Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Egalitarian Paxos

This paper describes the design and implementation of Egalitarian Paxos (EPaxos), a new distributed consensus algorithm based on Paxos. EPaxos achieves two goals: (1) availability without interruption as long as a simple majority of replicas are reachable—its availability is not interrupted when replicas crash or fail to respond; and (2) uniform load balancing across all replicas—no replicas experience higher load because they have special roles. Egalitarian Paxos is to our knowledge the first distributed consensus protocol to achieve both of these goals efficiently: requiring only a simple majority of replicas to be non-faulty, using a number of messages linear in the number of replicas to choose a command, and committing commands after just one communication round (one round trip) in the common case or after at most two rounds in any case. We prove Egalitarian Paxos’s properties theoretically and demonstrate its advantages empirically. Acknowledgements: This work was supported by Intel Science & Technology Center for Cloud Computing, Google, and the National Science Foundation under award CCF-0964474. We would like to thank the members and companies of the PDL Consortium (including Actifio, American Power Conversion, EMC Corporation, Emulex, Facebook, Fusion-io, Google, Hewlett-Packard Labs, Hitachi, Huawei Technologies Co., Intel Corporation, Microsoft Research, NEC Laboratories, NetApp, Inc., Oracle Corporation, Panasas, Riverbed, Samsung Information Systems America, Seagate Technology, STEC, Inc., Symantec Corporation, VMware, Inc., and Western Digital) for their interest, insights, feedback, and support.
Teacher-Reported Goal Structures: Assessing Factor Structure and Invariance

The purpose of this study was to extend the research on achievement goal theory by examining the measurement and understanding of goal structures using teacher-reported data. A large number of elementary, middle, and high school teachers completed an online survey that included items assessing their use of instructional practices associated with mastery and performance goal structures in the fall (n = 1,079) and spring (n = 867) of one school year. Findings supported the general 2-factor model that distinguishes mastery and performance goal structures. In addition, findings indicated differences in goal structures on the basis of academic level and the subject area for which teachers were responsible but not for experience as a teacher. Results also show that goal structures were fairly stable across the school year.
Adoption and Adult Outcomes in the Early 20th Century

Modern research has found strong links between family structure and children’s outcomes. One of the robust findings is that stepchildren and adopted children have worse adult outcomes compared to biological children. However, we know very little about how non-biological children fared historically. In this study, by linking adopted children across U.S. federal censuses in the first half of the 20th century, we create a new dataset that contains rich information on both their childhood households and adult outcomes. To control for household heterogeneity, we also follow (non-adopted) siblings of adopted children into their adulthood. This unique dataset enables us to compare the long-run outcomes of adopted children and biological children controlling for observable and unobservable household characteristics. Our preliminary analysis suggests that educational attainment, income, and marriage patterns of adopted children differed significantly from non-adopted children. Overall, our study brings new historical evidence to the research on family structure. JEL classifications: I2, J1, N3
Regulation and Evolution of Malonate and Propionate Catabolism in Proteobacteria

ABSTRACT Bacteria catabolize malonate via two pathways, encoded by the mdc and mat genes. In various bacteria, transcription of these genes is controlled by the GntR family transcription factors (TFs) MatR/MdcY and/or the LysR family transcription factor MdcR. Propionate is metabolized via the methylcitrate pathway, comprising enzymes encoded by the prp and acn genes. PrpR, the Fis family sigma 54-dependent transcription factor, is known to be a transcriptional activator of the prp genes. Here, we report a detailed comparative genomic analysis of malonate and propionate metabolism and its regulation in proteobacteria. We characterize genomic loci and gene regulation and identify binding motifs for four new TFs and also new regulon members, in particular, tripartite ATP-independent periplasmic (TRAP) transporters. We describe restructuring of the genomic loci and regulatory interactions during the evolution of proteobacteria.
Local Governance as Government–Business Cooperation in Western Democracies: Analysing Local and Intergovernmental Effects by Multi‐Level Comparison

The internationalization of economics and politics has forced local governments to develop new context-appropriate strategies; these strategies, characterized by a greater degree of interaction with non-governmental key actors and with the business world in particular, have been termed local or urban governance. This article is intended to illustrate the impact of three factors - local leadership, local political arenas and intergovernmental relationships - on the formation of cooperative networks between local governments and business organizations as one of the basic types of urban governance model. To achieve this, a comparative multi-level analysis presenting the CEO's perpective on such issues was conducted. The results show how local and intergovernmental opportunity costs and leadership are the factors that largely determine the degree of collaboration between local government and business. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2008 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
The impact of junior kindergarten on behaviour in elementary school children

Using data from the first cycle of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, this study examines the impact of junior kindergarten on children’s behavioural development, above and beyond regional differences and individual/household factors. It was hypothesised that earlier schooling would help children learn behavioural control skills for participating in group settings like the elementary school classroom. Research has established that children from disadvantaged environments face an increased risk of behavioural problems, usually by virtue of accompanying risk factors. As such, we hypothesised that junior kindergarten attendance would reduce the risk gap for behavioural problems between children from economically disadvantaged and advantaged families. The results revealed that on the whole, junior kindergarten did not seem to decrease problem behaviour. These results are above and beyond a number of controls (sex, age, region, SES, family functioning, family configuration, education, and family size). Although children from disadvantaged environments exhibited more behaviour problems, attending junior kindergarten did not reduce the risk gap for behavioural difficulties between children from lower SES and higher SES backgrounds.
Clickbait Identification using Neural Networks

This paper presents the results of our participation in the Clickbait Detection Challenge 2017. The system relies on a fusion of neural networks, incorporating different types of available informations. It does not require any linguistic preprocessing, and hence generalizes more easily to new domains and languages. The final combined model achieves a mean squared error of 0.0428, an accuracy of 0.826, and a F1 score of 0.564. According to the official evaluation metric the system ranked 6th of the 13 participating teams.
Extraction and classification of dense implicit communities in the Web graph

The World Wide Web (WWW) is rapidly becoming important for society as a medium for sharing data, information, and services, and there is a growing interest in tools for understanding collective behavior and emerging phenomena in the WWW. In this article we focus on the problem of searching and classifying communities in the Web. Loosely speaking a community is a group of pages related to a common interest. More formally, communities have been associated in the computer science literature with the existence of a locally dense subgraph of the Web graph (where Web pages are nodes and hyperlinks are arcs of the Web graph). The core of our contribution is a new scalable algorithm for finding relatively dense subgraphs in massive graphs. We apply our algorithm on Web graphs built on three publicly available large crawls of the Web (with raw sizes up to 120M nodes and 1G arcs). The effectiveness of our algorithm in finding dense subgraphs is demonstrated experimentally by embedding artificial communities in the Web graph and counting how many of these are blindly found. Effectiveness increases with the size and density of the communities: it is close to 100% for communities of thirty nodes or more (even at low density). It is still about 80% even for communities of twenty nodes with density over 50% of the arcs present. At the lower extremes the algorithm catches 35% of dense communities made of ten nodes. We also develop some sufficient conditions for the detection of a community under some local graph models and not-too-restrictive hypotheses. We complete our Community Watch system by clustering the communities found in the Web graph into homogeneous groups by topic and labeling each group by representative keywords.
Models for mineralization kinetics with the variables of substrate concentration and population density

The rates of mineralization of [14C]benzoate by an induced population of Pseudomonas sp. were measured at initial substrate concentrations ranging from 10 ng/ml to 100 micrograms/ml. Plots of the radioactivity remaining in the culture were fit by nonlinear regression to six kinetic models derived from the Monod equation. These models incorporate only the variables of substrate concentration and cell density. Plots of the mineralization kinetics in cultures containing low, intermediate, and high initial substrate concentrations were well fit by first-order, integrated Monod, and logarithmic kinetics, respectively. Parameters such as maximum specific growth rate, half-saturation constant, and initial population density divided by yield agreed between cultures to within a factor of 3.4. Benzoate mineralization by microorganisms in acclimated sewage was shown to fit logistic (sigmoidal), Monod, and logarithmic kinetics when the compound was added at initial concentrations of 0.1, 1.0, and 10 micrograms/ml, respectively. The mineralization of 10 micrograms of benzoate per ml in sewage also followed logarithmic kinetics in the absence of protozoa. It is concluded that much of the diversity in shapes of mineralization curves is a result of the interactions of substrate concentration and population density. Nonlinear regression with models incorporating these variables is a valuable means for analysis of microbial mineralization kinetics.
Stream Classification with Recurring and Novel Class Detection Using Class-Based Ensemble

Concept-evolution has recently received a lot of attention in the context of mining data streams. Concept-evolution occurs when a new class evolves in the stream. Although many recent studies address this issue, most of them do not consider the scenario of recurring classes in the stream. A class is called recurring if it appears in the stream, disappears for a while, and then reappears again. Existing data stream classification techniques either misclassify the recurring class instances as another class, or falsely identify the recurring classes as novel. This increases the prediction error of the classifiers, and in some cases causes unnecessary waste in memory and computational resources. In this paper we address the recurring class issue by proposing a novel "class-based" ensemble technique, which substitutes the traditional "chunk-based" ensemble approaches and correctly distinguishes between a recurring class and a novel one. We analytically and experimentally confirm the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art techniques.
Harmony, Dissonance, and the Gay Community: A Dialogical Approach to Same-Sex Desiring Men's Sexual Identity Development

This study explores implications of adapting Hermans’ (2001) dialogical model of self as multiply voiced to Cohler and Hammack’s (2007) theoretical approach to sexual identity as a dynamic relationship between sexual desires, behaviors and broadly shared cultural discourses. I used the Listening Guide as a novel way of investigating the interrelationships of individual I and social We sexual self voices in tandem with 2 cultural discourses of Struggle and Success (“coming out” as gay) and Emancipation (“post gay” queer identity). The data were individual interviews with a developmentally diverse group of 10 white, same-sex desiring men (ages 20 –50). In these men’s narratives of the gay community in particular, I and We sexual self voices combined in 2 distinct ways: harmoniously in tandem with a single cultural discourse of Struggle and Success or Emancipation, and dissonantly in tandem with both cultural discourses voiced together. Whereas patterns of harmony reflected coherent stories of sexual identity, patterns of dissonance marked narratives of identity confusion. I discuss implications of an approach to sexual identity as multiply voiced for current theory and practice.
The Effect of Awareness and Incentives on Tax Evasion

We examine the role of tax incentives, tax awareness, and complexity in tax evasion. We observe a specific type of tax evasion among business owners in Swedish administrative panel data, after the tax authority has approved all tax returns. For the period 2006-2009, approximately 5% of tax returns overstate a claimed dividend allowance. Tax awareness decreases and complexity increases the likelihood of misreporting. Our results indicate that some observed misreporting could be accidental, while some misreporting is deliberate tax evasion. We identify a positive and significant effect of tax rates on tax evasion, by exploiting a large kink in the tax schedule. The majority of misreporting cases remains undetected by the tax authority. Self-correction of tax evasion by taxpayers is the dominant type of detection.
German Glide Formation and the suffix –esk

German Glide Formation converts /i/ to [j] before vowels, e.g. ‘Spain’, but the rule is consistently blocked in neologisms containing the suffix –esk, e.g. hippiesk [hrpiɛsk] / *[hrpjɛsk]. It is argued below that the underapplication of Glide Formation in such examples follows from a requirement that the stem in a derived word must be identical to the unaffixed base. The base in such examples will be shown to be a free-standing morpheme as opposed to a bound root. The analysis proposed will be shown to be supported in additional examples in which Glide Formation is blocked from applying to the [i] preceding the suffix –aner, but only if the suffix follows a free-standing morpheme, e.g. ‘adherent of Schumi (Michael Schumacher)’.
Catalytically powered dynamic assembly of rod-shaped nanomotors and passive tracer particles

Significance Microscale catalyst particles suspended in fluids can convert the energy of chemical reactions that occur on their surfaces to movement. Collections of particles undergoing powered motion exhibit behavior that mimics living microparticles such as bacteria: swarming, predator–prey interactions, and chemotaxis. These behaviors originate from pairwise interactions of particles that so far have not been measured or understood. In this article, short-range attractive interactions of catalytic nanorod motors were shown to arise from electrical forces. These forces drive the transient formation of dimers and trimers, and are also responsible for the collection of passive tracer particles at the ends of the nanorods. The quantitative description of these interactions lays the theoretical groundwork for understanding and manipulating the collective behavior of nanomotors. Nano- and microscale motors powered by catalytic reactions exhibit collective behavior such as swarming, predator–prey interactions, and chemotaxis that resemble those of biological microorganisms. A quantitative understanding of the catalytically generated forces between particles that lead to these behaviors has so far been lacking. Observations and numerical simulations of pairwise interactions between gold-platinum nanorods in hydrogen peroxide solutions show that attractive and repulsive interactions arise from the catalytically generated electric field. Electrokinetic effects drive the assembly of staggered doublets and triplets of nanorods that are moving in the same direction. None of these behaviors are observed with nanorods composed of a single metal. The motors also collect tracer microparticles at their head or tail, depending on the charge of the particles, actively assembling them into close-packed rafts and aggregates of rafts. These motor–tracer particle interactions can also be understood in terms of the catalytically generated electric field around the ends of the nanorod motors.
Family-Centered, Community-Based Asset Building: A Strategic Use of Individual Development Accounts

This research examines individual development account (IDA) programs as part of a broader community development strategy for low-income/low-wealth communities, particularly communities of color. Through a review of multiple literatures and detailed case studies, we explore the potential of explicitly creating a community-based, family-centered development account program as a step toward a comprehensive community asset building approach in low-income urban neighborhoods. From the perspective of IDA practitioners, such an approach provides program participants with local support networks and access to additional services. From the perspective of grassroots community organizers, such an approach provides tangible benefits to low-income residents of their neighborhoods. The likelihood of success may depend on the availability of local resources to build areas of strength and reduce vulnerabilities, but there are examples where a family-centered, community-based asset building approach seems to thrive.
Defining Strategic Communication

This article examines the nature of strategic communication, which is defined as the purposeful use of communication by an organization to fulfill its mission. Six relevant disciplines are involved in the development, implementation, and assessment of communications by organizations: management, marketing, public relations, technical communication, political communication, and information/social marketing campaigns. The nature of the term strategic is examined, and key aspects of communication are identified. This article is based, in part, on a panel discussion involving the journal's editors and international scholars at the International Communication Association in May 2005 in New York.
Modulating cellular recombination potential through alterations in RecA structure and regulation

The wild‐type Escherichia coli RecA protein is a recombinase platform with unrealized recombination potential. We have explored the factors affecting recombination during conjugation with a quantitative assay. Regulatory proteins that affect RecA function have the capacity to increase or decrease recombination frequencies by factors up to sixfold. Autoinhibition by the RecA C‐terminus can affect recombination frequency by factors up to fourfold. The greatest changes in recombination frequency measured here are brought about by point mutations in the recA gene. RecA variants can increase recombination frequencies by more than 50‐fold. The RecA protein thus possesses an inherently broad functional range. The RecA protein of E. coli (EcRecA) is not optimized for recombination function. Instead, much of the recombination potential of EcRecA is structurally suppressed, probably reflecting cellular requirements. One point mutation in EcRecA with a particularly dramatic effect on recombination frequency, D112R, exhibits an enhanced capacity to load onto SSB‐coated ssDNA, overcome the effects of regulatory proteins such as PsiB and RecX, and to pair homologous DNAs. Comparisons of key RecA protein mutants reveal two components to RecA recombination function – filament formation and the inherent DNA pairing activity of the formed filaments.
Assessing impacts of locally designed environmental education projects on students’ environmental attitudes, awareness, and intention to act

This study investigates whether consistent effects on students’ environmental attitudes, awareness, and behavioral intentions could be discerned in an initiative that supports environmental education (EE) designed at the classroom level. Students of grades four, five, and seven participated in an assessment at the beginning and end of the school year. Quantitative assessment questions were adapted from the Children’s Environmental Perception Scale. Factor analysis identified three factors related to intentions for environmental learning and behavior, environmental appreciation, and awareness of the potential to impact nature. Qualitative items assessed students’ perception of their EE experience. Over one school year, fourth- and fifth-grade EE students gained awareness of the potential to impact nature, but EE students did not exhibit changes to environmental appreciation or intentions for environmental learning and behavior. With increasing years of EE experience, students demonstrated slight increases in environmental appreciation and intentions for environmental learning and behavior. Students’ recollection of in-class discussions primarily related to cognitive and psychomotor domains, with minimal mention of social or affective themes. Student perspectives highlighted individuals’ unique interests, which may not be fostered when all students conduct the same activity. Over a third of all students most enjoyed the EE experience for the chance to be outside, and only five percent most enjoyed gaining environmental knowledge.
Black and minority ethnic leaders in England: a portrait

Black and minority ethnic (BME) leaders are greatly under-represented in English schools compared with the number of BME pupils. This paper reports the findings from research with BME leaders in 2004–2005 and links them to insights from a systematic literature review. The paper shows that BME teachers experience many barriers in developing their careers, including family and community attitudes, unfair recruitment and selection processes, and both covert and overt discrimination. The participants in the research demonstrate qualities of determination, resilience and hard work in overcoming these barriers, leading to the conclusion that these pioneers are ‘exceptional’ people.