Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The reorganisation of the Australian higher educational institutions towards a Unified National System

ABSTRACT The Green and White Papers of 1987 and 1988 advocated the reorganisation of Australian higher education by creating a Unified National System (UNS). The purpose was to develop the system as an export industry in keeping with the national goals. It was called upon to participate both in improving the skill levels of the country's work-force and earn foreign exchange by providing educational services to overseas students, thus making a contribution to economic development. The mechanism encouraged was institutional mergers with the intention of eliminating the colleges of advanced education. This paper examines the procedures and processes adopted and the resultant UNS with a detailed study of the first institutional merger cited as an exemplar. The study is based on an evaluation of the official reports, views expressed by key players, archival records observations and interviews with the key personnel involved in the merger between La Trobe and Lincoln.
Degree-guided map-reduce task assignment with data locality constraint

The map-reduce framework is used in many data-intensive parallel processing systems. Data locality is an important problem with map-reduce as tasks with local data complete faster than those with remote data. We propose a degree-guided task assignment algorithm, which uses very little extra information than the currently implemented Random Server algorithm. We analyze a simple version of the degree-guided algorithm, called Peeling algorithm, and the Random Server algorithm in a discrete-time model using evolution of random graphs. We characterize the thresholds below which no queueing takes place and compute the effective service rates for both algorithms. The degree-guided algorithm achieves the optimal performance in the region of practical interest and significantly outperforms the Random Server algorithm. The performance characteristics derived from discrete time model are confirmed with simulation in continuous time.
Improving Test Generation under Rich Contracts by Tight Bounds and Incremental SAT Solving

We present a novel and general technique for automated test generation that combines tight bounds with incremental SAT solving. The proposed technique uses incremental SAT to build test suites targeting a specific testing criterion, amongst various black-box and white-box criteria. As our experimental results show, the combination of tight bounds with incremental SAT, and the testing criterion driven approach implemented in our prototype tool FAJITA, enable us to effectively generate test suites for container classes with rich contracts, more efficiently than other state-of-the-art tools.
Sentiment Analysis in Scholarly Book Reviews

So far different studies have tackled the sentiment analysis in several domains such as restaurant and movie reviews. But, this problem has not been studied in scholarly book reviews which is different in terms of review style and size. In this paper, we propose to combine different features in order to be presented to a supervised classifiers which extract the opinion target expressions and detect their polarities in scholarly book reviews. We construct a labeled corpus for training and evaluating our methods in French book reviews. We also evaluate them on English restaurant reviews in order to measure their robustness across the domains and languages. The evaluation shows that our methods are enough robust for English restaurant reviews and French book reviews.
On the design of Camelot, an outdoor game for children

This paper describes the design of Camelot, a mobile outdoor game for small groups of children aged 7-10. Camelot was designed with the aim to encourage social interaction between the players and to encourage physical activity. The paper extends the research literature on design methodology for children, by recording and reflecting upon the lessons learnt by applying a range of techniques for involving children in the design of interactive systems.
Absenteeism, burnout and symptomatology of teacher stress: sex differences

Although numerous studies have been carried out confirming the high levels in the symptomatology of stress and depression in the teaching profession, research focusing on the sex differences in these problems has been both scarce and inconclusive. The objective of this study is to analyze the differences with regards to sex in the incidence of absenteeism, work-related stress, symptomatology of depression, level of burnout and psychiatric symptomatology. The sample consists of 71 teachers, 31 men and 40 women, all of them from Secondary Education. The tools used were the Questionnaire of Teacher Burnout (CBP-R), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Symptomatology Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R) and a socio-demographic and work-situation questionnaire. Female teachers were expected to report higher level of absenteeism whereas their male counterparts were expected to show higher levels of symptomatology, burnout, particularly in Depersonalization, and similar levels of depressive symptoms are expected in both sexes. Results show sex differences only in Somatization, which mean was significantly higher in women than in men, and in the types of illness that caused sick leaves. In conclusion, this research support the results of other studies that have not found different patterns of stress, burnout and depression between female and male teachers.
Creating a Clinical Screening Questionnaire for Eating Behaviors Associated with Overweight and Obesity

Objective: The objective of this study was to associate questions about specific eating behaviors with weight. Our ultimate goal was to create a clinical screening questionnaire for eating behaviors associated with overweight and obesity. Methods: We developed a questionnaire based on eating behaviors associated with overweight and obesity. After pilot testing and revision, we administered the questionnaire to patients in 2 primary care clinics from the Utah Health Research Network. We analyzed the relationship between measured body mass index, demographic factors, and responses to screening questions about eating behaviors and physical activity. Results: We collected 261 completed questionnaires with weight and height measurements. With regression analysis, questions about consumption of beverages with sugar added, fruits and vegetables, and full portions served at restaurants as well as questions about physical activity were associated with body mass index and being overweight and/or obese. Conclusions: We suggest that future research about eating behaviors focus on the questions regarding typical consumption of beverages with sugar added, fruits and vegetables, and full portions served at restaurants to further develop a tool for clinical screening.
Rebuttal from Mehul S. Patel, Nicholas Hart and Michael I. Polkey

Professor McConnell's thesis seems to be that a single meta-analysis (Illi et al. 2012) in healthy individuals concludes that respiratory muscle training (RMT) improves exercise tolerance (McConnell, 2012, this issue), coupled with eloquent mechanistic arguments that it ought indeed to do so. Overall, we retain our view that the literature does not sufficiently support the argument that RMT improves exercise tolerance (Patel et al. 2012, this issue). The thorough work of Illi and colleagues is insightful with regard to the quality of the literature; a point raised by us. First, from an initial screening of 236 potentially relevant studies, only 28 were randomised controlled studies and the median quality score was 2 out of 7, illustrating the low standard of work in this area. Subsequently, only 8 studies provided sufficient data to be included in a meta-analysis. However, we are indebted to Professor McConnell for calling to our attention what we believe to be the most revealing figure from Illi and co-workers’ meta-analysis (see Fig. 1). This is a textbook example of publication bias, in which small negative studies remain unpublished, so fatally undermining their conclusions. Figure 1 Funnel plot revealing the absence of negative smaller studies Illi and colleagues’ work also sidesteps the question of whether respiratory muscle training is better than general physical training. We have previously noted, in the case of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), that time spent on respiratory muscle training may entail an ‘opportunity cost’ for physical training (Polkey et al. 2011). Illi et al.'s sub-analysis suggested that less fit individuals benefited more from RMT, unsurprising given the recognised benefits of whole body training (Bernard et al. 1999; Mickleborough et al. 2008). Moreover, considered mechanistically, the peripheral muscles seem to represent the better training target given that preferential perfusion of peripheral rather than respiratory muscles during exercise may limit global benefits with RMT (Vogiatzis et al. 2010). Space does not permit an in-depth discussion of the detailed physiology of the metaboreflex, and in any case, like Professor McConnell, we applaud the physiology that elucidated it. Nevertheless, we caution that interventions used in physiological scenarios, for example by using assisted ventilation (Harms et al. 2000; Kyroussis et al. 2000; Romer et al. 2006), may be of an order of magnitude significantly different to the benefits conferred by RMT. For this reason, we do not believe that mechanistic studies can be a substitute for straightforward experimentation when answering the question posed.
Estimating the Effects of No Child Left Behind on Teachers’ Work Environments and Job Attitudes

Several recent studies have examined the impacts of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on school operations and student achievement. We complement that work by investigating the law’s impacts on teachers’ perceptions of their work environments and related job attitudes, including satisfaction and commitment to remain in teaching. Using four waves of the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey, which cover the period from 1994 to 2008, we document overall trends in teacher attitudes across this time period and take advantage of differences in the presence and strength of prior state accountability systems and differences in likely impacts on high- and low-poverty schools to isolate NCLB effects. Perhaps surprisingly, we show positive trends in many work environment measures, job satisfaction, and commitment across the time period coinciding with the implementation of NCLB. We find, however, relatively modest evidence of an impact of NCLB accountability itself. There is some evidence that the law has negatively affected perceptions of teacher cooperation but positively affected feelings of classroom control and administrator support. We find little evidence that teacher job satisfaction or commitment has changed in response to NCLB.
Image inpainting based on wavelet transformation

During the time of manual image repair, people tend to follow the principle of the first repair after the overall structure repair of texture details. In this paper, taking into account that the partial differential equation model has strong capacity of keeping linear structure, and texture synthesis model has good effect in repairing the texture information, the defect image is decomposed into structural image and texture image by wavelet transformation, and then the structural image is repaired by partial differential equation model; the texture image is repaired by texture synthesis technique. The experimental results show that the algorithm can effectively improve the quality of image inpainting.
Approximate Soft Shadows on Arbitrary Surfaces using Penumbra Wedges

Shadow generation has been subject to serious investigation in computer graphics, and many clever algorithms have been suggested. However, previous algorithms cannot render high quality soft shadows onto arbitrary, animated objects in real time. Pursuing this goal, we present a new soft shadow algorithm that extends the standard shadow volume algorithm by replacing each shadow quadrilateral with a new primitive, called the penumbra wedge. For each silhouette edge as seen from the light source, a penumbra wedge is created that approximately models the penumbra volume that this edge gives rise to. Together the penumbra wedges can render images that often are remarkably close to more precisely rendered soft shadows. Furthermore, our new primitive is designed so that it can be rasterized efficiently. Many real-time algorithms can only use planes as shadow receivers, while ours can handle arbitrary shadow receivers. The proposed algorithm can be of great value to, e.g., 3D computer games, especially since it is highly likely that this algorithm can be implemented on programmable graphics hardware coming out within the next year, and because games often prefer perceptually convincing shadows.
The Occipital Face Area Is Causally Involved in Facial Viewpoint Perception

Humans reliably recognize faces across a range of viewpoints, but the neural substrates supporting this ability remain unclear. Recent work suggests that neural selectivity to mirror-symmetric viewpoints of faces, found across a large network of visual areas, may constitute a key computational step in achieving full viewpoint invariance. In this study, we used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to test the hypothesis that the occipital face area (OFA), putatively a key node in the face network, plays a causal role in face viewpoint symmetry perception. Each participant underwent both offline rTMS to the right OFA and sham stimulation, preceding blocks of behavioral trials. After each stimulation period, the participant performed one of two behavioral tasks involving presentation of faces in the peripheral visual field: (1) judging the viewpoint symmetry; or (2) judging the angular rotation. rTMS applied to the right OFA significantly impaired performance in both tasks when stimuli were presented in the contralateral, left visual field. Interestingly, however, rTMS had a differential effect on the two tasks performed ipsilaterally. Although viewpoint symmetry judgments were significantly disrupted, we observed no effect on the angle judgment task. This interaction, caused by ipsilateral rTMS, provides support for models emphasizing the role of interhemispheric crosstalk in the formation of viewpoint-invariant face perception. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Faces are among the most salient objects we encounter during our everyday activities. Moreover, we are remarkably adept at identifying people at a glance, despite the diversity of viewpoints during our social encounters. Here, we investigate the cortical mechanisms underlying this ability by focusing on effects of viewpoint symmetry, i.e., the invariance of neural responses to mirror-symmetric facial viewpoints. We did this by temporarily disrupting neural processing in the occipital face area (OFA) using transcranial magnetic stimulation. Our results demonstrate that the OFA causally contributes to judgments facial viewpoints and suggest that effects of viewpoint symmetry, previously observed using fMRI, arise from an interhemispheric integration of visual information even when only one hemisphere receives direct visual stimulation.
Effects of increasing modalities in understanding three simultaneous speeches with two microphones

This paper reports effects of increasing modalities in understanding three simultaneous speeches with two microphones. This problem is difficult because the beamforming technique adopted for a microphone array needs at least four microphones, and because independent component analysis adopted for blind source separation needs at least three microphones. We investigate four cases; monaural (one microphone), binaural (two microphones), binaural with independent component analysis (ICA), and binaural with vision (two microphones and two cameras). The performance of word recognition of three simultaneous speeches is improved by adding more modalities, that is monaural, binaural, and binaural with vision.
Early-Stage White Matter Lesions Detected by Multispectral MRI Segmentation Predict Progressive Cognitive Decline

White matter lesions (WML) are the main brain imaging surrogate of cerebral small-vessel disease. A new MRI tissue segmentation method, based on a discriminative clustering approach without explicit model-based added prior, detects partial WML volumes, likely representing very early-stage changes in normal-appearing brain tissue. This study investigated how the different stages of WML, from a “pre-visible” stage to fully developed lesions, predict future cognitive decline. MRI scans of 78 subjects, aged 65–84 years, from the Leukoaraiosis and Disability (LADIS) study were analyzed using a self-supervised multispectral segmentation algorithm to identify tissue types and partial WML volumes. Each lesion voxel was classified as having a small (33%), intermediate (66%), or high (100%) proportion of lesion tissue. The subjects were evaluated with detailed clinical and neuropsychological assessments at baseline and at three annual follow-up visits. We found that voxels with small partial WML predicted lower executive function compound scores at baseline, and steeper decline of executive scores in follow-up, independently of the demographics and the conventionally estimated hyperintensity volume on fluid-attenuated inversion recovery images. The intermediate and fully developed lesions were related to impairments in multiple cognitive domains including executive functions, processing speed, memory, and global cognitive function. In conclusion, early-stage partial WML, still too faint to be clearly detectable on conventional MRI, already predict executive dysfunction and progressive cognitive decline regardless of the conventionally evaluated WML load. These findings advance early recognition of small vessel disease and incipient vascular cognitive impairment.
Effect of chromatic dispersion on four-wave mixing in WDM systems and its suppression

The dominating effect of Wavelength Division multiplexed system is Four Wave Mixing (FWM). Channel crosstalk and performance degradation of the system can be induced in the multi channel systems by FWM. In this paper, we have simulated the effect of chromatic dispersion on FWM using equal channel spacing in terms input/output spectrum, eye diagram and bit error rate. Results show that the effect of FWM reduces with the increasing dispersion coefficient. And the suppression of FWM is achieved by placing the Optical Phase Conjugator (OPC) in the midway of the fiber optic link. It strongly suppresses the FWM signal by introducing the destructive interference between the first and second halves of the fiber optic link. Reconstruction of original signal can be achieved by placing another OPC at the end of the second fiber span. DWDM system with OPC can effectively suppress the Four Wave Mixing signal power.
Speaker-Dependent Voice Activity Detection Robust to Background Speech Noise

In this paper, we proposed a speaker-dependent voice activity detection (VAD) algorithm that only extracts the speech period uttered by a target user. Based on our survey of the recognition error of real speech data collected in “VoiceTra,” which is a speech-to-speech translation system for smartphones, we found that many word insertion errors are caused by background speakers’ speech. Our VAD, which consists of three GMMs (noise and speaker-independent GMMs as used in a traditional GMM-based VAD and a speaker-adapted GMM) can be used for speech detection of the target speaker. In the VAD evaluations for the test utterances with background speakers’ speech, our proposed VADs achieved better performance than the conventional VAD. Also speech recognition experiments demonstrated that an ASR system with our proposed VAD achieved better performance than an ASR system using the conventional VAD.
Stroke Verification with Gray-level Image for Hangul Video Text Recognition

Traditional OCR uses binarization technique, which makes OCR simple. But it makes strokes ambiguous and that causes recognition errors. Main reason of those errors is similar grapheme pair confusing error. It can be reduced by verifying ambiguous area of gray level image. After checking whether there is similar grapheme pair by analyzing traditional OCR result candidates, the base stroke of confused grapheme can be found using the fitness function which reflects the base stroke characteristics. The possibility of confused stroke existence can be measured by analyzing the boundary area of the base stroke. The result is merged with traditional OCR using score-probability converting. We achieved 68.1% error reduction for target grapheme pair errors by the proposed method and it means that 23.1 % total error is reduced
Conflict, Context, Concreteness: Koselleck and Schmitt on Concepts

In Reinhart Koselleck’s history of concepts, the general orientation that concepts are to be understood in their proper contexts is intertwined with the assumption that they are manifestations of particular political conflicts. The essay shows that the dense compound of context and conflict in Koselleck’s thought springs from Carl Schmitt’s political theory and also forms an important point of continuity between Koselleck’s early work and his later methodological writings. The formalized assumption of conflict, somewhat problematically, binds Koselleckian conceptual history to a particular conception of politics, one that sees politics ultimately as struggle and conflict. Once the historical-theoretical contingency of this conception is recognized, it becomes both possible and necessary to reassess the role of conflict in the methodology of conceptual history.
Impaired reward processing in the human prefrontal cortex distinguishes between persistent and remittent attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children often persist into adulthood and can lead to severe antisocial behavior. However, to‐date it remains unclear whether neuro‐functional abnormalities cause ADHD, which in turn can then provide a marker of persistent ADHD. Using event‐related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we measured blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal changes in subjects during a reversal learning task in which choice of the correct stimulus led to a probabilistically determined ‘monetary’ reward or punishment. Participants were diagnosed with ADHD during their childhood (N = 32) and were paired with age, gender, and education matched healthy controls (N = 32). Reassessment of the ADHD group as adults resulted in a split between either persistent (persisters, N = 17) or remitted ADHDs (remitters, N = 15). All three groups showed significantly decreased activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the left striatum during punished correct responses, however only remitters and controls presented significant psycho‐physiological interaction between these fronto‐striatal reward and outcome valence networks. Comparing persisters to remitters and controls showed significantly inverted responses to punishment (P < 0.05, family‐wise error corrected) in left PFC region. Interestingly, the decreased activation shown after punishment was located in different areas of the PFC for remitters compared with controls, suggesting that remitters might have learned compensation strategies to overcome their ADHD symptoms. Thus, fMRI helps understanding the neuro‐functional basis of ADHD related behavior differences and differentiates between persistent and remittent ADHD. Hum Brain Mapp 36:4648–4663, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.