Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predictors of Moral Reasoning among African American Children: A Preliminary Study

This study examined the ways in which gender, empathy, and cultural orientation (communalism and competitive individualism) influence the moral judgments of urban fifth and eighth grade African American children. Pencil and paper measures of these constructs were completed by 44 fifth and 46 eighth graders. Results revealed greater endorsement of communalism among girls than boys. Separate correlation matrices and path analysis models were computed for girls and boys. Communalism, empathy, and grade emerged as significant correlates and predictors of moral reasoning among boys. Empathy emerged as a mediator between communalism and moral reasoning for boys. Grade was the only significant correlate and predictor of moral reasoning for girls. The findings are discussed in terms of the study’s methodological limitations and implications for future research on African American culture and moral development.
QUETRA: A Queuing Theory Approach to DASH Rate Adaptation

DASH, or Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, relies on a rate adaptation component to decide on which representation to download for each video segment. A plethora of rate adaptation algorithms has been proposed in recent years. The decisions of which bitrate to download made by these algorithms largely depend on several factors: estimated network throughput, buffer occupancy, and buffer capacity. Yet, these algorithms are not informed by a fundamental relationship between these factors and the chosen bitrate, and as a result, we found that they do not perform consistently in all scenarios, and require parameter tuning to work well under different buffer capacity. In this paper, we model a DASH client as an M/D/1/K queue, which allows us to calculate the expected buffer occupancy given a bitrate choice, network throughput, and buffer capacity. Using this model, we propose QUETRA, a simple rate adaptation algorithm. We evaluated QUETRA under a diverse set of scenarios and found that, despite its simplicity, it leads to better quality of experience (7% - 140%) than existing algorithms.
An integrated design flow in user interface and interaction for enhancing mobile AR gaming experiences

Interaction is a prominent feature that distinguishes computer (video) games from other kinds of entertainment [1, 2]. Given that Augmented Reality (AR) presentations enable the creation of user interactions that expand traditional HCI from 2D to 3D spaces, this offer an ideal opportunity for game developers to design more playful and interesting mobile AR games that embed various interaction forms. This paper introduces a mobile AR cooking game that is based on the integration of adopted AR interaction and user interface principles in its design flow. These embedded interactions are designed with considerations and spatial mappings to real cooking mechanisms in order to provide a unique gaming experience and increased engagement for a better overall AR interaction on the multimodal mobile device.
Baikal-GVD: first cluster Dubna

In April 2015 the demonstration cluster "Dubna" was deployed and started to take data in Lake Baikal. This array is the first cluster of the cubic kilometer scale Gigaton Volume Detector (Baikal-GVD), which is constructed in Lake Baikal. In this contribution we will review the design and status of the array.
How Well Can a User’s Location Privacy Preferences be Determined Without Using GPS Location Data?

The recent proliferation of GPS-enabled mobile phones has allowed people to share their current locations with others. Because disclosing one’s location can be valuable but risky, many services and studies employ a user’s GPS coordinates to determine automatically whether or not those coordinates can be disclosed by comparing them with handcrafted rules or privacy models trained using the user’s actual preferences. However, these approaches that employ GPS coordinates constitute a drain on a phone’s battery when the services assume continuous location sharing. In addition, recent positioning methods (assisted GPS and a WiFi-based positioning) rely on external location providers. That is, when a user’s current location preference is determined using her coordinate point, her location information is disclosed to external providers even if this is not her wish. In this paper, we explore a way of learning a user’s location privacy preference using sensors that are energy saving and that do not rely on external providers. This enables us to save energy and protect a user’s privacy when she is unwilling to disclose her location. Note that the machine learning based approach cannot deal well with a user’s private situations that are not included in its training data. So, this paper proposes a new model that can determine a user’s privacy preferences and handle such outlying situations.
Fully adaptive Gaussian mixture Metropolis-Hastings algorithm

Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods are widely used in signal processing and communications for statistical inference and stochastic optimization. In this work, we introduce an efficient adaptive Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to draw samples from generic multimodal and multidimensional target distributions. The proposal density is a mixture of Gaussian densities with all parameters (weights, mean vectors and covariance matrices) updated using all the previously generated samples applying simple recursive rules. Numerical results for the one and two-dimensional cases are provided.
The many faces of graph dynamics

The topological structure of complex networks has fascinated researchers for several decades, resulting in the discovery of many universal properties and reoccurring characteristics of different kinds of networks. However, much less is known today about the network dynamics: indeed, complex networks in reality are not static, but rather dynamically evolve over time. Our paper is motivated by the empirical observation that network evolution patterns seem far from random, but exhibit structure. Moreover, the specific patterns appear to depend on the network type, contradicting the existence of a ‘one fits it all’ model. However, we still lack observables to quantify these intuitions, as well as metrics to compare graph evolutions. Such observables and metrics are needed for extrapolating or predicting evolutions, as well as for interpolating graph evolutions. To explore the many faces of graph dynamics and to quantify temporal changes, this paper suggests to build upon the concept of centrality, a measure of node importance in a network. In particular, we introduce the notion of centrality distance, a natural similarity measure for two graphs which depends on a given centrality, characterizing the graph type. Intuitively, centrality distances reflect the extent to which (non-anonymous) node roles are different or, in case of dynamic graphs, have changed over time, between two graphs. We evaluate the centrality distance approach for five evolutionary models and seven real-world social and physical networks. Our results empirically show the usefulness of centrality distances for characterizing graph dynamics compared to a null-model of random evolution, and highlight the differences between the considered scenarios. Interestingly, our approach allows us to compare the dynamics of very different networks, in terms of scale and evolution speed.
Dynamic Auctions for On-Demand Services

In this paper, we consider a market in which a finite number of firms compete in prices for the incoming demand for service. Upon every customer arrival, an independent auctioneer gathers bids from each one of the competing queuing systems and assigns the incoming customer to the system that submitted the lowest bid. We provide a simple characterization of Markov Perfect equilibrium in terms of ldquoindifference prices,rdquo i.e., price levels at which players are indifferent between committing available capacity or withholding it. We identify sufficient conditions for socially efficient performance in equilibrium.
Childhood trauma, attachment style, and a couple's experience of terminal cancer: Case study

Abstract Objective: The primary objective of this article is to elucidate the significance of psychosocial distress and risk in a sub-population of end-stage cancer patients and their spouse caregivers who present with an especially challenging attachment style and histories of childhood trauma. The case study presented highlights the need to both identify and offer an empirically validated couple–based intervention, along with a multi-disciplinary team approach over the trajectory of the illness and at end of life. Method: A validated marital protocol (emotionally focused couple therapy [EFT]) is modified for this population and conducted by an EFT-trained psychologist as part of a pilot investigation as to the feasibility and effectiveness of EFT for the terminal cancer population. Measures of marital distress, depression, hopelessness, and attachment security are completed at baseline and subsequent intervals, as reported in another publication. Attachment insecurity and the exquisitely intimate relationship with caregiving and care receiving are underscored, given the couple's traumatic childhood history. Results: The couple described herein, followed from diagnosis of metastatic disease to end of life illuminates the potential effectiveness of a modified EFT protocol, and underscores the need to both identify and intervene with a population potentially at significantly high risk for marital distress, suicidality, depression, and hopelessness. Significance of Results: The benefits of a multidisciplinary team is evident as the patient's symptoms of physical distress increased toward end of life and she returned to earlier behaviors, namely suicidal ideation and an attempt to alleviate her experience of suffering. The strength of the marital bond, possibly as a result of the intervention, and the efforts of the multidisciplinary team approach, demonstrate potential to mitigate a catastrophic end of life and a complicated spousal bereavement. This case study adds to the current empirical literature in an area that is currently under-studied and under-reported.
The Relationship of Cortical Activity and Personality in a Reinforced Go-Nogo Paradigm

Abstract. The reinforcement sensitivity theory proposes two biological systems for the regulation of emotion, motivation, and personality: the behavioral activation system (BAS), which responds to stimuli related to positive and negative reinforcement, and the behavioral inhibition system (BIS), which responds to conditioned stimuli of punishment and nonreward. Recent findings provided evidence for increased bilateral frontal cortical trait activity in high BAS subjects. We hypothesized that increased bilateral frontal cortical state activity might be found in high BAS subjects in response to stimuli related to positive and negative reinforcement. The cortical reaction of 38 subjects to a reinforced Go-Nogo task was analyzed. A trial consisted of three subsequent stimuli: a cue stimulus (indicating positive, negative, or no reinforcement), an imperative stimulus (Go or Nogo/Inhibition), and a feedback stimulus (success/failure). Alpha power was extracted as a measure of cortical activity. In addition, BAS.
Effects of sequence variation on differential allelic transcription factor occupancy and gene expression

A complex interplay between transcription factors (TFs) and the genome regulates transcription. However, connecting variation in genome sequence with variation in TF binding and gene expression is challenging due to environmental differences between individuals and cell types. To address this problem, we measured genome-wide differential allelic occupancy of 24 TFs and EP300 in a human lymphoblastoid cell line GM12878. Overall, 5% of human TF binding sites have an allelic imbalance in occupancy. At many sites, TFs clustered in TF-binding hubs on the same homolog in especially open chromatin. While genetic variation in core TF binding motifs generally resulted in large allelic differences in TF occupancy, most allelic differences in occupancy were subtle and associated with disruption of weak or noncanonical motifs. We also measured genome-wide differential allelic expression of genes with and without heterozygous exonic variants in the same cells. We found that genes with differential allelic expression were overall less expressed both in GM12878 cells and in unrelated human cell lines. Comparing TF occupancy with expression, we found strong association between allelic occupancy and expression within 100 bp of transcription start sites (TSSs), and weak association up to 100 kb from TSSs. Sites of differential allelic occupancy were significantly enriched for variants associated with disease, particularly autoimmune disease, suggesting that allelic differences in TF occupancy give functional insights into intergenic variants associated with disease. Our results have the potential to increase the power and interpretability of association studies by targeting functional intergenic variants in addition to protein coding sequences.
Social navigation for loosely-coupled information seeking in tightly-knit groups using webwear

Many web-based information-seeking tasks are set in a social context where other people's knowledge and advice improves success in finding information. However, when tightly-knit contacts (friends, family, colleagues) are not available, information seeking becomes more difficult. Inspired by previous work in social navigation, we developed WebWear, a system that collects and displays traces of activity for tightly-knit groups. WebWear allows people to use contextual knowledge of contacts' interests and activities to interpret the meaning of the traces, improving their usefulness. In a comparative study, we found that WebWear helped people complete information-seeking tasks more accurately, without requiring additional effort. A one-week field trial found that WebWear was both usable and useful, and that privacy concerns were reduced in the small-group context. WebWear shows that small-scale social navigation systems are feasible, and that they can improve the effectiveness of information seeking on the World-Wide Web.
Evaluation of spectrum usage based on peak excursion, using an off the shelf spectrum analyzer

In cognitive radio networks, spectrum sensing plays a crucial role in the discovery of spectrum opportunities for secondary systems (or unlicensed systems). The performance of spectrum sensing is characterized by both accuracy and efficiency, and more importantly the time taken to make a decision and also the complexity involved in doing so. In this work we propose a simple detection technique based on a peak excursion threshold. To go around developing this method, a reference spectrum is formulated which is void of missed detections using an improved energy detection method, and use it to compare decisions made by the proposed model. The model is modeled for false alarms making certain assumptions about missed detections. Later, the equations developed are verified for accuracy and efficiency over large data sets.
New treebank or repurposed? On the feasibility of cross-lingual parsing of Romance languages with Universal Dependencies†

Abstract This paper addresses the feasibility of cross-lingual parsing with Universal Dependencies (UD) between Romance languages, analyzing its performance when compared to the use of manually annotated resources of the target languages. Several experiments take into account factors such as the lexical distance between the source and target varieties, the impact of delexicalization, the combination of different source treebanks or the adaptation of resources to the target language, among others. The results of these evaluations show that the direct application of a parser from one Romance language to another reaches similar labeled attachment score (LAS) values to those obtained with a manual annotation of about 3,000 tokens in the target language, and unlabeled attachment score (UAS) results equivalent to the use of around 7,000 tokens, depending on the case. These numbers can noticeably increase by performing a focused selection of the source treebanks. Furthermore, the removal of the words in the training corpus (delexicalization) is not useful in most cases of cross-lingual parsing of Romance languages. The lessons learned with the performed experiments were used to build a new UD treebank for Galician, with 1,000 sentences manually corrected after an automatic cross-lingual annotation. Several evaluations in this new resource show that a cross-lingual parser built with the best combination and adaptation of the source treebanks performs better (77 percent LAS and 82 percent UAS) than using more than 16,000 (for LAS results) and more than 20,000 (UAS) manually labeled tokens of Galician.
Semantic multi-layered design of interactive 3D presentations

Dependencies between interactive 3D content elements are typically more complex than dependencies between standard web pages as they may relate to different aspects of the content-spatial, temporal, structural, logical and behavioural. The Semantic Web approach helps in making data understandable and processable for both humans and computers by providing common concepts for describing web resources. However, semantic concepts may be also used to improve the process of designing content. In this paper, a new approach to semantic multi-layered design of interactive 3D content is presented. The proposed solution provides a semantic representation of 3D content in multiple layers reflecting diverse aspects of 3D content. The presented solution conforms to well-established 3D content and semantic description standards and-therefore-may facilitate creation, dissemination and reuse of 3D content in a variety of application domains on the web.
A Behavioural Approach to Teaching Subsidiary Physics to Engineering Students

A modified version of the Keller Plan or Personalised System of Instruction (PSI) was employed in a controlled experiment designed to evaluate the success of an innovatory behavioural teaching approach in Higher Education. Technology students studying subsidiary physics were randomly allocated to two groups. One group was taught under a traditional lecture format and the other under a modified PSI format. The PSI group were able to earn free time and bonus coursework marks for successfully completing fortnightly criterion tests. The results showed that fewer PSI students failed the course or passed with low marks and that overall their mean scores on the exam were significantly higher, by about 10%.
Wearable Medical Devices Using Textile and Flexible Technologies for Ambulatory Monitoring

Health smart clothes are in contact with almost all the surface of the skin offer large possibilities for the location of sensors for non invasive measurements. Head band, collar, tee-shirt, socks, shoes, belts for chest, arm, wrist, legs . provide localization with specific purpose taking into account their proximity of an organ or a source of biosignal, and also its ergonomic possibility (user friendly) to fix a sensor, and the associated instrumentations (batteries, amplifiers, signal processing, telecom, alarm, display .). Progress in science and technology offers, for the first time, intelligence, speed, miniaturization, sophistication and new materials at low cost. In this new landscape, microtechnologies, information technologies and telecommunications are a key factor. Microsensors:Microtechnologies offer the possibility of small size, but also intelligent, active device, working with low energy, wireless and non invasive or mini invasive. These sensors have to be thin, flexible and compatible with textile, or made using textile technologies, new fibers with specific properties: mechanical, electrical, optical. The field of applications is very large, e.g. continuous monitoring on elderly population, professional and military activities, athlete's performance and condition, and people with disabilities. The research are oriented toward two complementary directions: Improving the relevancy of each sensor and increasing the number of sensors for having a more global synthetic and robust information
Keeping and Crossing Professional and Racialized Boundaries

In this article we reflect on the process of a white woman researching a Black woman's experiences of engaging in clinical psychology services. This involved interviewing both a Black woman client and her white woman therapist four times over an 11-month therapy period. We discuss issues of identifications and relationships, the interface between research and therapy, and professional and ethical responsibilities of disclosures arising from this particular study in relation to general debates about feminist research. Rather than presuming that feminist research involves identifications between women or the aim of dissolving power relations, we highlight how issues of power and difference form a continuous topic and site of negotiation within the research relationship. We explore how this parallels and informs the therapy process. Despite differences in structural relations of privilege and power and reservations about feminist research practices around disclosure, we argue that fruitful consequences can follow from an explicit acknowledgment of the multiple identifications and institutional positions all participants occupy within research relationships. These include dimensions of difference between women structured around race, class, and professional—client relations.
Rule-Based WiFi Localization Methods

The rule-based localization methods proposed in this paper are based on two important observations. First, although the absolute RSS values change with time, the relative RSS (RRSS) values between several Access Points (APs) are more stable than the absolute RSSs. Thus, we can use RRSSs as rules for inferring a client's location. Second, when a unique location cannot be obtained based on RRSS rules, the localization process can backtrack to the previous observed client location. By analyzing the accessible paths on the floor plan, locations that are not reacheable from the previous location can be disqualified. Based on these two key observations, we propose several localization methods, implement them in a life environment and conduct extensive experiments to measure the localization accuracy of the proposed methods. We found that our methods achieve much higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art localization methods, namely, RADAR, LOCADIO and WHAM!