Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of information modeling methods-a review

Hundreds of modeling methods are in existence today, yet practitioners and researchers are zealously "producing" new modeling methods. The "blooming" of modeling methods is not the problem; the lack of standardized techniques for evaluating them is. To further complicate the matter, most of the modeling methods are introduced based on common sense and intuition. Theoretical foundations and empirical evidence are severely lacking. With the current state of affairs, evaluation of modeling methods has become necessary. Comparing modeling methods provides us with the necessary knowledge and understanding on the strengths and weaknesses of each method. This knowledge can also guide us in our quest for new modeling methods. This paper reviews the various evaluation techniques used by researchers and practitioners. The evaluation techniques are categorized into non-empirical and empirical techniques.
A Political Perspective on Staff Development

Staff development in education is a curious phenomenon; it resembles the world's search for eternal peace. The citizens of the world seek the end of war and violence, yet somehow it always eludes their grasp. Similarly with staff development—everyone extolls its merits and sees the need for it. Many even agree on what characterizes an effective staff-development program. Yet the lament from the vast majority of those who are subjected to staff-development activities is that they are ineffective and generally a failure.
Transnational dissent: feeling, thinking, judging and the sociality of Palestinian solidarity activism

This thesis examines the role emotions play in the practice and sociality of Palestinian solidarity activism in Israel and Palestine. It finds that emotion is a subtle and sophisticated, and often ambiguous, form of knowledge and perception which is implicit in forming, appraising and adjusting the relationships participants have with intimates, fellow dissenters and public discourses on identity and the regional conflict. Fieldwork was based in and around Jerusalem and carried out over twelve months in 2011-12. This is a highly diverse transnational field where Palestinians, Israelis and Internationalists come together at specific times and places to practice various forms of dissent, largely but not exclusively against the socio-political conditions of the Palestinians vis-a-vis Israeli State policy. I present three separate propositions on Weirdness, Wrongness and Love, which relate to three different affective dimensions; perception, morality and loyalty. Each proposition also develops upon what Hannah Arendt defined the innate political faculties or activities of the human condition; thinking, action and judging. The perceptive quality of finding something Weird is found to produce doubt in the subjective mind, the purpose for which Arendt believed thinking to be a political act. The moral appraisal that something is Wrong, underwrites concerted political action in the public realm. Finally judging, as the attempt to understand the world from the perspective of another, is facilitated by the discourse of Love in the long-term loving relations activists have with friend and family, who are antagonistic to the aims of solidarity activism. Taken together these feelings are found to flow through and inform one another, constituting a nuanced affective understanding and appraisal of our world, one that is producing and maintaining a politically engaged transnational community of dissent. This community has been fostered to a large degree by the insistence and perseverance of a small number of Palestinians in villages across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, who call upon peoples of all creeds, colours and places to witness and experience the repression of non-violent resistance. If as researchers we are to understand the complexities of human life and practices, I believe we must carefully attend to this sophisticated form of emotional reasoning and begin to think not just about feelings, but also with feelings.
How to Find a Coin: Propositional Program Logics Made Easy

ion can overcome the deficit of the power of modern computers and solve the metaprogram problem: let’s consider amounts of coins instead of coin numbers. This idea is natural: when somebody is solving puzzles he/she operates in terms of amounts of coins of different kinds not in terms of their numbers! Let us present this hint in formal terms as an abstract model game(N,M) (N ≥ 1, M ≥ 0). Positions in this parameterized game are tuples (u, l, h, v, q) where • u is the amount of coins in [1.N ] which were not tested against other coins; • l is the amount of coins in [1.N ] which were tested against other coins and turned out to be lighter than other coins; • h is the amount of coins in [1.N ] which were tested against other coins and turned out to be heavier than other coins; • v is an amount of coins in [1. (N + M)] which are currently known to be valid; • q is a balancing query, i.e. a pair of quadruples ((u1, l1, h1, v1) , (u2, l2, h2, v2)) of numbers of [1. (N +M)]. Five constraints are absolutely natural and are closely related to constraints 1–5 for the concrete model: (1)u+l+h ≤ N , (2)u+l+h+v = N+M , (3)u+l+h ≥ 1, (4)u 6= 0 iff l + h = 0, and (5)v1 = 0 or v2 = 0. Additional constraints should be imposed for queries (since we can borrow coins for weighing from available untested, lighter, heavier and valid ones): (6)u1 + u2 ≤ u, (7)l1 + l2 ≤ l, (8)h1 + h2 ≤ h, (9)v1 + v2 ≤ v, (10)u1 + l1 +h1 + v1 = u2 + l2 +h2 + v2. A possible move of a player prog is a query for balancing two sets of coins, i.e. pair of positions (u, l, h, v, ((0, 0, 0, 0), (0, 0, 0, 0))) prog −→ (u, l, h, v, ((u1, l1, h1, v1), (u2, l2, h2, v2))). A possible move of a player user is a reply for a query which causes position change (u, l, h, v, ((u1, l1, h1, v1), (u2, l2, h2, v2))) user −→ (u, l, h, v, ((0, 0, 0, 0), (0, 0, 0, 0))) in accordance with the query and a reply: u =    0 if the reply is ,
Effect of the relA gene on derepression of amino acid biosynthetic enzymes in growing Escherichia coli depends on the pathway being derepressed

Derepression of an enzyme in the arginine biosynthetic pathway, but not of an enzyme in the tryptophan biosynthetic pathway, is inhibited during the stringent response produced by a partial deprivation of valyl transfer ribonucleic acid in a rel+ strain. In contrast, derepression of the tryptophan biosynthetic enzyme, but not of the arginine biosynthetic enzyme, was inhibited during the relaxed response produced in an isogenic relA strain by the partial deprivation of valyl transfer ribonucleic acid.
Clinical course and management of SARS in health care workers in Toronto: a case series.

BACKGROUND Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has only recently been described. We provide individual patient data on the clinical course, treatment and complications experienced by 14 front-line health care workers and hospital support staff in Toronto who were diagnosed with SARS, and we provide follow-up information for up to 3 weeks after their discharge from hospital. METHODS As part of the initial response to the SARS outbreak in Toronto, our health care centre was asked to establish a SARS unit for health care workers who were infected. Patients were admitted to this unit and were closely monitored and treated until they were well enough to be discharged. We prospectively compiled information on their clinical course, management and complications and followed them for 3 weeks after discharge. RESULTS The 11 women and 3 men described here (mean age 42 [standard deviation [SD] 9] years) were all involved in providing medical or ancillary hospital services to patients who were later found to have SARS. Onset of symptoms in 4 of our patients who could clearly identify only a single contact with a patient with SARS occurred on average 4 (SD 3) days after exposure. For the remaining 10 patients with multiple patient contacts, symptom onset followed exposure by a mean of 3.5 (SD 3) days after their exposure. All patients were treated with ribavirin, and all patients received levofloxacin. Many experienced major complications. Dyspnea was present in 12 patients during their stay in hospital, and all developed abnormalities on chest radiograph; 3 patients developed severe hypoxemia (PaO(2) < 50 mm Hg). All patients experienced a drop in hemoglobin. Nine patients had hemolytic anemia. Three patients experienced numbness and tingling in their hands and feet, and 2 developed frank tetany. All 3 had magnesium levels that were less than 0.1 mmol/L. All patients recovered and were discharged home. At a follow-up examination 3 weeks after discharge (5 weeks after onset of illness), all patients were no longer weak but continued to become fatigued easily and had dyspnea on minimal exertion. For 5 patients, chest radiographs still showed residual disease. INTERPRETATION SARS is a very serious illness even in healthy, relatively young people. The clinical course in our patients, all of whom met the case definition for SARS (which requires pulmonary involvement), resulted in dyspnea and, in some individuals, severe hypoxemia. Severe hemolytic anemia may be a feature of SARS or may be a complication of therapy, possibly with ribavirin.
On the design of low-density parity-check codes within 0.0045 dB of the Shannon limit

We develop improved algorithms to construct good low-density parity-check codes that approach the Shannon limit very closely. For rate 1/2, the best code found has a threshold within 0.0045 dB of the Shannon limit of the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel. Simulation results with a somewhat simpler code show that we can achieve within 0.04 dB of the Shannon limit at a bit error rate of 10/sup -6/ using a block length of 10/sup 7/.
Adaptive Robust Control for Servo Mechanisms With Partially Unknown States via Dynamic Surface Control Approach

In order to achieve high performance control for servo mechanisms with electrical dynamics and unmeasurable states, an observer-based adaptive robust controller (ARC) is developed via dynamic surface control (DSC) technique. To represent electrical dynamics, a third-order model is used to describe the servo mechanism. However, the third-order model brings some difficulties to observer construction and recursive controller design. To solve this problem, we first transform the model into a particular form suitable for observer design, and then construct a parameterized observer to estimate the unmeasurable states. The state estimation is based on the output and its derivatives, which can be acquired by an output differential observer. Subsequently, an observer-based ARC can be developed through DSC technique, with which the problem of "explosion of complexity" caused by backstepping method in the traditional ARC design can be overcome. A stability analysis is given, showing that our control law can guarantee uniformly ultimate boundedness of the solution of the closed-loop system, and make the tracking error arbitrarily small. This scheme is implemented on a precision two-axis turntable. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and the achievable control performance of the proposed scheme.
Chapter xx Network Theory 1

1 The authors are indebted to Ajay Mehra, Dan Brass, and Joe Labianca who coauthored a piece in Science (Borgatti et al., 2009) on which this chapter is based, and Beth Becky, Travis Grosser and Brandon Ofem for their critical reviews of the chapter. We would also like to thank Jackie Thompson for her editorial assistance.
Spatial Variations in Channel Morphology at Segment and Reach Scales, Middle Fork John Day River, Northeastern Oregon

Like many montane rivers in the western U. S. , the Middle Fork of the John Day River is characterized by alternating narrowand wide-valley segments. Although the river has a low gradient (generally < 0.01) alluvial channel, changes in valley width exert a clear infl uence on channel morphology. A spatial hierarchical model of channel morphology was applied to the Middle Fork to understand reach-level and segment-level patterns of morphologic variation. Channel unit data for a 55-km long section of the mainstem channel and detailed profi les at segment transitions where the valley width widens or narrows sharply were used in the analysis. Wide-valley segments, where not signifi cantly modifi ed by human activities, have higher sinuosity, 80% more pool area, and pools up to 40% deeper, on average, than narrow-valley segments. Going downstream from a wide-valley segment to a narrow-valley segment, channel morphology changes relatively abruptly from pool-riffl e morphology, coarse pebble bed-material, and a gradient of less than 0.005, to plane bed morphology, cobble bed material, and a gradient of 0.005 to 0.010. Within one wide-valley segment, distinct reaches were delineated based on channel pattern and valley position. The more sinuous mid-valley reaches have several times more pool area, and pools more than 25% deeper, than the less sinuous valley-edge reaches. Segment-level differences appear to be related primarily to long term geologic controls, but these differences have been modifi ed by human impacts. Observed reach-level differences are related to both geomorphic controls and human impacts. In this montane setting, the hierarchical spatial model is a useful way of analyzing and understanding spatial patterns of channel morphology and aquatic habitat.
The Loudness War: Background, Speculation, and Recommendations

There is growing concern that the quality of commercially distributed music is deteriorating as a result of mixing and mastering practices used in the so-called “loudness war. ” Due to the belief that “louder is better,” dynamics compression is used to squeeze more and more loudness into the recordings. This paper reviews the history of the loudness war and explores some of its possible consequences, including aesthetic concerns and listening fatigue. Next, the loudness war is analyzed in terms of game theory. Evidence is presented to question the assumption that loudness is significantly correlated to listener preference and sales rankings. The paper concludes with practical recommendations for de-escalating the loudness war.
Cooperative Diversity in Interference Limited Wireless Networks

Using relays in wireless networks can potentially lead to significant capacity increases. However, within an asynchronous multi-user communication setting, relaying might cause more interference in the network, and significant sum-rate deterioration may be observed. In this work the effect of cooperation in an interference limited, narrow-band wireless network is investigated. It is crucial to determine the optimal trade-off between the amount of throughput gain obtained via cooperation and the amount of interference introduced to the network. We quantify the amount of cooperation using the notion of a cooperative region for each active node. The nodes which lie in such a region are allowed to cooperate with the source. We adopt the decode-and-forward scheme at the relays and use the physical interference model to determine the probability that a relay node correctly decodes its corresponding source. Through numerical analysis and simulation, we study the optimal cooperative region size to maximize the network sum-rate and energy efficiency, based on network size, relay availability, node decoding threshold, and destination reception capability. It is shown that optimized system performance in terms of the network sum-rate and the power efficiency is significantly improved compared with cases where relay nodes are not exploited or where the cooperative region size is suboptimal.
Lightweight code mobility for proxy-based service rebinding in MANET

Advances in device miniaturization and wireless technologies are stimulating mobile ad-hoc NETworks (MANET) where mobile nodes can autonomously organize in a peer-to-peer mode, without requiring a statically deployed network infrastructure. Because of node mobility, the set of service components that MANET clients have at one-hop distance changes often during service provisioning. That continuous change in locally accessible services significantly increases the complexity of designing and implementing effective MANET applications. The paper claims the need of dynamic middleware supports for MANET, not only to address routing/configuration issues, but also to automate the re-qualification of service bindings at provision time. It presents COMMAND, a flexible middleware solution, based on code mobility, for transparent service rebinding in MANET. COMMAND exploits dynamically elected proxies that act as intermediaries to decouple mobile clients and needed service components. In particular, the paper focuses on how COMMAND implements a lightweight MANET-specific solution for effective code distribution to deploy the needed proxy behavior only when and where required. Finally, the paper shows the implementation of a COMMAND-based forum distributed application, together with its related performance, to point out how the proposed middleware can help service development in MANET.
Music recommendation system based on usage history and automatic genre classification

The personalized music recommender supports the user-favorite songs stored in a huge music database. In order to predict only user-favorite songs, managing user preferences information and genre classification are necessary. In our study, a very short feature vector, obtained from low dimensional projection and already developed audio features, is used for music genre classification problem. We applied a distance metric learning algorithm in order to reduce the dimensionality of feature vector with a little performance degradation. We propose the system about the automatic management of the user preferences and genre classification in the personalized music system.
Sparse Forward-Backward Using Minimum Divergence Beams for Fast Training Of Conditional Random Fields

Hidden Markov models and linear-chain conditional random fields (CRFs) are applicable to many tasks in spoken language processing. In large state spaces, however, training can be expensive, because it often requires many iterations of forward-backward. Beam search is a standard heuristic for controlling complexity during Viterbi decoding, but during forward-backward, standard beam heuristics can be dangerous, as they can make training unstable. We introduce sparse forward-backward, a variational perspective on beam methods that uses an approximating mixture of Kronecker delta functions. This motivates a novel minimum-divergence beam criterion based on minimizing KL divergence between the respective marginal distributions. Our beam selection approach is not only more efficient for Viterbi decoding, but also more stable within sparse forward-backward training. For a standard text-to-speech problem, we reduce CRF training time fourfold - from over a day to six hours - with no loss in accuracy
RBF neural networks for handwriting process modelling

Handwriting process is one of the most complex processes of our biological repertory. Modelling of such process remains difficult to implement. Several approaches were proposed in the literature. However, the validation results of these models remain less or more satisfactory and the basic models were the subject of improvement in the objective to approach reality as much as possible. This paper deals with new unconventional handwriting process characterization approaches based on the use of soft computing techniques namely the exploitation of artificial neural networks and more precisely the Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural networks. The obtained simulation results show a satisfactory agreement between responses of the developed RBF neural model and the experimental electromyographic signals (EMG) data for various letters and forms then the efficiency of the proposed approaches.
Bridging the gap between technical and social dependencies with Ariadne

One of the reasons why large-scale software development is difficult is the number of dependencies that software engineers need to face; e.g., dependencies among the software components and among the development tasks. These dependencies create a need for communication and coordination that requires continuous effort by software developers. Empirical studies, including our own, suggest that technical dependencies among software components create social dependencies among the software developers implementing these components. Based on this observation, we developed Ariadne, a Java plug-in for Eclipse. Ariadne analyzes a Java project to identify program dependencies and collects authorship information about the project by connecting to a configuration management repository. Through this process, Ariadne can "translate" technical dependencies among software components into social dependencies among software developers. This paper describes the design of Ariadne, how it identifies technical dependencies among software components, how it extracts information from configuration management systems and, finally, how it translates this into social dependencies. Ariadne's purpose is to create a bridge between technical and social dependencies.
A Comparison of Parameters of Acoustic Vowel Space in Patients with Parkinson's Disease

The acoustic vowel space has been used as an acoustic parameter in dysarthric speech. The aim of this work was to examine mathematical formulae for acoustic vowel space and to apply these to Korean speakers with idiopathic Parkinson's disease(IPD). Five acoustic parameters were chosen from earlier works and one new parameter was proposed, the pentagonal vowel space. The six parameters included triangular vowel space (3 area), irregular quadrilateral vowel space (4 area), irregular pentagonal vowel space (5 area), vowel articulatory index (VAI), formant centralization ratio (FCR) and F2i/F1u ratio (F2 ratio). An experimental group of 32 IPD patients(male:female=16:16) and a control group of twenty healthy people (male:female=8:12) participated in the study and repeated vowels (/a-i-u-e-o/) three times. A correlation analysis was performed among the six parameters, 2-way ANOVA was done with gender and groups as independent factors, and an independent sample t-test was conducted between the male and the female group as post hoc comparison. All parameters were highly correlated with each other and only the FCR showed a high negative correlation with the others. The results of ANOVA showed a significant difference in F2 ratio, 3 area, 4 area and 5 area between gender and in 4 area and 5 area between groups. For the male members of the two groups, significant statistical differences were found in all parameters whereas no such differences were found for the female members. These findings indicated that the vowel space of the female group was wider than the vowel space of the male group. These differences may have been caused by gender-specific speech styles rather than by patho-physiological mechanisms. We also claim that the pentagonal vowel space is better than the other vowel spaces at representing the disordered speech in natural speech situations.