Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adversarial Information Retrieval Aspects of Sponsored Search

Search engines are commercial entities that require revenue to survive. The most prevalent revenue stream for search engines is sponsored search, where content providers have search engines service their links to users in response to queries or in a contextual manner on relevant Web sites. In exchange for providing this service, content providers pay search engines based on the number of clicks (i.e., a click being a visit by a user to the content providers Web page). This business model has proven to be very effective for the search engines, content providers, and searchers. However, click fraud, a unique form of adversarial information retrieval, threatens this business model and, therefore, the “free search” that has rapidly become indispensable to the daily lives of many people. In this paper, we outline how sponsored search is a unique form of information retrieval – not just a mode of advertising, what is click fraud, how click fraud happens, and what are some possible countermeasures.
Programming models for hybrid CPU/FPGA chips

Designers of embedded and real-time systems are continually challenged to meet tighter system requirements at better price-performance ratios. Best-practice methods have long promoted the use of commercial-off-the-shelf components to reduce design costs and time to market, but creating COTS components that are reusable in a wide range of applications remains difficult. In part, the challenge lies in satisfying the contradictory design forces of generalization and specialization. Systems designers are all too familiar with the tension these opposing forces cause in trying to balance cost versus performance. Adopting COTS components reduces costs and time to market but often fails to meet the most demanding performance requirements; custom-designed components can achieve significantly higher performance but at greater development costs and longer times to market. Emerging hybrid chips containing both CPU and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) components are an exciting new development. They promise COTS economies of scale while also supporting significant hardware customization. Components that combine a CPU and reconfigurable logic gates need a programming model that abstracts the computational hardware.
Return of the hardware floating-point elementary function

The study of specific hardware circuits for the evaluation of floating-point elementary functions was once an active research area, until it was realized that these functions were not frequent enough to justify dedicating silicon to them. Research then turned to software functions. This situation may be about to change again with the advent of reconfigurable co-processors based on field-programmable gate arrays. Such co-processors now have a capacity that allows them to accommodate double-precision floating-point computing. Hardware operators for elementary functions targeted to such platforms have the potential to vastly outperform software functions, and will not permanently waste silicon resources. This article studies the optimization, for this target technology, of operators for the exponential and logarithm functions up to double-precision. These operators are freely available from www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/Arenaire/.
A Bibliometric Study of Citations to Sport Management and Marketing Journals

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of seven sport management and marketing journals on sport-related research published in 20 top tier generic management and marketing journals. Ten top tier management and 10 top tier marketing journals were inventoried to ascertain the number of sport-related management and marketing manuscripts published in those journals from 1987 to 2007. Twenty-five sport management and 51 sport marketing-related manuscripts were identified in the generic journals. From these manuscripts, twelve citations to the seven sport journals were identified in the management publications and 98 citations to the seven sport journals were found in the marketing publications. Sport Marketing Quarterly (62) was the most cited sport management and marketing journal followed by the Journal of Sport Management (28). Results also identify citation frequency by year, first citations and time taken for the seven sport journals to record first citations, author citation frequency and.
Sub-diffraction imaging on standard microscopes through photobleaching microscopy with non-linear processing

Visualization of organelles and molecules at nanometer resolution is revolutionizing the biological sciences. However, such technology is still limited for many cell biologists. We present here a novel approach using photobleaching microscopy with non-linear processing (PiMP) for sub-diffraction imaging. Bleaching of fluorophores both within the single-molecule regime and beyond allows visualization of stochastic representations of sub-populations of fluorophores by imaging the same region over time. Our method is based on enhancing the probable positions of the fluorophores underlying the images. The random nature of the bleached fluorophores is assessed by calculating the deviation of the local actual bleached fluorescence intensity to the average bleach expectation as given by the overall decay of intensity. Subtracting measured from estimated decay images yields differential images. Non-linear enhancement of maxima in these diffraction-limited differential images approximates the positions of the underlying structure. Summing many such processed differential images yields a super-resolution PiMP image. PiMP allows multi-color, three-dimensional sub-diffraction imaging of cells and tissues using common fluorophores and can be implemented on standard wide-field or confocal systems.
Strategic subcortical hyperintensities in cholinergic pathways and executive function decline in treated Alzheimer patients.

OBJECTIVE To investigate changes in cognition, function, and behavior after 1 year in patients with Alzheimer disease being treated with cholinesterase inhibitors, in relation to the presence or absence of subcortical hyperintensities involving the cholinergic pathways. DESIGN One-year prospective cohort study. SETTING Memory Clinic, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, University of Toronto. Patients Ninety patients with possible/probable Alzheimer disease who were being treated with cholinesterase inhibitors at baseline. INTERVENTIONS Yearly standardized neuropsychological testing and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The Cholinergic Pathways Hyperintensities Scale (CHIPS) was applied to baseline MRIs to rate the severity of subcortical hyperintensities in cholinergic pathways. The consensus-derived Age-Related White Matter Changes (ARWMC) Rating Scale was used as a general measure of white matter disease burden. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Tests of global cognition, function, and behavior and specific cognitive and functional domains. RESULTS Patients in the low CHIPS group were equivalent to those in the high CHIPS group with regard to baseline demographic characteristics, cognitive severity, and vascular risk factors. After covarying age and education, no differences were found after 1 year in overall cognition, function, and behavior or on memory, language, and visuospatial tasks. Patients in the high CHIPS group showed improvement on executive function and working memory tasks compared with those in the low CHIPS group. For the ARWMC scale, groups with and without white matter abnormalities were equivalent on baseline demographics and in cognitive, functional, and behavioral outcomes. CONCLUSION Cerebrovascular compromise of the cholinergic pathways may be a factor that contributes more selectively than does total white matter lesion burden to response to cholinergic therapy in Alzheimer disease, particularly on frontal/executive tasks.
Multi-Agent Planning as a Dynamic Search for Social Consensus

When autonomous agents attempt to coordinate action, it is often necessary that they reach some kind of consensus. Reaching consensus has traditionally been dealt with in the Distributed Artificial Intelligence literature via negotiation. Another alternative is to have agents use a voting mechanism; each agent expresses its preferences, and a group choice mechanism is used to select the result. Some choice mechanisms are better than others, and ideally we would like one that cannot, be manipulated by untruthful agents. Coordination of actions by a group of agents corresponds to a group planning process. We here introduce a new multi-agent planning technique, that makes use of a dynamic, iterative search procedure. Through a process of group constraint aggregation, agents incrementally construct a plan that brings the group to a state maximizing social welfare. At each step, agents vote about the next joint action in the group plan (i.e., what the next transition state will be in the emerging plan) Using this technique agents need not fully reveal their preferences, and the set of alternative final states need not be generated in advance of a vote. With a minor variation, the entire procedure can be made resistant to untruthful agents.
Misogyny on Twitter

This study was undertaken to better understand the volume, degree and type of misogynistic language used on Twitter. Summary While the internet was seen as a utopian platform for free speech and equality when it began to become popularly used in the 1990s, it was evident from the very start that the inequalities that structured ‘real-world’ society had been transferred online. In particular, the online space has long been a difficult place for women to operate. Research has consistently found that women are subjected to more bullying, abuse, hateful language and threats than men when on-line. There is significant debate and discussion about the extent of misogyny on line – and on Twitter in particular – and what might be driving it. Demos ran a series of short studies in order to better understand the volume, degree and type of misogynistic language used on Twitter. Tweets that featured the words 'rape', 'slut' and 'whore' were captured over two short periods during Winter 2013-4 and analysed using natural language processing techniques. This report reveals that of over 100,000 Tweets mentioning 'rape' between 26th Decmber 2013 and 9th February 2014, more than 1 in 10 appeared to be threatening in nature. A high proportion of Tweets containing misogynistc language were judged to be doing so in a 'casual' or metaphorical way. This report also suggests that women are almost as likely as men to use the terms 'slut' and 'whore' on Twitter, and that women are increasingly inclined to use the same derogatory language that has been, and continues to be, used against them. Finally, unusual use of misogynistic terms tends to be in response to events such as television programmes, rather than to rape coverage in the media.
Adding preemption to TinyOS

Event-driven operating systems such as TinyOS are the preferred choice for wireless sensor networks. Alternative designs such as MANTIS following a classical multi-threaded approach are also available. Event-based systems are generally more energy efficient than multi-threaded systems. However, multi-threaded systems are more capable than event-based systems of supporting time critical tasks as task preemption is supported. Timeliness can be traded for energy efficiency by choosing the appropriate operating system. In our recent work we have shown that the multi-threaded system MANTIS can be modified to be as energy efficient as TinyOS. As a result, the modified MANTIS can be used to fit both sensor network design goals of energy efficiency and timeliness. This solution is not considered optimal as most existing sensor network applications and software libraries are developed for TinyOS. Therefore, we present a TinyOS modification that adds preemption while retaining the existing TinyOS structure and features.
QT interval in right and left bundle-branch block.

The QT interval of the electrocardiogram is prolonged in right and left bundle-branch block. Since the QT interval is not prolonged outside the normal range due to myocardial disease alone, this lengthening of the QT interval is due to the conduction defect and is probably due to delayed depolarization (and thus repolarization) of the heart. There is, however, a significant difference in the QT interval in left and right bundle-branch block (t= 386; P< ooi), since the QT was shorter in right than in left bundle-branch block. This may be due to the completion of normal repolarization in the left ventricle, so that only in some cases of right bundle-branch block does repolarization end in the right ventricle.
Tararira : Query By Singing System

This extended abstract details a submission to the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange in the Query by Singing/Humming task. The problem of query by singing consists of building a machine capable of simulating the cognitive process of identifying a musical piece from a few sung notes of its melody. In this work, the algorithms of pitch tracking, onset detection and melody matching used in the system Tararira [1] are briefly described. Much effort has been put on automatic transcription of singing voice as it is a key factor in the overall performance. A novel way of combining note by note matching with the approach based on pitch time series matching is introduced.
OFRewind: Enabling Record and Replay Troubleshooting for Networks

Debugging operational networks can be a daunting task, due to their size, distributed state, and the presence of black box components such as commercial routers and switches, which are poorly instrumentable and only coarsely configurable. The debugging tool set available to administrators is limited, and provides only aggregated statistics (SNMP), sampled data (NetFlow/sFlow), or local measurements on single hosts (tcpdump). In this paper, we leverage split forwarding architectures such as OpenFlow to add record and replay debugging capabilities to networks - a powerful, yet currently lacking approach. We present the design of OFRewind, which enables scalable, multi-granularity, temporally consistent recording and coordinated replay in a network, with fine-grained, dynamic, centrally orchestrated control over both record and replay. Thus, OFRewind helps operators to reproduce software errors, identify datapath limitations, or locate configuration errors.
Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis in california, 1993-2006.

BACKGROUND Extensively drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) is a global public health emergency. We investigated the characteristics and extent of XDR TB in California to inform public health interventions. METHODS XDR TB was defined as TB with resistance to at least isoniazid, rifampin, a fluoroquinolone, and 1 of 3 injectable second-line drugs (amikacin, kanamycin, or capreomycin). Pre-XDR TB was defined as TB with resistance to isoniazid and rifampin and either a fluoroquinolone or second-line injectable agent but not both. We analyzed TB case reports submitted to the state TB registry for the period 1993-2006. Local health departments and the state TB laboratory were queried to ensure complete drug susceptibility reporting. RESULTS Among 424 multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB cases with complete drug susceptibility reporting, 18 (4.2%) were extensively drug resistant, and 77 (18%) were pre-extensively drug resistant. The proportion of pre-XDR TB cases increased over time, from 7% in 1993 to 32% in 2005 (P = .02)). Among XDR TB cases, 83% of cases involved foreign-born patients, and 43% were diagnosed in patients within 6 months after arrival in the United States. Mexico was the most common country of origin. Five cases (29%) of XDR TB were acquired during therapy in California. All patients with XDR TB had pulmonary disease, and most had prolonged infectious periods; the median time for conversion of sputum culture results was 195 days. Among 17 patients with known outcomes, 7 (41.2%) completed therapy, 5 (29.4%) moved, and 5 (29.4%) died. One patient continues to receive treatment. CONCLUSIONS XDR TB and pre-XDR TB cases comprise a substantial fraction of MDR TB cases in California, indicating the need for interventions that improve surveillance, directly observed therapy, and rapid drug susceptibility testing and reporting.
Helping Students with LD Progress as Writers

I have just returned for a morning observing five firstand secondgrade classrooms. My daughter, Leah, will be starting school this next year and my wife and I are looking at how several schools she might attend approach writing instruction in the primary grades. Though I did not have a list of specific questions to ask as I observed each class and talked to the teachers, I did have a mental map of some of the things that I hoped to see. These included:
Spectral Embedding of Signed Networks

Social networks are often modelled by graphs, with nodes representing individuals, and positively weighted edges representing the strength of the relationships between them. Working directly with such graphs is difficult, and it has become common to use spectral techniques that embed graphs in a geometry, and then work with the geometry instead. In a good embedding, edges that are heavily (positively) weighted, and so represent strong interactions, cause the vertices they connect to be embedded close to one another. However, in some social networks there are also antagonistic relationships that are naturally represented by negatively weighted edges. The resulting graphs are called signed graphs. Clearly an embedding of such a signed graph should place nodes connected by positively weighted edges close together, but nodes connected by negatively weighted edges far apart. Existing spectral techniques to embed signed graphs have serious drawbacks. We derive two normalized spectral analysis methods for signed graphs and show, using realworld data, that they produce robust embeddings.
SUPPORTING REFLECTIVE LEARNING FOR DAILY ACTIVITIES USING AN INTERACTIVE DASHBOARD

This paper presents the motivation, design and evaluation of an interactive dashboard, supporting reflective learning for daily activities. Based on gathering data from a 4-week field trial in which 24 participants used a Fitbit and a GPS tracker, design and interaction recommendations were made by taking the Fitbit dashboard as a starting point. A dashboard was developed according to the visual analytics model proposed by Keim, Mansmann, Schneidewind, Thomas, and Ziegler (2008). This model describes the iterative process of data gathering and exploration, hypothesis building, visualization design and analysis, and the gaining of insight by directly interacting with the gathered data. This study aims to evaluate the e↵ectiveness of using a visual analytics tool to facilitate insight into how this daily physical activity data yields to reflective learning, also known as learning by returning to and evaluating past work performances and personal experiences in order to promote continuous learning and improve future experiences (Boud, 1985).
Social Behavior of Field Independents and Dependents in an Organic Group

This study hypothesized that the social behavioral of field independent-dependent (Witkin, 1978) subjects in a noncontrived organic group will differ along the task emotionally-expressive dimensions identified by Bales and Cohen (1979). In addition, the study sought to establish discriminant validity for the field independent-cognitive style variable by contrasting it with apparently similar but conceptually different variables, i.e., dogmatism and sociability. Behaviors of field independents and dependents were observed over 25 1 ½-hr sessions, spread over a 4-month period. Social behaviors of participants were rated by both participating and nonparticipating observers at the middle and at the end of sessions by Bales' Interpersonal Rating Forms. Field independence and dependence was found not related to dogmatism or sociability. As hypothesized, field dependents behaved in a responsive, task-oriented, problem-solving mode while field independents behaved in a social-emotional rebellious and resistant mode in the present organic group. It was concluded that field independents show discomfort in the organic group by withdrawing from and rebelling against the task and its leadership. Field dependents accept and are supportive of the socially open-ended task of the organic group and its leadership.
Achievement Goals and their Correlates among American and Chinese Students in Physical Education

The purpose of this study was to examine achievement goals and their correlates in physical education from a cross-cultural perspective. One hundred and eighty Chinese students and 121 Anglo-American students in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades completed questionnaires assessing their goal orientations, perceived ability, task choice, and satisfaction in physical education. Analyses indicated that the same two-dimensional factor structure of goal orientation, namely, task and ego orientation, cut across the two cultural groups in physical education. Cultural variations were found for the relationships between achievement goals and related motivational variables. The findings suggest that factorial structure of achievement goal holds cross-culturally, whereas the relationships vary as a function of cultural background of students.
Assessment of a Low-Power 65 nm CMOS Technology for Analog Front-End Design

This work is concerned with the study of the analog properties of MOSFET devices belonging to a 65 nm CMOS technology with emphasis on intrinsic voltage gain and noise performance. This node appears to be a robust and promising solution to cope with the unprecedented requirements set by silicon vertex trackers in experiments upgrades and future colliders as well as by imaging detectors at light sources and free electron lasers. In this scaled-down technology, the impact of new dielectric materials and processing techniques on the analog behavior of MOSFETs has to be carefully evaluated. An inversion level design methodology has been adopted to analyze data obtained from device measurements and provide a powerful tool to establish design criteria for detector front-ends in this nanoscale CMOS process. A comparison with data coming from less scaled technologies, such as 90 nm and 130 nm nodes, is also provided and can be used to evaluate the resolution limits achievable for low-noise charge sensitive amplifiers in the 100 nm minimum feature size range.