Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling the Visual Word Form Area Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

The visual word form area (VWFA) is a region of the cortex, located in the left fusiform gyrus, that appears to be a waystation in the reading pathway. The discovery of the VWFA occurred in the late twentieth century with the advancement in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Since then, there has been an increased number of neuroimaging studies to understand the VWFA further for its properties. Because it is still relatively recent, there are disagreements in some properties of the VWFA. One such disagreement is regarding whether or not the VWFA is highly more selective for whole real words than pseudowords. A recent study provided evidences that the neurons in the VWFA are tuned to be more selective to real words. This contradicts past studies which hypothesize that the VWFA is tuned to sublexical structure of visual words, and therefore has no preference for real words over pseudowords. The goal of this project is to develop a realistic model of the VWFA by training a deep convolutional neural network to map printed words to their labels. We then analyzed this network to see if we could observe the same selectivity the recent study found for whole real words. On the test set, the network that we trained from scratch is able to achieve an accuracy of 98.5%. Furthermore, we notice the same trends in our network, as in the results of the study, that show how the VWFA is highly selective for whole real words
A multi-model power estimation engine for accuracy optimization

RTL power macromodeling is a mature research topic with a variety of equation and table-based approaches. Despite its maturity, macromodeling is not yet widely accepted as an industrial de facto standard for power estimation at the RT level. Each approach has many variants depending upon the parameters chosen to capture power variation. Every macromodeling technique has some intrinsic limitation affecting either its performance or its accuracy. Therefore, alternative macromodeling methods can be envisaged as part of a power modeling toolkit from which the most suitable method for a given component should be automatically selected. This paper describes a new multi-model power estimation engine that selects the macromodeling technique leading to the least estimation error for a given system component depending on the properties of its input-vector stream. A proper selection function is built after component characterization and used during estimation. Experimental results show that our multi-model engine improves the robustness of power analysis with negligible usage overhead. Accuracy becomes 3 times better on average, as compared to conventional single-model estimators, while the overall maximum estimation error is divided by 8.
Optimal Power Control in Ultra-Dense Small Cell Networks: A Game-Theoretic Approach

In this paper, we study the power control problem for interference management in the ultra-dense small cell networks, which is formulated to maximize the sum-rate of all the small cells while keeping tolerable interference to the macrocell users. We investigate the problem by proposing a novel game with dynamic pricing. Theoretically, we prove that the Nash equilibrium (NE) of the formulated game coincides with the stationary point of the original sum-rate maximization problem, which could be locally or globally optimal. Furthermore, we propose a distributed iterative power control algorithm to converge to the NE of the game with guaranteed convergence. To reduce the information exchange and computational complexity, we propose an approximation model for the original optimization problem by constructing the interfering domains, and accordingly design a local information-based iterative algorithm for updating each small cell’s power strategy. Theoretic analysis shows that the local information-based power control algorithm can converge to the NE of the game, which corresponds to the stationary point of the original sum-rate maximization problem. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach yields a significant transmission rate gain, compared with the existing benchmark algorithms.
Lateral septal area α1‐ and α2‐adrenoceptors differently modulate baroreflex activity in unanaesthetized rats

The lateral septal area (LSA) is a limbic structure involved in autonomic, neuroendocrine and behavioural responses. An inhibitory influence of the LSA on baroreflex activity has been reported; however, the local neurotransmitter involved in this modulation is still unclear. In the present study, we verified the involvement of local LSA adrenoceptors in modulating cardiac baroreflex activity in unanaesthetized rats. Bilateral microinjection of the selective α1‐adrenoceptor antagonist WB4101 (10 nmol in a volume of 100 nl) into the LSA decreased baroreflex bradycardia evoked by blood pressure increases, but had no effect on reflex tachycardia evoked by blood pressure decreases. Nevertheless, bilateral administration of the selective α2‐adrenoceptor antagonist RX821002 (10 nmol in 100 nl) increased baroreflex tachycardia without affecting reflex bradycardia. Treatment of the LSA with a cocktail containing WB4101 and RX821002 decreased baroreflex bradycardia and increased reflex tachycardia. The non‐selective β‐adrenoceptor antagonist propranolol (10 nmol in 100 nl) did not affect either reflex bradycardia or tachycardia. Microinjection of noradrenaline into the LSA increased reflex bradycardia and decreased the baroreflex tachycardic response, an opposite effect compared with those observed after double blockade of α1‐ and α2‐adrenoceptors, and this effect of noradrenaline was blocked by local LSA pretreatment with the cocktail containing WB4101 and RX821002. The present results provide advances in our understanding of the baroreflex neural circuitry. Taken together, data suggest that local LSA α1‐ and α2‐adrenoceptors modulate baroreflex control of heart rate differently. Data indicate that LSA α1‐adrenoceptors exert a facilitatory modulation on baroreflex bradycardia, whereas local α2‐adrenoceptors exert an inhibitory modulation on reflex tachycardia.
Personality Strength and Situational Influences on Behavior

Notwithstanding a recent flurry of organizational research on the construct of “situational strength,” research on the other side of the coin—“personality strength”—has rarely been conducted in organizational settings, has been scattered across multiple disciplines, has been called different things by different researchers, and has not yet been used to test theoretical propositions paralleling those in recent organizational research on situational strength. In the present review, drawing from several disparate research literatures (e.g., situational strength, personality states, traitedness, cross-situational consistency, scalability, appropriateness, self-monitoring, interpersonal dependency, hardiness, attitude strength, and self-concept clarity), we (a) define personality strength and contrast it with personality trait, personality strengths (plural), and layperson conceptualizations of the terms “strong personality” and “weak personality,” (b) briefly discuss the history of research related to personality strength, (c) identify a common prediction, emanating largely independently from several literatures, regarding the interactive effect of personality traits and personality strength on behavior, (d) articulate three novel predictions regarding the impact of personality strength on within-person situational and behavioral variability, (e) develop three broad categories of personality strength operationalizations (i.e., statistical, content-general, and content-independent) and discuss potential interrelationships among them, (f) suggest “best practices” for operationalization, thereby providing an agenda for future research, and, finally, (g) discuss the practical implications of this work for human resource management.
Medicalization of the Uncertainty? An Empirical Study of the Relationships between Unemployment or Job Insecurity, Professional Care Seeking, and the Consumption of Antidepressants

In addition to concerns about the treatment gap in mental health (MH) care, an increasing number of researchers are paying attention to the medicalization of daily life. Framed in a context characterized by a growth in the use of antidepressants and at the same time economic instability, the aim of this study is to unravel the relations between employment status/job insecurity, seeking professional care for MH problems, and antidepressant use. Data from the Eurobarometer 345 (2010) are used to perform gender-differentiated, multilevel logistic regression analyses. Our results show that, in accordance with the need hypothesis, part of the professional care use for emotional problems and part of the antidepressant use among the unemployed and those in insecure jobs are associated with their comparatively worse MH status. In addition, medicalization processes contribute to more frequent care and antidepressant use, irrespective of MH status, among the unemployed: increased antidepressant consumption among women in insecure jobs and more general practitioner consultations for emotional health problems among their male counterparts. In conclusion, evidence is found for both the need hypothesis as well as the medicalization hypothesis. In addition, we cannot conclude that women are more vulnerable to medicalization than men are.
Reading comprehension performance as a function of individual differences in working memory for texts of varying reading difficulty.

Reading Comprehension Performance as a Function of Individual Differences in Working Memory for Texts of Varying Reading Difficulty September, 1984 Douglas Jay Lynch, B.A., Colorado College M.S., University of Wisconsin M.S., Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Directed by: Professor James M. Royer The construct of working memory is a critical feature in a commonly cited theory of reading comprehension (cf. Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978) . The dissertation identified good and poor working memory fourth grade subjects with a probe recall test. The subjects read text of increasing reading difficulty level (easy, moderate and difficult) and responded to a reading comprehension task called the sentence verification technique (cf. Royer, 1984) after reading the text. The experiment investigated the reading comprehension performance of good and poor working memory readers and the relationship between text microstructure and reading comprehension performance. Reading comprehension performance was significantly higher for good working memory readers compared to poor working memory readers at each level of text difficulty. Reading comprehension performance declined with an increase in text difficulty level, with a marginally significant working memory group X reading difficulty level interaction. There were no significant differences in reading time per passage between good and poor working memory readers. The sentence verification technique provided reading comprehension
Handwritten digit recognition using statistical and rule-based decision fusion

In this paper, the cooperation of two feature families for handwritten digit recognition using SVM (support vector machine) classifiers is examined. We investigate the advantages and weaknesses of various decision fusion schemes using statistical and rule-based reasoning. The obtained results show that it is difficult to exceed the recognition rate of a single classifier applied straightforwardly on both feature families as one set by rule based reasoning applied on the individual classifier decisions. However, the rule-based cooperation schemes enable an easy and efficient implementation of various rejection criteria. On the other hand, the statistical cooperation schemes offer a better possibility for fine tuning of the recognition versus the reliability tradeoff, which leads to recognition systems with high reliability that also keep high recognition rates.
Ontology-based Information Sharing in Service-Oriented Database Systems

This paper presents a novel information sharing framework using Service-Oriented Database System (SODB) for service registry and repository that facilitates data integration. A SODB is a database architecture composed with reusable services to support searching, querying, deleting, and storing data. As SODB is organized in a service-oriented manner, SODB can be easily changed or maintained by reusing different services. Thus, it can be used to share information in the cloud. The Information Sharing System (ISS) component of the SODB employs domain ontology to share data sources. The domain ontology utilizes mathematical equivalence relations to map data sources into appropriate domain ontology. It also facilitates dynamic query composition across data sources. This paper also presents the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of the ISS component. Our implementation is based on a real application, the Arizona Healthcare Cost Containment System (AHCCCS). This application demonstrates that the ISS can facilitate complex information integration. Finally, this paper presents the performance of the ISS using WAPT (Web Application Testing) for Microsoft Windows XP, and the response time consistently fall in between 0.1 to 0.15 second for each request.
Using an advance organizer to facilitate change in students’ conceptualisation of the role of creativity in science

An advance organizer pertaining to the nature of science (NOS) aspect of the role creativity plays in science was incorporated into a problem-based laboratory activity of an undergraduate first-year chemistry curriculum. The advance organizer was presented in one of three versions to different sections of students: (1) definite explication of the NOS learning outcome, (2) indefinite explication, and (3) no explication. An NOS survey was administered to 235 students prior to implementation of the advance organizer and to 136 students after completion of the instructional activity involving the advance organizer. The results of this study indicate that the different versions of the advance organizer differ with respect to altering students’ conceptualisation of creativity: specifically, only the indefinite explication of the intended learning outcome led to a significant change in the percentage of students holding more informed views. This finding suggests that a relatively small change in instructional design can advance improvement in achieving NOS learning outcomes within a large-scale content-based science course.
The CONSORT statement instructions for reporting randomized clinical trials

O raciocinio clinico e a tomada de decisao pelo profissional de saude devem ter como base as evidencias cientificas relevantes e nao apenas a intuicao ou experiencias clinicas previas nao-sistematizadas. Estas evidencias sao adequadamente obtidas a partir de estudos clinicos controlados randomizados (ECRs), cujas informacoes sao frequentemente relatadas de forma incompleta, prejudicando a identificacao de possiveis erros metodologicos. Com intuito de aprimorar o relato de ECR, um grupo de cientistas e editores de periodicos medicos elaborou o enunciado CONSORT, constituido de uma lista de checagem com 22 itens e um fluxograma dos participantes. Atualmente, o CONSORT se encontra traduzido em diversas linguas e em versoes adaptadas para atender aos diferentes modelos de estudos. O presente trabalho pretendeu, portanto, facilitar a compreensao de tais instrucoes, assim como sua divulgacao na lingua portuguesa, ao abordar brevemente os principais aspectos contidos na versao revisada do enunciado CONSORT.
Direction estimation based on sound intensity vectors

The direction of a sound source in an enclosure can be estimated with a microphone array and some proper signal processing. Earlier, in applications and in research the use of time delay estimation methods, such as the cross correlation, has been popular. Recently, techniques for direction estimation that involve sound intensity vectors have been developed and used in applications, e.g. in teleconferencing. Unlike in time delay estimation, these methods have not been compared widely. In this article, five methods for direction estimation in the concept of sound intensity vectors are compared with real data from a concert hall. The results of the comparison indicate that the methods that are based on convolutive mixture models perform slightly better than some of the simple averaging methods. The convolutive mixture model based methods are also more robust against additive noise.
Who Pays for Dates? Following Versus Challenging Gender Norms

Chivalry dictates that on a “date,” the man pays, whereas egalitarian ideals suggest that gender should not determine who pays. We examined the extent to which people embrace or reject these competing notions. Unmarried heterosexual participants (N = 17,607) reported their behaviors and attitudes regarding who does and who should pay for dates on a survey posted on NBCNews.com. Although most men (74%) and women (83%) report that both members of the couple contribute to dating expenses after dating for 6 months, most men (84%) and women (58%) reported that men still pay more expenses. Many women (39%) wished men would reject their offers to pay and 44% of women were bothered when men expected women to help pay. Many women, however, were bothered when men won’t accept their money (40%). Nearly two thirds of men (64%) believed that women should contribute and nearly half of men (44%) said they would stop dating a woman who never pays. Nevertheless, the majority of men said they feel guilty when accepting women’s money (76%). These data illustrate how many people are resisting or conforming to traditional gender norms in one telling aspect of dating that historically was related to the male’s displaying benevolent sexism, dominance, and ability to fulfill breadwinner role during courtship.
The Importance of Race and Religion in Social Service Providers

type="main"> The objectives of this study are to investigate the traits that clients find important in professional social service providers, comparing confidence in client management skills (friendliness, experience, and knowledge) to desire for demographic characteristics (being of the same race and religion). To accomplish this task, we use multiple regression to analyze results of the Lehigh Valley Trust Survey of low-income recipients of social services. While most respondents find the professional traits important, there is significant variation in whether respondents consider demographic characteristics to be important. We find that having a provider of the same race is very important for African Americans and Hispanics, while having a provider with similar religious beliefs is extremely important for evangelical Protestants. Other predictive variables for homophilous preferences in race and religion are age, mobility, and education. Professional skills corresponding to organizational position are important to most people, but specific demographic groups prioritize racial, ethnic, and religious homophily. While we suggest some possible explanations (perceived or actual discrimination and cultural concordance), further research is needed to determine the causes.
Frequency of occurrence effects on pitch accent realisation

This paper presents the results of a corpus study which examines the impact of frequency of occurrence of accented words on the realisation of pitch accents. In particular, statistical analyses explore this influence on pitch accent range and alignment. The results indicate a significant effect of frequency of occurrence on the relative height of L*H and H*L pitch accents and an also significant but more subtle effect on the alignment of L*H accents. Index Terms: exemplar theory, pitch accents, frequency effects
Markov modeling of online inter-arrival times

One of the popular research topics on networked humanity is to understand how people interact and communicate. Scholars investigated the arising communication patterns, and in particular the series of events happening for a single user. The distribution of waiting times separating two consecutive events - also denoted by the inter-event distribution - is well known have a density fitting a power-law. A debate, however, persists on the nature of an underlying model that explains the observed distribution, and whether the model should incorporate an inter-event dependence. The purpose of the present research is to integrate the dependence of consecutive waiting times into the power-law model. One can observe that social media behavior is characterized by periods of intensive activities separated by longer periods of inactivity. We propose an intuitive explanation to understand the observed dependence of subsequent waiting times. This leads us to create a model to incorporate memory. Our contribution is twofold. The first idea consists of separating the short waiting times - out of scope for power-law distributions - from the long ones. The model is further enhanced by introducing a two-state Markovian process to incorporate memory. Both contributions show a significant improvement for modeling commenting events on Twitter and Reddit.
Java Implementation Verification Using Reverse Engineering

An approach to system verification is described in which design artefacts produced during forward engineering are automatically compared to corresponding artefacts produced during reverse engineering. The goal is to automatically determine if an implementation is consistent with the original design. In the system described, XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) representations of Unified Modelling Language (UML) class diagrams are recovered from compiled Java class files. These are automatically compared with the corresponding diagrams produced during forward engineering by software engineers using CASE tools. Examples are provided in which reversed engineered UML class diagrams differ from those produced during forward engineering but are still faithful to the original design intent. Such differences are often due to more abstract system representations being captured in forward engineered design artefacts, the inclusion of design attributes and annotations that are not retained in the final implementation, and issues associated with the use of weakly typed containers. In other cases, differences indicate a deviation from the intended design. It is this latter type of difference that this paper is particularly interested in identifying. We advocate that an automated comparison of forward and reverse engineering artefacts should be performed during formal code inspection preparation and used to guide human review of the identified differences.
The Influence and Implications of Chinese Culture in the Decision to Undertake Cross-Border Higher Education

Little is known about how a family in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) makes decisions on cross-border study. International marketers and managers in higher education turn to research based on Chinese student preferences. However, such research ignores cultural traditions steeped in Confucian ideals of family and the subsequent roles and influence of parents. Using surveys and interviews with Chinese students our findings indicate that despite exponential financial and social development in contemporary Chinese society, traditional Confucian values are still largely upheld by parents. The influence of these parents extends beyond initial decision making and impacts on the student’s social and academic well-being. To effectively market, manage and provide academic and welfare support for Chinese students studying across borders requires host universities to develop strategies that acknowledge and demonstrate respect for cultural traditions, parental perspectives and related ongoing influences.