Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detecting Disordered Eating among Recreational Exercisers; Exploring the Role of Personal Trainers

This study aimed to understand how personal trainers identify and manage disordered eating among their clients. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with eleven UK based personal trainers to document their experiences of working with clients exhibiting symptoms of disordered eating. The interviews were recorded, fully transcribed and subjected to a thematic analysis. The findings suggest that personal trainers rely on external cues to identify disordered eating among clients such as changes to physical appearance, exercise behaviours and performance. The findings also revealed that personal trainers lack knowledge and hold misconceptions about disordered eating. Such misconceptions influenced their ability to identify and manage potential problems among their clients. Participants described the need for further education and guidelines to increase their knowledge and confidence in identifying and managing disordered eating among their clients. The findings from this study will be useful for professional bodies and practitioners in the development of guidelines and educational material for personal trainers.
Validation of Embedded Systems Behavioral Models on a Component-Based Ericsson Nikola Tesla Demonstrator

Embedded systems are challenging to design, due to the implementation platform constraints that have to be considered, preferably from early stages of design, next-by system functionality. Hence, embedded system models need to be timing and resource-aware, to make formal verification of extra functional properties applicable at high levels of abstraction. In most cases, a frequent obstacle to the successful application of such rigorous techniques is the lack of the proposed models'validation against real-world application measurements. In this paper, we show how to model extra-functional behavior, and verify the resulted behavioral models of a component-based Ericsson Nikola Tesla prototype telecommunications system. The models are described in our recently introduced REMES language, with Priced Timed Automata semantics that allows us to apply UPPAAL -based tools for model-checking the system'sresponse time and compute optimal resource usage traces. The validation of our models is ensured by using actual values of timing, CPU, and memory usage in our models, measured by Ericsson researchers on the prototype's source code.
An exploratory study of sexism in online gaming communities: Mapping contested digital terrain

An awareness is emerging of women’s participation in online games and it’s culture, however they may experience substantive challenges in laying claim to the ‘gamer identity’, within digital domains described as masculine, and sometimes hostile spaces by players, campaigners and activists. In public discourse, gaming is becoming increasingly synonymous with sexism; with media reporting harassment of female-identifying gamers as well as those who voice concern about these issues. The gendered dimension of these issues tends to be fiercely disputed and has competing understandings in online spaces. This study combined issue network analysis and grounded theory to produce a contextualised exploration of the ways in which sexism was understood in such communities. Analysis of multi-modal data revealed three categories which were strategic in framing this debate including; 1) potential (mis)recognition of such behaviours within these contexts, 2) mistaken emphasis upon the gendered dimension of identity within interactions, and 3) qualification to ‘count’ and be heard on these issues. Online spaces reproduce inequalities that exist offline and owing to the technological affordances and contextual nuances, are also sites of cultural production where relations of gendered power may be configured. The implications for transformation efforts to promote inclusive spaces are considered.
I Know Where You've Been: Geo-Inference Attacks via the Browser Cache

To provide more relevant content and better responsiveness, many websites customize their services according to users' geolocations. However, if geo-oriented websites leave location-sensitive content in the browser cache, other sites can sniff that content via side channels. The authors' case studies demonstrate the reliability and power of geo-inference attacks, which can measure the timing of browser cache queries and track a victim's country, city, and neighborhood. Existing defenses cannot effectively prevent such attacks, and additional support is required for a better defense deployment.
Differences in STEM doctoral publication by ethnicity, gender and academic field at a large public research university

Two independent surveys of PhD students in STEM fields at the University of California, Berkeley, indicate that underrepresented minorities (URMs) publish at significantly lower rates than non-URM males, placing the former at a significant disadvantage as they compete for postdoctoral and faculty positions. Differences as a function of gender reveal a similar, though less consistent, pattern. A conspicuous exception is Berkeley’s College of Chemistry, where publication rates are tightly clustered as a function of ethnicity and gender, and where PhD students experience a highly structured program that includes early and systematic involvement in research, as well as clear expectations for publishing. Social science research supports the hypothesis that this more structured environment hastens the successful induction of diverse groups into the high-performance STEM academic track.
28 V low thermal impedance HBT with 20 W CW output power

AlGaAs/GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistors have been fabricated which exhibit record output power for GaAs flip-chip technology, and record operating voltage for GaAs microwave power devices. Transistors with 2 mm emitter length readily achieve 20 W CW output power at 2 GHz when biased at 28 V, with typical power-added efficiencies of 62% (typical collector efficiencies of 70%). Maximum CW output power of 25 W has been obtained, corresponding to a power density of 12.5 W/mm.
Looking beyond the idyllic representations of the rural: The Konkan Railway controversy and middle-class environmentalism in India

Post-independence India has had its share of controversies around mega-infrastructure projects that have pitted environmental preservation against development concerns. This article studies the environmental controversy around one such megaproject, the Konkan Railway, employing a framework that integrates the environmental values, beliefs and behaviour of individuals and groups with a historical understanding of political economy and ecology (science). Essentialist and over-simplified environmental discourses, without scientific credibility and not based on historical facts, are often influential in policy making, especially when channelled by the middle classes. Better understanding our present concerns and guiding decisions and policies to deal with the problems we currently face, requires unmasking the romanticization of the countryside. We must replace the idyllic version of the past with a nuanced historical understanding of the interaction between nature and culture. This article also locates the controversy over the Konkan Railway within the frames used to study Indian environmentalism. The aim is to improve our understanding of the regional, ideological and cultural pluralities in environmental values, beliefs and behaviour of the middle class in India.
Statistical timing analysis using levelized covariance propagation

Variability in process parameters is making accurate timing analysis of nanoscale integrated circuits an extremely challenging task. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for statistical timing analysis using levelized covariance propagation (LCP). The algorithm simultaneously considers the impact of random placement of dopants (which makes every transistor in a die independent in terms of threshold voltage) and the spatial correlation of the process parameters such as channel length, transistor width and oxide thickness due to the intra-die variations. It also considers the signal correlation due to reconvergent paths in the circuit. Results on several benchmark circuits in 70 nm technology show an average of 0.21 % and 1.07 % errors in mean and the standard deviation, respectively, in timing analysis using the proposed technique compared to the Monte-Carlo analysis.
Subgradient methods with perturbations in network problems

We study the impact of perturbations on the convergence of the subgradient method for the dual problem in constrained convex optimisation. Perturbations are likely to be present in practical implementations of the subgradient method and can affect either the computation of a subgradient, the update of the dual variables, or both. In the context of networks, perturbations can be related to the exchange of network information, time varying channel conditions, discrete actions, etc. The analysis presented in this paper is general, and establishes the conditions under which the objective function will converge to the optimum asymptotically. With an example, we illustrate how the analysis can be applied to network flow problems where the intensity of the flows that arrive in the system changes over time.
Satellite Image Classification via Two-Layer Sparse Coding With Biased Image Representation

This letter presents a method for satellite image classification aiming at the following two objectives: 1) involving visual attention into the satellite image classification; biologically inspired saliency information is exploited in the phase of the image representation, making our method more concentrated on the interesting objects and structures, and 2) handling the satellite image classification without the learning phase. A two-layer sparse coding (TSC) model is designed to discover the “true” neighbors of the images and bypass the intensive learning phase of the satellite image classification. The underlying philosophy of the TSC is that an image can be more sparsely reconstructed via the images (sparse I) belonging to the same category (sparse II). The images are classified according to a newly defined “image-to-category” similarity based on the coding coefficients. Requiring no training phase, our method achieves very promising results. The experimental comparisons are shown on a real satellite image database.
Electronic Communications of the EASST Volume X ( 2007 ) Proceedings of the Third International ERCIM Symposium on Software Evolution ( Software Evolution 2007 ) Evolution styles : change patterns for Software Evolution

Patterns have been proved useful in many problem domains. In the domain of software evolution, only behaviour-preserving patterns (e.g. refactorings) have ever been proposed. This paper proposes to broaden the scope of change patterns by means of a reification of any evolution efforts into styles. We define an evolution style as a first-class entity which is specified once and can be applied many times. Evolution styles allow the specification of (non) behaviour-preserving change patterns. We exemplify the use of the evolution style concept by means of two applications which evolve in a style-based way.
Automating the Choice of Consistency Levels in Replicated Systems

Online services often use replication for improving the performance of user-facing services. However, using replication for performance comes at a price of weakening the consistency levels of the replicated service. To address this tension, recent proposals from academia and industry allow operations to run at different consistency levels. In these systems, the programmer has to decide which level to use for each operation. We present SIEVE, a tool that relieves Java programmers from this errorprone decision process, allowing applications to automatically extract good performance when possible, while resorting to strong consistency whenever required by the target semantics. Taking as input a set of application-specific invariants and a few annotations about merge semantics, SIEVE performs a combination of static and dynamic analysis, offline and at runtime, to determine when it is necessary to use strong consistency to preserve these invariants and when it is safe to use causally consistent commutative replicated data types (CRDTs). We evaluate SIEVE on two web applications and show that the automatic classification overhead is low.
VISUAL DISCOMFORT IS NOT ALWAYS PROPORTIONAL TO EYE BLINKING RATE: EXPLORING SOME EFFECTS OF PLANAR AND IN-DEPTH MOTION ON 3DTV QOE

Visual discomfort is an important factor in determining QoE in 3DTV. It can be measured by physiological signals. In this study, the relationship between 3D video characteristics (e.g., motion type, disparity, velocity, etc), visual discomfort and eye blinking rate were studied. Three motion types were considered, which were static scenes, planar motion and in-depth motion. 44 stimuli with dierent motion types, disparity levels and velocity levels were studied. The eye blinking signals of 28 observers were obtained by an electro-physiological measurement device. The experimental results showed that stimulus velocity aected eye blinks signicantly and dierently for planar motion stimuli and in-depth motion stimuli. A general objective eye blinking model for 3D stimuli was developed in function of disparity oset, disparity amplitude, planar motion velocity, in-depth motion velocity and the frequency of changing the motion direction of in-depth motion. Furthermore, the results showed that eye blinking rate was proportional to the visual discomfort of the static 3D stimuli but inversely proportional to the visual discomfort of planar motion stimuli.
Australian women’s experiences of smoking, cessation and ‘cutting down’ during pregnancy

ABSTRACT This article presents an analysis of interviews with Australian women who had smoked or were currently smoking during pregnancy. It explores how they spoke about their experiences of smoking, cessation and harm minimisation during pregnancy. Eighteen women underwent a single in-depth interview, these were analysed using an iterative thematic method. We found that smoking, cessation and harm minimisation by pregnant women are complex social practices. Participants viewed smoking as a potential risk to fetal health and as an actual risk to their own health and described feeling embarrassed and ashamed of smoking when pregnant. Their opinions about the relative seriousness of health risks posed by smoking when pregnant were often informed by their own personal observations and experiences. Participants used this knowledge to engage in lay epidemiological processes as they rationalised and made sense of the relative risks of smoking, quitting or cutting down. They also sought legitimacy for their claims about the safety of quitting or cutting down in two potentially contradictory ways. These were personal experience/observations and medical advice. Our findings contribute to sociological understanding about lay responses to medical advice on smoking in pregnancy and will be of value to healthcare professionals who work with pregnant women.
Home Learning Environments: A Cross-Cultural Study Between Germany and Iran

The home learning environment (HLE) index is composed of seven questions regarding educational parent–child interactions. To compare the psychometric characteristics of the six items of HLE index between the two different contexts of Germany and Iran, a sample including 468 preschool children from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), Germany, and 465 preschool children from the Longitudinal Study of Iranian Children (LSIC; Growing Up in Iran) were examined. Rasch analysis supports the fitness of the five items of HLE into the model in both countries. However, differential item functioning (DIF) results revealed significant differences between items functioning across the two samples. According to the item difficulty maps, reading to children was the most reported item in the German families, while Iranian parents tended to paint and draw with their children more. While findings support the construct validity and reliability of five of the six items in both samples, different Rasch results may reveal the effects of the cultural dimensions of each country on HLE items.
From dance notation to human animation: The LabanDancer project

Symbolic systems such as Labanotation for notating dance and choreography provide a critical tool for the preservation of cultural heritage in what once was considered an ‘illiterate’ art form. While the goals of such notation systems are laudable, the unfortunate reality is that most dancers and choreographers cannot read or write the notation; that is, they are loath to take the considerable effort to learn a rich, but complex methodology. To make Labanotation scores more accessible the LabanDancer system has been developed to translate Labanotation scores recorded in the LabanWriter editor into 3‐d human figure animations. A major challenge in the development of this translator has been to find approaches that are general enough to create reasonable animations for a wide variety of different movements. Any translator must also take account of the context of a movement since this can affect the interpretation of the Labanotation scores. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Random Coding Bound for E-Capacity of DMC with Stochastic Encoding

This paper gives a lower bound for rate-reliability function of the discrete memoryless channel(DMC) with stochastic encoding. The result shows that, the stochastic encoding gets bigger random coding bound rather than that of the discrete memoryless channel where deterministic encoding is applied. Mathematics Subject Classification: 68P30, 94A24
Enhanced learning in the parish context: a learning community approach

ABSTRACT The author undertook a research project with parishes in the Anglican Diocese of Adelaide, South Australia, 2013–2014 to find evidence, if any, as to whether a learning community approach enhanced learning outcomes in parishes. The three learning processes of holism, collaboration and theological reflection define this approach. The image of the ‘body of Christ’ provides a biblical foundation for the approach. The article explores the effectiveness of a learning community process in relation to the enhancement of learning outcomes. Research participants reported much growth and enhancement of their knowledge, understanding and practice of the Christian faith where parishes practised all three learning processes. Implications of the research results for parish ministry practice today are discussed.
ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF MAPPINGS FOR ITERATIVE DECODING OF BICM

1 This work was sponsored by NEWCOM and DoCoMo Communications Laboratories Europe GmbH Abstract: We consider bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) for bandwidth efficient transmission, where the bit error rate is reduced through iterations between a multilevel demapper and a simple channel decoder. The iterations lead to a performance gain only if a suitable mapping of the bits to the complex transmit symbols is chosen. We investigate properties of mappings and compare different methods to find mappings optimized for arbitrary, high order signal constellations.
Loop Calculus in Statistical Physics and Information Science

Considering a discrete and finite statistical model of a general position we introduce an exact expression for the partition function in terms of a finite series. The leading term in the series is the Bethe-Peierls (belief propagation) (BP) contribution; the rest are expressed as loop contributions on the factor graph and calculated directly using the BP solution. The series unveils a small parameter that often makes the BP approximation so successful. Applications of the loop calculus in statistical physics and information science are discussed.
Social and Emotional Learning in Schools: From Programs to Strategies and commentaries

S chools are an important context for children’s social and emotional development. In classrooms and other school settings, children and adolescents need to have skills such as managing negative emotions, being calm and focused, following directions, and navigating relationships with peers and adults. To build and support these skills, schools have widely adopted social and emotional learning (SEL) programs. When well-designed and well-implemented, SEL programs are associated with positive outcomes; however, effect sizes are generally modest even for the most promising interventions. This issue of Social Policy Report proposes that schools should take a new approach: integrating the teaching and reinforcement of SEL skills into their daily interactions and practices with students. It explains that research warrants a new perspective and highlights a range of new approaches and support strategies that are designed to be time-efficient, low-cost, and integrated with (rather than distracting from) academic curricula. These strategies are grounded in an organizing framework for SEL and a review of current programmatic approaches to SEL. They are introduced with a set of principles for creating better integration of SEL into educational practice and accompanied by recommendations about the role of policy.
Real-Time Implementation and Hardware Testing of a Hybrid Vehicle Energy Management Controller Based on Stochastic Dynamic Programming

An energy management controller based on shortest path stochastic dynamic programming (SP-SDP) is implemented and tested in a prototype vehicle. The controller simultaneously optimizes fuel economy and powertrain activity, namely gear shifts and engine on–off events. Previous work reported on the controller's design and its extensive simulation-based evaluation. This paper focuses on implementation of the controller algorithm in hardware. Practical issues concerning real-time computability, driver perception, and command timing are highlighted and addressed. The SP-SDP controllers are shown to run in real-time, gracefully handle variations in engine start and gear-shift-completion times, and operate in a manner that is transparent to the driver. A hardware problem with the test vehicle restricted its maximum engine torque, which prevented a reliable fuel economy assessment of the SP-SDP controller. The data that were collected indicated that SP-SDP controllers could be straightforwardly designed to operate at different points of the fuel economy tradeoff curve and that their fuel economy may equal or exceed that of a baseline industrial controller designed for the vehicle.
Machine Learning, Special Issue on Unsupervised Learning, 1?? (to Appear) Supervised versus Unsupervised Binary-learning

Binary classiication is typically achieved by supervised learning methods. Nevertheless , it is also possible using unsupervised schemes. This paper describes a connectionist unsupervised approach to binary classiication and compares its performance to that of its supervised counterpart. The approach consists of training an autoassociator to reconstruct the positive class of a domain at the output layer. After training, the autoassociator is used for classiication, relying on the idea that if the network generalizes to a novel instance, then this instance must be positive, but that if generalization fails, then the instance must be negative. When tested on three real-world domains, the autoassociator proved more accurate at classiication than its supervised counterpart, MLP, on two of these domains and as accurate on the third. The paper seeks to generalize these results and concludes that, in addition to learning a concept in the absence of negative examples, 1) autoassociation is more eecient than MLP in multi-modal domains, and 2) it is more accurate than MLP in multi-modal domains for which the negative class creates a particularly strong need for specialization or the positive class creates a particularly weak need for specialization. In multi-modal domains for which the positive class creates a particularly strong need for specialization, on the other hand, MLP is more accurate than autoassociation.