Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantitative Analysis of the Elements of Interpersonal Trust of Poles

Interpersonal trust is a crucial element of the social trust and contributes essentially to economic growth. Various studies show that the level of interpersonal trust in Poland is relatively low what is an unfavorable situation. This paper aims at giving a statistical insight into interpersonal trust elements distinguished in the European Social Survey which can be described as trustfulness, helpfulness and fairness. These three components are considered with respect to some socio-economic characteristics as gender and age. As the dataset used in this study comprises both metric and non-metric variables several analytical methods are applied to explore the structure and nature of relationships. Additionally, the analyses are supported by appropriate data visualization techniques. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014. v5n13p72
Nondeterministic State Complexity for Suffix-Free Regular Languages

We investigate the nondeterministic state complexity of basic operations for suffix-free regular languages. The nondeterministic state complexity of an operation is the number of states that are necessary and sufficient in the worst-case for a minimal nondeterministic finite-state automaton that accepts the language obtained from the operation. We consider basic operations (catenation, union, intersection, Kleene star, reversal and complementation) and establish matching upper and lower bounds for each operation. In the case of complementation the upper and lower bounds differ by an additive constant of two.
Mapping species abundance by a spatial zero‐inflated Poisson model: a case study in the Wadden Sea, the Netherlands

Abstract The objective of the study was to provide a general procedure for mapping species abundance when data are zero‐inflated and spatially correlated counts. The bivalve species Macoma balthica was observed on a 500×500 m grid in the Dutch part of the Wadden Sea. In total, 66% of the 3451 counts were zeros. A zero‐inflated Poisson mixture model was used to relate counts to environmental covariates. Two models were considered, one with relatively fewer covariates (model “small”) than the other (model “large”). The models contained two processes: a Bernoulli (species prevalence) and a Poisson (species intensity, when the Bernoulli process predicts presence). The model was used to make predictions for sites where only environmental data are available. Predicted prevalences and intensities show that the model “small” predicts lower mean prevalence and higher mean intensity, than the model “large”. Yet, the product of prevalence and intensity, which might be called the unconditional intensity, is very similar. Cross‐validation showed that the model “small” performed slightly better, but the difference was small. The proposed methodology might be generally applicable, but is computer intensive.
On the extremal behavior of a Pareto process: an alternative for ARMAX modeling

In what concerns extreme values modeling, heavy tailed autoregressive processes defined with the minimum or maximum operator have proved to be good alternatives to classical linear ARMA with heavy tailed marginals (Davis and Resnick [8], Ferreira and Canto e Castro [13]). In this paper we present a complete characterization of the tail behavior of the autoregressive Pareto process known as Yeh-Arnold-Robertson Pareto(III) (Yeh et al. [32]). We shall see that it is quite similar to the first order max-autoregressive ARMAX, but has a more robust parameter estimation procedure, being therefore more attractive for modeling purposes. Consistency and asymptotic normality of the presented estimators will also be stated.
Refactoring tools for dynamic languages

Dynamic languages play an increasingly prominent role in modern software development. They are used in domains as diverse as web programming and scientific computing, for developing simple scripts as well as large applications. Tool-supported refactoring for these languages can bring important benefits to programmers. First, manual refactoring tends to be error-prone in dynamic languages since they impose very little static structure; hence, erroneous refactorings often cannot be detected until runtime. A tool can use static program analysis to check the soundness of a proposed refactoring, thus mitigating this problem. Second, dynamic languages tend to lack constructs for modularisation and encapsulation, which can be an obstacle to writing maintainable software. In many cases, such constructs can be emulated using other language features, but refactoring a program to make use of such patterns is often non-trivial and could benefit from tool support. Third, refactoring tools can be useful for adapting programs to use high-level features, thus supporting script to program evolution. However, specifying and implementing refactorings for dynamic languages is a challenging endeavour. We highlight some of the major issues in this area, and discuss recent progress towards solving them.
Using Proximity and Homophily to Connect Conference Attendees in a Mobile Social Network

In an academic conference, it is difficult to find people that share similar research interests with you, and it is also a chore to add them into your personal online social network for later communication. Aiming at helping the conference attendees better organize their schedule and expand their social network, we designed and developed Find &amp; Connect where we used location and encounters, together with the conference basic services, all through a web user interface, in order to get the homophily and physical interactions between users, and then to base these information for recommending new contacts to users. To demonstrate the usefulness of Find &amp; Connect, we conducted a field trial at the UbiComp 2011 conference. Results show that users tended to consider historical physical encounter information to be the most important when they wanted to know someone or add other users as contacts, and that homophily works as a factor in users' decision to add contacts.
A Comparison of Human and Statistical Language Model Performance using Missing-Word Tests

This paper presents results from a series of missing-word tests, in which a small fragment of text is presented to human subjects who are then asked to suggest a ranked list of completions. The same experiment is repeated with the WA model, an n-gram statistical language model. From the completion data two measures are obtained: (i) verbatim predictability, which indicates the extent to which subjects nominated exactly the missing word, and (ii) grammatical class predictability, which indicates the extent to which subjects nominated words of the same grammatical class as the missing word. The differences in language model performance and human performance are encouragingly small, especially for verbatim predictability. This is especially significant given that the WA model was able, on average, to use at most half the available context. The results highlight human superiority in handling missing content words. Most importantly, the experiments illustrate the detailed information one can obtain about the performance of a language model through using missing-word tests.
Laryngeal Inflammation in the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

Objective: Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is marked by ‘the sudden death of an infant that is unexpected by history and remains unexplained after a thorough forensic autopsy and a detailed death scene investigation’. The cause is unknown. Excessive subglottic submucosal glandular tissue and excessive sulphated mucus glycoprotein in the larynges of SIDS babies have been previously reported from our institution. We now report on laryngeal immunohistology. Methods: Larynges from 7 children who died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) at under 16 weeks of age were examined immunohistologically and compared to those from 8 age- matched control infants who died from other causes. Results: The SIDS babies had increased inflammatory changes in the laryngeal epithelium and sub- epithelium with raised numbers of cells staining for elastase (p<0.01), EG2(a marker for activated eosinophils) (p<0.01) and CD4(p<0.05) suggesting that some SIDS deaths involve preceding inflammation. Conclusions: Although death may be sudden and unexpected it appears that, at least in some SIDS victims, there is a preceding inflammatory process in the larynx which may allow hyper-reactivity of laryngeal reflexes and consequent apnoea. This observation concurs with others in the SIDS literature and offers a field for further research and possible prevention.
Just be empowered: how girls are represented in a sport for development and peace HIV/AIDS prevention manual

HIV/AIDS prevention is often described as one way that sport for development and peace (SDP) organizations can contribute to international development, particularly through the empowerment of girls and young women. However, there has been little research examining how SDP organizations (re)produce gendered identities in educational texts for those identified as being at-risk for contracting HIV/AIDS, particularly girls, to justify appropriate prevention strategies. The purpose of this study was to conduct a feminist critical discourse analysis of a manual that an SDP organization uses for its HIV/AIDS prevention programme. The findings illustrate how gender was represented in static and heteronormative terms. Girls were constructed as deficient because of their minds and bodies, yet were also positioned as being responsible for preventing HIV/AIDS by becoming more self-interested and assertive. The educational texts designed to empower girls were decontextualized and reproduced neoliberal notions of development and self-governance. The implications of the findings are discussed.
Incremental Redundancy Hybrid ARQ with LDPC and Raptor Codes

Two incremental redundancy hybrid ARQ (IR-HARQ) schemes are proposed, analyzed, and compared: one is based on LDPC code ensembles with random transmission assignments, the other is based on recently introduced Raptor codes. A number of important issues, such as rate and power control, Raptor code design, and error rate performance after each transmission on time varying binary-input, symmetricoutput channels are addressed by analyzing performance of LDPC and Raptor codes on parallel channels. The spectrum properties of LDPC code ensembles that are necessary for this analysis are derived. A set of rules for incrementing redundancy and setting the signal power at each transmission in order to maximize the throughput are derived for both schemes. The theoretical results obtained for random code ensembles are tested on several practical code examples by simulation. Both theoretical and simulation results show that both LDPC and Raptor codes are suitable for HARQ schemes. Which codes would make a better choice depends mainly on the width of the operating range of the HARQ scheme, prior knowledge of that range, and other design parameters and constraints dictated by standards.
Longitudinal examination with shoulder ultrasound of patients with polymyalgia rheumatica.

OBJECTIVE To determine if ultrasonography (US) and power Doppler (PD) may be useful in identifying polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) patients with relapsing disease. METHODS For a mean of 41 months, 57 consecutive untreated patients with PMR were prospectively assessed for relapses/recurrences. This cohort represented all the patients diagnosed over a 18-month period in one Italian secondary referral centre. Clinical signs and symptoms as well as ESR and CRP were evaluated. US examination of the shoulders was performed in all 57 patients at diagnosis and after the onset of prednisone treatment (mean 24 +/- 3 weeks). Power Doppler ultrasonography (PDUS) was performed in 24 patients. Shoulder sonograms were obtained according to standardized techniques. RESULTS Prednisone therapy significantly reduced the frequency and the degree of subacromial/subdeltoid bursitis, long head biceps tenosynovitis and glenohumeral synovitis. At diagnosis, a positive PD signal was observed more frequently in the subacromial/subdeltoid bursae (33%). Prednisone therapy significantly reduced the frequency of patients with positive PD signal. Of the 44 patients in remission or with low disease activity at the time of the second US, 26 (59%) still had evidence of persistent inflammatory lesions. There was no association between the persistence of inflammation at US and relapses/recurrences; in contrast, a positive PD signal at diagnosis was significantly associated with the occurrence of relapses/recurrences at follow-up. CONCLUSION Subclinical inflammation detected by US persists in most PMR patients despite glucocorticoid treatment. PDUS may be useful to detect at diagnosis the patients with most active inflammation who have a higher risk of relapses/recurrences.
Qualitative analysis of patients’ feedback from a PROMs survey of cancer patients in England

Objective This study examined how free-text comments from cancer survivors could complement formal patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), as part of the England PROMs survey programme for cancer. Design A qualitative content analysis was conducted of responses to a single open-ended free-text question placed at the end of the cross-sectional population-based postal questionnaire. Setting Individuals were identified through three UK Cancer Registries and questionnaires were posted to their home addresses. Participants A random sample of individuals (n=4992) diagnosed with breast, colorectal, non-Hodgkins lymphoma or prostate cancer at 1, 2, 3 and 5 years earlier. Results 3300 participants completed the survey (68% response rate). Of these 1056 (32%) completed the free-text comments box, indicating a high level of commitment to provide written feedback on patient experience. Almost a fifth (19%) related experiences of excellent care during the treatment phase, with only 8% reporting negative experiences. This contrasted with experiences of care after primary cancer treatment where the majority were negative. Factors impacting negatively upon patient-reported outcomes included the emotional impact of cancer; poor experiences of treatment and care; comorbidities, treatment side effects, social difficulties and inadequate preparation for a wide range of sometimes long-lasting on-going physical and psychological problems. Mediating factors assisting recovery incorporated both professional-led factors, such as quality of preparation for anticipated problems and aftercare services, and participant-led factors, such as learning from other cancer survivors and self-learning through trial and error. The support of friends and family was also a factor in participants' outcomes. Conclusions This analysis of free-text comments complements quantitative analysis of PROMs measure's by illuminating relationships between factors that impact on quality of life (QoL) and indicate why cancer patients may experience significantly worse QoL than the general population. The data suggest more systematic preparation and aftercare for individuals to self-manage post-treatment problems might improve QoL outcomes among cancer survivors.
On Performance Improvement of Concurrent Applications Using Simultaneous Multithreaded Processors as NoC Resources

Network on chip (NoC) is a new design paradigm for building scalable multi-core/multiprocessors systems on chip (SoC) which are able to exploit the coarse grain parallelism of concurrent applications. Simultaneous multi-threaded processor (SMTP) is a superscalar processor architecture which adoptively exploits the coarse grain and the fine grain parallelism of applications, by simultaneously executing instructions from several thread contexts. In this paper, the authors make a case for using SMTPs as NoC resources and show that such a multiprocessor architecture provides better timing performances than a NoC with solely general-purpose processors (GP) or with multi-threaded processors (MTP). The authors have developed a methodology for task mapping and scheduling on a NoC with mixed SMTPs, MTPs and GPs resources, which aims to maximize the timing performances of concurrent applications and to verify their soft timing constraints. The methodology incorporates a timing analysis for estimating the response time of tasks executed in multithreaded mode of SMTPs. The experiments performed on synthetic benchmarks with average instruction parallelism of 200, have shown a maximum speedup of 2.91 for a 3times3 NoC with 9 SMTPs (4-issue, 4-multithreaded)
A New Method of Force Control for Unknown Environments

Current robotic systems are expected to interact with unknown environment where controlling the interaction forces becomes an important issue. We propose a new control technique for force control on unknown environments that tunes the force controller based on online estimation of the environment parameters. However, the proposed approach overcomes the need for precise estimation of environment parameters, which are needed in many system identification-based force control approaches. This framework uses an artificial neural network (ANN)-based proportional-integral (PI)-gain scheduling force controller to track the desired force by adjusting control gains such that error in parameter estimation can be accommodated. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed control framework. Finally, the advantages and limitations of the proposed controller are discussed.
Evaluation of Indoor Radio Deployment Options in High-Rise Building

In this paper we set out to analyze the indoor capacity under a realistic high-rise building scenario. The study takes into consideration the number of indoor cells deployed per floor, different inter-site distances (ISDs), transmit power settings and outdoor macro interference levels. The outcome shows large variation in performance gain just by optimizing indoor cell locations, highlighting the need for thorough indoor radio planning. Investing into more indoor cells helps to increase capacity, and also to cope better with outdoor interference, but the gain tends to be diminishing due to the increase of inter-cell interference (ICI). Increasing transmit power brings largest gain when the density of indoor cell is low, and the noise and/or outdoor interference is the dominant source of performance degradation. When analyzing performance gain of an ideal receiver-side Interference Cancellation (IC) algorithm, the study also shows that, if the Dominant Interferer Removal (DIR) rate is below 50%, doubling the number of indoor cells would bring better capacity gain than investing into such an IC receiver.
A robust image watermarking based on DWT-QR decomposition

In this paper, a novel optimal watermarking scheme based DWT and QR decomposition is presented. Before embedding the watermark, information was firstly encrypted to enhance the security and robustness. Then LL subband is blocked 8×8 after DWT transformation. When each of them is QR decomposed, the watermark is embedded in the first row elements of R matrix. The experimental results show that the algorithm has high robustness, invisibility and higher embedding capacity.
Adapting to Non-stationarity with Growing Expert Ensembles

When dealing with time series with complex non-stationarities, low retrospective regret on individual realizations is a more appropriate goal than low prospective risk in expectation. Online learning algorithms provide powerful guarantees of this form, and have often been proposed for use with non-stationary processes because of their ability to switch between different forecasters or ``experts''. However, existing methods assume that the set of experts whose forecasts are to be combined are all given at the start, which is not plausible when dealing with a genuinely historical or evolutionary system. We show how to modify the ``fixed shares'' algorithm for tracking the best expert to cope with a steadily growing set of experts, obtained by fitting new models to new data as it becomes available, and obtain regret bounds for the growing ensemble.
Eliciting Experts’ Context Knowledge with Theory-Based Experiential Questionnaires

This paper describes a useful addition to behavioral researchers' set of research methods, supplementing and extending what can be learned from interviews, surveys, and experiments. The experiential questionnaire (EQ) is designed to study the context within which experts behave, guided by theory about that context and by extensive pre‐testing with representatives of the target population of respondents. An EQ is built around expert respondents' experience of their context, the world in which they function, as represented by cases they have experienced and can describe in detail. The value of the data is supplemented by having the respondents choose the cases and do much of the categorization and coding of their own responses. The EQ's questions are worded in matter‐of‐fact terms familiar to the respondents, to encourage respondents to report their experienced contexts dispassionately. This paper describes the EQ method, with examples from the mostly auditing published studies and suggestions about extensi.
OpenCL-accelerated object classification in video streams using Spatial Pooler of Hierarchical Temporal Memory

The paper presents a method to classify objects in video streams using a brain-inspired Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) algorithm. Object classification is a challeng-ing task where humans still significantly outperform machine learning algorithms due to their unique capabilities. A system which achieves very promising performance in terms of recogni-tion accuracy have been implemented. Unfortunately, conducting more advanced experiments is very computationally demanding; some of the trials run on a standard CPU may take as long as several days for 960x540 video streams frames. Therefore, authors decided to accelerate selected parts of the system using OpenCL. In particular, authors seek to determine to what extent porting selected and computationally demanding parts of a core may speed up calculations. The classification accuracy of the system was examined through a series of experiments and the performance was given in terms of F1 score as a function of the number of columns, synapses, min overlap and winners set size. The system achieves the highest F1 score of 0.95 and 0.91 for min overlap=4 and 256 synapses, respectively. Authors have also conduced a series of experiments with different hardware setups and measured CPU/GPU acceleration. The best kernel speed-up of 632x and 207x was reached for 256 synapses and 1024 columns. However, overall acceleration including transfer time was significantly lower and amounted to 6.5x and 3.2x for the same setup.
The perfectible vagina: Size matters

With the construction of women's genitals as problematic, the 'private' female body becomes a site for potential improvement. Socio-cultural accounts of vaginal size in the West construct a tight (but not too tight) vagina as desirable, and a 'loose' vagina as undesirable. The importance of size is evident in contexts as diverse as slang, comedy, and surgical practices to tighten the vagina. After identifying the desirability of tightness, we analyse talk collected from women in individual and group interviews, and in undergraduate tutorials on intersex. In women's talk, we found a curious pattern: Women identified the cultural desirability of a tight vagina, and noted negative uses to which this is put (such as the positioning of women with 'loose' vaginas as promiscuous). However, when women described their personal concerns about vaginal size, these were couched in terms of anxiety about being too tight. We argue that constructions of vaginal size are problematic because they create another site of bodily concern for women, and are used to control and abuse women. We suggest that they also reflect a disregard of women's sexual pleasure, and a lack of familiarity with the functions of the vagina.