Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Active Quorum Systems

This paper outlines a flexible suite of object replication protocols that brings together Byzantine quorum systems registers and state machine replication. These protocols enable the implementation of Byzantine fault-tolerant applications that make minimal assumptions about the environment and that run in at most two more communication steps in almost all cases of non-favorable executions (in comparison with favorable executions).
Examining the Relationship between Literacy Coaching and Student Reading Gains in Grades K–3

This article presents the results of a study that examined the relationship between the amount, type, and content of literacy coaching and K–3 student reading gains in a school district that received a Reading First grant. In addition, this study investigated the relationship between student reading gains and literacy coach certification. Findings from the study suggested that the amount of time literacy coaches spent with teachers and 5 specific aspects of literacy coaching predicted student reading gains at one or more grade levels. Using the findings from this study, the authors proposed a research-based model of literacy coaching focused on promoting student reading gains.
THE EFFECTS OF A PEER-MEDIATED SOCIAL SKILLS INTERVENTION ON THE SOCIAL COMMUNICATION BEHAVIOR OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM AT RECESS

iii Acknowledgements . iv Introduction . 1 Effects of Social Impairment . 2 Naturalistic Observations of the Social Behavior of Children with ASD . 3 Instructional Procedures for Teaching Social Skills to be Used With Peers . 8 Priming . 9 Prompting . 10 Initiation training . 12 Contextual support . 13 Incidental teaching . 14 Self-monitoring/task analysis . 16 Peer-Mediated Social Skills Interventions . 16 Peer Networks interventions . 20 Pivotal Response Training . 22
Debt A Disciplining Force for Managers or a Debilitating Force for Organizations

Some scholars have argued that the use of leverage can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of firms by disciplining managers. In fact, many U.S. corporations significantly increased their use of leverage during the 1980s. However, a number of these highly leveraged corporations have encountered severe performance problems in recent times. The reductions in performance are often attributed to extraordinary debt and, consequently, the value of debt as a disciplining force in the modern corporation is being questioned. Herein, the authors explore inconsistencies in the logic underlying popularly held views regarding the use of debt as a managerial disciplining force. They also highlight investment tradeoffs associated with high debt. Although they do not advocate the elimination of debt, they argue that it must be effectively balanced with other governance mechanisms to ensure maximum firm performance.
The Effect of Teacher-Led Interventions on Social and Emotional Behaviour in Primary School Children: A Systematic Review.

The purpose of this article is to clarify the role of teacher training initiatives aimed at improving social, emotional and behavioural outcomes of primary school aged children through improved classroom management. Systematic searches were conducted using a range of electronic databases from inception up to September 2011. Included studies were controlled trials that described training provided to teachers in classroom management techniques designed to improve primary school children's behavioural and social outcomes. Study selection and appraisal of quality were carried out by two researchers and a narrative synthesis was carried out. A total of 14 studies were included involving 8 interventions. Results show that statistically significant effects are limited, with only 20 outcomes showing significant effects in the desired direction. Effect sizes ranged from g = −0.17 (95%CI: −0.32, −0.02) to g = 1.88 (95%CI: 0.55, 3.21). Overall, the programmes indicate an improvement in some outcomes of interest. However, further research into the implementation and comparative effectiveness of such programmes is needed before implications for educational policy and practice can be established.
Modeling musical rhythmatscale with the music Genome project

Musical meter and attributes of the rhythmic feel such as swing, syncopation, and danceability are crucial when defining musical style. However, they have attracted relatively little attention from the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community and, when addressed, have proven difficult to model from music audio signals. In this paper, we propose a number of audio features for modeling meter and rhythmic feel. These features are first evaluated and compared to timbral features in the common task of ballroom genre classification. These features are then used to learn individual models for a total of nine rhythmic attributes covering meter and feel using an industrial-sized corpus of over one million examples labeled by experts from Pandora® Internet Radio's Music Genome Project®. Linear models are shown to be powerful, representing these attributes with high accuracy at scale.
Landscape Diversity Related to Buruli Ulcer Disease in Côte d'Ivoire

Background Buruli ulcer disease (BU), due to the bacteria Mycobacterium ulcerans, represents an important and emerging public health problem, especially in many African countries. Few elements are known nowadays about the routes of transmission of this environmental bacterium to the human population. Methodology/Principal Findings In this study, we have investigated the relationships between the incidence of BU in Côte d'Ivoire, western Africa, and a group of environmental variables. These environmental variables concern vegetation, crops (rice and banana), dams, and lakes. Using a geographical information system and multivariate analyses, we show a link between cases of BU and different environmental factors for the first time on a country-wide scale. As a result, irrigated rice field cultures areas, and, to a lesser extent, banana fields as well as areas in the vicinity of dams used for irrigation and aquaculture purposes, represent high-risk zones for the human population to contract BU in Côte d'Ivoire. This is much more relevant in the central part of the country. Conclusions/Significance As already suspected by several case-control studies in different African countries, we strengthen in this work the identification of high-risk areas of BU on a national spatial scale. This first study should now be followed by many others in other countries and at a multi-year temporal scale. This goal implies a strong improvement in data collection and sharing in order to achieve to a global picture of the environmental conditions that drive BU emergence and persistence in human populations.
Physical Activity for Children: Current Patterns and Guidelines

Editor’s Note Since the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports Research Digest resumed publication in 1993, we have published ten issues devoted primarily to physical activity among children and adolescents. The papers have covered a wide variety of topics but two in particular have been devoted to physical activity patterns and guidelines for youth. In an early issue of the Digest, Corbin et al. (1994) outlined the need for specific physical activity guidelines for children and youth. In 1998, the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE, 1998) and Health Education Authority (HEA, 1998) independently developed physical activity guidelines for children. The recommendations of the two groups were quite similar. Pate (1998) described current activity patterns of children and reviewed the various physical activity guidelines for children. Since that time many studies describing the physical activity patterns of youth have been published and new guidelines developed. The editors felt it was time to revisit the topic. This issue of the Digest reviews current activity patterns of youth and current guidelines.
Formalized Lambek Calculus in Higher Order Logic (HOL4)

In this project, a rather complete proof-theoretical formalization of Lambek Calculus (non-associative with arbitrary extensions) has been ported from Coq proof assistent to HOL4 theorem prover, with some improvements and new theorems. Three deduction systems (Syntactic Calculus, Natural Deduction and Sequent Calculus) of Lambek Calculus are defined with many related theorems proved. The equivalance between these systems are formally proved. Finally, a formalization of Sequent Calculus proofs (where Coq has built-in supports) has been designed and implemented in HOL4. Some basic results including the sub-formula properties of the so-called "cut-free" proofs are formally proved. This work can be considered as the preliminary work towards a language parser based on category grammars which is not multimodal but still has ability to support context-sensitive languages through customized extensions.
Stage-Speci fi c Changes in Neurogenic and Glial Markers in Alzheimer ’ s Disease

BACKGROUND: Reports of altered endogenous neurogenesis in people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and transgenic AD models have suggested that endogenous neurogenesis may be an important treatment target, but there is considerable discrepancy among studies. We examined endogenous neurogenesis and glia changes across the range of pathologic severity of AD in people with and without dementia to address this key question. METHODS: Endogenous neurogenesis and glia in the subventricular zone and dentate gyrus neurogenic niches were evaluated using single and double immunohistochemistry and a validated antibody selection for stage-specific and type-specific markers in autopsy tissue from a representative cohort of 28 participants in the Medical Research Council Cognitive Function and Ageing Study. Immunopositive cells were measured blinded to diagnosis using bright-field and fluorescent microscopy. RESULTS: The number of newly generated neurons significantly declined only in the dentate gyrus of patients with severe tau pathology. No other changes in other neurogenic markers were observed in either of the neurogenic niches. Alterations in astrocytes and microglia were also observed in the dentate gyrus across the different stages of tau pathology. No change in any of the markers was observed in individuals who died with dementia compared with individuals who did not die with dementia. CONCLUSIONS: Alterations in endogenous neurogenesis appeared to be confined to a reduction in the generation of new neurons in the dentate gyrus of patients with AD and severe neurofibrillary tangle pathology and were accompanied by changes in the glia load. These data suggest that intervention enhancing endogenous neurogenesis may be a potential therapeutic target in AD.
Novel Scheduling of A Mixed Batch / Continuous Sugar Milling Plant Using Petri nets

Abstract Scheduling of processes in mixed batch/continuous plants, due to their hybrid nature can become very complex. This paper presents the Timed Hybrid Petri net (THPN) as a suitable tool for modelling and scheduling of hybrid systems. One of the major benefits over traditional methods is a significant reduction in complexity during problem formulation. A sugar milling plant containing both batch and continuous processing units is considered as a case study by which the application of the proposed scheduling algorithm is illustrated.
Intra‐ and Interracial Best Friendships During Middle School: Links to Social and Emotional Well‐being

This study examined patterns of intra- and interracial best friendships during middle school and their associations with social and emotional well-being. We hypothesized that intraracial friendships would be beneficial for racial or ethnic minority youth because such relationships provide protection and solidarity in a discriminatory society. Results revealed that most youth had only intraracial best friends during middle school, but 38% had at least one interracial best friend. Associations between interracial best friendships and well-being varied by racial group; Black and Asian American youth with only interracial best friends reported lower emotional well-being than those with only intraracial best friends. Additionally, intraracial best friendships were associated with higher conflict than interracial best friendships, especially for Black and Latino youth.
Positive musical effects on two types of negative stressful conditions

The present study focused on mood effects of high-tempo (HT) or low-tempo (LT) music on a high-or a low-arousal stressful task condition (HST or LST), manipulating the relationship between affective valence and psycho-physiological arousal. In Experiment 1, 20 participants listened to the HT or LT music immediately after the HST or LST condition, determining heart rate (HR), skin conductance level (SCL), respiratory rate (RR), cortisol (CS) concentration level, and visual analogue scales (VAS). Experiment 2 established a 10-minute rest between stressful and musical conditions by using a method similar to that used in Experiment 1. Consequently, in Experiment 1, the LT music significantly reduced HR levels under the HST condition. In addition, in subjective vector analyses derived from the VAS, the LT music indicated stress-distractive effects on the HST condition (arousal allopathy) and on the LST condition (arousal sympathy). In Experiment 2, there were arousal-moderating effects of the LT music in all stress groups.
Performance guarantees and performance optimization of MRAC for non-minimum phase systems

Non-minimum phase systems pose a challenge in the design of MRAC. While some methods that can handle non-minimum phase systems are available in the literature, it is not always easy to guarantee tracking performance with these methods. This paper offers a partial solution to this problem. The method of generating an augmented plant by adding some dynamics in parallel to the original plant is used to make the adaptation scheme see a minimum phase system. The drawback of this method is that the error between original plant and original reference model does not asymptotically converge to zero, and even analysis of this error is not available in the literature. This paper offers a way to find an upper bound on the tracking error and design an alternative reference model to minimize the error. The application of the new reference model leads to improved tracking performance with respect to the original reference model. The alternative reference model is designed by iteratively solving linear matrix inequalities. Performance guarantees are given in terms of an £2-gain bound from the reference to the tracking error, and this £2-gain bound is minimized when the matrix inequalities are solved. An aerospace example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.
LAMS: A latency-aware memory scheduling policy for modern DRAM systems

This paper introduces a new memory scheduling policy called LAMS, which is inspired by a recently proposed memory architecture and targets for future high capacity memory systems. As memory capacity increases, the bit-lines connected to memory row buffers become much longer, dramatically lengthening memory access latency, due to increased parasitic capacitance. Recent study has proposed to partition long bit-lines into near and far (relative to the row buffer) segments via inserting isolation transistors such that access to near segment can be accomplished much faster, while access to far segment remains nearly the same. However, how to effectively leverage the new memory architecture still remains unexplored. We suggest to take advantage of this new memory architecture via performing latency-aware memory scheduling for pending requests to explore their performance potentials. In this scheduling policy, each memory request is classified to one of the following three categories, row-buffer hit, near-buffer, and far-buffer. Based on the classification, it issues requests in the order of row-buffer hit → near-buffer → far-buffer. In doing so, it avoids long-latency requests blocking short-latency memory requests, reducing total memory queuing time in the memory controller and improving overall memory performance. Our evaluation results on a simulated memory system show that comparing with the commonly used FR-FCFS scheduler, our LAMS improves performance and energy efficiency by up to 20.6% and 34%, respectively. Even comparing with the four competitive schedulers chosen from memory scheduling champion (MSC), LAMS still improves performance and energy efficiency by up to 6.1% and 23.4%, respectively.
Postsecondary Education Persistence of Adolescents With Specific Learning Disabilities or Emotional/Behavioral Disorders

While experiences of students with disabilities transitioning from high school to college have been well documented, the influence exerted by selected factors on these experiences is less well understood. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, the influence of selected risk and resilience factors on the short-term postsecondary educational outcomes, that is, persistence, of adolescents with specific learning disabilities or emotional/behavioral disorders was examined. A logistic model revealed group differences between individuals with disabilities and peers without disabilities. All selected risk and resilience factors significantly predicted educational persistence. No significant differences were observed between adolescents with specific learning disabilities or emotional/behavioral disorders, but three factors—grade point average, socioeconomic status, and number of friends having plans to attend a 4-year college—were significant predictors of educational persistence for adolescents with disabilities. Implications of these findings are discussed.
Marking in discourse: “Birds of a feather”

ABSTRACT Subject/verb agreement and subject/predicate adjective agreement in spoken Brazilian Portuguese are subject to a parallel processing effect, such that marking leads to further marking and lack of marking leads to further lack of marking. For example, semantically plural verb tokens preceded by marked plural subjects in the same clause or other marked verb tokens with the same subject in the preceding discourse are more likely to be explicitly marked for plural than similar tokens preceded by unmarked subjects or verbs. This phenomenon is in direct contradiction to the principle of linguistic economy, since marking tends to occur precisely in those contexts in which it is most highly redundant and could therefore be discarded with no loss of information. Furthermore, the marking of successive plural tokens cannot be considered statistically independent events, since the outcome of previous marking decisions effects future marking. We propose that the parallel processing principle is a universal of language use.
Time-resolved photometry of the nova remnants DM Gem, CP Lac, GI Mon, V400 Per, CT Ser and XX Tau

We present the first results of a photometric survey of poorly studied nova remnants in the Northern Hemisphere. The main results are as follows: DM Gem shows a modulation at 0.123 d (probably linked to the orbit) and rapid variations at ∼22 min. A moderate resolution spectrum taken at the time of the photometric observations shows intense He II λ4686 and Bowen emission, characteristic of an intermediate polar or a SW Sex star. Variability at 0.127 d and intense flickering (or quasi-periodic oscillations) are the main features of the light curve of CP Lac. A 0.1-mag dip lasting for ∼45 min is observed in GI Mon, which could be an eclipse. A clear modulation (probably related to the orbital motion) either at 0.179 d or 0.152 d is observed in the B-band light curve of V400 Per. The results for CT Ser point to an orbital period close to 0.16 d. Intense flickering is also characteristic of this old nova. Finally, XX Tau shows a possible periodic signal near 0.14 d and displays fast variability at ∼24 min. Its brightness seems to be modulated at ∼5 d. We relate this long periodicity to the motion of an eccentric/tilted accretion disc in the binary.
Hormonal responses to a rugby match: a brief review.

INTRODUCTION Rugby is an intermittent team sport, commonly stressing the endocrine system by physiological efforts. However, no review has synthesized the available literature on the hormonal responses to a rugby match. The purpose of this review was to examine the hormonal responses to a rugby match. Mediator and moderator variables for the rugby match-hormonal responses relationship were also discussed. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION The systematic search was conducted using different databases and according to the Population/Intervention or Exposure/Comparison/Outcome(s) (PICO) criteria. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS The data obtained in the present review show that match contests were the moderator variable between rugby match-testosterone changes relationship. Particularly, official matches decreased pre-to-post testosterone levels by 43.9%, while simulated matches increased pre-to-post testosterone levels by 33.6%. There were no significant differences between official and simulated contests for the cortisol response to a rugby match which could be explained in part by the small numbers of included studies and participants (71 high-level male players). Thus, it has been shown that a rugby match provides considerable stress to the endocrine system, which lasts up 38-48 h into the recovery period. CONCLUSIONS The hormonal assessment of rugby players is a valid tool for monitoring stress during a rugby match and provides the opportunity to identify how athletes cope with stress induced by a competition. The information also provides potential for various mental/recovery strategies that may contribute to performance enhancement.
Development of 22 Polymorphic Microsatellite Loci for the Critically Endangered Morato’s Digger Toad, Proceratophrys moratoi

The Morato’s digger toad (Proceratophrys moratoi) inhabits Brazilian moist savannas and is critically endangered due to its very limited geographic distribution, reduced number of isolated populations, and evidence of population decline and local extinctions. With the objective of providing tools for the genetic study of the species, 22 polymorphic microsatellite loci were isolated and screened using DNA extracted from samples of oral mucosa cells obtained from 113 individuals representing five remnant P. moratoi populations in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. These markers presented 2–18 alleles per locus, polymorphism information content (PIC) of 0.02–0.87, observed heterozygosity of 0.02–0.96 and expected heterozygosity of 0.02–0.87. Three of the loci deviated significantly from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium in one of the populations, possibly due to the presence of null alleles. Significant linkage disequilibrium was also detected between three pairs of loci. The molecular markers developed in this study were able to discriminate each of the individuals sampled (identity analysis). This means that they will be extremely useful for future genetic studies applied to the conservation of P. moratoi, providing a baseline for estimating the levels of genetic diversity, pedigrees, inbreeding, and population structure, which will be essential for the development of effective genetic management programs.
Lazy Determinisation for Quantitative Model Checking

The bottleneck in the quantitative analysis of Markov chains and Markov decision processes against specifications given in LTL or as some form of nondeterministic Buchi automata is the inclusion of a determinisation step of the automaton under consideration. Such determinisation constructions are notoriously difficult and cumbersome to implement. In this paper we argue that applying this step in full generality is only required in some places, and can often be circumvented by subset and breakpoint constructions. We have implemented our approach in a prototype tool. Our experiments show that our prototype can compete with mature tools like PRISM.