. For instance, an increase in the supply of basic public schools of one school per 1,000 people reduces the father-son and mother-son associations of schooling by 10 percent and the father-daughter and mother-daughter associations by nearly 30 percent. However, an increase in the local supply of secondary public schools does not seem to have a similar effect on intergenerational mobility in education.
Association between CEBPE Variant and Childhood Acute Leukemia Risk: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis of 22 Studies

The CCAAT/enhancer binding proteins (CEBPs) have been involved in the etiology of acute leukemia (AL) and investigated in numerous genetic association studies, however, the results were inconclusive. The current meta-analysis was conducted to clarify the effect of CEBPE rs2239633 variant on childhood AL risk. Electronic literature search was performed on August 15, 2014, from databases of Medline, PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science. A total of 22 case-control studies were eligible for the pooled analysis. The results demonstrated that rs2239633 A allele was significantly associated with a decreased risk of childhood AL (A vs G: OR=0.87, 95%CI = 0.80, 0.94, p<0.001), especially in B-cell ALL subgroup (A vs G: OR = 0.79, 95%CI = 0.74, 0.83, p<0.001), but not among T-cell ALL or AML subgroups. In the stratified analysis by ethnicity, the association was observed in Europeans (A vs G: OR = 0.80, 95%CI = 0.76, 0.84, p<0.001) but not in Asian and mixed populations. Moreover, the results of sensitivity and cumulative meta-analysis indicated the robustness of our results. Also, Begg’s and Egger’s tests did not indicate any evidence of obvious asymmetry. In summary, our study provided evidence that CEBPE rs2239633 variant is associated with decreased risk of childhood B-cell ALL in Europeans.
Discrete breathers in protein secondary structure

The role of the rigidity of a peptide chain in its equilibrium dynamics is investigated within a realistic model with stringent microscopically derived coupling interaction potential and effective on-site potential. The coupling interaction characterizing the chain rigidity and the effective on-site potentials are calculated for three main types of protein secondary structure. The coupling interaction is found to be surprisingly weak for all of them but different in character: repulsive for alpha-helix and anti-parallel beta-sheet structures and attractive for parallel beta-sheet structure. The effective on-site potential is found to be a hard one for alpha-helix and anti-parallel beta-sheet and a soft one for parallel beta-sheet. In all three types of protein secondary structures a stable zig-zag shape discrete breather (DB) associated with the oscillations of torsional (dihedral) angles can exist due to weakness of the coupling interaction. However, since the absorption of far infrared radiation (IR) by proteins is known to require the existence of rather long chains of hydrogen bonds that takes place only in alpha-helicies, then one can conclude that the excitation of a DB in such a way is possible in alpha-helix and seems to be hardly possible in beta-sheet structures. The interpretation of the recent experiments of Xie et al. on far IR laser pulse spectroscopy of proteins is suggested. The frequency of a DB in an the alpha-helix is obtained in the region of 115 cm^{-1} in accordance with these experiments.
Predictors of Treatment Response for Suicidal Youth Referred for Emergency Psychiatric Hospitalization

This study evaluated factors that predicted poor treatment response for 70 suicidal youth (ages 10 to 17 years; 67% African American) who received either multisystemic therapy (MST) or inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. Following treatment, suicidal youth were classified as either treatment responders or nonresponders based on caregiver or youth report of attempted suicide. Overall, female gender, depressive affect, parental control, caregiver psychiatric distress, and caregiver history of psychiatric hospitalization were associated with suicide attempts. However, controlling for other variables, only depressive affect and parental control predicted treatment nonresponse. These results suggest the need to adapt existing treatments for suicidal youth to better address problems relating to youth depression.
NATO and the European Union

Report which discusses issues related to the North Atlantic Trade Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) including the level of involvement of the entities in using political and military actions to defend against terrorism and proliferation, the types of military forces necessary, the role of the EU in crisis management, the appropriateness of decision-making procedures to respond to emerging threats, and the role of other international institutions.
A neuromimetic spiking neural network for simulating cortical circuits

In this paper, we present an hardware implementation of spiking neural networks based on analog integrated circuits. These ICs compute in real-time biologically realistic cortical neuron models. Each integrated circuit includes five neurons and analog memory cells to set and store the conductance model parameters. The system allows switching on-line the model of cortical neuron. Circuits are embedded in a multi-board system all connected to a backplane with daisy-chain facilities. Each action potential computed by analog neuromimetic chips is time-stamped when detected by digital device (FPGA). These FPGAs are also in charge of the real-time plasticity computation and of controlling inter-boards communication. The implemented neural plasticity is also biological relevant thanks to its time dependent computation. The whole system is designed to compute programmable models and connectivity schemes in biological real-time. It will allow extending the hybrid technique (connection between biological and artificial neurons) to Micro Electrode Array.
Multiprocessor System-on-Chip Profiling Architecture: Design and Implementation

With the growing needs for advanced functionalities in modern embedded systems, it is now necessary to integrate multiple processors in the system, preferably on a single chip, to support the required computing complexity. The problem is that such multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) architecture is very complex and its internal behavior is very difficult to track. An effective tool for profiling the behavior of the MPSoC system is in great need. Such a tool is very useful during system design for exploiting various options and identifying potential bottlenecks. In this paper, we introduce the MultiProcessor Profiling Architecture (MPPA) -- a general framework for profiling MPSoC embedded systems. The MPPA framework entails the use of FPGA emulation for the target system, the embedding of performance counters for recording system events, and the development of OS drivers for collecting the profiled data. To demonstrate its use, we show the implementation of an MPSoC emulation system based on Leon3 cores following the MPPA framework. We also show how the MPPA framework and the emulator help the designers to identify performance problems and improve their MPSoC embedded system design.
A case study for industrial centrifugal pump as a vibration source for macro-scale electromagnetic energy harvesting

This research proposes the industrial centrifugal pump as a potential application for vibration energy harvesting. The energy harvested from the centrifugal pump will be utilized in the condition monitoring system of the pump itself. The complete test setup along with the vibration results from an industrial centrifugal pump are presented. The most optimum position on the pump is proposed based on the highest vibration level achieved among all six tested positions. Furthermore, a study is performed on the power requirement of currently available wireless vibration sensors in the market. Based on the study, an estimate of expected power requirement from the energy harvester is presented. Various electromagnetic type energy harvesters are reviewed and compared in terms of FoMv (volume figure of merit) in order to find out the most optimum design and techniques. Lastly, based on all the test results and studies performed, an electromagnetic energy harvester design is proposed for the application of the centrifugal pump keeping the physical dynamics in scope.
LINE IN THE SAND

Intrusion detection along perimeters or borders is a surveillance problem of practical value that is well suited to wireless sensor networks. The goal of the work described here is to rapidly detect, track, and classify intruders along an arbitrary or ad hoc border. We examine the requirements of border surveillance in the context of a military scenario called “Line in the Sand” or “LITS. ” We explore strategies to detect and classify various intruders, develop a prototype to demonstrate our approach, and evaluate the system’s performance. Our approach is based on a distributed network of wireless sensors combined into coherent and incoherent sensor arrays that perform in situ signal processing, data aggregation, and array processing. The LITS architecture improves upon existing unattended battlefield ground sensors by eliminating both the need for hand-placement of sensors and radio repeaters, and by replacing the simple radio repeaters with integrated sensors nodes with built-in wireless microrouters. Hand-placement and repeaters are obviated though the use of ad hoc routing, localization, array processing, and data aggregation.
YA-TRAP: yet another trivial RFID authentication protocol

Security and privacy in RFID systems is an important and active research area. A number of challenges arise due to the extremely limited computational, storage and communication abilities of a typical RFID tag. This paper describes a simple technique for inexpensive untraceable identification of RFID tags. The proposed protocol (called YA-TRAP) involves minimal interaction between a tag and a reader and places low computational burden on the tag (a single keyed hash). It also imposes low computational load on the back-end server
Energy-efficient cellular communications powered by smart grid technology

The energy efficiency aspect of cellular networks is a vital topic of research over the recent days. As energy consumption is on the rise and the price of electricity is increasing very rapidly, necessity to reduce electricity usage in every aspect is becoming much more significant. The power grid infrastructure, from which the cellular networks attain the required electricity for operation is considering a significant change from the traditional electricity grid to the smart grid. The base stations, which are the main candidates for energy consumption in cellular networks, remain in operation even when there are a very few users or no user at all. In this paper, we propose an effective application scenario of the femtocell technology for power saving purpose of cellular networks. Effective deployment of femto-access-points in the required places can reduce the power usage of cellular networks by turning off the redundant base stations. Moreover, the signal to noise plus interference ratio is also enhanced in comparison to the traditional scheme. The base station turn off probability and the energy consumption in the overall network are analyzed. The comparison results show that the proposed energy efficient model can significantly reduce energy consumption and increase the service quality of the cellular users.
Validation of OMITotal Ozone Using Ground-Based Brewer Observations

Near-to-real time as well as “archive quality” Brewer total ozone observations, which are performed with well maintained and calibrated instruments over the Northern Hemisphere have been used for the validation of the total ozone column product of the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) aboard the NASA EOS-Aura satellite. During the commissioning phase of OMI, the near-to-real time ground-based data, which are submitted to the WMO Northern Hemisphere Ozone Mapping Centre within few hours after observation, have been employed to check the behaviour of the OMI instrument as a function of measuring geometry. In addition the near-to-real time ground based data are also used as an early warning tool for the detection of possible problems during the operation of OMI. Archived groundbased data have been used to validate more than one year of OMI-TOMS and OMI-DOAS total ozone measurements. The comparisons show an agreement of better than 1% for the OMI-TOMS measurements and better than 2% for OMIDOAS.
Synthetic aperture interferometric imaging using a passive microwave coding device

There has been growing interest in the use of microwave synthetic aperture radiometers since their could solve the trade-off between the image resolution and the antennas aperture size. Compared to classical techniques, SAIR (Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radiometer) can reach a large field of view (FOV) and high imaging rate. Nevertheless, the architecture of a conventional radiometer still bulky and costly. In this paper, a passive combining technique is proposed to reduce the hardware complexity as well as the dimensional requirements of the receiving antennas. Experimental results are presented to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
A New Approach to Automatic Summarization by Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation in Conditional Random Field

A New Approach to Automatic Summarization by Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation in Conditional Random Field Xiaofeng Wu, Chengqing Zong (National Lab of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, CAS, Beijing 100190, China) Abustract: In recent years, Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA) has been used more and more in Document Clustering, Classification, Segmentation, and some one has used it in query based multi-document summarization, which is an unsupervised approach. LDA is recognized by its great power in modeling a document in a semantic way. In this paper we propose a new approach to extractive-based, supervised single document summarization, which called LDA based CRF (Conditional Random Field) Automatic Summarization (LCAS), by adding of Latent Dirichlet Allocation of the document as new features into a CRF summarization system. We study the power of LDA, and analyze its different effects by changing the number of topics. Our experiments show that, by adding LDA features, the result of traditional CRF summarization system can be impressively increased.
Atmospheric Measurement Techniques the Grape Aerosol Retrieval Algorithm

The aerosol component of the Oxford-Rutherford Aerosol and Cloud (ORAC) combined cloud and aerosol retrieval scheme is described and the theoretical performance of the algorithm is analysed. ORAC is an optimal estimation retrieval scheme for deriving cloud and aerosol properties from measurements made by imaging satellite radiome-ters and, when applied to cloud free radiances, provides estimates of aerosol optical depth at a wavelength of 550 nm, aerosol effective radius and surface reflectance at 550 nm. The aerosol retrieval component of ORAC has several in-carnations – this paper addresses the version which operates in conjunction with the cloud retrieval component of ORAC (described by Watts et al., 1998), as applied in producing the Global Retrieval of ATSR Cloud Parameters and Evaluation (GRAPE) data-set. The algorithm is described in detail and its performance examined. This includes a discussion of errors resulting from the formulation of the forward model, sensitivity of the retrieval to the measurements and a priori constraints, and errors resulting from assumptions made about the atmo-spheric/surface state.
Publish/subscribe based reprogramming of sensor networks

Remote reprogramming of sensor nodes through wireless channel is a very important function for efficient sensor networks management. Now-a-days secure reprogramming protocols use asymmetric cryptography schemes which are in need of many computational cost and large memory. In this paper an efficient authentication strategy based on the publish/subscribe scheme for reprogramming of sensor networks is presented. By means of integrating this scheme with previous reprogramming protocol MNP, this strategy can ensure security of reprogramming at lower cost.
Artist filtering for non-western music classification

The "album effect" is a known phenomenon in musical artist and genre recognition. Classification results are often better when songs from the same album are used in the training and evaluation data sets. Supposedly, this effect is caused by the production conditions of the album, e.g. recording quality, mixing and equalization preferences, effects etc. This behavior is not representative of real world scenarios, though, and should therefore be avoided when evaluating the performance of a classifier. The related "artist effect" also affects the results of genre recognition. It is caused by the appearance of the same artists in the training and evaluation data sets. Artist filters have been proposed previously to remove this influence. We perform three different experiments to characterize the "artist effect" somewhat better and to analyze it in conjunction with non-western music. First, we test the effect's influence on the classification of musical pieces into their regions of origin. We then repeat this experiment using only specific sets of features (for the timbre, rhythm, and tonality domains). Finally, we perform a finer genre recognition with genres from four different world regions. The influence of the aforementioned effect is evaluated for all experiments.
Risk assessment and optimal proactive measure selection for IT service continuity management

IT service continuity management (ITSCM) is very important to current organizations. It ensures that the organizations can reduce and limit tangible and intangible losses of business in the events of contingencies or disasters. However, current risk management approaches and methodologies cannot focus on ITSCM. Therefore, this paper presents a risk assessment method to evaluate the risk exposure of one service. Further, we show how to use the risk exposure metric to select the optimal proactive measures. The optimal measure set is achieved through a set of experimental results.
Automated Visual Inspection of Road Surface Cracks

Pavement maintenance requires knowing the state of the road surface. Human inspection is the most common method for evaluating this state. Recently, the automated visual inspection has been addressed, but some important questions remain open concerning the variable ambient lighting, shadows, device synchronisation and the large amount of data. In the present paper, an automated visual inspection system is presented. Images are obtained using laser lighting and linear cameras onboard a vehicle. Longitudinal and transversal cracks are detected and classified using a novel approach based on combining traditional features and Gabor filters. A Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS), a web camera and an Inertial Profiler to measure the International Roughness Index (IRI) are also considered in order to obtain comprehensive information about the road state. Implementation details are given concerning image acquisition and processing, system architecture and data synchronisation. Field results are presented which prove the suitability of the approach.
The Convergence of Workflows, Business Rules and Complex Events - Defining a Reference Architecture and Approaching Realization Challenges

For years, research has been devoted to the introduction of flexibility to enterprise information systems. There are corresponding concepts for mainly three established paradigms: workflow management, business rule management and complex event processing. It has however been indicated that the integration of the three paradigms with respect to their meta-models and execution principles yields significant potential for more efficient and flexible enterprise applications and that there is still a lack in conceptual and technical guidance for their integration. The contribution of this work is a loosely coupled architecture integrating all three paradigms. This includes a clear definition of its building blocks together with the main realization challenges. In this context, an approach for assisting modelers in solving the question which paradigm should be used in which way for expressing a particular business aspect is presented.