Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modelling survival data of thalassaemia patients in Pakistan.

BACKGROUND Fatimid Foundation with its centers serves as a charitable organization for millions of blood disease carriers in Pakistan. This retrospective survival study is an analysis of the Thalassaemia patients registered in Multan centre who are followed up to nine years to assess the gender risk of death. METHODS Data on 120 patients of Thalassaemia during 1994-2002 was analyzed. The standard Kaplan-Meier and Nelson-Aalen procedures were used to compare the survival function of the male and female patients of Thalassaemia. The statistical significance was also assessed using log rank test. The Cox Proportional Hazards (PH) model using a forward selection procedure was used to identify the potential factors associated with the increase risk of death. RESULTS By ignoring the censoring, the average survival time of males and females were calculated to be 1308.1 and 1574.7 days respectively. The average hazard rate for the female group was 0.00033 and for the male group it was 0.00061. The median survival time was estimated from the Kaplan-Meier survival curves (Males: 1400 days, Females: 1785 days). Under the censoring mechanism, the mean survival time for males was calculated to be 1465.82 days with standard error of 146 days, where as for females it was calculated to be 1855.26 with standard error of 151.82 days. When considering death as event of interest Under the Cox modelling approach, we found a male patient of Thalassaemia was 1.484 times more likely to die when compared to his female counterpart. When considering the iron over load as the event of interest, we found a male patient of Thalassaemia was 1.753 fold more likely to reach excessive Haemochromatosis level compared to female patient. CONCLUSION The analysis reinforces that female group prognosis is better than the male group. Further, our analysis of real survival data set shows that the high status of Haemochromatosis level is associated with the increased risk of death in patients with Thalassaemia with other possible confounders.
The 2013 Best Dissertation Winner and Runners-Up for the Academy of Management’s Organizations and the Natural Environment Division

The Organizations and the Natural Environment (ONE) Division of the Academy of Management, like most Academy divisions, has an annual dissertation competition to recognize and honor exemplary work in the field. This article, kindly invited by the Editor of Business & Society, provides an overview of the winner and runners-up of that competition, insights into the process for selecting this work, and some reflections on future dissertations in the area.
Not So Subtle

Extant research suggests subtle, interpersonal forms of discrimination, though often normalized and overlooked, may be just as detrimental to targets as compared to more traditional, overt forms of discrimination. To further examine this question, we meta-analyzed the current literature to estimate the relationship between discrimination and a host of psychological, physical health, and work-related correlates as a function of its form (subtle or overt). Analysis of 90 effect sizes suggested that subtle and overt forms of discrimination hold relationships of comparable magnitude with a host of adverse correlates. By demonstrating that these two forms of discrimination are not differentially related to relevant outcomes, our findings call into serious question the pervasive belief that subtle discrimination is less consequential for targets as compared to overt discrimination (Landy, 2008; McWhorter, 2008). Taken together, our results suggest that subtle discrimination is at least as important to consider and address as its overt counterpart. Implications for organizational scholars and practitioners are discussed.
A Solar System Metaphor for 3D Visualisation of Object Oriented Software Metrics

Early detection of problems within a code base can save much effort and associated cost as time progresses. One method of performing routine assessment of code with a view to pre-emption of a decline in quality is to collect software metrics associated with code size and complexity. Despite the best efforts of the last decade to establish this type pf empirical analysis as best practice, it is not yet a standard activity in software production. One way of potentially increasing empirical analysis activity on this realm is to contemplate visualisation as a means to readily analyse either static or evolving code to perceive in real time suspected areas of risk within the code base. This paper presents a first attempt at 3D visualisation of software metrics by using a familiar metaphor to present empirical concepts.
CGSharing: Efficient content sharing in GPU-based cloud gaming

With the fast development of the GPU server technology, cloud gaming has become popular in recent years. Unlike the traditional desktop gaming where the graphic rendering is performed locally using the user's personal graphics card, cloud gaming runs multiple games to support many users at the same time in the data center where most of the rendering jobs are done in the remote GPU cluster. The rendered frames are streamed to user's devices such as notebooks, tablets and cell phones. For the economic cloud gaming to be viable, the operator must make full utilization of the expensive hardware resources like the graphic cards, and the state of art technology tries to render multiple instances of games on the same GPU. In this paper, we first identify that there are many redundant and duplicated contexts/workloads existing in today's cloud gaming rendering that waste a large amount of memory bandwidth and system energy. We in turn propose novel system architecture enhancements to effectively share the contents across the game instances from different users in the cloud gaming center.
On Reporting Recollective Experiences and “Direct Access to Memory Systems”

Strack and F$oUrster (1995) showed that, unlike remember responses, know responses in recognition memory were influenced by manipulating response bias. We describe an experiment that replicated theirs but additionally allowed subjects to report guesses. Only guess responses were influenced by this manipulation. Response bias had no effects on either know or remember responses. This outcome suggests that manipulating response bias influences know responses only when guessing is encouraged but not reported as such. Moreover, though know responses reflected memory for the study events, guess responses did not.
Factor Analysis of the KeyMath—Revised Normative Update Form A

The factor structure of the KeyMath—Revised Normative Update (KMR-NU) Form A was analyzed using data from a sample of 130 students. The KMR-NU is composed of 13 subtests that are purported to measure three important aspects of math ability: Basic Concepts, Operations, and Applications. A confirmatory factor analysis employing scaled scores from the 13 subtests was used to evaluate the model fit of the hypothesized three-factor model. The results of the analysis did not support the three-factor model. Follow-up exploratory factor analyses were conducted to determine if other models might provide a better model fit for the data. The results were consistent with the only factor-analytic study conducted with a previous version of the KMR-NU (Walker & Arnault, 1991), which suggested that the Total Score was the only score that should be used.
Cookies that give you away : Evaluating the surveillance implications of web tracking ( Draft : April 2 , 2014 )

We investigate the ability of a passive network observer to leverage third-party HTTP tracking cookies for mass surveillance. If two web pages embed the same tracker which emits a unique pseudonymous identifier, then the adversary can link visits to those pages from the same user (browser instance) even if the user’s IP address varies. Using simulated browsing profiles, we cluster network tra c by transitively linking shared unique cookies and estimate that for typical users over 90% of web sites with embedded trackers are located in a single connected component. Furthermore, almost half of the most popular web pages will leak a logged-in user’s real-world identity to an eavesdropper in unencrypted tra c. Together, these provide a novel method to link an identified individual to a large fraction of her entire web history. We discuss the privacy consequences of this attack and suggest mitigation strategies.
Relaxed Online SVMs in the TREC Spam Filtering Track

Relaxed Online Support Vector Machines (ROSVMs) have recently been proposed as an efficient methodology for attaining an approximate SVM solution for streaming data such as the online spam filtering task. Here, we apply ROSVMs in the TREC 2007 Spam filtering track and report results. In particular, we explore the effect of various slidingwindow sizes, trading off computation cost against classification performance with good results. We also test a variant of fixed-uncertainty sampling for Online Active Learning. The best results with this approach give classification performance near to that of the fully supervised approach while requiring only a small fraction of the examples to be labeled.
Integrated perception, mapping, and footstep planning for humanoid navigation among 3D obstacles

In this paper, we present an integrated navigation system that allows humanoid robots to autonomously navigate in unknown, cluttered environments. From the data of an onboard consumer-grade depth camera, our system estimates the robot's pose to compensate for drift of odometry and maintains a heightmap representation of the environment. Based on this model, our system iteratively computes sequences of safe actions including footsteps and whole-body motions, leading the robot to target locations. Hereby, the planner chooses from a set of actions that consists of planar footsteps, step-over actions, as well as parameterized step-onto and step-down actions. To efficiently check for collisions during planning, we developed a new approach that takes into account the shape of the robot and the obstacles. As we demonstrate in experiments with a Nao humanoid, our system leads to robust navigation in cluttered environments and the robot is able to traverse highly challenging passages.
Generalized immigration schemes for dynamic evolutionary multiobjective optimization

The insertion of atypical solutions (immigrants) in Evolutionary Algorithms populations is a well studied and successful strategy to cope with the difficulties of tracking optima in dynamic environments in single-objective optimization. This paper studies a probabilistic model, suggesting that centroid-based diversity measures can mislead the search towards optima, and presents an extended taxonomy of immigration schemes, from which three immigrants strategies are generalized and integrated into NSGA2 for Dynamic Multiobjective Optimization (DMO). The correlation between two diversity indicators and hypervolume is analyzed in order to assess the influence of the diversity generated by the immigration schemes in the evolution of non-dominated solutions sets on distinct continuous DMO problems under different levels of severity and periodicity of change. Furthermore, the proposed immigration schemes are ranked in terms of the observed offline hypervolume indicator.
THE SOLUTION OF THE DISTANCE GEOMETRY PROBLEM IN PROTEIN MODELING VIA GEOMETRIC BUILDUP

A well-known problem in protein modeling is the determination of the structure of a protein with a given set of inter-atomic or inter-residue distances obtained from either physical experiments or theoretical estimates. A general form of the problem is known as the distance geometry problem in mathematics, the graph embedding problem in computer science, and the multidimensional scaling problem in statistics. The problem has applications in many other scientific and engineering fields as well such as sensor network localization, image recognition, and protein classification. We describe the formulations and complexities of the problem in its various forms, and introduce a geometric buildup approach to the problem. Central to this approach is the idea that the coordinates of the atoms in a protein can be determined one atom at a time, with the distances from the determined atoms to the undetermined ones. It can determine a structure more efficiently than other conventional approaches, yet without requiring more distance constraints than necessary.
The Creative Dimension of Lay Thinking in the Case of the Representation of Democracy for Greek Youth

This article intends to make a contribution to the study of lay thinking on democracy and proposes a theoretical framework based on the notion of the `argumentative pole' that I have developed in my Ph.D. dissertation (Magioglou, 2005) and will be further presented in a series of articles. It focuses on the dialogical and creative dimension of lay thinking, based in a question—answer style. Argumentative poles are a number of open questions, such as `what is good? ', or what is democracy? ', `who should act? ' and `how? ', that attract different and, at times, opposing answers. The answers present a dynamic tension between an organized and an ambivalent dimension. In this article, the presentation is focused on the contradictory and ambivalent dimension of lay thinking and draws, from a theoretical point of view, on perspectives in social and cultural psychology (Bruner, 1986; Marková, 2003; Moscovici, 1976; Valsiner & Van der Veer, 2000) that attend to language and social and cultural context. This contradictory element is related to the creative character of lay thinking as a form of social thinking: bringing together ideas that do not match according to logic or ideology, which allows new combinations and new representations of democracy to appear. I present data from the narrative analysis because it led to the notion of the `argumentative pole'. The logic of the presentation is theoretical and does not follow a linear demonstrative style. It is typical of qualitative research (Flick, 2002), where the results of the data analysis inspire a `grounded' theory that fits the research questions (Strauss, 1987).
On capturing dependence in point processes : Matching moments and other techniques

Providing probabilistic analysis of queueing models can be difficult when the input distributions are non-Markovian. In response, a plethora of methods have been developed to approximate a general renewal process by a process with the time between renewals being distributed as a phase type random variable, which allows the resulting queueing models to become analytically or numerically tractable. However, from previous studies on the manufacturing sector, and more recently in analysis of telecommunications systems, assumptions of independence do not always hold and efforts have been made to approximate nonrenewal processes with Markovian Arrival Processes. In this paper we survey techniques for deriving the appropriate parameters of a Markovian process to accurately capture relevant characteristics of the original point process.
Performance Analysis of Log-map, SOVA and Modified SOVA Algorithm for Turbo Decoder

this paper we analyze the BER performance of the log-map and SOVA decoding algorithms for turbo codes over the AWGN and the fading channels, the Rayleigh, the Rician and the Nakagami-m. Also a modification to the SOVA algorithm is proposed to improve its BER performance. Simulation results show that with the proposed modification to the SOVA the BER performance of SOVA is improved. Simulations were done using MATLAB.
Buffer Overflow Analysis for C

Buffer overflow detection and mitigation for C programs has been an important concern for a long time. This paper defines a string buffer overflow analysis for C programs. The key ideas of our formulation are (a) separating buffers from the pointers that point to them, (b) modelling buffers in terms of sizes and sets of positions of null characters, and (c) defining stateless functions to compute the sets of null positions and mappings between buffers and pointers. This exercise has been carried out to test the feasibility of describing such an analysis in terms of lattice valued functions and relations to facilitate automatic construction of an analyser without the user having to write C/C++/Java code. This is facilitated by devising stateless formulations because stateful formulations combine features through side effects in states raising a natural requirement of C/C++/Java code to be written to describe them. Given the above motivation, the focus of this paper is not to build good static approximations for buffer overflow analysis but to show how given static approximations could be formalized in terms of stateless formulations so that they become amenable to automatic construction of analysers.
Swendsen‐Wang algorithm on the mean‐field Potts model

We study the q‐state ferromagnetic Potts model on the n‐vertex complete graph known as the mean‐field (Curie‐Weiss) model. We analyze the Swendsen‐Wang algorithm which is a Markov chain that utilizes the random cluster representation for the ferromagnetic Potts model to recolor large sets of vertices in one step and potentially overcomes obstacles that inhibit single‐site Glauber dynamics. Long et al. studied the case q = 2, the Swendsen‐Wang algorithm for the mean‐field ferromagnetic Ising model, and showed that the mixing time satisfies: (i) Θ(1) for ββc , where βc is the critical temperature for the ordered/disordered phase transition. In contrast, for q≥3 there are two critical temperatures 0
Implications of Student Teachers¿ Implementation of a Curricular Innovation

This study examined 49 student teachers’ actions and perspectives when implementing a curricular innovation (the tactical games approach). Data were collected via videotaped lessons, interviews, and follow-up questionnaires. Questions for interviews and questionnaires were pilot tested and data were analyzed using the constant comparison method. Videotape analysis was facilitated by Noldus’s Observer (4.0) software and was tested for interobserver reliability. Results revealed that pupils were actively engaged for more than half (52%) of class time. The majority of student teachers’ questions were of low order (76%). The greatest challenges student teachers faced were pupils being new to the approach, or lacking skills. The greatest facilitators to implementing the tactical approach were physical education teacher education courses. Student teachers suggested that more opportunities to teach using the tactical approach in schools during methods classes would better prepare them for practicum. A follow-up .
The Adoption of Green Information Technology and Information Systems: an Evidence from Corporate Social Responsibility

Over the last decade, an increasing number of firms are undertaking actions to cut their environmental impact. As information technology and information systems have permeated most business activities, they offer an important opportunity to solve the ecological problems. Green information technology and information systems (ITIS) has become one of the latest considerations to reduce energy consuming of IT operation and business operation. Firstly, the paper makes a definition of green IT and green IS based on the prior literature, and concludes the three aspects of green ITIS adoption motivations: regulations, competitiveness and ecological responsibility. Next, the paper looks into the role of business strategy in the process of green ITIS adoption, which can be classified into proactive strategy and reactive strategy. Finally, based on the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework, the paper proposes a green ITIS adoption model including the factors of business strategy, and three aspects of green ITIS motivations under the instruction of corporate social responsibility (CSR) theoretical perspective.
When Is It Okay to Exclude a Member of the Ingroup? Children's and Adolescents’ Social Reasoning

Social exclusion of those who challenge group norms was investigated by asking children and adolescents, adolescents, age 9–13 years (N = 381), to evaluate exclusion of group members who deviated from group norms. Testing predictions from social reasoning developmental theories of group-based exclusion, children and adolescents evaluated exclusion based on group norms involving allocation of resources and group traditions about dress code. Exclusion of deviant members was viewed as increasingly wrong with age, but also varied by the type of norm the deviant challenged. Participants who reported disliking a deviant member who wanted to distribute money unequally also found it acceptable to exclude them. Those who disliked deviants who went against norms about dress codes did not think exclusion was warranted. These findings are discussed in the context of children's social-cognitive development regarding peer rejection as well as the role played by moral judgment and group dynamics.
Routing metrics in wireless mesh networks: a Monte Carlo simulation approach

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) can extend the wireless technologies with respect to their coverage. In order to properly plan a WMN, it is not always easy to install it directly as the topology and configuration of some parameters may not be optimized leading to excessive costs and inefficient network services. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate WMN performance with different configurations of parameters and different topologies without the need to deploy them. The paper presented here proposes the use of Monte Carlo simulation in order to evaluate the performance of a WMN in order to satisfy acceptable QoS parameters for routing metrics, such as ETX and ETT. Results presented show that the method is quite effective in testing several scenarios and configurations in order to obtain a good feasible solution before installing the network.
Vision-based Localization of Leader-Follower Formations

This paper focuses on the localization problem for a mobile camera network. In particular, we consider the case of leader-follower formations of nonholonomic mobile vehicles equipped with vision sensors which provide only the bearing to the other robots. We prove a sufficient condition for observability and show that recursive estimation enables a leader-follower formation if the leader is not trapped in an unobservable configuration. We employ an Extended Kalman Filter for the estimation of each follower position and orientation with respect to the leader and we adopt a feedback linearizing control strategy to achieve a desired formation. Simulation results in a noisy environment are provided.