Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Instructional supervision : perceptions of Canadian and Ukrainian beginning high-school teachers

During the past several decades, instructional supervision and professional development have been identified as vehicles to enhance the performance of teachers. One of the most critical problems facing the profession is how to improve the development of beginning teachers. The purpose of the study was to examine beginning teachers’ perceptions of actual and ideal approaches to supervision and their perceived connection to professional development in Canadian and Ukrainian high schools. The study was based on the belief that the supervisory process should be a collaborative effort reflecting the professional concerns of the individual teacher. The study was based on the belief that the supervisory process should be a collaborative effort reflecting the professional concerns of the individual teacher. The conceptual framework dwelt upon supervisory choices for beginning teachers, namely collaboration with supervisors or peers, and self-reflection. Stemming from the need for improved supervision of teachers was a need to develop a connection between supervision and professional development for the purpose of instructional improvement. Quantitative and qualitative methods of inquiry were used in this study. The survey was used to elicit teachers’ points of view and to establish a profile of the supervision experiences of high school teachers in their first years of teaching in the areas of Saskatoon, Canada and Chernivtsi, Ukraine. The sample consisted of 22 teachers in Canada and 26 teachers in Ukraine. The qualitative data were obtained through the use of semi-structured interviews that incorporated open-ended questions. Interviews were conducted with four of the survey respondents in each country. Participants’ responses were analyzed according to the research questions and recurring themes. The findings revealed that in both countries beginning teachers desired more frequent use of supervision that meets their individual professional needs. A choice in supervisory approaches, better planning, and active involvement in decision making process regarding the supervisory practices were viewed as being beneficial for them. Beginning teachers advocated a need for supervision that promotes trust and collaboration, and that provides them with support, advice, and help. Respondents advocated supervision that is closely connected to professional development. They expressed the desire to grow professionally and improve their instruction in order to provide quality education for students. Participant responses, for the most part, aligned with the literature which indicated that beginning teachers need extensive supervisory assistance. A number of implications were derived for theory, practice, and further research.
The Roles of Two IκB Kinase-related Kinases in Lipopolysaccharide and Double Stranded RNA Signaling and Viral Infection

Viral infection and stimulation with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) or double stranded RNA (dsRNA) induce phosphorylation of interferon (IFN) regulatory factor (IRF)-3 and its translocation to the nucleus, thereby leading to the IFN-β gene induction. Recently, two IκB kinase (IKK)–related kinases, inducible IκB kinase (IKK-i) and TANK-binding kinase 1 (TBK1), were suggested to act as IRF-3 kinases and be involved in IFN-β production in Toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling and viral infection. In this work, we investigated the physiological roles of these kinases by gene targeting. TBK1-deficient embryonic fibroblasts (EFs) showed dramatic decrease in induction of IFN-β and IFN-inducible genes in response to LPS or dsRNA as well as after viral infection. However, dsRNA-induced expression of these genes was residually detected in TBK1-deficient cells and intact in IKK-i–deficient cells, but completely abolished in IKK-i/TBK1 doubly deficient cells. IRF-3 activation, in response not only to dsRNA but also to viral infection, was impaired in TBK1-deficient cells. Together, these results demonstrate that TBK1 as well as, albeit to a lesser extent, IKK-i play a crucial role in the induction of IFN-β and IFN-inducible genes in both TLR-stimulated and virus-infected EFs.
AN intelligent road traffic management system using NVIDIA GPU

Road traffic congestion remains a global phenomenon that causes great problems in the cities of the world; especially developing countries, resulting in massive delay, unpredictable travel times, increased fuel consumption, man-hour and monetary loss. In order to get a better solution, one of the preposition is to divert traffic to less congested route. One of the solution of collecting road traffic condition is crowd sourcing. We proposed that the crowd sourcing information will change road network graph of the city according to sourcing result. Based on this updated graph, the driver in jam needs information that which path is suitable for him based on current updated position of vehicle to intended destination almost in real time. To get a near real time performance for large graph, we try to investigate the use of parallel point to point graph search algorithm. For this purpose we use CUDA enable GPU for parallel implementation of Dijsktra's algorithm. We tested our modified algorithm for New York, Rome and Dhaka city (partial). It is found that parallel implementation gives a better result for all pair search.
Comparison of GSTEB, HEED and PEGASIS protocols

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a group of a huge number of wireless sensor nodes which are arranged in a targeted region. The networks work properly till it is having sufficient battery power. So to optimize battery power, energy efficient routing protocols should be used. The current work involves comparing of routing protocols such as GSTEB, HEED and PEGASIS. Only one node communicates with Base Station (BS) at any point of time in PEGASIS. HEED is a clustering based technique which transmits data packet by cluster heads. But the energy level decreases due to Cluster Head when CH is far away from the BS. GSTEB can be employed to reduce energy consumption. For each round, a routing tree is created where BS assigns a root node and broadcasts information about location awareness to all sensor nodes and it automatically organizes nodes when any node has low battery power. This protocol prolongs network lifetime. Among these protocols GSTEB provides high throughput, packet delivery ratio and having longer battery lifetime compared to HEED and PEGASIS.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Dependently typed array programs don ' t go wrong

The array programming paradigm adopts multidimensional arrays as the fundamental data structures of computation. Array operations process entire arrays instead of just single elements. This makes array programs highly expressive and introduces data parallelism in a natural way. Array programming imposes non-trivial structural constraints on ranks, shapes, and element values of arrays. A prominent example of such violations are out-ofbound array accesses. Usually, such constraints are enforced by means of run time checks. Both the run time overhead inflicted by dynamic constraint checking and the uncertainty of proper program evaluation are undesirable. In this paper, we propose a novel type system for array programs based on dependent types. Our type system makes dynamic constraint checks obsolete and guarantees orderly evaluation of well-typed programs. We employ integer vectors of statically unknown length to index array types. We also show how constraints on these vectors are resolved using a suitable reduction to integer scalars. Our presentation is based on a functional array calculus that captures the essence of the paradigm without the legacy and obfuscation of a fully-fledged array programming language.
OntoGen extension for exploring image collections

OntoGen is a semi-automatic and data-driven ontology editor focusing on editing of topic ontologies. It utilizes text mining tools to make the ontology-related tasks simpler to the user. This focus on building ontologies from textual data is what we are trying to bridge. We have successfully extended OntoGen to work with image data and allow for ontology construction and editing on collections of labeled or unlabeled images. Browsing large heterogenous image collections efficiently is certainly a challenging task - and we feel that semiautomatic ontology construction, as described in this paper, makes this task easier.
Efficient parallel implementation of Potts model

In this work we present a different approach to simulate the Ferromagnetic Potts model [1] described by Renfrey B. Potts in 1952 and it is a generalization of the Ising [2] model. It is well-known that the Potts model has a disadvantage when it is implemented using a Monte Carlo simulation with a standard Metropolis algorithm. Many parallel algorithms have recently been developed to reduce this ”drawback” [3,4]. The problem of these algorithms is that they are much more difficult to parallelize efficiently. Our work describes a parallel Monte Carlo solution, using a C and an MPI library, which is more efficient than the traditional methods. The Potts model consists of spins that are placed on a lattice; the lattice is usually taken to be a two-dimensional rectangular Euclidean lattice, but is often generalized to other dimensions or other lattices. The Hamiltonian function is defined as follows: H = J ∑ (i,j),(i′,j′) 1− δσ(i,j)σ(i′,j′) (1) where J is a positive constant, δ is the Kronecker delta, 1 < δ(i,j) < Nd denotes the orientation of the spin at (i, j), Nd is the number of possible domains in the system at the begining of the simulation and (i, j), (i′, j′) denotes the first neighbourhood area. The probability function is defined as:
Automatic Gain Control ADC based on signal statistics for a cognitive radio cross-correlation spectrum analyzer

For integration purposes of a cross-correlation spectrum analyzer for cognitive radio, the use of low-resolution ADCs is investigated. In radio astronomy cross-correlation is exploited intensively together with low resolution ADCs and therefore a 2-bit ADC concept originating from ASTRON is analyzed and implemented. This ADC has automatic gain control and oset canceling based on estimates of the cumulative distri-bution function of the input signal. The ADC is worked out at system level and simulated to verify its correctness. The comparator is a critical component in the ADC and it is implemented on circuit level in a 90 nm CMOS process. Performance dependencies on both system level and circuit level are analyzed. The ADC allows a SFDR of the spectrum analyzer of 60 dB when the measurement time is 0.2 seconds, the sample frequency is 1536 MHz and the resolution bandwidth is 6 MHz. In prac-tical cases this SFDR is lowered to 55 dB. The implemented comparator allows a SFDR of 54 dB. The AGC mechanism causes input signal de-pendency which degrades performance. The required measurement time to achieve substantial SFDR results in less ecient spectrum estimation than when higher resolution ADCs are used.
Integer Ray Tracing

Despite nearly universal support for the IEEE 754 floating-point standard on modern general-purpose processors, a wide variety of more specialized processors do not provide hardware floating-point units and rely instead on integer-only pipelines. Ray tracing on these platforms thus requires an integer rendering process. Toward this end, we clarify the details of an existing fixed-point ray/triangle intersection method, provide an annotated implementation of that method in C++, introduce two refinements that lead to greater flexibility and improved accuracy, and highlight the issues necessary to implement common material models in an integer-only context. Finally, we provide the source code for a template-based integer/floating-point ray tracer to serve as a testbed for additional experimentation with integer ray tracing methods.
Rationalizing the Design of the Toyota Production System : A Comparison of Two Approaches

This paper examines two recent attempts to develop frameworks to explain the Toyota Production System (TPS). In Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System, Spear and Bowen assert that the design, operation and improvement of manufacturing systems can be captured in four basic rules. In A Decomposition Approach for Manufacturing System Design, Cochran et. al. show how a Manufacturing System Design Decomposition (MSDD) can express the relationships between the design requirements and corresponding solutions within a manufacturing system. This paper compares and contrasts how each of these approaches incorporates the requirements of successful manufacturing system design.
Cross-layer optimized routing in wireless sensor networks with duty cycle and energy harvesting

In this paper, we propose a cross-layer optimized geographic node-disjoint multipath routing algorithm, that is, two-phase geographic greedy forwarding plus. To optimize the system as a whole, our algorithm is designed on the basis of multiple layers' interactions, taking into account the following. First is the physical layer, where sensor nodes are developed to scavenge the energy from environment, that is, node rechargeable operation a kind of idle charging process to nodes. Each node can adjust its transmission power depending on its current energy level the main object for nodes with energy harvesting is to avoid the routing hole when implementing the routing algorithm. Second is the sleep scheduling layer, where an energy-balanced sleep scheduling scheme, that is, duty cycle a kind of node sleep schedule that aims at putting the idle listening nodes in the network into sleep state such that the nodes will be awake only when they are needed, and energy-consumption-based connected k-neighborhood is applied to allow sensor nodes to have enough time to recharge energy, which takes nodes' current energy level as the parameter to dynamically schedule nodes to be active or asleep. Third is the routing layer, in which a forwarding node chooses the next-hop node based on 2-hop neighbor information rather than 1-hop. Performance of two-phase geographic greedy forwarding plus algorithm is evaluated under three different forwarding policies, to meet different application requirements. Our extensive simulations show that by cross-layer optimization, more shorter paths are found, resulting in shorter average path length, yet without causing much energy consumption. On top of these, a considerable increase of the network sleep rate is achieved. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Multiple-Copy Cluster-Type Organization and Evolution of Genes Encoding O-Methyltransferases in the Apple

Plant O-methyltransferases (OMTs) play important roles in secondary metabolism. Two clusters of genes coding for caffeic acid OMT (COMT) have been identified in the apple genome. Three genes from one cluster and two genes from another cluster were isolated. These five genes encoding COMT, designated Mdomt1–Mdomt5 (GenBank accession nos. DQ886018–DQ886022), were distinguished by a (CT)n microsatellite in the 5′-UTR and two transposon-like sequences present in the promoter region and intron 1, respectively. The transposon-like sequence in intron 1 unambiguously traced the five Mdomt genes in the apple to a common ancestor. The ancestor must have undergone an initial duplication generating two progenitors, and this was followed by further duplication of these progenitors resulting in the two clusters identified in this study. The distal regions of the transposon-like sequences in promoter regions of Mdomt genes are capable of forming palindromic hairpin-like structures. The hairpin formation is likely responsible for nucleotide sequence differences observed in the promoter regions of these genes as it plays a destabilizing role in eukaryotic chromosomes. In addition, the possible mechanism of amplification of Mdomt genes in the apple genome is also discussed.
Formally Introducing Alloy Idioms

Design patterns describe simple and elegant solutions to specific problems in software design. Usually designers have to perform ad hoc transformations in order to introduce them. Most of the time they do not want to introduce or change between patterns that result in a design with conflicting semantics. This is difficult to guarantee by performing ad-hoc transformations. In this paper, we use our catalog of semantics-preserving transformations for Alloy — proven to be sound in a theorem prover — to derive refactorings that formally introduce idioms (design patterns for Alloy). For instance, we derive a refactoring that allows us to change between idioms that declare a state locally or globally by using our catalog. Moreover, our catalog is useful for reasoning about models. For example, two models of a hotel room locking using two different idioms (operations are specified implicitly and explicitly) are stated to have the same state transition. However, we show that they are not equivalent by using our catalog.
Event Driven Input Sequence T-Way Test Strategy Using Simulated Annealing

Exhaustive testing for event driven sequence input interaction is costly and not always practicable for all types of software testing. So, an alternative technique is crucial where optimum/near optimum test case generation is key concern. This paper presents a feasible test suite generation technique using Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm for Event Driven Input Sequence Testing (EDIST)and called EDIST-SA T-way test strategy. The EDIST-SA technique focuses on a heuristic analysis for generating feasible and near optimum test suite(s), where a cost function carefully initiates acceptable test candidates and a fine-tuned cooling rate with temperature takes part as an iterative perspective. We corroborate on EDIST-SA algorithm by doing a large number of experiments to achieve optimum and/or near optimum test cases from a large number of test candidates. The experimental results are tested on a real application called Embedded Network Traffic Monitoring System (ENTM). Analysis on EDIST-SA strategy shows that the optimum test suite is found from some of the iterated solution and there is possibility to have more feasible accepted test suites.
Complexity Based Image Artifact Detection

Images may contain blemishes or artificial structures which come from the processing or directly from the sensors, that decrease the quality of the images and can lead to analysis and interpretation problems. We are interested in detecting these defects automatically. The aim of our method will be to look for artifacts as too regular or too irregular image structures that will be detected using the basic properties of Kolmogorov complexity.
SEM Analysis of Quartz Sand Grain Surface Textures Indicates Alluvial/Colluvial Origin of the Quaternary “Glacial” Boulder Clays at Huangshan (Yellow Mountain), East-Central China

Abstract Geomorphic features and Pleistocene deposits on Huangshan have been attributed to glaciation. Recent reassessment questions this interpretation. As part of the reassessment, quartz sand grains from deposits identified as glacial boulder clays (till composed of boulders in a clay or silt matrix) were analyzed by scanning electron microscope for evidence of their sedimentary history. Surface textures found on the boulder-clay grains were compared with those on grains with known sedimentary histories including glacial, grus, colluvial, and alluvial grains. The analysis shows that the grains lack typical glacial textures. The surface textures present indicate a complex history. Nonuniformly weathered grain surfaces point to chemical weathering of the source rock. This is supported by the deep weathering of the nonquartz clasts in the sand-sized fraction as well as in boulders at the outcrops. The close correspondence in surface-texture frequencies with those of the alluvial grains indicates an alluvial component to the grains’ history. The similarity with the colluvial grains and the outcrops’ structures suggest an alluvial/colluvial origin for the deposits. The history indicated by the surface textures agrees with the recent reassessment of the geomorphic features and points to warm climatic conditions in east-central China for at least part of the Pleistocene.
A Click Chemistry Approach towards Flavin-Cyclodextrin Conjugates—Bioinspired Sulfoxidation Catalysts

A click chemistry approach based on the reaction between alkynylflavins and mono(6-azido-6-deoxy)-β-cyclodextrin has proven to be a useful tool for the synthesis of flavin-cyclodextrin conjugates studied as monooxygenase mimics in enantioselective sulfoxidations.
Three-dimensional characteristics of polarimetric radar variables and their precipitation-type dependence

Understanding the characteristics of cloud microphysics in precipitation is important to enable accurate rainfall estimation through space-borne radar and microwave radiometers on satellites (e.g., TRMM, GPM, and AMSR-E) (e.g., Masunaga et al. 2002). One basic need is clarification of the differences in cloud microphysical characteristics, such as the drop size distribution (DSD), in convective precipitation and stratiform precipitation. Hydrometeor identification above an altitude of 0oC also provides indispensable information for rain retrieval algorithms. Some previous studies have revealed the vertical profiles of DSD and hydrometeor classification using wind profiler and polarimetric radar data (Kobayashi and Adachi 2005; May and Keenan, 2005). However, few studies have described and compared the three-dimensional characteristics of cloud microphysics in various types of precipitation on the basis of observational data. In the context of rainfall estimation through space-borne microwave radiometers, characterizing and classifying the precipitation type within an area that depends on the radiometers horizontal footprint size is also important. In the present study, we have studied polarimetric radar variables in three small areas (150 km) including different types of precipitation. In this study, we used observational data from COBRA (CRL Okinawa Bistatic Polarimetric Radar, C-band) which is operated on Okinawa Island (26.5N 128E), Japan (Nakagawa et al. 2003). We investigated the radar reflectivity factor (Zhh), differential reflectivity (ZDR), correlation coefficient (ρhv(0)), and the relationships between them to characterize each precipitation type rather than to reveal the detailed structure of precipitation. The horizontal variability and vertical distribution of these values in selected areas are provided as three-dimensional characteristics of the polarimetric radar variables in this study.