Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Active Algorithms For Preference Learning Problems with Multiple Populations

In this paper we model the problem of learning preferences of a population as an active learning problem. We propose an algorithm can adaptively choose pairs of items to show to users coming from a heterogeneous population, and use the obtained reward to decide which pair of items to show next. We provide computationally efficient algorithms with provable sample complexity guarantees for this problem in both the noiseless and noisy cases. In the process of establishing sample complexity guarantees for our algorithms, we establish new results using a Nystr{\"o}m-like method which can be of independent interest. We supplement our theoretical results with experimental comparisons.
Is There a Neurological Foundation for Institutions? Mirroring, Sympathy, and Institutional Design

Is there a neurological foundation for institutions? Recent neuroscience research has expanded our understanding of the cognitive foundations of economic decision-making at the individual level, but the implications of this research for institutions and institutional design have not yet been fully explored using the tools and concepts of new institutional economics. This paper explores these implications generally, focusing in part on the implications of mirror neuron systems research and the possible connection of the mirror system with the concepts of sympathy and mutual sympathy that Smith (1759) characterized as being at the foundation of evolved human institutions that enable civil society. Smith's connection between mutual sympathy and institutions also generates some hypotheses regarding the role of social distance in the form that institutions can take (an analysis that is similar in many ways to that of Hayek (1973) on laws and extended orders), and why those institutions change, for example, in the move from personal to impersonal exchange. The connection of mirror neurons with these concepts is consistent with their hypotheses, as well as the experimental research on the effects of social distance and social cues in dictator games.
‘ Internal Marketisation ’ : Between Redefinition and Erosion of ‘ Social Ties that Bind ’ at Company Level

The Warwick Papers in Industrial Relations series publishes the work of members of the Industrial Relations Research Unit (IRRU) and people associated with it. Papers may be of topical interest or require presentation outside of the normal conventions of a journal article. A formal editorial process ensures that standards of quality and objectivity are maintained. and this paper developed from his research seminar presentation to the Industrial Relations Research Unit in November 2008. It provides a broad overview of organisational changes developing to some extent across all developed economies, driven particularly by quests for closer controls within firms over cost and performance. Increased use of external suppliers of materials and services, outsourcing, is very well developed. This paper focuses on the ramifications of internal market relations, the creation of autonomous businesses contracting with each other within the firm, and their implications for employment relations and the 'psychological contract. ' Abstract Since the 1980s, companies have tried to improve their responsiveness to environmental dynamics that are above all characterised by enhanced international economic competition, and the liberalisation of markets and public services. The management approach of 'internal marketisation' is regarded as a means to enable firms to cope with increased environmental uncertainty. Among other aspects, it encompasses the introduction of cost or profit centres, benchmarking systems, the establishment of internal 'customer-supplier-relationships', forms of indirect control, and strategies to capitalise on human subjectivity in respect to economic goals. However, this management approach is manifested quite differently in practise, above all due to specific institutional contexts companies are embedded in. This paper deals with a still under-researched issue: it analyses the unintended effects of internal marketisation with respect to social integration at company or establishment level by the example of an in-depth case study referring to the introduction of internal marketisation in a larger German public transport company. Problematic unintended effects are highlighted with respect to three areas:  The emergence of cooperation barriers between in-company business units,  the disturbance of implicit employment contracts,  changes of collegiality in the workplace. Research results are ambivalent: on the one hand a tendency towards a redefinition of implicit or psychological contracts can be noticed. This tendency reflects the importance of German workplace institutions of Industrial Relations, i.e. works councils. It also can be attributed to a rebalance of 'give and take' between management and employees. On the other hand, internal fragmentation emerged among workmates calling …
A Study of Error-Correcting Codes for Quantum Adiabatic Computation CS 252 Course Project { Spring 2007

Adiabatic computation has been proposed as an architecture for quantum computation. In this project, we simulate an adiabatic computation de- signed to solve the MAX-2SAT problem, and study its behavior in the presence of noise. For this system, we implement a recently proposed error- correcting code (7) that is tolerant against 1-local errors. We show that the system can tolerate higher error rates using error-correction. trary to circuit model, the Hamiltonian of the sys- tem changes very slowly. One begins with a Hamil- tonian whose ground state is easy to construct, and gradually varies the Hamiltonian into one whose ground state encodes the solution to a computa- tional problem. It has been shown that the circuit model of quantum computers can be simulated by adiabatic computing (6). In this project we look at adiabatic computing in the presence of errors. We simulate a quantum adi- abatic algorithm designed to solve the NP-complete problem MAX-2SAT. We consider the in∞uence of quantum errors in the correctness probability of the algorithm. Recently, error-correcting codes speciflc for adiabatic quantum computation have been pro- posed. We implement these error-correcting codes for our particular instance of problem. We report the rate of error that these codes can tolerate.
Interspecific Hybridization Increased in Congeneric Flatfishes after the Prestige Oil Spill

Marine species with relatively low migratory capacity are threatened by habitat alterations derived from human activities. In November 2002 the tanker Prestige sank off the Spanish northwest coast releasing 70,000 tons of fuel and damaging biota in the area. Despite efforts to clean the damaged areas, fuel remnants have affected marine species over the last nine years. This study is focused on two flatfish, Lepidorhombus boscii (four-spotted megrim) and L. whiffiagonis (megrim), whose spawning areas are located at the edge of the continental platform. We have analyzed megrim samples from North Spanish and French waters obtained before and after the oil spill. Genotypes at the nuclear marker 5S rDNA indicate a significant increase in interspecific hybridization after the Prestige accident, likely due to forced spawning overlap. The mitochondrial D-Loop region was employed for determining the direction of hybrid crosses, which were most frequently L. boscii female x L. whiffiagonis male. Reduced ability of L. boscii females to select conspecific mates would explain such asymmetric hybridization. To our knowledge this is the first time that increased hybridization between fish species can be associated to an oil spill. These results illustrate the potential long-term effect of petrol wastes on wild fish species.
Does a Decrease in the Real Interest Rate Actually Stimulate Personal Consumption? - An Empirical Study -

1. As a remedy for Japan’s distressed economy, Professor Paul Krugman of MIT has suggested that a reduction in real interest rates caused by inflation expectations would stimulate personal consumption. Although that is controversy whether inflation causing policy is effective or feasible, we must still ask whether a decrease in real interest rates actually stimulated personal consumption in Japan. 2. Generally a decrease in real interest rates stimulates personal consumption, which is what Professor Krugman has pointed out. When the real interest rate goes down, in other words, the magnitude of the substitution effect, which stimulates consumption, outweighs that of the income effect, which reduces interest income. Scatter diagrams and estimation results of consumption functions show that negative relationships between the real interest rate and per capita consumption growth exist in the USA and UK, but there is no clear relationship in Japan. 3. We find no clear relationship between the real interest rate and personal consumption because the Japanese people like to save and they don’t want to consume by drawing on savings or by taking consumer loans even if real interest rates go down. In contrast, the use of consumer credit to buy durable goods is observed everywhere and every day in the USA and UK. 4. There is also the fact that Japanese households have over 60 percent of safety assets such as deposits in savings and the older the household is, the larger this ratio is. Although consumption is stimulated by a decrease in real interest rates, it seems that at the same time and at the same scale interest income is reduced by that decrease, so that the substitution effect and income effect cancel each other out. Yet, in the USA and UK, the shares of safety assets are about 15 percent and 20 percent, respectively at the end of 1998, so the income effect in each country seems to be smaller than that of Japan. 5. In conclusion, Professor Krugman’s proposition that stimulating consumption by making the real interest rate decline makes sense in the USA and UK. Statistical evidence, however, shows that is not the case in Japan, because of the reluctance to use consumer credit in general and the likelihood that Japanese households will accumulate safety assets under any circumstances.
A New Method of Cluster-Based Topic Language Model for Genomic IR

Accurately estimating language model is important to improve the performance of information retrieval. The key problems include solving synonymy and polysemy problem, and smoothing the seen term or not seen term in a document. In this paper, we propose a new method for topic language model. First, concept-based clustering is performed using improved fuzzy c-means. The clustering result is considered as the topics of document collections. The probability of a document generating the topics is estimated by the similarity between the document and each cluster. Then, the probability of the topics generating words is estimated using Expectation Maximization algorithm. At last, we integrate the above algorithms into aspect model to form our topic language model. This new language model accurately describes the distribution probability of the words in different topics and the probability of a document generating a topic. Moreover, it can solve synonymy and polysemy problems. The new method is evaluated on TREC 2004/05 Genomics Track collections. Experiments show that the retrieval performance is greatly improved by the new method compared with the simple language model.
Distributed , Heterogeneous Scheduling Techniques Motivated by Production Geophysical Applications

When developing applications on distributed, heterogeneous platforms in high-performance computing (HPC) we identify two common options software engineers choose between when designing the parallelism and resource management of their application. On the one hand, an application can spawn one process per core and statically assign accelerators evenly across those processes. Using separate processes enables isolation from soft errors in other processes, but also makes coordination and resource management between different processes more difficult. This may reduce the efficiency or system utilization of the application. On the other hand, creating a single process per socket with one thread per core improves coordination, decreases overhead, and makes it possible to dynamically schedule work across multiple accelerators and cores. However, it reduces isolation and may lead to underutilized resources if the granularity of tasks is too fine-grained to use all available hardware. That is not to say these are the only two choices. Indeed, a full spectrum of options lies between these two extremes. In this paper, we explore the application of various scheduling techniques that lie along this spectrum on distributed, heterogeneous systems. We introduce a novel intra-process load-balancing technique for accelerators named donation, which follows a push model. We also describe a greedy hostdevice task scheduler. We focus our investigation on a twostage production hydrocarbon exploration application with different scheduling requirements in each stage. Our exploration covers different granularity levels and characteristics of the target application, identifies the benefit of techniques described here, and measures the overall performance improvement. This work results in a 2.69x speedup for the first stage of the target application and a 9.31x speedup for the second stage, relative to an equivalent homogeneous, production implementation. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright 20XX ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX . $15.00.
Time Domain Channel Estimation Based on Power Roll-Off Strategy and Kalman Algorithm for MIMO-OFDM in WLAN

In this paper, a time-domain (TD) channel estimation scheme, based on power roll-roff strategy and Kalman algorithm, is proposed for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless local area networks (WLANs). The estimator is then extended to perform decision-directed (DD) channel estimation during data transmission. A power roll-roff strategy exploiting the clustering feature of WLAN MIMO channel is used to get the number of significant taps, which largely improves the performance of common time TD kalman algorithm. The channel is assumed to be constant during one OFDM symbol but evolves in time according to the first-order Markov process. The performance for adopted tap length is investigated. Simulation results show that the proposed estimation scheme has good performance measured in terms of the mean squares error (MSE) and the bit error rate (BER)
A systematic spatiotemporal test of the critical point hypothesis for large earthquakes

The critical point hypothesis for large earthquakes predicts two different precursory phenomena in space and time, an accelerating moment release and the growth of the spatial correlation length. The objective of this work is to investigate both methods with respect to their predictive power. A systematic statistical test based on appropriate random earthquake catalogs allows to quantify the correlations of a precursory pattern with the subsequent mainshock activity. The analysis of target earthquakes in California since 1960 with magnitudes M ≥ Mcut reveals that these correlations increase systematically with growing Mcut, and correlations at greater than 95% confidence are observed for Mcut ≥ 6.5 in the case of the spatial correlation length. In particular, the seismicity patterns are found to be significantly correlated with each of the largest earthquakes (M ≥ 7.0), individually. The acceleration of the moment release has a similar trend, but is less significant.
The Evaluation of Chinese LBS Quality Based on An Improved SERVQUAL

With the rapid penetration of mobile Internet, the use of LBS has gradually become a mainstream in China E- Business. Considering all factors affecting the quality of LBS, an improved SERVQUAL model and a correspondent LBS quality evaluation index system was set up. After analyzing some Chinese LBS service platforms (WeChat, Sina Weibo, Diangping etc.), we have found that the two traditional dimension, tangibility and assurance, have no significant effects. Except for the other three traditional dimensions, the Personal privacy protection, accurate Positioning and Information Security affected user's evaluation much. That denotes Security and Reliability are other important dimensions to improve the quality of LBS.
A Comparative Study on the Effects of Sex Education between Computer Assisted Instruction and Lecture: Focused on Middle School Female Students

Objectives: The propose of this study was to compare the effects of sex education methods between CAI and Lecture on to improve sex related knowledge and attitudes of middle school female students. Methods: The subjects were selected from one of the Kyoungbuk province's girls middle school. Out of 9 classes of first grade, 2 classes were selected as experimental group and 2 classes were selected as control group. This research was conducted from September 1st to October 1st, 2004. 8 lessons of CAI sex education program was given to experimental group and 8 lessons of sex education lectures was given to control group. To measure the level of sex related knowledge and attitudes of the subjects, the researcher used the modified Kye's, Sung's and Jung's sex related knowledge and attitudes scale. SPSS/Win 10.0 program was used to analyse the data along with Frequency, Percentage, -test, t-test, and paired t-test. Results: 1. Sex related knowledge score in the experimental group educated by CAI program will be different from the control group using lecture education(t=3.49, p=0.001). 2. Sex related attitudes score in the experimental group educated by CAI will be different from the control group using lecture education(t=2.94, p=0.004). Conclusions: From the above results, CAI sex education program showed as more effective than lecture method to improve sex related knowledge and attitudes.
Glycated Hemoglobin (HbA1c): Clinical Applications of a Mathematical Concept

Background and purpose: Glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) reflects the cumulative glucose exposure of erythrocytes over a preceding time frame proportional to erythrocyte survival. HbA1c is thus an areal function of the glucose-time curve, an educationally useful concept to aid teaching and clinical judgment. Methods: An ordinary differential equation is formulated as a parsimonious model of HbA1c. The integrated form yields HbA1c as an area-under-the-curve (AUC) of a glucose-time profile. The rate constant of the HbA1c model is then derived using the validated regression equation in the ADAG study that links mean blood glucose and HbA1c with a very high degree of goodness-of-fit. Results: This model has didactic utility to enable patients, biomedical students and clinicians to appreciate how HbA1c may be conceptually inferred from discrete blood glucose values using continuous glucose monitoring system (CGMS) or self-monitored blood glucose (SMBG) glucometer readings as shown in the examples. It can be appreciated how hypoglycemia can occur with rapid HbA1c decline despite poor glycemic control. Conclusions: Being independent of laboratory assay pitfalls, computed ‘virtual’ HbA1c serves as an invaluable internal consistency cross-check against laboratory-measured HbA1c discordant with SMBG readings suggestive of inaccurate/fraudulent glucometer records or hematologic disorders including thalassemia and hemoglobinopathy. This model could be implemented within portable glucometers, CGMS devices and even smartphone apps for deriving tentative ‘virtual’ HbA1c from serial glucose readings as an adjunct to measured HbA1c. Such predicted ‘virtual’ HbA1c readily accessible via glucometers may serve as feedback to modify behavior and empower diabetic patients to achieve better glycemic control.
MODEL PEMBELAJARAN PROBLEM BASED LEARNING DALAM IMPLEMENTASI KURIKULUM 2013 DI SMK

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk merumuskan model teoritis pembelajaran Problem Based Learning dalam implementasi Kurikulum 2013 di SMK.Penelitian dilakukan terhadap guru-guru di SMK bidang keahlian Teknik Pemesinan, Teknik Otomotif, dan Boga Busana SMK di DIY yang terdiri dari 100 orang.Untuk mengungkap data implementasi pembelajaran dalam penerapan Kurikulum 2013 digunakan angket, dan untuk merumuskan model digunakan validasi ahli.Data dianalisis secara deskriptif. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa kesiapan guru dalam implementasi Kurikulum 2013 dan implementasi pembelajaran dalam penerapan Kurikulum 2013 termasuk kategori sedang hingga tinggi. Telah dihasilkan model teoritis implementasi Problem Based Learning dalam penerapan Kurikulum 2013 dengan cara mengintegrasikan pendekatan saintifik dan model pembelajaran PBL. Model pmbelajaran PBL mampu menyempurnakan implementasi pendekatan saintifik terutama dalam langkah terakhir yaitu menganalisis dan mengevaluasi proses pemecahan masalah.
Adaptive TAKAGI-SUGENO fuzzy model using weighted fuzzy expected value in wireless sensor network

Limited energy resources of sensor nodes are the main constraint in wireless sensor networks, many researches applied multi input single output fuzzy models for cluster heads election. These models are less interpretable and built from expert's knowledge. The adaptive TS fuzzy model sensor node (ATSFMSN) protocol aims to adapt MIMO TAKAGI-SUGENO model for cluster heads and relay nodes election. Adaptive TAKAGI-SUGENO model is done by fuzzy cluster algorithms based on fuzzy expected value. In addition to, fuzzy rule base is reduced by similarity measure and fuzzy cluster algorithm. Similarity measure requires two parameters to estimate overlap degree. The simulation results show the ATSFMSN protocol is more energy efficient routing protocol against LEACH, CHEF, and FCM routing protocol.
The PSIPRED protein structure prediction server

SUMMARY The PSIPRED protein structure prediction server allows users to submit a protein sequence, perform a prediction of their choice and receive the results of the prediction both textually via e-mail and graphically via the web. The user may select one of three prediction methods to apply to their sequence: PSIPRED, a highly accurate secondary structure prediction method; MEMSAT 2, a new version of a widely used transmembrane topology prediction method; or GenTHREADER, a sequence profile based fold recognition method. AVAILABILITY Freely available to non-commercial users at http://globin.bio. warwick.ac. uk/psipred/
Active Families in the Great Outdoors: a program to promote family outdoor physical activity

ABSTRACT This study evaluated a 4-week program to increase the time families spent engaging in outdoor activity. Parents were provided strategies to increase family outdoor activity and locations to be active. Sixteen families completed the program. Duration and number of family outdoor activity bouts per week, type of activities, locations, and family member attendance were measured using logs. Pre/post surveys were conducted to determine the usefulness of providing educational resources and maps. Compared to baseline (216.1±127.3 min/week), family outdoor activity for weeks 1 (316.1±180.2 min/week), 2 (351.1±209.1 min/week), and 4 (317.5±186.8 min/week) were significantly greater at follow-up. At follow-up, parents reported increased regular exercise and encouragement for their child to be active. Children reported adults engaged in physical activity with them and increased transportation to places to be active. This novel program increased family outdoor activity levels and contributes to limited research on strategies to increase outdoor activity in youth.