Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Online University Students' Performance

The Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Online University Students’ Performance by Maureen Cort-Blackson MA, Walden University, 2010 BS, University of Guyana, 1997 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Clinical Psychology Walden University August 2018 Abstract Sleep deprivation affects the academic performance of online university students, and students who have family responsibilities and a full-time job have a higher prevalence of sleep deprivation. This phenomenological study examined the lived experiences of online university students regarding sleep patterns, sleep deprivation, and the impact on their academic performance. The theoretical foundation for this study was based on the opponent processing model that explains the 2 fundamental processes necessary for individuals to function at their optimum ability: the sleep-wake homeostatic process and the circadian rhythm processes. The research question explored the beliefs andSleep deprivation affects the academic performance of online university students, and students who have family responsibilities and a full-time job have a higher prevalence of sleep deprivation. This phenomenological study examined the lived experiences of online university students regarding sleep patterns, sleep deprivation, and the impact on their academic performance. The theoretical foundation for this study was based on the opponent processing model that explains the 2 fundamental processes necessary for individuals to function at their optimum ability: the sleep-wake homeostatic process and the circadian rhythm processes. The research question explored the beliefs and perceptions of 10 online university students, while the sub questions focused on how distractions, social media, family, and work-related duties affected their sleep patterns. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit the participants who were current online university students, with a full time job, a family and family responsibilities. Data were analyzed through pattern coding and structural analysis. Four themes emerged from the analysis of the data: the effects of sleep deprivation, adjustment to daily lives, factors affecting sleep deprivation, and impressions of online education. Results demonstrated that sleep deprivation causes tiredness, sluggish thinking and cranky responses. Positive social change can be achieved if the 10 participants participate in building a community of online university students who will maintain an alumni base that can foster mentoring and empowering others to decrease sleep deprivation that helps in maintaining good academic standards. The Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Online University Students’ Performance by Maureen Cort-Blackson MA, Walden University, 2010 BS, University of Guyana, 1997 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Clinical Psychology
2-DOF Control Configuration Applied to 1992 ACC Benchmark Problem

The 2-DOF Observer-Controller configuration is based on a right coprime factorization of the plant and makes use of an observer-based feedback control scheme combined with a prefilter controller. A two-step design procedure is accomplished: first, we can design to guarantee stability robustness and some levels of performance in terms of disturbance rejection; second, we can design the prefilter controller to guarantee open-loop processing of the reference commands. The first step is carried out by solving a constrained Hinfin optimization problem using the right coprime factorization of the plant in an active way. The second step is done by assuming a Reference Model and by solving a Model Matching Problem. The design procedure is exemplified by means of the 1992 ACC Benchmark Problem.
Paths and Contextually Specific Recommendations

We describe the Recer system and its underlying model of user activity, paths. A path is a timestamped log of activity in one of more tools, such as web browsers and text editors, gained by client–side tracking. By default, recent user activity is taken as representing the current context, and as an implicit query to the database of paths. The result is a set of recommendations specific to that context, and also reflecting a group’s patterns of past activity with the logged tools. We give some examples of its use before going on to discuss how recommender systems’ ability to handle heterogeneous data types allows extension of the model of user context to include locations and artefacts in both the physical world and virtual worlds. Our aim here is to have a much more realistic and broad notion of context and activity implemented in our systems, moving beyond an implicit assumption that all that is significant about a person’s activity is on their desktop. We outline our current work extending Recer to track multiple devices and media so that recommendations refer to people, places and things—both physical and digital. Recer will become part of a larger system aiming to support awareness and collaboration amongst people exploring a collection of documents about Glasgow, the physical city and a VR model of the city centre.
Experiences Using Usability Techniques in Development of Active Spaces RBAC GUI

Abstract This paper presents a case study in developing an administration GUI using Cognitive Walkthrough and usability testing. We introduce the evaluation procedure of the GUI. We then compare the predictions made by Cognitive Walkthrough with the usability problems found in empirical usability testing. The strength and weakness of the two methodologies and their respective task scenarios are discussed. Based on the analysis, we arrive at conclusions which could be used to improve the effectiveness of the two evaluation methods and point out the problems still open.
Energy-Efficient Relaying via Store-Carry and Forward within the Cell

In this paper, store-carry and forward (SCF) decision policies for relaying within the cell are developed. The key motivation of SCF relaying stems from the fact that energy consumption levels can be dramatically reduced by capitalizing on the inherent mobility of nodes and the elasticity of Internet applications. More specifically, we show how the actual mobility of relay nodes can be incorporated as an additional resource in the system to achieve savings in the required communication energy levels. To this end, we provide a mathematical programming formulation on the aforementioned problem and find optimal routing and scheduling policies to achieve maximum energy savings. By investigating structural properties of the proposed mathematical program we show that optimal solutions can be computed efficiently in time. The tradeoffs between energy and delay in the system are meticulously studied and Pareto efficient curves are derived. Numerical investigations show that the achievable energy gains by judiciously storing and carrying information from mobile relays can grow well above 70 percent for the macrocell scenario when compared to a baseline multihop wireless relaying scheme that uses shortest path routes to the base station.
Academic Ethics Conflict in the Age of Wikipedia and Turnitin.com: A Study Assessing the Opinions of Exiting College Students

Technology has wrought paradigmatic shifts in societal, institutional, and individual power to instantly share and collaboratively produce knowledge, influencing the definition and perceived significance of academic ethics (AE), a continually evolving social construct. Student disregard of AE can generate wide-ranging conflicts affecting multiple student-success stakeholders: students, their families, instructors, administrators, schools, employers of graduates, and society. Dominant AE higher education institutional strategies typically position the individual student as the problem, leaving contextual influences on their academic conduct outside the AE conflict resolution discourse. The researcher conducted an exploratory research study to ascertain undergraduate students’ opinions about AE at a university poised to coordinate and consolidate policy for its undergraduate student population—Nova Southeastern University (NSU). NSU recently announced the creation of a new College of Undergraduate Studies (CUS) to establish a single and unified undergraduate identity throughout its six undergraduate degreeconferring schools. Data was collected and analyzed to assess the opinions of exiting NSU undergraduate students’: 1) beliefs about AE, 2) familiarity with school policies and rules, 3) perceived AE experience at NSU, and 4) awareness of conflicts generated by disregard of AE standards and objectives. Conflicts resulting from disparate understandings of academic ethics between students, faculty, and administrators can be reduced and prevented through enhanced communication. This study’s findings provided a repository of knowledge to inform NSU/CUS institutional AE strategies by giving voice to students, thereby enhancing communication and the conflict resolution potential of institutional initiatives for the benefit of students and student-success stakeholders at NSU and all similarly-structured universities.
Cognitive radio MAC protocol for WLAN

To solve the performance degradation issue in current WLAN caused by the crowded unlicensed spectrum, we propose a cognitive radio (CR) media access protocol, C-CSMA/CA. The basic idea is that with cognitive radio techniques the WLAN devices can not only access the legacy WLAN unlicensed spectrum but opportunistically access any other under-utilized licensed spectrum without a license. The application scenario of C-CSMA/CA is infrastructure BSS (Basic Service Set) WLAN. C-CSMA/CA efficiently exploits the inherent characteristics of CSMA/CA to design distributed cooperative outband sensing to explore spectrum hole; moreover, it designs dual inband sensing scheme to detect primary user appearance. Additionally, C-CSMA/CA has the advantage to effectively solve the cognitive radio self-coexistence issues in the overlapping CR BSSs scenario. It also realizes station-based dynamic resource selection and utilization. It is compatible with any legacy WLAN (BSS) system. We develop and implement the simulation of C-CSMA/CA by OPNET. The simulation results show that C-CSMA/CA highly enhances throughput and reduces the queuing delay and media access delay.
Locality aware management on NAND flash-based main memory for in-memory database systems

Conventional database systems manage all data on hard disks, but due to a hard disk's frequent I/O operations, this kind of management exposes critical problems when data is huge or operations are complex and frequent. As the size of the main memory continues to increase, main memory architecture and management becomes the major research trend in big data processing. Thus, we propose an optimized NAND Flash-based main memory (NFMM) structure for in-memory database systems to achieve the goal of having DRAM like performance at the lower cost and power consumption of Flash memory. For this goal, a horizontal combination of DRAM and NAND Flash memory is designed as a main memory model for database applications. A stream buffer and a DRAM buffer are designed to compensate for the slow access latency of Flash memory. Its optimized management method is designed to enhance the accessing locality and manage the stream buffer by prefetching pages. To evaluate the performance, Redis and Yahoo! Cloud Service Benchmark (YCSB) are used. In our experiment, a stream buffer is used to improve the data transfer speed. The result shows that in the proposed system, the execution time can achieve only 1.16x to 1.21x slower on average. At the same time, optimized NAND Flash-based main memory with 40 entries of stream buffer reduces power consumption up to 25% compared to the DRAM-based main memory system.
Getting emotional - a neural perspective on emotion, intention, and consciousness

Intentions and emotions arise together, and emotions compel us to pursue goals. However, it is not clear when emotions become objects of awareness, how emotional awareness changes with goal pursuit, or how psychological and neural processes mediate such change. We first review a psychological model of emotional episodes and propose that goal obstruction extends the duration of these episodes while increasing cognitive complexity and emotional intensity. We suggest that attention is initially focused on action plans and their obstruction, and only when this obstruction persists does focal attention come to include emotional states themselves. We then model the self-organization of neural activities that hypothetically underlie the evolution of an emotional episode. Phases of emotional awareness are argued to parallel phases of synchronization across neural systems. We suggest that prefrontal activities greatly extend intentional states while focal attention integrates emotional awareness and goal pursuit in a comprehensive sense of the self in the world. 3 People and cats can stare vacantly out the window and watch the world go by: until something happens. An itch needs to be scratched, a movement grabs our interest, a hunger pang reminds us of lunch, or a wish for company demands our focused attention. Thus, attention crystallizes in the moment and changes our mode of being in the world: from a watcher to a doer, a planner, or an intender. Cats will suddenly gaze from their perch at a spot on your lap, then hunch their bodies, tense their muscles, and spring to their intended place. Humans rapidly hatch a plan to snack or browse the web, thus beginning their stream of intended action by thinking about a sojourn to the kitchen or the office. For both cats and people, cognition converges rapidly to a plan in the service of intention. However, such plans are not always successful: the lap is blocked by an open newspaper, or the plan to snack is hampered by thoughts about one's waistline. That is when things get emotional—when goals are blocked and intentions are extended in time. Or, more accurately, that is when the preconscious feelings that accompany the immediate impulse to act begin to blossom into more coherent and more compelling emotional states, and only then can these emotional states themselves become the object of focal attention—at least for humans. In this article, we examine the progression from watching (or listening), to intending action, to extending that intention …
Dynamic Visualisation of Software State

The size and complexity of software systems presents many challenges to developers. Software visualisation techniques can help make more manageable tasks across the development cycle. In this paper we focus on the dynamic visualisation of software state---an important element in supporting activities such as debugging. We propose Pseudo-Breakpoints as a means of collecting data and making it available to specialised visualisation components. We describe the implementation of this concept in Eclipse and present some example visualisations.
Acute Renal Replacement Therapy in Children with Diarrhea-Associated Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome: A Single Center 16 Years of Experience

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is becoming more prevalent among hospitalized children, its etiologies are shifting, and new treatment modalities are evolving; however, diarrhea-associated hemolytic uremic syndrome (D+HUS) remains the most common primary disease causing AKI in young children. Little has been published about acute renal replacement therapy (ARRT) and its challenges in this population. We describe our single center's experience managing 134 pediatric patients with D+HUS out of whom 58 (43%) required ARRT over the past 16 years. In our cohort, all but one patient were started on peritoneal dialysis (PD). Most patients, 47 (81%), received acute PD on a pediatric inpatient ward. The most common recorded complications in our cohort were peritoneal fluid leaks 13 (22%), peritonitis 11 (20%), and catheter malfunction 5 (9%). Nine patients (16%) needed surgical revision of their PD catheters. There were no bleeding events related to PD despite a mean platelets count of 40.9 (±23.5) × 103/mm3 and rare use of platelets infusions. Despite its methodological limitations, this paper adds to the limited body of evidence supporting the use of acute PD as the primary ARRT modality in children with D+HUS.
Physical Database Design Using a Genetic Algorithm Approach

In this paper we present a mechanism for performing physical database design using a genetic algorithm (GA) based approach. We will explain why database design is such a rich environment for the application of GAs. We envision the use of GAs in five areas: data type selection, data placement, index creation, determining the type of index to be used, and, finally, the internal parameters/setups for the RDBMS itself. The area we will focused on for this paper is index creation. We designed a system using a custom GA tool kit that we wrote which makes recommendations on what indexes should be created for a particular database logical design. To evaluate our thesis, we constructed a simulation of the TPC-C benchmark. We found that we were able to construct a series of recommendations which cover the specification’s setups without encoding the application semantics into the GA system (i.e. its fitness function).
Isoprene levels in the exhaled breath of 200 healthy pupils within the age range 7–18 years studied using SIFT-MS

The published results of breath isoprene studies, to date largely involving adults, are briefly reviewed with special attention given to the work done on this topic during the last 10 years using selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry, SIFT-MS. Then the new data recently obtained on isoprene levels in the exhaled breath of some 200 healthy children and young adults (pupils) with ages ranging from 7 to 18 years measured using SIFT-MS are presented in detail. A concentration distribution has been constructed from the data obtained and compared to that for healthy adults also obtained from SIFT-MS data. Although there is overlap between the two distributions, which are close to log normal in both cases, the median level for the young cohort is much lower at 37 parts-per-billion, pbb, geometric standard deviation, GSD, 2.5, compared to that for the adult cohort of 106 ppb with a GSD of 1.65. Further to this, there is a clear increase in the mean breath isoprene concentration with age for the young cohort with a doubling of the level about every 5–6 years until it reaches the age-invariant mean level of that for adult cohort. Should this trend be extrapolated downwards in age it would indicate a near-zero breath isoprene in the newborn that was indicated by a previous study. Indeed, in the present study isoprene was not detected on the breath of two young children. The results reveal mean breath isoprene levels (±SD) for pupils within the given age ranges as 7–10 years (28 ± 24 ppb), 10–13 years (40 ± 21 ppb), 13–16 years (60 ± 41 ppb) and 16–19 years (54 ± 31 ppb). The more rapid increase that occurs between the second and third age ranges is statistically highly significant (p = 0.001) and we attribute this phenomenon to the onset of puberty and the spurt in growth that occurs during this phase of development. There is no significant difference in mean breath isoprene between males and females for both the adult cohort and the younger cohort.
The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Program as a Collective Institution

A number of factors favor a collective strategy for African countries to build their reputation regarding improved governance and commitment to agriculture. These include negative spillover effects of poor governance (for example, obstacles to developing regional markets), improved bargaining power of African governments vis-A -vis the donor community, long-standing political efforts to build a positive African identity, and a donor interest in reducing transaction costs by interacting with African countries though regional organizations rather than individually. While realizing these potentials, the CAADP effort to build collective rather than individual reputation involves the classical free-rider problem of collective action: Countries may not honor their commitments after having received increased aidâ€”a strategy that will harm all member countries since it undermines the collective reputation. Since CAADP involves a collective commitment by the donor community as well, donors face similar problems of collective action. They, too, may fail to honor their commitments or revert to individual rather than harmonized approaches to support African agriculture. The paper discusses the strategies that CAADP can use to overcome these collective action challenges.
An algorithm based on response time and traffic demands to scale containers on a Cloud Computing system

This paper proposes a cloud computing architecture based in containers and on an algorithm that intends to achieve an efficient allocation of processing resources to comply with response time requirements in a Web system. The algorithm is based on the characterization of web requests and on a PID (Proportional - Integral- Derivative) controller. The proposal was evaluated with a real time series obtained from an operational massive web system in a controlled infrastructure. The results show that the proposal achieves the expected response times allocating a lower number of containers than other related proposals.
Exponential-Polynomial Equations and Dynamical Return Sets

We show that for each finite sequence of algebraic integers α1, . , αn and polynomials P1(x1, . . . , xn; y1, . . . , yn), . , Pr(x1, . . . , xn; y1, . . . , yn) with algebraic integer coefficients, there are a natural number N , n commuting endomorphisms Φi : Gm → Gm of the Nth Cartesian power of the multiplicative group, a point P ∈ Gm(Q), and an algebraic subgroup G ≤ Gm so that the return set {(`1, . . . , `n) ∈ Nn : Φ◦`1 1 ◦· · ·◦Φ ◦`n n (P ) ∈ G(Q)} is identical to the set of solutions to the given exponential-polynomial equation: {(`1, . . . , `n) ∈ Nn : P1(`1, . . . , `n;α1 1 , . . . , α `n n ) = · · · = Pr(`1, . . . , `n;α1 1 , . . . , α `n n ) = 0}.
Choice Bracketing and Construal Level Theory : The Effects of Problem Representation and Mental Representation on Sequential Risk-Taking

Two important theories in intertemporal choice are choice bracketing and construal level theory (CLT), but their relationship to each other is unexplored. Broad bracketing (considering many choices in a sequence) may induce a more holistic approach to decisions, suggesting overlap between choice bracketing and CLT. We attempt to integrate the theories and distinguish their effects on risk-taking. In three studies we demonstrate that construal level (manipulated through temporal distance) and choice bracketing have independent effects on risk-taking. Greater temporal distance and broader choice brackets both significantly increase risk-taking, even controlling for both manipulations simultaneously. We also test and find that temporal distance acts through mental construal, and its effect on risk-taking is mediated by risk perception, while bracketing acts through another mechanism. Taken together, our results indicate that choice bracketing, a well-accepted result in the decision-making literature, is independent from construal level theory. This finding has important implications for financial decision-making and other consumer-related choices that take place over time or wherein consumers must make decisions for the future.