Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Migration of Hmong to Rochester, Minnesota: Life in the Midwest

This study was designed to investigate one of the newest refugee groups to the Midwestern United States, the Hmong refugees from Laos, China, Vietnam and Thailand. This study broadly examines how multigenerational Hmong families are adjusting and adapting to life in Rochester, Minnesota. The following questions guided this study: (1) What effect does non-voluntary migration have on the acculturation levels as measured by cultural awareness and ethnic loyalty of the Hmong in Rochester, Minnesota? (2) How do the Hmong perceive their host Anglo culture? (3) How do the Hmong adjust to their host social system in the United States? (4) How much do Hmong learn about their new environment? (5) How do the Hmong retain traditions within in the United States? Qualitative interviewing through in-depth individual interviews and participant observation was the method of data collection. Participants were recruited through purposive sampling, volunteering, and snowball sampling techniques. Criteria for inclusion in this study were: 1) Being Hmong; 2) Residing in Rochester, Minnesota, and; 3) Being at least 13 years of age or older. Grounded theory methodology was the primary tool of data analysis. The findings clearly demonstrated that the Hmong subjects interviewed for this study showed a high degree of discrepancy between the acculturation levels based on age and country of origin from point of migration. This discrepancy has created an acculturation gap, which is related to the younger Hmong’s increased identification with the American culture and their decreased identification with their family’s culture of origin. This shift has created family difficulties and communication gaps between the
The Intellectual and Spiritual Contribution of Nuruddin Ar-Raniri to Islamic Education in Indonesia

This paper attempts to analyze the intellectual and spiritual contributions of Nuruddin ar-Raniri to Islamic education in Indonesia. It gives the genealogy of ar-Raniri and his arrival to Indonesia as well as the vital role he played in the documentation of important literatures in Malay and Islamic education. This paper further argues that Nuruddin ar-Raniri, serving as a Sufi scholar, great writer, theologian, historian has immense contribution. His impact and influence in Indonesia was profound and noteworthy. His contribution to Malay literature and Islamic education is unavoidable. His masterpieces on intellectual writings has exerted considerable effort in the field of Malay letters and historical writings. His writings cover various fields of knowledge which helped in developing the learning culture in the society. This study used a qualitative approach in collecting and analyzing the data. This study concludes that due to this great contribution in the field of Islamic knowledge, ar-Raniri emerged as an exceptional scholar of his time and a pioneer in the standardization of Islamic religious text within Indonesia. Thus, it remains a legacy and a significant contribution in transforming Indonesia spiritually and intellectually. His contribution in Islamic education includes learning material and Islamic traditional book delivered in Pegon language which used in pesantren and other Islamic education institutions in Indonesia.
Access control: adaptation and real-time implantation of a face recognition method

An improvement of a face recognition method is proposed. The goal is to develop easy-to-use access control software, allowing personal-computer or building access control with minimal constraints for the users. This approach requires a high-speed classification method (about 8 images/s) and a high global recognition rate. We obtain good results using a method derived from principal-component analysis, a geometric transformation of the feature space, and a fast decision algo- rithm. © 2001 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.
On the use of symmetric scatterers for calibration and validation of PALSAR polarimetric modes

PALSAR L-band SAR is affected by Faraday rotation. In this study, PALSAR system is briefly described, and Freeman's method is considered for the calibration of PALSAR. Unless channel imbalances are measured abroad, a reference point target has to be deployed for each scene to be calibrated. For practical reasons, the use of symmetric targets is investigated for calibration and validation of polarimetric PALSAR data
Low power techniques for MP3 audio decoder using subband cut-off approach

In this paper low power techniques for MP3 audio decoder are used based on a phenomenon of zero-filled subbands. By our analysis, large part of subbands contains useless zero-valued data, which can be cut-off. We propose an effective architecture to gain incremental improvements in power consumption and computation complexity. In DWIMDCT block, the computational complexity can be reduced to 34% when we combine the subband cut-off technique and our proposed fast algorithm. In SIMDCT block of synthesis filterbank, the same technique can be applied and the computational complexity can be reduced to 17%. This subband cut-off approach is simple and can be easily integrated with other designs.
Spirituality, Religion, Social Justice Orientation, and the Career Aspirations of Young Adults

ABSTRACT Spirituality and religion predicted the development of social justice orientation (SJO) among young adults in a previous study (Chenot & Kim, 2013). The current study explores the manner in which the effects of spirituality and religion on social justice orientation vary depending on the career aspirations of young adults. The longitudinal data (two waves) used for this study was gathered from 14,527 students at 136 universities in the USA. Results of structural equation modeling analyses revealed that spirituality significantly predicted projected SJO behaviors among those who aspire to join the helping professions and the SJO attitudes of those who sought to join other professions. The implications of the findings for social work and social work education are discussed.
The Influence of Crosslink Density on the Failure Behavior in Amorphous Polymers by Molecular Dynamics Simulations

The crosslink density plays a key role in the mechanical response of the amorphous polymers in previous experiments. However, the mechanism of the influence is still not clear. In this paper, the influence of crosslink density on the failure behavior under tension and shear in amorphous polymers is systematically studied using molecular dynamics simulations. The present results indicate that the ultimate stresses and the broken ratios (the broken bond number to all polymer chain number ratios) increase, as well as the ultimate strains decrease with increasing crosslink density. The strain concentration is clearer with the increase of crosslink density. In other words, a higher crosslink density leads to a higher strain concentration. Hence, the higher strain concentration further reduces the fracture strain. This study implies that the mechanical properties of amorphous polymers can be dominated for different applications by altering the molecular architecture.
The role of clusters within contemporary economic issues

Klasteri, kao skupine povezanih poduzeca i drugih dionika na određenom podrucju, u posljednjih dvadesetak godina imaju sve znacajniju ulogu u poticanju razvoja gospodarstva. Iskustvo razvoja klastera u brojnim zemljama ukazuje na to da klasteri pridonose rastu produktivnosti, inovativnosti i konkurentnosti povezanih poduzeca. Istovremeno, klasteri pridonose jacanju konkurentnosti regija te, posljedicno, pridonose jacanju konkurentnosti nacionalnog gospodarstva. Oblikovanje odgovarajuceg institucionalnog mehanizma izazov je za suvremenu državu. Cilj ovog rada je istražiti ulogu koju klasteri imaju u suvremenom gospodarstvu. S obzirom na izazove implementacije koncepcije održivog razvoja u gospodarsku praksu, rad istražuje mogucnosti razvoja klastera u skladu s koncepcijom održivog razvoja, koja se odnosi na dugorocni gospodarski razvoj uz ostvarenje drustvenog blagostanja i ocuvanja okolisa.
An Elastic-Phrase Model for Statistical Machine Translation

We present some on-going research on phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation using flexible phrases that may contain gaps of variable lengths. This allows us to naturally handle various linguistic phenomena such as negations or separable particles. We integrate this within the standard Maximum Entropy model using some dedicated feature functions, and describe a beam-search stack decoder that handles these noncontiguous, elastic phrases. Preliminary experimental results show that the translation performance compares favourably with phrase-based MT using fixed gap size. We expect that future results may allow us to leverage the added flexibility of elastic chunks to further increase translation performance.
Preventing orphan requests in the context of replicated invocation

In today's systems, applications are composed from various components that may be located on different machines. The components (acting as servers) may have to collaborate in order to service a client request. More specifically, a client request to one component may trigger a request to another component. To ensure fault-tolerance, components are generally replicated. Replicated components lead to the problem of a replicated server invoking another replicated server. We call this the problem of replicated invocation. Replicated invocation has been considered in the context of deterministic servers. However, the problem is more difficult to address when servers are non-deterministic. In this context, work has been done to enforce deterministic execution. In this paper, we consider a different approach: instead of preventing non-deterministic execution of servers we discuss how to handle it. We present the problem of non-deterministic replicated invocation. Our solution then consists of sharing sufficient undo information among the replicas of the server invoking another server.
Relational Storage for XML Rules

Very few research works have been done on XML security over relational databases despite that XML became the de facto standard for the data representation and exchange on the internet and a lot of XML documents are stored in RDBMS. In [14], the author proposed an access control model for schema-based storage of XML documents in relational storage and translating XML access control rules to relational access control rules. However, the proposed algorithms had performance drawbacks. In this paper, we will use the same access control model of [14] and try to overcome the drawbacks of [14] by proposing an efficient technique to store the XML access control rules in a relational storage of XML DTD. The mapping of the XML DTD to relational schema is proposed in [7]. We also propose an algorithm to translate XPath queries to SQL queries based on the mapping algorithm in [7].
Using Bigrams to Identify Relationships Between Student Certainness States and Tutor Responses in a Spoken Dialogue Corpus

We use n-gram techniques to identify dependencies between student affective states of certainty and subsequent tutor dialogue acts, in an annotated corpus of human-human spoken tutoring dialogues. We (cid:2)rst represent our dialogues as bi-grams of annotated student and tutor turns. We next use (cid:31) 2 analysis to identify dependent bigrams. Our results show dependencies between many student states and subsequent tutor dialogue acts. We then analyze the dependent bigrams and suggest ways that our current computer tutor can be enhanced to adapt its dialogue act generation based on these dependencies.
An evaluation of methods to determine the intensity of subjective expressions

In this contribution, we present a survey of several methods that have been applied to the ordering of various types of subjective expressions (e.g. good < great), in particular adjectives and adverbs. Some of these methods use linguistic regularities that can be observed in large text corpora while others rely on external grounding in metadata, in particular the star ratings associated with product reviews. We discuss why these methods do not work uniformly across all types of expressions. We also present the first application of some of these methods to the intensity ordering of nouns (e.g. moron < dummy).
An analysis of users' propensity toward diversity in recommendations

Providing very accurate recommendations to end users has been nowadays recognized to be just one of the main tasks a recommender systems must be able to perform. While predicting relevant suggestions, attention needs to be paid to their diversification in order to avoid monotony in recommendation. In this paper we focus on modeling users' inclination toward selecting diverse items, where diversity is computed by means of content-based item attributes. We then exploit such modeling to present a novel approach to re-rank the list of Top-N items predicted by a recommendation algorithm, in order to foster diversity in the final ranking. Experimental evaluation proves the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Simulation of Different Routing Protocols in MANET Using NS 2

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANETs) is an infrastructure – less network which is created by deploying the mobile nodes carrying wireless devices, able to route the data through multi hop fashion. MANETs uses distributed routing approach. In this paper, analysis of different classification of routing protocols such as: Reactive (AODV, DSR) Proactive (DSDV) and Hybrid protocols ZRP (Zone Routing Protocols) has been done using NS2 simulator. The above work analysis has been done on the following QoS parameters such as: Packet Delivery Ratio, Average Throughput, Routing Overhead and Average Delay.
Merkel Cell Polyomavirus Large T Antigen Has Growth-Promoting and Inhibitory Activities

ABSTRACT Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) is a rare and aggressive form of skin cancer. In at least 80% of all MCC, Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV) DNA has undergone clonal integration into the host cell genome, and most tumors express the MCPyV large and small T antigens. In all cases of MCC reported to date, the integrated MCPyV genome has undergone mutations in the large T antigen. These mutations result in expression of a truncated large T antigen that retains the Rb binding or LXCXE motif but deletes the DNA binding and helicase domains. However, the transforming functions of full-length and truncated MCPyV large T antigen are unknown. We compared the transforming activities of full-length, truncated, and alternatively spliced 57kT forms of MCPyV large T antigen. MCPyV large T antigen could bind to Rb but was unable to bind to p53. Furthermore, MCPyV-truncated large T antigen was more effective than full-length and 57kT large T antigen in promoting the growth of human and mouse fibroblasts. In contrast, expression of the MCPyV large T antigen C-terminal 100 residues could inhibit the growth of several different cell types. These data imply that the deletion of the C terminus of MCPyV large T antigen found in MCC serves not only to disrupt viral replication but also results in the loss of a distinct growth-inhibitory function intrinsic to this region.
Interference Modeling for Cognitive Radio Networks with Power or Contention Control

In this paper, we present an interference model for cognitive radio (CR) networks employing power control or contention control scheme. The probability density functions (PDFs) of the interference received at a primary receiver from a CR network are derived for two cases. For the first case, a power control scheme is proposed to govern the transmission power of a CR node. For the second one, a cognitive media access control (MAC) employs carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) based contention control to coordinate the operation of CR nodes with transmission requests. These two control schemes are compared in terms of their resulting interference distributions. It is demonstrated that both power and contention controls are effective approaches to alleviate the interference caused by CR networks. Some in-depth analysis for the impact of key parameters on the interference of CR networks is given via numerical studies as well.
An Effective Method to Enhance the RDO Performance for H.264/AVC Video Coding

Rate-distortion optimization (RDO) plays quite an important role in today's video coding scheme. This approach seeks a balance between the coding rate and distortion of the picture. The rate of video sequences is negatively related to the distortion between the original pictures and the reconstructed frames in traditionally opinions, for both of them are greatly affected by the quantization parameter (QP) - the larger QP means the greater quantization error, which leads to less bit-rate and more distortion. However, the deduced conclusion maintains the feature that the more precise prediction may benefit both the performance of the rate and that of distortion, with other conditions unchanged. The proposed scheme derives a theoretical estimation an effective algorithm to generate the reference data with least mean square error (MSE) is raised afterwards , which can effectively reduce the prediction error both in IPPPP sequence mode and in IBBBB style. Experimental results provide evidence for substantial improvements (about 0.3-0.5 dB gain) than JM18.3 (the most recent H.264/AVC reference software).
The Effect of Competition on Unions

Removal of geographical restrictions on bank branching in the U.S. intensified competition in the non-financial sector by lowering entry barriers and by accelerating formation of new firms. I use bank deregulation as an instrumental variable to identify an exogenous increase in the competitiveness of the non-financial sector and evaluate its impact on union membership. Two-stage least squares estimates indicate that competition materially reduced union membership. The reduction in union membership is larger in states with greater changes in competition and in manufacturing sectors with relatively high dependence on external finance. Moreover, the reduction in union membership is associated with a reduction in the union wage premium and with an increase in working hours among workers who lost union representation. The results are consistent with the view that unions target less competitive industries and that shocks to competition increase the elasticity of labor-demand. Finally, this paper’s results show that intensified competition explains about two-thirds of the reduction in union membership in the United States since the late 1970s.
GiraphAsync: Supporting Online and Offline Graph Processing via Adaptive Asynchronous Message Processing

It is highly desired for existing distributed graph processing systems to support both offline analytics and online queries adaptively. Existing offline graph analytics systems are mostly based on synchronous model. Although achieving high throughput, they suffer relatively high latency in answering simple queries due to synchronization overhead and slow convergence. On the other hand, online graph query systems adopting asynchronous model can response at any time, while incur overwhelmed messages and network packets, making them unable to meet the high throughput demand of offline analytics. In this work, we propose an adaptive asynchronous message processing (AAMP) method, which improves the efficiency of network communication while maintains low latency, to efficiently support offline analytics and online queries in one graph processing framework. We then design GiraphAsync, an implementation of AAMP on top of Apache Giraph, and evaluate it using several representative offline analytics and online queries on large graph datasets. Experimental results show that GiraphAsync gains an up to 10X improvement over synchronous model systems for graph analytics, while performs as well as specialized systems for online graph queries.
PROPERTIES OF HE-RICH STARS. I. THEIR EVOLUTIONARY STATE AND HELIUM ABUNDANCE

A determination of the surface gravity and an abundance analysis of helium in a sample of 17He-rich and 5 normal, reference stars is presented. These results are derived from low resolution CCD spectra, but each star was measured at least 6 times in order to obtain a significant average spectrum for the spectroscopic variables. The helium abundances derived from the models used are very close to 0.1 for normal, reference stars and are larger for the others, clearly indicating the He-rich phenomenon in them. NLTE effects, errors on the microturbulence value or on the surface gravity do not influence the estimated helium abundances. Nevertheless, synthesized Geneva colours are affected by the He-rich peculiarity, especially the [U-B] index which systematically changes by -0.025 mag per 0.1 of He abundance for the coolest stars in the sample. We cannot confirm the correlation between the evolutionary state and the helium abundance reported previously (Zboril et al. 1994), although we used a more reliable technique of log g determination. All He-rich objects lie within themain sequence: their surface gravities are all inside the range 4.1 < log g < 4.5, with no more than three objects having log g < 4.25. We find a significant spread of helium abundances in this range of surface gravities, from the solar value∼ 0.1 up to about 0.4. Some of the programme stars (including reference stars) present emission in their Balmer lines and therefore some kind of stellar activity. Strong helium overabundance often coexists with emission and stellar activity.
Phase-locking between Kuramoto oscillators: Robustness to time-varying natural frequencies

In this paper we analyze the robustness of phase-locking in the Kuramoto system with arbitrary bidirectional interconnection topology. We show that the effects of time-varying natural frequencies encompass the heterogeneity in the ensemble of oscillators, the presence of exogenous disturbances, and the influence of unmodeled dynamics. The analysis, based on a Lyapunov function for the incremental dynamics of the system, provides a general methodology to build explicit bounds on the region of attraction, on the size of admissible inputs, and on the input-to-state gains. As an illustrative application of this method, we show that, in the particular case of the all-to-all coupling, the synchronized state is exponentially input-to-state stable provided that all initial phase differences lie in the same half circle. The approach provides an explicit bound on the convergence rate, thus extending recent results on the exponential synchronization of the finite Kuramoto model. Furthermore, the proposed Lyapunov function for the incremental dynamics allows for a new characterization of the robust asymptotically stable phase-locked states of the unperturbed dynamics in terms of its isolated local minima.