Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Minimum throughput adaptive perception for high speed mobility

For autonomously navigating vehicles, the automatic generation of dense geometric models of the environment is a computationally expensive process. Yet, analysis suggests that some approaches to mapping the environment in mobility scenarios can waste significant computational resources. This paper proposes a relatively simple method of approaching the minimum required perceptual throughput in a terrain mapping system, and hence the fastest possible update of the environmental model. We accomplish this by exploiting the constraints of typical mobility scenarios. The technique proposed will be applicable to any application that models the environment with a terrain map or other 2-1/2 D representation.
An evaluation of the Positive Emotional Experiences Scale: A preliminary analysis

Orientation: The positive organisational behaviour movement emphasises the advantages of psychological strengths in business. The psychological virtues of positive emotional experiences can potentially promote human strengths to the advantages of business functioning and the management of work conditions. This is supported by Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory that emphasises the broadening of reactive thought patterns through experiences of positive emotions. Research purpose: A preliminary psychometric evaluation of a positive measurement of dimensions of emotional experiences in the workplace, by rephrasing the Kiefer and Barclay Toxic Emotional Experiences Scale. Motivation for the study: This quantitative Exploratory Factor Analysis investigates the factorial structure and reliability of the Positive Emotional Experiences Scale, a positive rephrased version of the Toxic Emotional Experiences Scale. Research approach, design and method: This Exploratory Factor Analysis indicates an acceptable three-factor model for the Positive Emotional Experiences Scale. These three factors are: (1) psychological recurrent positive state, (2) social connectedness and (3) physical refreshed energy, with strong Cronbach’s alphas of 0.91, 0.91 and 0.94, respectively. Main findings: The three-factor model of the Positive Emotional Experiences Scale provides a valid measure in support of Fredrickson’s theory of social, physical and psychological endured personal resources that build positive emotions. Practical/Managerial implications: Knowledge gained on positive versus negative emotional experiences could be applied by management to promote endured personal resources that strengthen positive emotional experiences. Contribution/value-add: The contribution of this rephrased Positive Emotional Experiences Scale provides a reliable measure of assessment of the social, physical and endured psychological and personal resources identified in Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory. Application of this Positive Emotional Experiences Scale as a diagnostic tool may allow businesses to work towards more positive emotional experiences in the workplace.
Grounded intersectionality: Key tensions, a methodological framework, and implications for diversity research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to build on contemporary intersectional literature to develop a grounded methodological framework for the study of social differences. Design/methodology/approach – A systematic literature review serves as the foundation for a discussion of the challenges associated with intersectional research. The findings assist in positioning the proposed methodological framework within recent intersectional debates. Findings – The review shows a rise in intersectional publications since the birth of the “intersectionality” term in 1989. Moreover, the paper points to four tensions within the field: a tension between looking at or beyond oppression; a tension between structural-oriented and process-oriented perspectives; an apparent incommensurability among the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis; and a lack of coherent methodology. Research limitations/implications – On the basis of the highlighted tensions in contemporary research as well as the limitations of that research, the present presents a methodological framework and a discussion of the implications of that framework for the wider diversity literature. Practical implications – The paper suggests an empirically grounded approach to studying differences. This provides an opportunity, for scholars and practitioners, to reassess possible a priori given assumptions, and open up to new explorations beyond conventional identity theorization. Social implications – The paper suggests a need for an empirically grounded approach to studying social differences, which would not only create an opportunity to reassess common assumptions but also open up for explorations beyond conventional identity theorizations. Originality/value – The framework departs from traditional (critical) diversity scholarship, as it is process oriented but still emphasizes stable concepts. Moreover, it does not give primacy to oppression. Finally, it adopts a critical stance on the nature of the macro, meso, and micro levels as dominant analytical perspectives. As a result, this paper focusses on the importance of intersectionality as a conceptual tool for exploring social differences.
Lost in Publications? How to Find Your Way in 50 Million Scientiﬁc Documents

Researchers must navigate big data. Current scientiﬁc knowledge includes 50 million published articles. How can a system help a researcher ﬁnd relevant documents in her ﬁeld? We introduce IntentRadar , an interactive search user interface and search engine that anticipates user’s search intents by estimating them form user’s interaction with the interface. The estimated intents are visualized on a radial layout that organizes potential intents as directions in the information space. The intent radar assists users to direct their search by allowing feedback to be targeted on keywords that represent the potential intents. Users can provide feed-back by manipulating the position of the keywords on the radar. The system then learns and visualizes improved estimates and corresponding documents. Inten-tRadar has been shown to signiﬁcantly improve users’ task performance and the quality of retrieved information without compromising task execution time.
Wideband in-phase power divider using cascaded parallel coupled microstrip lines

A compact wideband in-phase power divider is presented. The proposed device utilizes parallel coupled microstrip lines, connected in cascaded configurations, and a stepped impedance T-junction of microstrip line. To achieve tight coupling for wideband performance, a slotted ground is utilized under each of the parallel coupled lines. Moreover, chip capacitors are connected between the coupled lines to enhance the coupling. To improve isolation between the output ports, an isolation resistor is added between the microstrip lines that are connected to the output ports just before the coupled lines. The proposed structure provides 100% fractional bandwidth based on 15 dB isolation as the reference. The simulated results of the proposed divider show equal power division with less than 0.5 dB additional insertion loss and more than 13 dB return loss at all the ports with less than 1° phase imbalance across the band 1-3 GHz.
An Extended Star Formation History for the Galactic Center from Hubble Space Telescope NICMOS Observations

We present Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Near-Infrared Camera and Multiobject Spectrometer (NICMOS) observations as evidence that continuous star formation has created much of the central stellar cusp of the Galaxy. The data are the deepest ever obtained for a Galactic center population, being more than 50% complete for mF205W < 19.3, or initial stellar masses ≳2 M☉. We use Geneva and Padova stellar evolution models to produce synthetic luminosity functions for burst and continuous star formation scenarios, finding that the observations are fitted best by continuous star formation at a rate that is consistent with the recent star formation activity that produced the three massive young clusters in the central 50 pc. Further, it is not possible to fit the observations with ancient burst models, such as would be appropriate for an old population like that in Baade's window or NGC 6528.
Stable Allocations of Risk

The measurement and the allocation of risk are fundamental problems of portfolio management. Coherent measures of risk provide an axiomatic approach to the former problem. In an environment given by a coherent measure of risk and the various portfolios' realization vectors, risk allocation games aim at solving the second problem: How to distribute the diversification benefits of the various portfolios? Understanding these cooperative games helps us to find stable, efficient, and fair allocations of risk. We show that the class of risk allocation and totally balanced games coincide, hence a stable allocation of risk is always possible. When the aggregate portfolio is riskless, the class of risk allocation games coincides with the class of exact games. As in exact games any subcoalition may be subject to marginalization even in core allocations, our result further emphasizes the responsibility involved in allocating risk.
Drum Track Transcription of Polyphonic Music Using Noise Subspace Projection

This paper presents a novel drum transcription system for polyphonic music. The use of a band-wise harmonic/noise decomposition allows the suppression of the deterministic part of the signal, which is mainly contributed by nonrhythmic instruments. The transcription is then performed on the residual noise signal, which contains most of the rhythmic information. This signal is segmented, and the events associated to each onset are classified by support vector machines (SVM) with probabilistic outputs. The features used for classification are directly extracted from the sub-band signals. An additional pre-processing stage in which the instances are reclassified using a localized model was also tested. This transcription method is evaluated on ten test sequences, each of them being performed by two drummers and being available with different mixing settings. The whole system achieves precision and recall rates of 84% for the bass drum and snare drum detection tasks.
Using talker location to detect spurious utterances in desktop command and control

Hands-free desktop command and control speech recognition suffers from the critical drawback of improperly rejecting spurious conversation. This results in false acceptances of unintended speech commands that can inconvenience the user. A neural-network approach is proposed to detect spurious conversation by determining talker location. The approach is based on the premise that spoken utterances not directed towards the microphone source tend to be more reverberant and are likely to be spurious. The method estimates a confidence measure proportional to the amount of reverberation in the end-pointed speech signal. The measure is obtained from a neural network that determines if the speech signal was directed to the microphone or was spoken otherwise. The proposed measure can be combined with the acoustic, linguistic and semantic information to improve upon decisions taken by conventional rejection modeling schemes.
Reconciling divergent estimates of oil and gas methane emissions

Significance Past studies reporting divergent estimates of methane emissions from the natural gas supply chain have generated conflicting claims about the full greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas. Top-down estimates based on large-scale atmospheric sampling often exceed bottom-up estimates based on source-based emission inventories. In this work, we reconcile top-down and bottom-up methane emissions estimates in one of the country’s major natural gas production basins using easily replicable measurement and data integration techniques. These convergent emissions estimates provide greater confidence that we can accurately characterize the sources of emissions, including the large impact that a small proportion of high-emitters have on total emissions and determine the implications for mitigation. Published estimates of methane emissions from atmospheric data (top-down approaches) exceed those from source-based inventories (bottom-up approaches), leading to conflicting claims about the climate implications of fuel switching from coal or petroleum to natural gas. Based on data from a coordinated campaign in the Barnett Shale oil and gas-producing region of Texas, we find that top-down and bottom-up estimates of both total and fossil methane emissions agree within statistical confidence intervals (relative differences are 10% for fossil methane and 0.1% for total methane). We reduced uncertainty in top-down estimates by using repeated mass balance measurements, as well as ethane as a fingerprint for source attribution. Similarly, our bottom-up estimate incorporates a more complete count of facilities than past inventories, which omitted a significant number of major sources, and more effectively accounts for the influence of large emission sources using a statistical estimator that integrates observations from multiple ground-based measurement datasets. Two percent of oil and gas facilities in the Barnett accounts for half of methane emissions at any given time, and high-emitting facilities appear to be spatiotemporally variable. Measured oil and gas methane emissions are 90% larger than estimates based on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory and correspond to 1.5% of natural gas production. This rate of methane loss increases the 20-y climate impacts of natural gas consumed in the region by roughly 50%.
The role of teachers’ comments during book reading in children's vocabulary growth

ABSTRACT This study described the commenting practices of Head Start teachers, and the relationship of comments to the expressive and receptive vocabulary growth of children with below-the-mean language ability across one year of preschool. Participants included 52 Head Start teachers, and 489 children (247 early intervention candidates and 242 Head Start typical). Descriptive analyses reveal that teachers used informative comments that gave or explained information more frequently than comments that responded to children's utterances, and that these comments contained more conceptually focused content than vocabulary or skills content. Responsive and conceptually focused comments were significantly related to the children's receptive vocabulary growth, and were moderated by children's initial language ability indicating the presence of the Matthew Effect. These findings underscore the importance of integrating instructional comments into book reading sessions, and the need to differentiate instruction based on children's initial vocabulary sizes. Practical implications are discussed.
A DOCUMENT-BASED SOFTWARE TRACEABILITY TO SUPPORT CHANGE IMPACT ANALYSIS OF OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE

The need for software modifications especially during the maintenance phase, is inevitable and remains the most costly. A major problem to software maintainers is that seemingly small changes can ripple through the entire system to cause major unintended impacts. As a result, prior to performing the actual change, maintainers need mechanisms in order to understand and estimate how a change will affect the rest of the system. Current approaches to software evolution focus primarily on the limited scope of change impact analysis e.g. code. This research is based on the premise that a more effective solution to manage system evolution can be achieved by considering a traceability approach to pre-determine the potential effects of change. The aim of this research is to establish a software traceability model that can support change impact analysis. It identifies the potential effect to software components in the system that does not lie solely on code but extends to other high level components such as design and requirements. As such, in this research, modification to software is therefore considered as being driven by both high level and low level software components. This research applies a comprehensive static and dynamic analysis to provide better impact infrastructures. The main research contribution in this thesis can be seen in the ability to provide a new software traceability approach that supports both top-down and bottom-up tracing. In further proving the concept, some software prototype tools were developed to automate and support the potential effects. The significant achievement of the model was then demonstrated using a case study on a non-trivial industrial application software, and evaluated via a controlled experiment. The results when compared against existing benchmark proved to be significant and revealed some remarkable achievements in its objective to determine change impacts
Measuring Concept Change

In this paper we present a general approach to learning in domains in which concepts change over time. We introduce a new metric, concept instability, that detects whether a concept is changing by examining changes in the concept representation formed by a supervised incremental learning algorithm. When a change is detected, we form the hypothesis that the change is due to a shift in the underlying concept. If the hypothesis is accepted, then a learning method that adapts the concept representation to the new concept is applied. We illustrate the approach in conjunction with an incremental decision tree algorithm. The approach is applicable to a wide class of learning systems because it is designed to be used in conjunction with any incremental learning algorithm that adjusts its concept representation in response to each observed positive or negative example of the target concept.
Lecture 1: Covariate Adjustment

The attempt by social scientists to uncover causal relationships with linear regression methods is a century old enterprise.1 One hundred years later this enterprise remains as controversial as it was at its outset (e.g., Freedman, 1997). Two key challenges arise. The first is foundational. The second is technical, but by no means trivial. The second will be the focus of this lecture, but we will nevertheless begin with a quick overview of the first.
Sensitive periods for the effect of peer victimization on self-cognition: Moderation by age and gender

Abstract The link between the experience of peer victimization (PV) and future psychological maladjustment has been consistently documented; however, little is known about intermediary cognitive processes that underlie this relation or how these processes vary across childhood. The present study examined the prospective relations between physical and relational PV and the development of negative and positive automatic thoughts and self-cognitions. Self-reports of cognitions and peer nomination measures of victimization were obtained from 1,242 children and young adolescents (Grades 3 through 6) in a two-wave longitudinal study. The results revealed that PV predicted significant increases in negative views of the self, world, and future and decreases in self-perceived competence for girls under 11 years of age, with the effect being stronger for younger girls. PV was not significantly associated with changes in positive or negative self-cognitions for older girls or for boys of any age. These findings support the hypothesis that PV may be linked to future psychopathology through its influence on self-cognitions, but only for girls.
An efficient implementation of tiled polymorphic temporal media

Tiled Polymorphic Temporal Media (TPTM) are a convenient way to describe, compose and encode multimedia streams. This paper presents a TPTM encoding that allows simple and efficient implementation of both composition and rendering. In particular, an on-the-fly rendering procedure is provided in order to handle infinite (lazy) TPTM.
A Cooperative Scheduling Model for Timetable Optimization in Subway Systems

In subway systems, the energy put into accelerating trains can be reconverted into electric energy by using the motors as generators during the braking phase. In general, except for a small part that is used for onboard purposes, most of the recovery energy is transmitted backward along the conversion chain and fed back into the overhead contact line. To improve the utilization of recovery energy, this paper proposes a cooperative scheduling approach to optimize the timetable so that the recovery energy that is generated by the braking train can directly be used by the accelerating train. The recovery that is generated by the braking train is less than the required energy for the accelerating train; therefore, only the synchronization between successive trains is considered. First, we propose the cooperative scheduling rules and define the overlapping time between the accelerating and braking trains for a peak-hours scenario and an off-peak-hours scenario, respectively. Second, we formulate an integer programming model to maximize the overlapping time with the headway time and dwell time control. Furthermore, we design a genetic algorithm with binary encoding to solve the optimal timetable. Last, we present six numerical examples based on the operation data from the Beijing Yizhuang subway line in China. The results illustrate that the proposed model can significantly improve the overlapping time by 22.06% at peak hours and 15.19% at off-peak hours.
The effect of land versus aquatic exercise program on bone mineral density and physical function in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis: a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND Osteoporosis is a multifactorial progressive skeletal disorder characterized by reduced bone mass. Exercise is widely recommended to reduce osteoporosis, falls and related fragility fractures. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of land exercise (LE) and aquatic exercise (AE) on physical function and bone mineral density (BMD). MATERIAL AND METHODS Fifty-eight postmenopausal women, aged 50-70 years, diagnosed with osteoporosis according to BMD measures, enrolled in this study. The subjects were randomly assigned to either the intervention group (LE group) or the control group (AE group). Physical function and BMD were assessed in all subjects in both groups before and after 10 months of intervention. Muscle strength, flexibility, balance, gait time and pain were measured to assess physical function. Bone mineral density at the lumbar spine was measured by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA). RESULTS There were no significant differences between the two groups in the baseline anthropometric data. The two groups were similar with respect to age, weight, height, and body mass index (p>0.05). After the exercise program, muscle strength, flexibility, gait time, pain, and bone density (p<0.001) improved significantly with LE compared to AE. There was no significant difference between the two groups with regard to balance at the 10-month follow-up. CONCLUSION Significant improvements in physical function and BMD suggest that LE is a possible alternative for postmenopausal women with OP.