Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Agony of Education. Black Students at White Colleges and Universities.

The Agony of Education is about the life experience of African American students attending a historically white university. Based on seventy-seven interviews conducted with black students and parents concerning their experiences with one state university, as well as published and unpublished studies of the black experience at state universities at large, this study captures the painful choices and agonizing dilemmas at the heart of the decisions African Americans must make about higher education.
Linear quadratic control under quadratic constraints

The linear quadratic optimal control problem under quadratic constraints is an optimization problem over a generally non-convex set. Yakubovich [8] and Megretski [4] have studied this problem, and they show how it may be translated into a two-stage, convex optimization problem. In this paper we study the linear quadratic control problem under quadratic constraints for generalized first-order systems. As in the state-space case the linear quadratic control problem without quadratic constraints may be solved in terms of a linear matrix inequality. Subsequently, we use the results from [8] to derive a linear matrix inequality characterizing the linear quadratic optimal behaviour under quadratic constraints.
The finite element method in electromagnetics

This Key Note presents a summary of the development of the Finite Element Method in the field of Electromagnet ic Engineering, together with a description of several contributions of the authors to the Finite Element Method and its application to the solution of electromagnetic problems. First, a self-adaptive mesh scheme is presented in the context of the quasi-static and full-wave analysis of general anisotropic multiconductor arbitrary shaped waveguiding structures. A comparison between two a posteriori error estimates is done. The first one is based on the complete residual of the differential equations defining the problem. The second one is based on a recovery or smoothing technique of the electromagnetic field. Next, an implementation of the first family of Nedelec's curl-conforming elements done by the authors is outlined. Its features are highlighted and compared with other curl-conforming elements. A presentation of an iterative procedure using a numerically exact radiation condition for the analysis of open (scattering and radiation) problems follows. Other contributions of the authors, like the use of wavelet like basis functions and an implementation of a Time Domain Finite Element Method in the context of two-dimensional scattering problems are only mentioned due to the lack of space.
A cross-layer goodput enhancement considering CRC coding and ARQ dynamics

Time varying channel conditions with high bit error rate causes frequent packet corruptions in wireless communication networks. Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRCs) and Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) mechanisms are heavily used for effective error detection and recovery, respectively. In previous studies, the performance of CRC generator polynomials is evaluated solely based on Undetected Error (UE) probability without taking retransmission and overhead dynamics into account. This paper presents a new performance evaluation criterion (i.e., link layer goodput) which takes both CRC coding and ARQ dynamics into account. The proposed criterion is used as an objective function to compute the best polynomial and message length pairs corresponding to varying network conditions. We, then, propose an adaptive CRC coding mechanism which dynamically updates the CRC polynomial and message length pair at run-time in accordance with the time varying conditions. Simulation experiments show that dynamic selection of CRC polynomial and message length pair yields significant performance gains.
Factoring Process Improvement into the Awarding of Sustainment Contracts

CROSSTALK is beneficial, and I endorse it every chance I get. I really enjoyed “Rules a Program Manager Can Live By,” July 1998. I especially identified with Step 7, “Summarize Meetings. ” All too often, people get burned by not doing this. Everyone seems to come away with something different. I have been emphasizing the importance of summarizing meetings, and quoting your article. Al Kaniss U.S. Navy Patuxent River, Md. Summarizing Meetings Is Vital Letter to the Editor Reductions in procurement funds mean that most of the U.S. military’s year 2010 systems are already in our current inventory. Because modification of software-intensive systems provides the most promise for increases in system capability and flexibility, many 2010 requirements will be achieved through sustainment of existing systems. With so much being dependent upon the successful upgrade of existing systems, perhaps it is time to assess how process improvement efforts might be better factored into “best value” comparisons associated with the award of sustainment contracts. Process improvement requires an investment of time and resources, which in turn raises direct labor and overhead costs. Development organizations make this investment because their increased efficiency and quality translate into higher profitability and more follow-on contracts. Because such organizations usually produce systems in less time and with fewer defects thus lowering development costs, process improvement can be factored into bids associated with new system deliveries. On the other hand, sustainment contracts normally involve “level of effort” tasks and are negotiated based on labor rates for defined periods and funding levels. Therefore, labor rates weigh heavily in the determination of best value, and unfortunately, process improvement efforts are often difficult to quantify relative to labor rates. Indeed, an organization that uses low-skill-level Factoring Process Improvement into the Awarding of Sustainment Contracts Lt. Col. Joe Jarzombek ESIP Director
Neto auxiliary proteins control both the trafficking and biophysical properties of the kainate receptor GluK1

Kainate receptors (KARs) are a subfamily of glutamate receptors mediating excitatory synaptic transmission and Neto proteins are recently identified auxiliary subunits for KARs. However, the roles of Neto proteins in the synaptic trafficking of KAR GluK1 are poorly understood. Here, using the hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neuron as a null background system we find that surface expression of GluK1 receptor itself is very limited and is not targeted to excitatory synapses. Both Neto1 and Neto2 profoundly increase GluK1 surface expression and also drive GluK1 to synapses. However, the regulation GluK1 synaptic targeting by Neto proteins is independent of their role in promoting surface trafficking. Interestingly, GluK1 is excluded from synapses expressing AMPA receptors and is selectively incorporated into silent synapses. Neto2, but not Neto1, slows GluK1 deactivation, whereas Neto1 speeds GluK1 desensitization and Neto2 slows desensitization. These results establish critical roles for Neto auxiliary subunits controlling KARs properties and synaptic incorporation. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.11682. 001
An integrated cognitive-behavioural approach to the aetiology and treatment of violence

In this article a number of environmental and psychological variables that play an important role in the assessment and treatment of violent offenders are discussed. Several theories on the aetiology of deviant and criminal behaviour are presented, with a special emphasis on parental rearing styles, traumatic experiences, co-current mental disorders and personality disorders. These theories are integrated in a model of the development of criminal behaviour. This holistic model may be useful in the assessment and treatment of offenders, since it offers theory based explanations for the development of violent behaviour in individual offenders. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Student responsibility and classroom discipline in Australia, China, and Israel

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between teachers' classroom discipline techniques and students' individual and communal responsibility in Australian, Chinese, and Israeli classrooms. The sample comprised 5521 students in grades 7–12 and 748 teachers. The participating Australian, Chinese, and Israeli schools included both larger and smaller schools, situated in a range of socioeconomic and geographic areas. Results showed that teachers who utilize more inclusive disciplinary techniques have students who take more responsiblity for their own behavior and for the behavior of their peers. In general students appeared to act responsibly in class in all three settings, and their self‐reported levels of responsibility were generally validated by their teachers' perceptions. Implications for educators and further research are discussed.
Comparing Two Multiagent Reinforcement Learning Approaches for the Traffic Assignment Problem

The traffic assignment problem (TAP) consists of assigning routes to trips, in order to minimize the travel time of all these trips. Classical methods assume the existence of a central authority that computes and assigns routes to road users. In this paper, we present two multiagent reinforcement learning approaches for the TAP. They solve the problem in a distributed perspective, in which road users (agents) decide which route to take and learn from their trips. The first approach, named edge-based Q-Learning, can learn a route from any existing route in the search space. The second, called route-based Q-Learning, restricts the search space to a fixed subset of precomputed routes. Experimental evaluation is conducted in two transportation scenarios that differ in the amount of learning agents and network topology. The results obtained are compared against three classical (and centralized) methods for the TAP.
Practical and Realistic Facial Wrinkles Animation

Virtual characters in games are becoming more and more realistic, with recent advances for instance in the fields of skin rendering [d’Eon and Luebke 07, Hable et al. 09, Jimenez and Gutierrez 10] or behavior-based animation [NaturalMotion 05]. To avoid lifeless representations and help the user engage in the action, more and more sophisticated algorithms are being devised that capture subtle aspects of the appearance and motion of these characters. Unfortunately, facial animation and the emotional aspect of the interaction have not been traditionally pursued with the same intensity. We believe this is an important missing aspect in games, especially given the current trend of story-driven AAA games and their movie-like real-time cutscenes. Without even realizing it, we often depend on the subtleties of facial expression to give us important contextual cues about what someone is saying, thinking or feeling. For example, a wrinkled brow can indicate surprise, while a furrowed brow may indicate confusion or inquisitiveness. In the mid-1800s, a French neurologist named Guillaume Duchenne performed experiments that involved applying electric simulation to his subject’s facial muscles. Duchenne’s experiments allowed him to map which facial muscles were used for different facial expressions. One interesting fact that he discovered was that smiles resulting from true happiness not only utilize the muscles of the mouth, but also those of the eyes. It is this subtle but important additional muscle movement that distinguishes a genuine happy smile from an inauthentic or sarcastic smile. What we learn from this is that facial expressions are complex and sometimes subtle, but extraordinarily important in conveying meaning and intent. In order to allow artists to create realistic, compelling characters we must allow them to harness the power of subtle facial expression. We present a method to add expressive animated wrinkles to characters, helping enrich stories through subtle visual cues. Our system allows the animator to independently blend multiple wrinkle maps across regions of a character’s face. We demonstrate how combining our technique with state-
Reliable Lexical Simplification for Non-Native Speakers

Lexical Simplification is the task of modifying the lexical content of complex sentences in order to make them simpler. Due to the lack of reliable resources available for the task, most existing approaches have difficulties producing simplifications which are grammatical and that preserve the meaning of the original text. In order to improve on the state-of-the-art of this task, we propose user studies with nonnative speakers, which will result in new, sizeable datasets, as well as novel ways of performing Lexical Simplification. The results of our first experiments show that new types of classifiers, along with the use of additional resources such as spoken text language models, produce the state-of-the-art results for the Lexical Simplification task of SemEval-2012.
The Occurrence of Borderline Personality Disorder in the Families of Borderline Patients

This paper reports on the morbid risk of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in first-degree relatives of BPD patients using direct and indirect family data. From data obtained on 320 family members, the morbid risk for BPD was found to be 15.3%. Concomitant diagnoses were frequently present in the relatives with BPD, and the sex ratio of male to female relatives with BPD was 1:1.2. The evidence suggests that there is an increased prevalence of BPD in the first-degree family members of borderline patients.
Detecting Learning Moment-by-Moment

Intelligent tutors have become increasingly accurate at detecting whether a student knows a skill, or knowledge component (KC), at a given time. However, current student models do not tell us exactly at which point a KC is learned. In this paper, we present a machine-learned model that assesses the probability that a student learned a KC at a specific problem step (instead of at the next or previous problem step). We use this model to analyze which KCs are learned gradually, and which are learned in "eureka" moments. We also discuss potential ways that this model could be used to improve the effectiveness of cognitive mastery learning.
Face recognition based on Low-Rank matrix Representation

Based on the recent success of Low-Rank matrix Representation (LRR), we propose a novel classification method for robust face recognition, named LRR-based Classification (LRRC). By the ideal that if each data class is linearly spanned by a subspace of unknown dimensions and the data are noiseless, the lowest-rank representations of a set of test vector samples with respect to a set of training vector samples have the nature of being both dense for within-class affinity and almost zero for between-class affinities. Consequently, the LRR exactly reveals the classification of the data. Our experimental results demonstrate that LRRC has competitive with state-of-the-art classification methods.
Editorial: Promoting Children's Rights: Rekindling Respectivity

The past few years have been a productive period for the SAJP. We recently learned that the SAJP's impact factor for 2011 was 0.457, while the five-year impact factor is 0.630. These statistics confirm the SAJP's standing as the leading psychology journal on the continent, and, for this achievement, I wish to thank the core editorial staff as well as our colleagues at PsySSA for their tireless efforts. The downward trend that emerged a few years ago has now been reversed, and further growth can be expected as the SAJP will be published both online and in hard copy format from 1 January 2013.
Formation and Crystallization of Yeast RNA Polymerase II Elongation Complexes*

Minimal templates were devised for the efficient generation of yeast RNA polymerase II transcription elongation complexes. A 33-base pair DNA with a 15-residue dC tail at one 3′-end supported the formation of a complex containing the polymerase paused at nucleotide 11 of the duplex region and an RNA of 14–16 residues. The same template could yield an arrested complex with the enzyme at nucleotide 13–15 and RNA of 15–17 residues. These complexes were stable for at least a week under various conditions and could be resolved by gel electrophoresis or purified by ion exchange chromatography. The purified paused complex formed crystals capable of x-ray diffraction to 3.5 Å resolution. The complex remained active in the crystal and, in the presence of nucleoside triphosphates, could efficiently extend the transcript in situ.
On finding power method in spreading activation search

Graph ranking algorithms such as PageRank and HITS share the common idea of calculating eigenvectors of graph adjacency matrices. This paper shows that the power method usually used to calculate eigenvectors is also present in a spreading activation search. In addition, we empirically show that spreading activation algorithm is able to converge on periodic graphs, where power method fails. Furthermore, an extension to graph ranking calculation scheme is proposed unifying calculation of PageRank, HITS, NodeRanking and spreading activation search.
Investigating the Effect of ASR Tuning on Named Entity Recognition

Information retrieval from speech is a key technology for many applications, as it allows access to large amounts of audio data. This technology requires two major components: an automatic speech recognizer (ASR) and a text-based information retrieval module such as a key word extractor or a named entity recognizer (NER). When combining the two components, the resulting final application needs to be globally optimized. However, ASR and information retrieval are usually developed and optimized separately. The ASR tends to be optimized to reduce the word error rate (WER), a metric which does not take into account the contextual and syntactic roles of the words, which are valuable information for information retrieval systems. In this paper we investigate different ways to tune the ASR for a speech-based NER system. In an end-to-end configuration we also tested several ASR metrics, including WER, NE-WER and ATENE, as well as the use of an oracle during the development step. Our results show that using a NER oracle to tune the system reduces the named entity recognition error rate by more than 1% absolute, and using the ATENE metric allows us to reduce it by more than 0.75%. We also show that these optimization approaches favor a higher ASR language model weight which entails an overall gain in NER performance, despite a local increase of the WER.
Early Glomerular Filtration Defect and Severe Renal Disease in Podocin-Deficient Mice

ABSTRACT Podocytes are specialized epithelial cells covering the basement membrane of the glomerulus in the kidney. The molecular mechanisms underlying the role of podocytes in glomerular filtration are still largely unknown. We generated podocin-deficient (Nphs2−/−) mice to investigate the function of podocin, a protein expressed at the insertion of the slit diaphragm in podocytes and defective in a subset of patients with steroid-resistant nephrotic syndrome and focal and segmental glomerulosclerosis. Nphs2 −/− mice developed proteinuria during the antenatal period and died a few days after birth from renal failure caused by massive mesangial sclerosis. Electron microscopy revealed the extensive fusion of podocyte foot processes and the lack of a slit diaphragm in the remaining foot process junctions. Using real-time PCR and immunolabeling, we showed that the expression of other slit diaphragm components was modified in Nphs2 −/− kidneys: the expression of the nephrin gene was downregulated, whereas that of the ZO1 and CD2AP genes appeared to be upregulated. Interestingly, the progression of the renal disease, as well as the presence or absence of renal vascular lesions, depends on the genetic background. Our data demonstrate the crucial role of podocin in the establishment of the glomerular filtration barrier and provide a suitable model for mapping and identifying modifier genes involved in glomerular diseases caused by podocyte injuries.
A screen in Saccharomyces cerevisiae identified CaMCM1, an essential gene in Candida albicans crucial for morphogenesis

Morphogenesis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the pathogenic yeast Candida albicans is governed in part by the same molecular circuits. In S. cerevisiae, FLO11/MUC1 expression has been shown to be modulated by multiple signalling pathways required for pseudohyphal development. We have established a screen in S. cerevisiae to identify regulators of fungal development in C. albicans based on FLO11::lacZ expression as a reporter. This screen identified both known components of the mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade and the cAMP cascade that are important for hyphal development in C. albicans, as well as genes not yet known to be involved in morphogenesis. The Candida homologue of MCM1 is one of the novel factors identified in this screen as being important for morphogenesis. CaMcm1p levels do not vary significantly in different cell types and respond to an autoregulatory feedback mechanism, arguing that CaMcm1p activity is regulated by post‐translational modifications. Both overexpression and repression of this essential gene led to the induction of hyphae. Moreover, we found that the expression of HWP1, a hyphae‐specific gene, was induced by repression of CaMCM1. The changes in morphology and HWP1 expression were not the result of a change in expression levels of NRG1 or TUP1, known repressors of hyphal development. Thus, CaMcm1p is a component of a hitherto unknown regulatory mechanism of hyphal growth.
Epoch-incremental reinforcement learning algorithms

Abstract In this article, a new class of the epoch-incremental reinforcement learning algorithm is proposed. In the incremental mode, the fundamental TD(0) or TD(λ) algorithm is performed and an environment model is created. In the epoch mode, on the basis of the environment model, the distances of past-active states to the terminal state are computed. These distances and the reinforcement terminal state signal are used to improve the agent policy.
Factors predicting efficacy of oxaliplatin in combination with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) ± folinic acid in a compassionate-use cohort of 481 5-FU-resistant advanced colorectal cancer patients

A statistical analysis was performed on the patient data collected from two compassionate-use programmes using oxaliplatin (Eloxatin®) + 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) ± folinic acid (FA), to identify predictive factors for oxaliplatin-based salvage treatment in patients with 5-FU-resistant advanced colorectal cancer (ACRC). 481 5-FU-resistant ACRC patients, most with performance status ≤ 2, ≥ 3 involved sites, and ≥ 2 prior lines of chemotherapy, received oxaliplatin + 5-FU ± FA. Prognostic factors associated with overall response rate (ORR), time to progression (TTP) and overall survival (OS) were identified using univariate and multivariate logistic and/or Cox proportional hazards analyses. The ORR was 16% (95% CI: 13–20), the median TTP was 4.2 months (95% CI: 3.4–4.6), and the median OS was 9.6 months (95% CI: 8.6–10.6). The multivariate analysis indicated poor (≥ 2 WHO) performance status (PS), a large number of prior chemotherapy regimens (≥ 3), a low baseline haemoglobin level (< 10 g/dl), and a triweekly (vs biweekly) treatment administration schedule as significantly associated (P< 0.05) with a lower ORR. Sex (male), number of organs involved (≥3) and alkaline phosphatase (AP) level (≥ 2 × the upper limit of normal) were associated (P< 0.05) with shorter TTP. Poor PS, a large number of organs involved, and elevated AP were independently and significantly correlated with shorter OS. Our analysis identified a relationship between efficacy results of oxaliplatin + 5-FU ± FA treatment in 5-FU-resistant ACRC patients and baseline prognostic factors related to PS, extent of disease and number of prior regimens. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaign http://www.bjcancer. com