Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Choosing a High School in Open Enrollment Areas: Voices of Israeli Parents and Children

parents are granted the right to choose their child’s school, they will act rationally, in a goal-oriented fashion, to maximize their educational utility by finding the “best” school for their children. The current qualitative study aims to examine these basic assumptions by exploring the elements that comprise the process of school choice, thereby unearthing the reasons for choosing or rejecting a school. Based on data gathered from eight families in Tel Aviv, it seems that a major factor in choosing a school among these Israeli families was the child’s classmates in the elementary school, and their decision was largely influenced by inaccurate, informal sources of information. Theoretical implications for parental choice reform are suggested. School choice has been introduced in many Western countries over the past two decades (Carlson, 1996; Cookson, 1994; Glegg, 2002; Haymann, Golan, & Shapira, 1997; Levin, 2001; Teelken, 1999). Advocates of choice in education argue that the exigencies of competition will make public school systems more efficient, more productive, and more responsive to the demands of students, parents, and communities (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Peterson & Hassel, 1998). Greater use of free market institutions, it is held, will more effectively provide the range and quality of education demanded by parents and students (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Tooley, 1992). For this to occur, however, parents are expected to engage in a rational decision-making process of school choice. From the standpoint of parental choice reform, it is assumed that when families are granted the right to choose their child’s school, they will subsequently act rationally, in a goaloriented fashion, to maximize their educational utility by finding the “best” school for their children (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Cookson, 1994). Furthermore, it is thought that parents, as rational choosers, will make informed choices in selecting schools for their children, because these choices will be based on the assessment of their children’s interests and educational needs and on their evaluation of the capacity of schools to engage those interests and meet those needs (Gorard, 1997; Carlson, 1996). In that sense, parents choosing their child’s school need a good flow of accurate information about
Experiences with Location Sensing Systems

Over the last decade, a great deal of research has been done in location-aware computing. Making a user’s location available to them, their computing devices, and optionally to other people creates many interesting research opportunities in areas such as mobile computing, ubiquitous computing, user interface design, and database design. Many projects using location-aware computing begin by designing a location sensing system, then create projects and experiments based around that system. We decided to provide the location sensing system as infrastructure, so our various research groups could spend their time thinking about the “next step”—that is, what you can do with location information, rather than how to collect and process it. To provide this infrastructure, we began work on a new project with the following goals:
Consumer Impact of Animal Welfare Regulation in the California Poultry Industry

This study examines the consumer welfare impact of animal welfare legislation mandating cage-free egg production in California. We estimate California egg consumersâ€™ willingness to pay (WTP) for cage-free eggs using household-level purchase data and compare the implied premium to higher production costs when calculating the potential change in consumer surplus. Our findings suggest that larger households and/or households with limited means are most likely to be affected. Furthermore, the implied welfare loss for consumers is approximately $106 million. Although consumers value cage-free eggs, higher production costs result in a net welfare loss to consumers. One implication of this finding is that a clear labeling practice may be a more efficient way to motivate animal welfare and non-cage systems.
Reviewing How Preservice Teachers Are Prepared to Teach Reading Processes: What the Literature Suggests and Overlooks

Today’s world requires attention to all aspects of initial literacy teacher preparation, including how and what preservice teachers learn about the component processes of reading. To address this imperative, a review was conducted of articles published from 2000 to 2018 identified through the CITE-ITEL database (https://cite.edb.utexas.edu) that reported findings related to reading processes and initial teacher preparation. After an inductive analytic process, the authors organize findings into five focus areas: (a) definitions and delimitations of reading processes, (b) studies of preservice teachers’ beliefs about teaching reading processes, (c) research identifying preservice teachers’ knowledge gaps and misconceptions, (d) intervention studies aimed at increasing preservice teachers’ knowledge, and (e) studies detailing the application of knowledge about reading processes into contexts of pedagogical practice. The discussion considers the current gaps in how reading processes and literacy are conceptualized and possible areas of inquiry related to preservice teacher education and reading processes.
La responsabilidad social dentro del sector público

The compromising towards the Social Responsibility (SR) by the Public Administrations relates with the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and is the aim of this article. The good «global» government of the Public Administration includes not only discipline, transparency, independence, accountability and sense of duty and impartiality, but also participation and dialogue with stakeholders, ethical compromising and respect of the diversity and equality of opportunities. It implies changes in the processes of public decision making, with a paper of more active stakeholders. This article resumes the main actions integrating the SR and the principles of the sustainability, developed by the systems of public management.
Autobiographical Memory, Past and Future Events, and Self-images in Younger and Older Adults

There are differences in the ways in which younger and older adults remember the past and imagine the future. However, little research has examined this finding in relation to the self. Older and younger adults described current and future self-images and generated associated memories and future events. Age differences in the generation of past and future events were paralleled in self-images: Older adults' future self-images were closer to the present, whereas their current self-images were formed longer ago. Both groups' memories and future events clustered temporally around times of self-image formation. We propose that the self governs event construction in both younger and older adults, and discuss the role of self-related processing in imagining the future and remembering the past.
Supergravity Supertubes

: We ﬁnd the supergravity solution sourced by a supertube: a (1/4)-super-symmetric D0-charged IIA superstring that has been blown up to a cylindrical D2-brane by angular momentum. The supergravity solution captures all essential features of the supertube, including the D2-dipole moment and an upper bound on the angular momentum: violation of this bound implies the existence of closed timelike curves, with a consequent ghost-induced instability of supertube probes.
Eco-Evolutionary Feedback in Host--Pathogen Spatial Dynamics

Spatial extent is a complicating factor in mathematical biology. The possibility that an action at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B creates the opportunity for spatial nonuniformity. This nonuniformity must change our understanding of evolutionary dynamics, as the same organism in different places can have different expected evolutionary outcomes. Since organism origins and fates are both determined locally, we must consider heterogeneity explicitly to determine its effects. We use simulations of spatially extended host--pathogen and predator--prey ecosystems to reveal the limitations of standard mathematical treatments of spatial heterogeneity. Our model ecosystem generates heterogeneity dynamically; an adaptive network of hosts on which pathogens are transmitted arises as an emergent phenomenon. The structure and dynamics of this network differ in significant ways from those of related models studied in the adaptive-network field. We use a new technique, organism swapping, to test the efficacy of both simple approximations and more elaborate moment-closure methods, and a new measure to reveal the timescale dependence of invasive-strain behavior. Our results demonstrate the failure not only of the most straightforward ("mean field") approximation, which smooths over heterogeneity entirely, but also of the standard correction ("pair approximation") to the mean field treatment. In spatial contexts, invasive pathogen varieties can prosper initially but perish in the medium term, implying that the concepts of reproductive fitness and the Evolutionary Stable Strategy have to be modified for such systems.
An efficient retrieval strategy for wavelet-based quantized images

Recent research efforts have been devoted to the improvement of image retrieval systems when datasets are represented in a compressed form. In this context, new studies have shown that compression has a negative impact on the performances of the traditional retrieval systems. In this work, we are mainly interested in designing an efficient retrieval approach well adapted to wavelet-based compressed images. More precisely, we first propose to apply a compression scheme based on the Moment Preserving Quantization (MPQ). Then, the feature vectors will be defined in an appropriate way by focusing on the quantized subbands where some given statistical moments have been preserved. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the most recent one which involves the conventional uniform quantizer and constrains the query and the model images to have similar qualities during the retrieval step.
Ubiquitous Interactive Graphics

This paper presents a device that creates ubiquitous interactive graphics in a real world environment without the need for pre-wiring surfaces or requiring users to carry or wear any special devices. Called the Everywhere Displays projector, or ED-projector, this device employs steerability as the key principle to achieve the promise of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality. The ED-projector uses an LCD projector with a steerable mirror to project graphics onto any pre-calibrated surface, while warping the projected image to correct for oblique distortion. Three different methods to determine this warping function are given. To sense user interaction with the projected image, the ED-projector employs a pan/tilt/zoom camera and a motion-based computer vision system to track the user’s hand and touch-like gestures. We propose a system software structure that ties together steering, display, and sensing. Three implemented applications demonstrate the notion of ubiquitously “painting” the real world with interactive graphics, in the context of a futuristic office, an augmented assembly task, and a ubiquitous computer game. The observation of hundreds of users performing the assembly task suggests that the traditional desktop paradigm is inadequate for ubiquitous interaction and that new conceptual widgets and interaction paradigms must be developed.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation Measures for Machine Translation and / or Summarization Proceedings of the ACL-05 Workshop Organizing Committee

This paper demonstrates the usefulness of summaries in an extrinsic task of relevance judgment based on a new method for measuring agreement, Relevance-Prediction , which compares subjects’ judgments on summaries with their own judgments on full text documents. We demonstrate that, because this measure is more reliable than previous gold-standard measures, we are able to make stronger statistical statements about the benefits of summarization. We found positive correlations between ROUGE scores and two different summary types, where only weak or negative correlations were found using other agreement measures. However, we show that ROUGE may be sensitive to the choice of summarization style. We discuss the importance of these results and the implications for future summarization evaluations.
Analysis and Modelling of Collaborative Learning Interactions

The analysis of the interactions produced in computer mediated collaborative learning systems can take advantage of their capability of recording the events produced during the process. However, this evaluation has to consider many environmental factors, as well as the pedagogical goals of the system, impossible to detect using only computational methods. The assistance of a conceptual framework, in which interactions are de ned in the context of an accurate description of the learning environment, can be a great help for achieving these objectives. This paper presents the DELFOS conceptual framework and the experience acquired with PENCACOLAS, a particular system for teaching/learning collaborative writing techniques.
A Middle-Range Interrogation of Ethnographic Case Studies in the Exploration of E-science

This article addresses the need to problematize “cases” in science and technology studies (STS) work, as a middle-range theory issue. The focus is not on any one case study per se, but on why case studies exist and endure in STS. Case studies are part of a specific problematization in the field. We therefore explore relations between motivation for the use of cases (especially ethnographic ones), their constitution, and ways they can be invoked to make particular kinds of arguments in STS. We set out to examine the case as an object that links together research practices, intellectual debates, and programmatic concerns in our own work. Based on our experiences and on this reflection on the links between cases and questions in STS, we propose a number of casemaking strategies that shift and enrich the deployment of ethnographic cases as an epistemic tool in STS.
Carbon nanotube correlation: Promising opportunity for CNFET circuit yield enhancement

Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) are grown using chemical synthesis, and the exact positioning and chirality of CNTs are very difficult to control. As a result, “small-width” Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistors (CNFETs) can have a high probability of containing no semiconducting CNTs, resulting in CNFET failures. Upsizing these vulnerable small-width CNFETs is an expensive design choice since it can result in substantial area/power penalties. This paper introduces a processing/design co-optimization approach to reduce probability of CNFET failures at the chip-level. Large degree of spatial correlation observed in directional CNT growth presents a unique opportunity for such optimization. Maximum benefits from such correlation can be realized by enforcing the active regions of CNFETs to be aligned with each other. This approach relaxes the device-level failure probability requirement by 350X at the 45nm technology node, leading to significantly reduced costs associated with upsizing the small-width CNFETs.
Density Equalizing Distortion of Large Geographic Point Sets

Visualizing large geo-demographical datasets using pixel-based techniques involves mapping the geospatial dimensions of a data point to screen coordinates and appropriately encoding its statistical value by color. The analysis of such data presents a great challenge. General tasks involve clustering, categorization, and searching for patterns of interest for sociological or economic research. Available visual encodings and screen space limitations lead to over-plotting and hiding of patterns and clusters in densely populated areas, while sparsely populated areas waste space and draw the attention away from the areas of interest. In this paper, two new approaches (RadialScale and AngularScale) are introduced to create density-equalized maps, while preserving recognizable features and neighborhoods in the visualization. These approaches build the core of a multi-scaling technique based on local features of the data described as local minima and maxima of point density. Scaling is conducted several times around these features, which leads to more homogeneous distortions. Results are illustrated using several real-world datasets. Our evaluation shows that the proposed techniques outperform traditional techniques as regard the homogeneity of the resulting data distributions and therefore build a more appropriate basis for analytic purposes.
Asymptotic Normality of Posterior Distributionsin High Dimensional Linear

We study consistency and asymptotic normality of posterior distributions of the regression coeecient in a linear model when the dimension of the parameter grows with the sample size. Under certain growth restrictions on the dimension (depending on the design matrix), we show that the posterior distributions concentrate in neighbourhoods of the true parameter and can be approximated by an appropriate normal distribution.
PID Controller for Idle Speed Control

The performance comparison of PID controllers for idle speed control internal combustion engine (ICE) is presented in this paper. There are three methods of PID tuning applied: heuristic tuning, self-tuning by pole placement, and also iterative learning algorithm (ILA). Prior to that, data collection is gained from four cylinder sparkignition engine modeling and used as the input-output data in the system identification part. The obtained transfer function from RLS technique is used in the development of the control system for the idle speed control by PID controllers. The main objective of the idle speed control is to maintain the idling speed at 650rpm and to reject as quickly as possible the extra load exerted on the engine system during idling mode. Comparing the three methods, it shows that PID tuning by ILA produced better results than heuristic tuning and pole placement.
Balun-BPF using magnetically coupled interdigital-loop resonators

In this paper, we proposed the Balun-BPF(band pass filter) using the magnetically coupled resonators. The proposed Balun-BPF is a deformation of the transformer which operates like the ideal Balun in low frequency. The conventional coupled-resonator filter design theory was used for the design of a Balun-BPF. Moreover, the Interdigital-loop resonator was used to miniaturize the Balun-BPF. This Balun-BPF operated in a 2.4∼2.5 GHz band, generally used in the wireless communication. Experimental measurements are also presented to validate the theory and EM simulations.
A case study of CLIL practices in the EFL classroom

Introduction With the expansion of globalisation and increased contact between countries, being able to use English is essential. In Japan, all elementary schools have been required to introduce compulsory English lessons for the fifth and sixth graders since 2011. We would probably be able to see the results around 2018 and it is still difficult, in some sense, to imagine how much improvement would be made by learning English from the age of 11 years. In this paper, the current university students that I focus on are those who started their English lessons from the first year of junior high school and studied for six years before entering the university. However, it still seems to be difficult for many of them to think, express, research and present their ideas in their own words in English. Even though more communicative methods are adopted nowadays, English education in most of the schools is still primarily grammar-translation based. Japanese students can be quite inexperienced as far as English communication ability is concerned and that is one of the reasons why I am interested in CLIL methodology. CLIL stands for “Content and Language Integrated Learning” which involves teaching a subject through the medium of a second or foreign language (Coyle, Hood & Marsh, 2010). Learners acquire knowledge about the content of the subject and language at the same time. It is a methodology that can enhance an interest in learning English and enables students to improve their fluency by focusing more on the content rather than English itself. It is not a new or innovative way to teach English as a foreign language but it has been used in most European countries since the 1990s. Here are some benefits regarding CLIL methodology as illustrated on the European Commission's website (CLIL's Benefits, 2012): 1 It develops intercultural communication skills. 2 It improves language competence and oral communication skills. 3 It develops multilingual interests and attitudes. 4 It provides opportunities to study content through different perspectives. A case study of CLIL practices in the EFL classroom
TASI Lectures on Solitons Lecture 2: Monopoles

In this second lecture we describe the physics of ’t Hooft-Polyakov magnetic monopoles when embedded in supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theories. We cover properties of the solutions and the moduli spaces of monopoles and review how Nahm’s equations arise in their natural D-brane setting. We end with several applications, including S-duality, the dynamics of three-dimensional gauge theories and field theoretic D-branes.
Online autoregressive prediction in time series with delayed disclosure

We propose a supervised machine learning method to automate the classification of events within time series in a monitoring context. It is based on a generative stochastic model of the time series which combines a probabilistic autoregressive classifier to determine the class label of each event, and a hidden Markov model to capture the production of the events. Events can be described by arbitrary combinations of discrete and continuous features. While at training time (offline), it is assumed that the class labels of all the events are known, at inference time (online), when a prediction is to be made for an event, it is not assumed that the class labels of the preceding events are known. This makes prediction more complex due to the autoregressive nature of the model. Instead, we make and exploit a “delayed disclosure” assumption, namely that the class labels of all the events are eventually revealed, but the occurrence of an event and the revelation of its class are asynchronous. We report experimental results obtained by application of this approach to the monitoring of a fleet of distributed devices.