Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Anticipative coordinated cognitive processes for interactivist and Piagetian theories

This paper presents a model of intelligence based on principles introduced by Piaget and the interactivist framework. It focuses on embodiment and sensory-motor aspects of the mind but copes with general issues such as regulation, accommodation to noise and variability or synchronization of the agent internal dynamics with the environment. The proposed evolutionary and constructivist theory is illustrated by a real-time rhythm recognition program and goal-reaching algorithm, both based on prediction and assimilation.
Average E ff ects of School Choice on Educational Attainment : Evidence from Japanese High School Attendance Zones

Empirical studies on the effects of competition among schools rarely identified the effects on all affected students. Using heterogeneous variations in the boundaries of public high school attendance zones in Japan, I estimated the average effect of high school competition on the college advancement rate. The data covering nearly all fulltime high schools in Japan over 12 years permitted control for unobservable school characteristics and regional trends and the within-zone sorting of students. I found that the college advancement rate of public schools increases when they compete with more schools while vocational schools show mixed results and private schools show negative results. The average college advancement rate of all high schools improved with increased competition in urban areas with no negative effect on rural schools. I found evidence that the education quality at urban schools improved with an increased choice, but its contribution to the average student’s achievement was very small relative to the students’ enhanced effort or sorting. ∗Faculty of Economics, Keio University. Correspondence: hakab@econ.keio. ac.jp. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Ministry of Education, Seimei-Kai, the Institute of Statistical Research (ISR), and the Japan Foundation Area Studies Fellowship. The National Family Research of Japan 1998 was made available through the SSJ Data Archive (ICSSRJ-ISS, University of Tokyo) and can be requested directly. All the other data used in this research can be made available upon request. I would like to sincerely thank to Masayuki Kakuho, Michiko Saito, and Kazunori Shima for providing valuable school data for this research. I am grateful for discussions in seminars at the ISR, Keio, Ohio State, 2003 JEA meeting, 2004 AEA meeting, and 2006 SOLE meeting. I am also grateful for comments from Towa Tachibana, Hideo Owan, Hidehiko Ichimura, Daiji Kawaguchi, Atsushi Yoshida, and especially Caroline Hoxby. The boards of education of 47 prefectures provided the official documents of the previous school attendance zones. Many students at Keio, especially Michio Naoi, patiently assisted with the data management for which I am grateful. Of course, I am responsible for all possible errors.
Young Children's Understanding of Learning and Its Relation to Their Own Learning

The current dissertation examines how young children aged from 3 to 6 years come to understand learning from a mentalistic perspective, and how this understanding is related to their own learning. Study 1 found that preschoolers’ prediction of learning is influenced by the informant’s knowledge state, and that there is an agerelated increase in the expectation of learning from another and sensitivity to an informant’s knowledge state. Children’s prediction of another’s learning was applied to their actual learning in Study 2, showing that children’s perception of an informant’s knowledge state affects how much information they themselves accept from the informants. Overall, the findings from Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that children’s judgment of another’s knowledge affects not only their predictions about learning from him, but also their actual learning. Studies 3 and 4 broadened the framework to see how children consider not only the informant’s but also the learner’s mental states. Findings from Studies 3 and 4 indicated that young children come to understand that a person’s knowledge state influences the formation of the intention to learn, and that the judgment of the occurrence of learning requires a change in the learner’s knowledge. Study 5 further examined whether the knowledge-based judgments of another’s learning are applied to judgments of children’s own learning, and whether these judgments are related to how much and how they actually learn. As children judge another’s learning based on the learner’s knowledge, they judged the necessity and desire for their own learning based on their own knowledge state, and they determine whether they have learned based on the presence of knowledge change. Moreover, this knowledge-based reasoning about learning was uniquely related with how much they learned from an example learning situation, and with teacher ratings of their learning relatedbehavior in schools. The overall findings across five studies indicated that in early childhood, children come to understand learning on the basis of mental states, and that this emerging understanding has important implications for their metacognitive knowledge to regulate their learning as well as their actual learning. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Education First Advisor Douglas Frye
Dynamic Load Balancing in Ceph

The Ceph distributed object-based storage system, developed at UC Santa Cruz, [1] uses CRUSH, a pseudo-random placement function, to decide which OSDs to store data on, instead of storing the placement information in a table. This technique offers multiple advantages. In particular, the amount of metadata stored per file is drastically reduced, reducing the load on the metadata servers and speeding up metadata accesses and clients need communicate with the metadata servers only for metadata operations, since they can directly calculate the correct data placement for read and write operations. [2] However, pseudorandom placement also brings challenges for load balancing, since data cannot be arbitrarily moved to other nodes. We identify two types of load imbalance: persistent imbalance and transient imbalance. Persistent imbalance is caused by performance differences among nodes; we found that supposedly identical nodes in our cluster had up to four-fold differences in I/O performance. This can be addressed in Ceph by assigning different weights to different nodes in CRUSH. Transient imbalance has two causes. First, a workload may be inherently imbalanced; for instance, a flash crowd on a single object can overload a storage node. Second, even without an imbalanced workload, transient imbalance may coincidentally occur: CRUSH’s pseudorandom placement statistically distributes workloads well over time, but this does not guard against coincidental hotspots at any given moment. We have a number of ideas for load-balancing techniques. We have added limited support for read shedding, where clients in a read flash crowd are redirected to replicas instead of the primary copy. This can be extended to allow clients to read from other clients in the flash crowd. We can switch primaries to distribute non-flash-crowd load from one primary to several primaries. We also have an algorithm to take a flash crowd of multiple writers to the same object and split the work among several nodes, by delaying synchronization. We have tested the primary switching technique. When a single primary is overloaded by requests on multiple objects, those objects will typically have different sets of replicas. For each object, we temporarily transfer the primary role to one of the replicas. We have shown that primary shifting successfully relieves the load on the original primary and distributes it among several new primaries. However, we have not yet found workloads that saturate the primary in such a way that the load balancing makes the workload complete more quickly. Future work includes testing the other techniques; characterizing which techniques speed up which workloads; and dynamically detecting overload to automatically invoke these load-balancing techniques. Figure 1: In this workload, eight clients write 256 MB each, and all writes initially have OSD 0 as the primary. The top graph shows the load on OSD 0. In the bottom graph, primary switching is activated, distributing the load among the OSDs.
An Improved Segmentation Method for Color Image

In the color image, based on the characteristics of the HIS (hue-saturation-intensity) color space, there is most of the white blood cell information in the H component of the HIS color space, and there is most of the white blood cell nucleus's structure information in the S component, we develop an improved method, iterative GGM (gray level and gradient mapping) function segmentation based on circular histogram for the leukocyte segmentation by making full use of this knowledge in stead of the iterative Otsu's approach based on circular histogram for the leukocyte segmentation. We call it iterative GGM function based on circular histogram method for short. The result of simulation demonstrates that, the new algorithm described in this paper can also detect the cell and cell nuclei effectively. The algorithm may have a widespread application prospect.
To be or Not to be Friends: Exploiting Social Ties for Venture Investments

Recent years have witnessed the boom of venture capital industry. Venture capitalists can attain great financial rewards if their invested companies exit successfully, via being acquired or going IPO (Initial Public Offering). The literature has revealed that, from both financial and managerial perspectives, decision-making process and successful rates of venture capital (VC) investments can be greatly improved if the investors well know the team members of target startups. However, much less efforts have been made on understanding the impact of prominent social ties between the members of VC firms and start-up companies on investment decisions. To this end, we propose to study such social relationship and see how this information can contribute to foreseeing investment deals. We aim at providing analytical guidance for the venture capitalists in choosing right investment targets. Specifically, we develop a Social-Adjusted Probabilistic Matrix Factorization (PMF) model to exploit members social connections information from VC firms and startups for investment recommendations. Unlike previous studies, we make use of the directed relationship between any pair of connected members from the two institutions respectively and quantify the variety of social network groups. As a result, it brings in much more flexibility, and the modeling results inherently provide meaningful managerial implications for the operators of VC firms and startups. Finally, we evaluate our model on both synthetic and real-world data. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the baseline algorithms with a significant margin.
Stochastic heating of cooling flows

It is generally accepted that the heating of gas in clusters of galaxies by active galactic nuclei is a form of feedback. Feedback is required to ensure a long-term, sustainable balance between heating and cooling. This work investigates the impact of proportional stochastic feedback on the energy balance in the intracluster medium. Using a generalized analytical model for a cluster atmosphere, it is shown that an energy equilibrium can be reached exponentially quickly. Applying the tools of stochastic calculus, it is demonstrated that the result is robust with regard to the model parameters, even though they affect the amount of variability in the system.
Diversity of Ammonium-oxidizing Bacteria in a Granular Sludge Anaerobic Ammonium-oxidizing (anammox) Reactor

The ammonium-oxidizing microbial community was investigated in a granular sludge anaerobic ammonium-oxidizing (anammox) reactor that was operated for about 1 year with high anaerobic ammo-nium oxidation activity (up to 0.8 kg NH4 +-N m-3 day-1). A Planctomycetales-specific 16S rRNA gene library was constructed to analyse the diversity of the anaerobic ammonium-oxidizing bacteria (AnAOB). Most of the specifically amplified sequences (15/16) were similar to each other (> 99%) but were distantly related to all of the previously recognized sequences (< 94%), with the exception of an unclassified anammox-related clone, KSU-1 (98%). An ammonia monooxygenase (amoA) gene library was also analysed to investigate the diversity of 'aerobic' ammonium-oxidizing bacteria (AAOB) from the b-Proteobacteria. Most of the amoA gene fragments (53/55) clustered in the Nitrosomonas europaea– Nitrosococcus mobilis group which has been reported to prevail under oxygen-limiting conditions. The quantitative results from real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification showed that the dominant AnAOB comprised approximately 50% of the total bacterial 16S rRNA genes in the reactor, whereas the AAOB of b-Proteobacteria represented only about 3%. A large fragment (4008 bp) of the rRNA gene cluster of the dominant AnAOB (AS-1) in this reactor sludge was sequenced and compared with sequences of other Planctomycetales including four anammox-related candidate genera. The partial sequence of hydrazine-oxidizing enzyme (hzo) of dominant AnAOB was also identified using new designed primers. Based on this analysis, we propose to tentatively name this new AnAOB Candidatus 'Jettenia asiatica'.
Effects of Preterm Experience on the Developing Visual System: A Longitudinal Study of Shifts of Attention and Gaze in Early Infancy

Several studies on visual development support the notion that healthy, low-risk preterm infants benefit from their early exposure to the visual world. It has been suggested, however, that mainly early developing sensory and motor processes are enhanced as a result of visual experience and early exercise, whereas later maturing processes might not. This study investigates whether preterm infants' visual and attentional development is accelerated as a consequence of their early visual experience and whether early and later maturing processes are affected differently. Preterm and full-term infants' performance on a gaze and attention shifting task was examined during the first six months of life. Until about 16 weeks post- term, preterm infants were faster in disengaging and shifting their attention and gaze from a stimulus in their central visual field to the periphery, whereas no difference was found for simple gaze shifts without disengagement. This finding is in contrast to earlier accounts that only early developing mechanisms might be advanced as a result of additional visual experience, whereas later developing cortical processes might depend mainly on preprogrammed maturation processes. However, it is consistent with a number of findings on visual, motor, and speech development, which have indicated accelerated cortical functioning in healthy preterm infants before.
Fast Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Rank-one ADMM

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), which aims to approximate a data matrix with two nonnegative low rank matrix factors, is a popular dimensionality reduction and clustering technique. Due to the non-convex formulation and the nonnegativity constraints over the two low rank matrix factors (with rank r > 0), it is often difficult to solve NMF efficiently and accurately. Recently, the alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) was shown to be more accurate and efficient than classical approaches such as the multiplicative update rule (MUR) or alternating least square (ALS). Nevertheless, the computation of ADMM is proportional to the cube of the rank r because of the underlying matrix inverse problem and thus may be inefficient when r is relatively large. In this paper, we propose a rank-one ADMM to address this problem. In each step, we search for a rank-one solution of NMF based upon ADMM and utilize greedy search to obtain the low rank matrix factors. In this way, rank-one ADMM avoids the matrix inverse problem and the computation is only linearly proportional to r. Thorough empirical studies demonstrate that rank-one ADMM is more efficient and accurate than baseline approaches.
The Foamy Virus Gag Proteins: What Makes Them Different?

Gag proteins play an important role in many stages of the retroviral replication cycle. They orchestrate viral assembly, interact with numerous host cell proteins, engage in regulation of viral gene expression, and provide the main driving force for virus intracellular trafficking and budding. Foamy Viruses (FV), also known as spumaviruses, display a number of unique features among retroviruses. Many of these features can be attributed to their Gag proteins. FV Gag proteins lack characteristic orthoretroviral domains like membrane-binding domains (M domains), the major homology region (MHR), and the hallmark Cys-His motifs. In contrast, they contain several distinct domains such as the essential Gag-Env interaction domain and the glycine and arginine rich boxes (GR boxes). Furthermore, FV Gag only undergoes limited maturation and follows an unusual pathway for nuclear translocation. This review summarizes the known FV Gag domains and motifs and their functions. In particular, it provides an overview of the unique structural and functional properties that distinguish FV Gag proteins from orthoretroviral Gag proteins.
Culture and media entertainment: A cross-cultural exploration of hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment motivations

Recent studies have juxtaposed hedonic forms of media entertainment motivations (seeking for pleasure and fun) with eudaimonic forms (seeking for insights into the human condition). As most of this research was confined to the Western world so far, this contribution explores the impact of culture on hedonic and eudaimonic media entertainment motivations. Culture is conceptualized on both macro- and micro levels of analysis. On the macro level of countries, the study draws of Hofstede’s concept of individualism/collectivism. On the micro level of individuals, the study explores independent and interdependent self-construals and ethnic identity as potential influences on hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment. A survey was carried out with international students and non-students in Germany and Turkey (N = 324). Cross-level operator analyses were calculated to explore relationships between cultural variables and hedonic/eudaimonic entertainment motivations. Results show consistently that variables of culture that tap into cultural belonging (collectivism, interdependence, and ethnic identity) are significant predictors of hedonic entertainment. Cultural variables that tap into distinctiveness and separation from one’s collective (individualism and independence) are significant predictors of eudaimonic entertainment. The study is among the first to explore the impact of cultural variability on entertainment motivations and thus especially relevant for sparking up a new line of research.
Searching Game Trees in Parallel Using SSS

PARSSS* is a parallel formulation of SSS* that is suitable for shared-memory multiprocessor systems. It is based on the distributed tree search paradigm of Ferguson and Korf. The main difficulty in parallelizing SSS* lies in achieving proper coordination between processes running on different subtrees of the game tree. This has been resolved in PARSSS* by the use of a shared array which maintains summary information on all processes that are currently in execution. Problem-independent speed-up values for PARSSS* have been obtained experimentally. It is shown that an earlier algorithm of the authors, called ITERSSS*, which allows SSS* to run in restricted memory, can also be parallelized using the above scheme.
ON/OFF Traffic Shaping in the Internet: Motivation, Challenges, and Solutions

Tremendous traffic on the Internet exhibits ON/OFF patterns. In the past, the generation of such ON/OFF traffic was mainly attributed to TCP and application characteristics. Nowadays, however, much traffic is often intentionally shaped into an ON/OFF pattern for achieving certain optimized system performance or resulting from characteristics of some new applications. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on the ON/OFF traffic shaping in the current Internet. We first introduce the motivations behind ON/OFF traffic shaping in different fields based on different system optimization objectives and application characteristics. We then introduce the impacts of ON/OFF traffic on packet drop probability, real-time applications, and also its interaction with TCP's congestion control mechanism. We further present a survey on existing mechanisms for mitigating these impacts in various aspects. We introduce how each of these mechanisms works, and discuss their merits and deficiencies. Finally, we conclude this article with some future directions for ON/OFF traffic shaping in the Internet.
Generation of Marker- and/or Backbone-Free Transgenic Wheat Plants via Agrobacterium-Mediated Transformation

Horizontal transfer of antibiotic resistance genes to animals and vertical transfer of herbicide resistance genes to the weedy relatives are perceived as major biosafety concerns in genetically modified (GM) crops. In this study, five novel vectors which used gusA and bar as a reporter gene and a selection marker gene, respectively, were constructed based on the pCLEAN dual binary vector system. Among these vectors, 1G7B and 5G7B carried two T-DNAs located on two respective plasmids with 5G7B possessing an additional virGwt gene. 5LBTG154 and 5TGTB154 carried two T-DNAs in the target plasmid with either one or double right borders, and 5BTG154 carried the selectable marker gene on the backbone outside of the T-DNA left border in the target plasmid. In addition, 5BTG154, 5LBTG154, and 5TGTB154 used pAL154 as a helper plasmid which contains Komari fragment to facilitate transformation. These five dual binary vector combinations were transformed into Agrobacterium strain AGL1 and used to transform durum wheat cv Stewart 63. Evaluation of the co-transformation efficiencies, the frequencies of marker-free transgenic plants, and integration of backbone sequences in the obtained transgenic lines indicated that two vectors (5G7B and 5TGTB154) were more efficient in generating marker-free transgenic wheat plants with no or minimal integration of backbone sequences in the wheat genome. The vector series developed in this study for generation of marker- and/or backbone-free transgenic wheat plants via Agrobacterium-mediated transformation will be useful to facilitate the creation of “clean” GM wheat containing only the foreign genes of agronomic importance.
SIW cavity-backed slot (multi-)antenna systems for the next generation IoT applications

Substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) cavity-backed slot antenna topologies are promising candidates to adress the specific design challenges posed by the Internet of Things (IoT). In this contribution, we demonstrate their potential by discussing two designs on two different, application-specific, innovative substrate materials. First, a compact, ultra-wideband three-element array with very low mutual coupling is presented for integration into furniture. In the second design, the half-mode SIW technique is applied to obtain a miniaturized ultra-wideband design, enabling invisible integration into cork floor and wall tiles. The compactness, integrability, and stable, high performance of both designs in different operating conditions, make them ideal candidates for IoT applications.