Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Introducing compositionality in Web service descriptions

Web services are essentially black box components from a composer's or a mediator's perspective. The behavioural description of any service can be asserted by the composer only through interface predicates exposed by the service provider Normally for proving properties of service compositions, pre/post conditions are found to be sufficient. However these properties are assertions only on the initial and final states of the service respectively. They do not help in specifying/verifying ongoing behaviour of an individual service or a composed system. We propose a framework for enriching service descriptions with two compositional assertions: assumption and commitment that facilitate reasoning about service composition and verification of their integration. The technique is based on interval temporal logic (ITL), a sound formalism for specifying and proving temporal properties of systems.
Using Dependency Paths for Answering Definition Questions on the Web

This work presents a new approach to automatically answer definition questions from the Web. This approach learns n-gram language models from lexicalised dependency paths taken from abstracts provided by Wikipedia and uses context information to identify candidate descriptive sentences containing target answers. Results using a prototype of the model showed the effectiveness of lexicalised dependency paths as salient indicators for the presence of definitions in natural language texts.
Analysis of Students’ Reflective Essays on Their First Human Dissection Experience

Purpose: Reflection is increasingly being used in higher education, but the criteria to assess the depth of reflection in student essays are difficult to define. This article tested the hypothesis that a good reflective essay contains more terms indicating mental processes. Methods: The authors selected two essays written by first year medical students at The University of Hong Kong, after their first encounter with cadavers in their dissection class. The two essays were perceived by teachers as having different depths of reflection. The transitivity system in Systemic Functional Linguistics was adopted to compare the two essays in terms of percentage occurrence of different process types (mental, material, relational, verbal, behavioral, existential). Results: The analysis showed that the essay with deeper reflection had a higher percentage occurrence of mental and relational processes and a low percentage occurrence of material processes. The other three processes accounted for only a low percentage of processes in both essays. Conclusion: From the transitivity analysis of the two reflective essays, the hypothesis that a good reflective essay contains more terms indicating mental processes is supported. The transitivity system in systemic functional linguistics can thus be used as an objective framework for assessing the depth of reflection in written essays.
Least-Squares Interpolation of Fused MR and CT Images in the Wavelet Domain

A suggested approach is presented in this paper to obtain high-resolution images from the fusion and then interpolation of Magnetic Resonance (MR) and Computed Tomography (CT) images. MR and CT images are fused with either the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) or the curvelet transform. After that, a least-squares interpolation step is carried out on the wavelet sub-bands of the fusion result. Simulation results show the feasibility of the fusion process to obtain images with more details and the efficiency of interpolation to obtain high-resolution images.
THE EFFECT OF LIVESTOCK INDUSTRY LOCATION ON RURAL RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY VALUES

Introduction The livestock industry creates jobs and income in, mostly rural, communities and can be an important engine of economic growth and development (e.g., Seidl and Weiler, 2000). Animal agriculture can also generate impacts beyond the boundaries of the farm, ranch, or feedlot, including flies, odor, water pollution, farm vehicle traffic, and noise, for example. The impact of these potential positive and negative economic effects increases with human interaction. Recent structural change within the livestock industry has heightened concerns about the industry’s potential negative impacts.
Optimization of cabling in power electronics structure using inductance criterion

The power electronics applications require design of more and more structures and control of the parasitic loop inductance because of increasing current and voltage levels induced by used components (IGBT). Part of this parasitic inductance is due to imperfect connections and is directly linked to their geometrical characteristics. Therefore we present in this paper a methodology to improve the geometry of the cabling of all converters in order to limit the parasitic loop inductance, while keeping its compactness. The optimization is based on two steps: first an analysis of the structure and then the optimization of the cabling.
Behavioural changes and the adaptive diversification of pigeons and doves

What factors determine the extent of evolutionary diversification remains a major question in evolutionary biology. Behavioural changes have long been suggested to be a major driver of phenotypic diversification by exposing animals to new selective pressures. Nevertheless, the role of behaviour in evolution remains controversial because behavioural changes can also retard evolutionary change by hiding genetic variation from selection. In the present study, we apply recently implemented Ornstein–Uhlenbeck evolutionary models to show that behavioural changes led to associated evolutionary responses in functionally relevant morphological traits of pigeons and doves (Columbiformes). Specifically, changes from terrestrial to arboreal foraging behaviour reconstructed in a set of phylogenies brought associated shorter tarsi and longer tails, consistent with functional predictions. Interestingly, the transition to arboreality accelerated the rates of evolutionary divergence, leading to an increased morphological specialization that seems to have subsequently constrained reversals to terrestrial foraging. Altogether, our results support the view that behaviour may drive evolutionary diversification, but they also highlight that its evolutionary consequences largely depend on the limits imposed by the functional demands of the adaptive zone.
A Heuristic Simulated Annealing Algorithm for the Circular Packing Problem

We study the circular packing problem (CPP) which consists of packing a set of circles of known radii into a larger containing circle without overlapping. The objective is to determine the smallest radius of the containing circle and the coordinates of the center of every packed circle. To solve CPP, we propose a heuristic simulated annealing (HSA) algorithm that incorporates heuristic neighborhood search mechanism and the gradient descent method into the simulated annealing procedure. The special neighborhood search mechanism can avoid the disadvantage of blind search in the simulated annealing algorithm and the gradient descent method can speed up searching the global optimal configuration. The computational results, on a set of instances taken from the literature, show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
A Critical Meta-Analysis of Lens Model Studies in Human Judgment and Decision-Making

Achieving accurate judgment (‘judgmental achievement’) is of utmost importance in daily life across multiple domains. The lens model and the lens model equation provide useful frameworks for modeling components of judgmental achievement and for creating tools to help decision makers (e.g., physicians, teachers) reach better judgments (e.g., a correct diagnosis, an accurate estimation of intelligence). Previous meta-analyses of judgment and decision-making studies have attempted to evaluate overall judgmental achievement and have provided the basis for evaluating the success of bootstrapping (i.e., replacing judges by linear models that guide decision making). However, previous meta-analyses have failed to appropriately correct for a number of study design artifacts (e.g., measurement error, dichotomization), which may have potentially biased estimations (e.g., of the variability between studies) and led to erroneous interpretations (e.g., with regards to moderator variables). In the current study we therefore conduct the first psychometric meta-analysis of judgmental achievement studies that corrects for a number of study design artifacts. We identified 31 lens model studies (N = 1,151, k = 49) that met our inclusion criteria. We evaluated overall judgmental achievement as well as whether judgmental achievement depended on decision domain (e.g., medicine, education) and/or the level of expertise (expert vs. novice). We also evaluated whether using corrected estimates affected conclusions with regards to the success of bootstrapping with psychometrically-corrected models. Further, we introduce a new psychometric trim-and-fill method to estimate the effect sizes of potentially missing studies correct psychometric meta-analyses for effects of publication bias. Comparison of the results of the psychometric meta-analysis with the results of a traditional meta-analysis (which only corrected for sampling error) indicated that artifact correction leads to a) an increase in values of the lens model components, b) reduced heterogeneity between studies, and c) increases the success of bootstrapping. We argue that psychometric meta-analysis is useful for accurately evaluating human judgment and show the success of bootstrapping.
Syntax and its Interfaces in L2 Grammars - Situating L1 Effects

Studies on the first language (L1) acquisition of word order optionality (e.g. Kramer 2000) report a developmental disjunction between syntactic and interpretive knowledge. We find suggestive evidence for a similar disjunction in the second language (L2) acquisition of German optional word order, so-called scrambling. This study examines scrambling in advanced and near-native English-German and Japanese-German Interlanguage (IL). Advanced L2 learners are found to have robust knowledge of underdetermined UG-specified syntax, but they show non-target-like behaviour on interpretive aspects of scrambling. We suggest that this distinction owes to protracted L1 transfer effects at the Interfaces, but does not necessarily entail representational deficits in the architecture of adult L2 grammars. Section 2 of this paper reviews scrambling in native and non-native language acquisition. In section 3, we formulate the experimental hypotheses. The study is presented in section 4, and its results are discussed in section 5. Section 6 concludes.
Genetic Manipulation of Adipose Cells to Improve Fatty Acid Composition of Meat

The purpose of this study is to modify adipose cells genetically in culture to produce cells that contain less saturated fat. To accomplish this objective, a fatty acid desaturase gene from castor beans will be transferred into adipose cells. Using cultured liver cells as a test system, the gene was successfully transferred into 12 different cultures of liver cells. We are currently studying the production of the corresponding RNA from the incorporated gene and the fatty acid composition of the transformed cells. Our next goal is to conduct similar activities using cultured adipose cells. Saturated fatty acids make up 40 to 55% of the total fat associated with meat. It has been demonstrated in animal and human studies that dietary saturated fatty acids (excluding C18:0) are hypercholesterolemic when compared with polyunsaturated fatty acids. Therefore, nutritional scientists must seek with urgency nutritional, managerial, and genetic protocols for decreasing the fat content and the proportion of saturated fatty acids in animal-derived foods.
Focused crawling for both relevance and quality of medical information ∗

Subject-specific search facilities on health sites are usually built using manual inclusion and exclusion rules. These can be expensive to maintain and often provide incomplete coverage of Web resources. On the other hand, health information obtained through whole-of-Web search may not be scientifically based and can be potentially harmful. To address problems of cost, coverage and quality, we built a focused crawler for the mental health topic of depression, which was able to selectively fetch higher quality relevant information. We found that the relevance of unfetched pages can be predicted based on link anchor context, but the quality cannot. We therefore estimated quality of the entire linking page, using a learned IR-style query of weighted single words and word pairs, and used this to predict the quality of its links. The overall crawler priority was determined by the product of link relevance and source quality. We evaluated our crawler against baseline crawls using both relevance judgments and objective site quality scores obtained using an evidence-based rating scale. Both a relevance focused crawler and the quality focused crawler retrieved twice as many relevant pages as a breadth-first control. The quality focused crawler was quite effective in reducing the amount of low quality material fetched while crawling more high quality content, relative to the relevance focused crawler. Analysis suggests that quality of content might be improved by post-filtering a very big breadth-first crawl, at the cost of substantially increased network traffic.
Auctions in do-not-track compliant internet advertising

Online tracking of users in support of behavioral advertising is widespread. Several researchers have proposed non-tracking online advertising systems that go well beyond the requirements of the Do-Not-Track initiative launched by the US Federal Trace Commission (FTC). The primary goal of these systems is to allow for behaviorally targeted advertising without revealing user behavior (clickstreams) or user profiles to the ad network. Although these designs purport to be practical solutions, none of them adequately consider the role of the ad auctions, which today are central to the operation of online advertising systems. This paper looks at the problem of running auctions that leverage user profiles for ad ranking while keeping the user profile private. We define the problem, broadly explore the solution space, and discuss the pros and cons of these solutions. We analyze the performance of our solutions using data from Microsoft Bing advertising auctions. We conclude that, while none of our auctions are ideal in all respects, they are adequate and practical solutions.
Semi-supervised Document Clustering via Active Learning with Pairwise Constraints

This paper investigates a framework that discovers pair-wise constraints for semi-supervised text document clustering. An active learning approach is proposed to select informative document pairs for obtaining user feedbacks. A gain directed document pair selection method that measures how much we can learn by revealing the relationships between pairs of documents is designed. Three different models, namely, uncertainty model, generation error model, and objective function model are proposed. Language modeling is investigated for representing clusters in the semi-supervised document clustering approach.
Learning to be literate: Insights from research for policy and practice

This article presents an overview of literacy teaching and learning, based on the author’s extensive research and, in particular, the recently revised and extended Learning to be Literate: Insights from Research for Policy and Practice (Routledge, 2016). It is set against a background in England in which government policy dictates synthetic phonics as the method of teaching reading, supported by a high-stakes phonics test including nonsense words. The article points to the lack of evidence for such an approach, the complex nature of English orthography and the problems for the increasing number of children not learning to read in their first language.
Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)

Developed to assess symptoms of psychopathy, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is a diagnostic tool which allows people to rate their psychopathic or antisocial habits. The PCL-R is used for legal, clinical, or research purposes as a indicator of potential risk posed by subject or prisoners. Two parts are include the Hare PCL-R test: a interview and a review of the subject’s file records and history. During the assessment, the administrator answers a 20-item test measuring psychopathic traits. Completion time is 90 to 120 minutes. The second edition (or revised edition) is the current version of the test. Author Robert D. Hare (2003) Where to Purchase Pearson Assessments Reliability and Validity The Hare Psychopathy Checklist is an established instrument for measuring psychopathy. Hare’s used a sample of 4,981 prison inmates and 1,246 inmates to calculate an alpha coefficient of 0.87 for both. Interrater reliability was also very high according to Rogers (2001). For a 5-year time period, the test-retest coefficient was presented at 0.89 (Schroeder, Schroeder, and Hare, 1983). Validity has been supported factor analysis studies (Hare, Harpur, Hakistan, Forth, & Hart, 1990) using samples of prisoner and forensic inpatients. Administration, Analysis and Reporting Statistics Solutions consists of a team of professional methodologists and statisticians that can assist the student or professional researcher in administering the survey instrument, collecting the data, conducting the analyses and explaining the results. For additional information on these services, click here.
Classification of Instant Messaging Communications for Forensics Analysis

Instant messaging (IM) is a well-established means of fast and effective communication. Once used primarily by home users for personal communications, IM solutions are now being deployed by organizations to provide convenient internal communication. This often includes the exchange and discussion of proprietary and sensitive information, thus introducing privacy concerns. Although IM is used in many legitimate activities for conversations and message exchange, it can also be misused by various means. For example, an attacker may masquerade as another user by hijacking the connection, performing a man-in-the-middle attack, or by obtaining physical access to a user's computer. There are various reasons that an attacker might want to masquerade as someone else, including spying, disgruntlement, snooping, or other malicious intentions. Analysis of IM in terms of computer forensics and intrusion detection has gone largely unexplored until now. This paper explores IM author classification based on author behavior. Author classification may be used for author identification/validation for forensics analysis or masquerade detection. The experiments presented here applied classification methods to IM messages to determine whether the author of an IM conversation could be identified based strictly on user behavior, and to determine the strongest identifying characteristics.
Flow Monitoring Explained: From Packet Capture to Data Analysis With NetFlow and IPFIX

Flow monitoring has become a prevalent method for monitoring traffic in high-speed networks. By focusing on the analysis of flows, rather than individual packets, it is often said to be more scalable than traditional packet-based traffic analysis. Flow monitoring embraces the complete chain of packet observation, flow export using protocols such as NetFlow and IPFIX, data collection, and data analysis. In contrast to what is often assumed, all stages of flow monitoring are closely intertwined. Each of these stages therefore has to be thoroughly understood, before being able to perform sound flow measurements. Otherwise, flow data artifacts and data loss can be the consequence, potentially without being observed. This paper is the first of its kind to provide an integrated tutorial on all stages of a flow monitoring setup. As shown throughout this paper, flow monitoring has evolved from the early 1990s into a powerful tool, and additional functionality will certainly be added in the future. We show, for example, how the previously opposing approaches of deep packet inspection and flow monitoring have been united into novel monitoring approaches.
Motion Analysis of Live Objects by Super-Resolution Fluorescence Microscopy

Motion analysis plays an important role in studing activities or behaviors of live objects in medicine, biotechnology, chemistry, physics, spectroscopy, nanotechnology, enzymology, and biological engineering. This paper briefly reviews the developments in this area mostly in the recent three years, especially for cellular analysis in fluorescence microscopy. The topic has received much attention with the increasing demands in biomedical applications. The tasks of motion analysis include detection and tracking of objects, as well as analysis of motion behavior, living activity, events, motion statistics, and so forth. In the last decades, hundreds of papers have been published in this research topic. They cover a wide area, such as investigation of cell, cancer, virus, sperm, microbe, karyogram, and so forth. These contributions are summarized in this review. Developed methods and practical examples are also introduced. The review is useful to people in the related field for easy referral of the state of the art.
Cells to Apoptosis Induced by Various Antitumor Agents The Cell Cycle Related Differences in Susceptibility of HL-60 Updated

The studies were aimed to detect the cell cycle-associated differences in the susceptibility of HL-60 cells to apoptosis induced by diverse agents. Exponentially growing HL-60 cells were treated with the DNA topoi somerase I inhibitor camptothecin; the DNA topoisomerase II inhibitors teniposide, /Â«-\\ISA, Mitoxantrone, or Fostriecin; the presumed tyrosine kinase inhibitor genistein; a serine/threonine kinase inhibitor H7; the protein synthesis inhibitor cycloheximide; the DNA replication inhibitor hydroxyurea; the nucleoside antimetabolites 1-ÃŸ-o-arabinofuranosylcytosine and 5-azacytidine; and the alkylating agent nitrogen mustard, cisplatin, hyperthermia, and y irradiation. Endonucleolysis, which accom panied apoptosis induced by these agents, was assessed by two different flow cytometric methods, one based on DNA content measurements fol lowing extraction of low molecular weight DNA, and another using exog enous terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase to label in situ DNA strand breaks. Each method allowed for both identification of apoptotic cells and analysis of the cell cycle distribution of the unaffected cell population; the method using terminal transferase also allowed for identification of the cell cycle position of apoptotic cells. Confirmed by analysis of DNA deg radation by gel electrophoresis and changes in cell morphology, apoptosis was observed as early as 3 h after administration of most drugs and for some drugs was cell cycle phase specific. Cells progressing through S phase were selectively susceptible when treated with camptothecin, teni poside, m-AMSA, Mitoxantrone, H7, hydroxyurea, and l-ÃŸ-Â»-arabinofuranosylcytosine. Cells in G2-M preferentially underwent apoptosis in cultures treated with H7 or with y-irradiation. Cells in GÂ¡phase were preferentially affected by 5-azacytidine, nitrogen mustard, and hyperther mia. No significant cell cycle specificity was observed in the case of Fos triecin, genistein, cycloheximide, or cisplatin. The cell cycle related differ ence in susceptibility to apoptosis may be a reflection of both the severity of the lesion induced by a given drug and the ability of the cells to repair that lesion; both can vary depending on the cell cycle phase.