Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reed-Muller Codes: Spherically-Punctured Codes and Decoding Algorithms

Author(s): Kapralova, Olga | Advisor(s): Dumer, Ilya | Abstract: Reed-Muller (RM) codes are classical codes that have enjoyed unabated interest since their introduction in 1954 due to their simple recursive structure and low-complexity decoding. The main goal of the thesis is to develop new coding techniques that can improve the performance of RM codes. In this work, we wish to keep the recursive low-complexity structure of RM codes while extending the sets of possible parameters and decoding algorithms. We address this task using two different methods. First, we consider new code constructions that extend code parameters using puncturing. Second, we design new decoding algorithms that repeatedly use the gradient properties of the classic recursive structure to improve code performance of RM codes. In the first part of the thesis, we propose a new class of codes that enjoy the recursive structure of RM codes, but reduce the exponential length of RM codes to a polynomial in m. These codes are obtained by puncturing classical RM codes, i.e. by restricting binary RM codes to small subsets of their positions. We study new recursive properties of these codes and analyze their parameters. In the second part of the thesis we develop new decoding algorithms for binary RM codes of second order that achieve near optimal performance for short and moderate code lengths. RM codes enjoy some simple decoding procedures; however, these algorithms fall short of optimal performance on moderate block lengths. We propose a suboptimal algorithm that reduces the complexity of maximum-likelihood decoding from super-polynomial order O(n(m+1)/2) to polynomial order O(mn2). At the same time, our numerical simulations show that the new algorithm performs very closely to its maximum-likelihood counterpart for blocks of up to several thousand bits.
Maternal smoking, xenobiotic metabolizing enzyme gene variants, and gastroschisis risk

Maternal smoking during pregnancy is one proposed risk factor for gastroschisis, but reported associations have been modest, suggesting that differences in genetic susceptibility might play a role. We included 108 non‐Hispanic white and 62 Hispanic families who had infants with gastroschisis, and 1,147 non‐Hispanic white and 337 Hispanic families who had liveborn infants with no major structural birth defects (controls) in these analyses. DNA was extracted from buccal cells collected from infants and mothers, and information on periconceptional smoking history was obtained from maternal interviews, as part of the National Birth Defects Prevention Study. We analyzed five polymorphisms in three genes that code for enzymes involved in metabolism of some cigarette smoke constituents (CYP1A1, CYP1A2, and NAT2). Logistic regression models were used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) independently for maternal smoking and maternal and infant gene variants, and to assess joint associations of maternal smoking and maternal or infant gene variants with gastroschisis. In analyses adjusted for maternal age at delivery and stratified by maternal race‐ethnicity, we identified three suggestive associations among 30 potential associations with sufficient numbers to calculate ORs: CYP1A1*2A for non‐Hispanic white mothers who smoked periconceptionally (aOR = 0.38, 95% CI 0.15–0.98), and NAT2*6 for Hispanic non‐smoking mothers (aOR = 2.17, 95% CI 1.12–4.19) and their infants (aOR = 2.11, 95% CI 1.00–4.48). This analysis does not support the occurrence of effect modification between periconceptional maternal smoking and most of the xenobiotic metabolizing enzyme gene variants assessed. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Teacher or PlaymaTe? asian immigranT and euro-american ParenTs' ParTiciPaTion in Their young children's daily acTiviTies

Parents often arrange activities for their children either by providing them with opportunities or restricting their participation. The way children spend their time affects their cognitive and social development. This study compares the involvement of Asian immigrant and Euro-American parents in their young children’s daily activities, with particular attention to two contrasting roles: teacher and playmate. Parents of children aged 3 to 6 years ( n = 24 children in each group) kept daily logs of their children’s activities and companions for a week. Results show that parents in both groups spent similar amounts of time in play activities with their children, although the Euro-American parents did more pretend play and the Asian parents did more constructive play. However, Asian parents spent far more time on preacademic activities with their children such as learning letters and numbers, playing math games, and working with the computer. The cultural differences among parents are mirrored to a lesser extent by patterns of participation of siblings, friends, and babysitters with the target children. These results are discussed in relation to universality and cultural specificity of parenting beliefs and practices.
Mariprofundus ferrooxydans PV-1 the First Genome of a Marine Fe(II) Oxidizing Zetaproteobacterium

Mariprofundus ferrooxydans PV-1 has provided the first genome of the recently discovered Zetaproteobacteria subdivision. Genome analysis reveals a complete TCA cycle, the ability to fix CO2, carbon-storage proteins and a sugar phosphotransferase system (PTS). The latter could facilitate the transport of carbohydrates across the cell membrane and possibly aid in stalk formation, a matrix composed of exopolymers and/or exopolysaccharides, which is used to store oxidized iron minerals outside the cell. Two-component signal transduction system genes, including histidine kinases, GGDEF domain genes, and response regulators containing CheY-like receivers, are abundant and widely distributed across the genome. Most of these are located in close proximity to genes required for cell division, phosphate uptake and transport, exopolymer and heavy metal secretion, flagellar biosynthesis and pilus assembly suggesting that these functions are highly regulated. Similar to many other motile, microaerophilic bacteria, genes encoding aerotaxis as well as antioxidant functionality (e.g., superoxide dismutases and peroxidases) are predicted to sense and respond to oxygen gradients, as would be required to maintain cellular redox balance in the specialized habitat where M. ferrooxydans resides. Comparative genomics with other Fe(II) oxidizing bacteria residing in freshwater and marine environments revealed similar content, synteny, and amino acid similarity of coding sequences potentially involved in Fe(II) oxidation, signal transduction and response regulation, oxygen sensation and detoxification, and heavy metal resistance. This study has provided novel insights into the molecular nature of Zetaproteobacteria.
Social work in Taiwan

English Social work development in Taiwan over the past five decades has been analyzed according to professional elements, historical background and the challenge of globalization and civilization. It also offers the factors that influence the process of professional formation of social work globally and the concern of social work indigenization. French Cette recherche présente une analyse du développement du travail social à Taiwan au cours des cinq dernières décennies. Elle s'appuie sur les facteurs professionnels, le contexte historique et les défis de la mondialisation et de la civilisation. Elle présente également les facteurs qui ont influencé le processus de la formation professionnelle en travail social dans son ensemble et elle aborde l'indigénisation du travail social. Spanish En las últimas cinco décadas se ha analizado el trabajo social en Taiwán según elementos profesionales, más el telón histórico de fondo y el reto de la globalización y civilización. También incluye los factores que globalmente influyen en el proceso de formación profesional y la preocupación por la indigenización del trabajo social.
Listening to Students, Negotiating Beliefs: Preparing Teachers for Urban Classrooms

Abstract Learning to teach in urban schools is difficult, particularly when prospective teachers come from different racial, ethnic and/or class backgrounds than their students. The task of urban-focused teacher education programs is to prepare prospective teachers to learn and enact practices that enable them to teach successfully in under-resourced districts that offer both opportunities and constraints. In this article, we report on a 2-year ethnographic study designed to investigate how new teachers enacted a listening stance in teaching that was introduced in their preparation program. Taking a listening stance implies entering a classroom with questions as well as answers, knowledge as well as a clear sense of the limitations of that knowledge (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Lytle & Cochran-Smith, 1992; Schultz, 2003). The article focuses on how four teachers attempted to adopt a listening stance in their classroom practice, while also responding to the constraints of the standardized curriculum of their district. We conclude that the process of negotiating among teachers’ beliefs, practices introduced in a teacher preparation program and district mandates is a critical practice for teachers to learn. We further suggest that in the current climate of high-stakes testing and mandated curriculum, explicit teaching of negotiation skills is likely to support more teachers to enter into and remain in classrooms.
Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990.

This work is the first systematic attempt to measure the impact of the US Voting Rights Act of 1965, commonly regarded in the USA as the most effective civil rights legislation of the century. The contributors show how blacks and Mexican-Americans in the South, along with the Justice Department, have used the Act and the US Constitution to overcome the resistance of white officials to minority mobilization. The book tells the story of the black struggle for equal political participation in eight core southern states from the end of the Civil War to the 1980s, emphasizing the period since 1965. The contributors use a variety of quantitative methods to show how the Act dramatically increased black registration and black and Mexican-American office-holding. They also explain modern voting rights law as it pertains to minority citizens, discussing important legal cases and giving numerous examples of how the law is applied.
Dragon2000: standard-cell placement tool for large industry circuits

In this paper, we develop a new standard cell placement tool, Dragon2000, to solve large scale placement problem effectively. A top-down hierarchical approach is used in Dragon2000. State-of-the-art partitioning tools are tightly integrated with wirelength minimization techniques to achieve superior performance. We argue that net-cut minimization is a good and important shortcut to solve the large scale placement problem. Experimental results show that minimizing net-cut is more important than greedily obtain a wirelength optimal placement at intermediate hierarchical levels. We run Dragon2000 on recently released large benchmark suite ISPD98 as well as MCNC circuits. For circuits which have more than 100 k cells, comparing to iToolsl.4. 0, Dragon2000 can produce slightly better placement results (1.4%) while spending much less amount of time (2/spl times/ speedup). This is also the first published placement result on the publicly available large industrial circuits.
Software Metrics Analysis with Genetic Algorithm and Affinity Propagation Clustering

Software metrics are collected in software development process and can be utilized to quantify software products, especially to predict software quality in the early stage of software life cycle. Data mining techniques have been applied to study software quality by analyzing software metrics. And clustering analysis, one of data mining techniques, has also been adopted to build software quality prediction models in the early period of software life cycle. However, not all kinds of software metrics are proper to be engaged in clustering analysis, and it is quite difficult to manually select them appropriately. Therefore, in this paper, based on the Genetic Algorithm (GA) and a new clustering method called Affinity Propagation (AP), we propose a novel strategy (GA-AP) to analyze software metrics for predicting software quality. Furthermore, we validate our new approach with two real-world software metrics datasets, and the experimental results show that GA-AP performs well in software metrics selection for clustering analysis.
Opponent Behaviour Recognition for Real-Time Strategy Games

In Real-Time Strategy (RTS) video games, players (controlled by humans or computers) build structures and recruit armies, fight for space and resources in order to control strategic points, destroy the opposing force and ultimately win the game. Players need to predict where and how the opponents will strike in order to best defend themselves. Conversely, assessing how the opponents will defend themselves is crucial to mounting a successful attack while exploiting the vulnerabilities in the opponent's defence strategy. In this context, to be truly adaptable, computer-controlled players need to recognize their opponents' behaviour, their goals, and their plans to achieve those goals. In this paper we analyze the algorithmic challenges behind behaviour recognition in RTS games and discuss a generic RTS behaviour recognition system that we are developing to address those challenges. The application domain is that of RTS games, but many of the key points we discuss also apply to other video game genres such as multiplayer first person shooter (FPS) games.
The role of morphology in the comprehension of wh-dependencies in Croatian aphasic speakers

Background: Recent research on the comprehension of subject and object wh-questions in English Broca's aphasic speakers has shown the existence of a specific pattern: subject and object who questions, as well as subject which NP questions, are comprehended above chance, while object which NP questions are comprehended at chance. Since English is a strict word-order language, the subject–object asymmetry is identified as an asymmetry both in word order and in thematic role assignment. The present study investigated the comprehension of wh-dependencies in Croatian, which is a language with relatively free word order that does not necessarily associate thematic roles with specific syntactic positions. Aims: The goal of the study was to determine whether the pattern of comprehension of wh-dependencies that has been reported for English Broca's aphasic speakers is also exhibited by Croatian aphasic speakers. We hypothesised that due to the role of morphological features such as case in sentence comprehension in a free word-order language like Croatian, aphasic speakers of that language would exhibit a different pattern. Methods & Procedures: We tested the comprehension of six types of wh-dependencies formed with tko “who” and koji “which” (direct, embedded, long-distance with za, long-distance without za, and passivised questions, and relative clauses with koji) in six Croatian aphasic speakers. All participants had had a lesion to the left hemisphere: three of them were Broca's aphasic speakers and three were mixed cases of non-fluent aphasia. Outcomes & Results: The main finding of the study is that Croatian Broca's aphasic speakers do not exhibit the same subject–object asymmetry that has been reported for English Broca's aphasic speakers. Some asymmetry was found in the three patients with mixed aphasia, whose comprehension was better on object- than subject-extracted structures. Conclusions: The asymmetric pattern found in the cases of mixed aphasia runs in the opposite direction to the asymmetry typically reported in the literature. Relying on cross-linguistic findings from the processing-based research on subject–object comprehension asymmetries in neurologically intact populations we assume that, in Croatian, thematic roles are assigned directly to case-marked arguments without the mediation of syntactic information, and propose a morphological account of the Croatian data based on the validity of case cues in MacWhinney and Bates' competition model.
RLAR: Robust Link Availability Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Many previously proposed routing metrics and algorithms for ad hoc networks work well in static networks, however, when nodes are moving and wireless links may fail from time to time, these routing metrics and algorithms are prone to poor performance. A cross-layer based routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks, called Robust Link Availability Routing (RLAR) protocol, is proposed in this paper. RLAR consists of two modules, which estimates the link reliability using physical layer information and deals with robust optimal routing, respectively. Based on the optimal tree backbone, a mesh structure is formed for reliability enhancement. Through simulations, RLAR is proved to be able to increase the packet delivery ratio and reduce the frequency of re routings for dynamic network topologies.
Method for the identification of the subsets of genes specifically consistently co-expressed in a set of datasets

The recently proposed binarization of consensus partition matrices (Bi-CoPaM) ensemble clustering method has offered the ability to mine multiple genome-wide microarray datasets for the subsets of genes which are consistently co-expressed in all of these datasets. Though, some of those subsets of genes might also be consistently co-expressed in many other datasets that were generated under a wider range of conditions than those of interest in a single focused study. Here we propose a new method, named as the unification of clustering results from multiple datasets using external specifications (UNCLES). The external specifications imposed in this study aim at mining for the subsets of genes that are consistently co-expressed in one set of datasets (S+) and not consistently co-expressed in another set of datasets (S-). We tested our proposed method over eight budding yeast cell-cycle datasets for S+ and other six general budding yeast datasets for S-. Our results have shown the ability of our method to find the subsets of genes consistently co-expressed in the S+ datasets successfully, while excluding the subsets of genes that are also consistently co-expressed in the S- datasets.
Design of turbo-like codes for short frames

Turbo codes have been shown to yield very good performance for long block sizes. However, their performance degrades when the frame size decreases. Furthermore, decoding turbo codes with the maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithm or the soft output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) is quite complex. We proposed a type of turbo-like (TL) codes for short frame transmission. The component encoder of a TL code is a systematic feed-forward convolutional (SFC) code designed without 4-cycles and the associated component decoder uses serial belief propagation rule. TL codes are linear-time encodable and they can be decoded by belief propagation (BP) algorithms with very low complexity.
TimeML-strict: clarifying temporal annotation

TimeML is an XML-based schema for annotating temporal information over discourse. The standard has been used to annotate a variety of resources and is followed by a number of tools, the creation of which constitute hundreds of thousands of man-hours of research work. However, the current state of resources is such that many are not valid, or do not produce valid output, or contain ambiguous or custom additions and removals. Difficulties arising from these variances were highlighted in the TempEval-3 exercise, which included its own extra stipulations over conventional TimeML as a response. To unify the state of current resources, and to make progress toward easy adoption of its current incarnation ISO-TimeML, this paper introduces TimeML-strict: a valid, unambiguous, and easy-to-process subset of TimeML. We also introduce three resources -- a schema for TimeML-strict; a validator tool for TimeML-strict, so that one may ensure documents are in the correct form; and a repair tool that corrects common invalidating errors and adds disambiguating markup in order to convert documents from the laxer TimeML standard to TimeML-strict.
Flexible structure alignment by chaining aligned fragment pairs allowing twists

MOTIVATION Protein structures are flexible and undergo structural rearrangements as part of their function, and yet most existing protein structure comparison methods treat them as rigid bodies, which may lead to incorrect alignment. RESULTS We have developed the Flexible structure AlignmenT by Chaining AFPs (Aligned Fragment Pairs) with Twists (FATCAT), a new method for structural alignment of proteins. The FATCAT approach simultaneously addresses the two major goals of flexible structure alignment; optimizing the alignment and minimizing the number of rigid-body movements (twists) around pivot points (hinges) introduced in the reference protein. In contrast, currently existing flexible structure alignment programs treat the hinge detection as a post-process of a standard rigid body alignment. We illustrate the advantages of the FATCAT approach by several examples of comparison between proteins known to adopt different conformations, where the FATCAT algorithm achieves more accurate structure alignments than current methods, while at the same time introducing fewer hinges.
The use of formal grammars in isolated word recognition

A method using finite-state grammars and nonrecursive context-free grammars is presented for the recognition of isolated words. Some form of 'training' is required to combat problems of variations in speech. In the training mode, one grammar for each word in the vocabulary is constructed directly from a set of sample strings of 'features' represented by symbols. In the recognition mode, an incoming string is analyzed to determine which grammar, if any, could have generated it. The word corresponding to such grammar is then said to have been recognized.
Shots Fired: Firearm Discharges during Fugitive Apprehensions

Abstract Violence directed at law enforcement has remained a critical issue for police, the public, and policing scholars. Recent years have witnessed a growth in lethal violence directed at officers. While several studies have examined noncompliance or resisting arrest, limited individual-level research exists on firearm use during fugitive apprehensions. We addressed this limitation by examining all fugitive apprehensions at one federal law enforcement agency involving shots fired from January 2005 through July 2011. These incidents were compared to a random sample of physical arrests during the same time period where a firearm was not discharged. Drawing on a logistic regression framework, the data highlighted the importance of current and previous warrant types in relation to firearm incidents. Implications and limitations of the model are discussed.