Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Experiences of Rural Volunteer Firefighters: a Mixed-Methods Approach.

Previous studies have examined the motivations, characteristics, and health outcomes of volunteer and paid firefighters. No research to date, however, has examined these psychological outcomes and their implications for role perception in firefighters who work in rural Canadian settings. The present study analyzed the experiences of volunteer firefighters in rural jurisdictions to understand their motivations, experiences of the role, and the well-being outcomes of the participants. A mixed-methods approach was employed, utilizing phenomenological analysis of interview transcripts as well as a Volunteer Firefighter Job Design Scale (VFJDS) to assess the reports of volunteers in rural stations in Alberta. The VFJDS highlighted a diversity of volunteer activities that extended beyond fire related incidents and reflected their rural environment. Review of the transcripts revealed five themes that defined the experiences of the participants: community support, camaraderie, personal factors, humanizing the hero image, role clarity, and community support. These findings have implications for the strategies of recruitment officers and trauma service providers. EXPERIENCES OF RURAL VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTERS iii This thesis is an original work by Samantha K. Jones. The research project, of which this thesis is a part, received research ethics approval from the University of Alberta Research Ethics Board, Project Name “The Experiences of Urban and Rural Volunteer Firefighters: a Mixed Methods Approach” No. Pro00061134, February 5, 2016. EXPERIENCES OF RURAL VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTERS iv
MISTY , KASUMI and Camellia Cipher Algorithm Development

MISTY and the Design Intent Behind it MISTY is the family name for two 64-bit blockcipher algorithms, MISTY1 and MISTY2, that have 128-bit keys, designed by the corporation with detailed specifications announced in academic conferences in 1996 and 1997. [1] [2] In terms of security, MISTY has the major benefit of “provable security,” in which the security is proven mathematically against differential cryptanalysis and linear cryptanalysis, which are extremely powerful methods for
Low rank sequential subspace clustering

Sequential data are ubiquitous in data analysis. For example hyperspectral data taken from a drill hole in geology, high throughput X-ray diffraction measurements in materials research and EEG brain wave signals in neuroscience. The common feature of sequential data is that they are all acquired subject to one external variable such as location, time or temperature. The data evolve along the direction of that variable through several patterns and the “neighboring” data are very likely to share similar features. The purpose of the segmentation for sequential data is then to identify those sequentially continuous segments/patterns. We approach this problem by adopting the subspace clustering method and propose a novel algorithm called low rank sequential subspace clustering (LRSSC), inspired by another method called spatial subspace clustering (SpatSC). SpatSC finds the subspaces by data self-reconstruction with a sparsity constraint on reconstruction weights and promotes the spatial smoothness of the weights by fusion, the essential part in the fused LASSO. However, the subspace identification capability is limited due to the indeterminacy of the sparse regression in finding suitable samples to linearly reconstruct a given sample. This confuses the graph cut algorithm that produces the final clustering results on the weights. To overcome this drawback, we propose to use the low rank penalty instead of sparsity in learning phase to separate subspaces. This improves the subspace identification as well as the robustness to noise. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we test LRSSC on both simulated and real world data compared with SpatSC and other methods. The proposed algorithm is superior to others when noise level is very high.
Demonstrating Anishinaabe storywork circle pedagogy: creating conceptual space for ecological relational knowledge in the classroom.

Aboriginal education reform policies, Truth and Reconciliation initiatives, and climate change indicators signal opportunity and an urgency for action to effect positive change through relationship with Aki1. Aboriginal peoples’ ancient and wholistic ways of knowing, being, doing, and feeling are touchstones to support timely transformative processes in education and Canadian society. Current educational initiatives emphasize learning Aboriginal content and the integration of historical perspectives and contemporary arts into the Ontario curricula. This case study of 17 participants in a grade 4/5 classroom explores a research journey in northeastern Ontario demonstrating how the oral tradition and an Anishinaabe storywork Circle pedagogy create conceptual space for Anishinaabe ecological relational knowledge within the urban public school classroom. An Anishinaabe shared learning process devoid of power imbalance draws on the life experience of each student and educator in a culture and land-based approach. This study addresses the following research questions: What is Anishinaabe ecological relational knowledge and what principles and concepts of Anishinaabe ecological relational knowledge are made visible in a public school classroom? How is Anishinaabe ecological relational knowledge socially enacted in the classroom? How does the teacher's perception of Anishinaabe ecological relational knowledge transform their pedagogy? A critical Indigenous2 research theory and qualitative methodological approach bring forward a narrative inclusive of teacher and elementary student voices and participant researcher reflections and query. 1 Aki is the Anishinaabemowin term for "Land". Anishinaabemowin refers to the Aboriginal languages of the Anishinaabek people, spoken by the Algonquin, Chippewa, Delaware, Mississauga, Odawa, and Ojibway and Pottawatomi people of the Great Lakes Region. 2 The term Indigenous refers to the first peoples that occupied the continents of the world and is used in this research context to refer to all first peoples-unique in our own cultures-but common in our experiences of colonialism and our understanding of the world (Wilson, 2008, p. 15).
People Like Us: Dominance-oriented Racial Affiliation Preferences and the White Greek System on a Southern U.S. Campus

ABSTRACT Studying in-group affiliation preferences can be a valuable tool for understanding race relations in the contemporary United States. We draw on theories of social dominance and social identity to analyze racial attitudes, as measured by the Social Distance Scale, for a subset of black and white students at the University of Mississippi. While both black and white students expressed strong in-group preference, this preference was stronger for whites than for blacks, especially for white women presently affiliated or planning to affiliate with campus Greek organizations. Social dominance orientation, a measure describing whether social inequalities are accepted and justified, mediated the greater in-group preference of many whites, especially for intimate or high-power relationships. We discuss possible individual and institutional causes for the differences we observe, and we draw implications for understanding continued self-segregation both on- and off-campus in a society that implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, espouses “color-blind” ideals.
Mental Health Problems among Korean American Adolescents

Korean American adolescents are a population that may be particularly vulnerable to mental health problems because of the potential cultural conflicts they face during an important developmental period. Yet little is known about the prevalence of their mental health problems. The aims of this study were to determine the prevalence of various mental health problems in a sample of Korean American adolescents, and to identify whether gender or age of the youth are associated with the types or severity of their mental health problems. This cross-sectional study included 138 Korean American adolescents from community settings in California. A demographic questionnaire and the Youth Self Report (YSR) were completed by adolescents. Descriptive analyses and t-tests were used to examine the aims. Percent of the sample falling into “normal”, “borderline”, and “clinical” ranges for different mental health problems was also determined based on normative scores provided in the YSR manual. Results indicate that 18% of the Korean American adolescents experienced clinically significant mental health problems. Most problems were of the internalizing type such as anxiety and depression where almost 23% of the youth reached the cutoff for clinical significance. The youth also experienced high levels of social problems, thought problems, and attention problems. However, scores for somatic complaints, rule-breaking behavior, and aggressive behavior as well as the composite score for externalizing problems were in the “normal” range. Girls reported higher levels of anxiety/depression and somatic complaints than boys, contributing to their higher internalizing score as well. Boys and older adolescents reported higher levels of rule-breaking behavior. A substantial percent of Korean American adolescents in this sample reported symptoms of anxiety and depression, especially girls. Findings suggest the need to screen for these problems in pediatric care and for development of prevention and referral programs in Korean American communities.
Experiments on two clock countermeasures against power analysis attacks

Two countermeasures against DPA/CPA attacks have been designed, tested and compared on an AES encoding coprocessor implemented on FPGA. Both countermeasures are based on altering the clock signal and can be readily implemented at RTL design stage. Experimental results based on first order CPA attacks confirmed the effectiveness of both the countermeasures in protecting the SBOX output, showing that even with the acquisition of 300000 power curves, the encryption key can't be revealed by the relevant correlation peaks.
Exploratory Tactile Servoing With Active Touch

A key unsolved problem in tactile robotics is how to combine tactile perception and control to interact robustly and intelligently with the surroundings. Here, we focus on a prototypical task of tactile exploration over surface features such as edges or ridges, which is a principal exploratory procedure of humans to recognize object shape. Our methods were adapted from an approach for biomimetic active touch that perceives stimulus location and identity while controlling location to aid perception. With minor modification to the control policy, to rotate the sensor to maintain a relative orientation and move tangentially (tactile servoing), the method applies also to tactile exploration. Robust exploratory tactile servoing is then attained over various two-dimensional objects, ranging from the edge of a circular disk, a volute laminar, and circular or spiral ridges. Conceptually, the approach brings together active perception and haptic exploration as instantiations of a common active touch algorithm, and has potential to generalize to more complex tasks requiring the flexibility and robustness of human touch.
Controlling a multi-joint robot for autonomous sewer inspection

In this paper a multi-joint robot for sewer inspection tasks is presented. In order to increase the operating scope the robot has been designed to run round or over obstacles, to follow sewage branches and is operated with no wire attached to it. As a result of the wireless approach the robot has to carry an energy resource and must be abbe to act autonomously. In this paper we give a short description of the mechanical design and the electronic components used. Then we describe the control system and show sequences and results of in-pipe experiments.
An efficient and robust pitch marking algorithm on the speech waveform for TD-PSOLA

In a Text-to-Speech system based on time-domain techniques that employ pitch-synchronous manipulation of the speech waveforms, one of the most important issues that affect the output quality is the way the analysis points of the speech signal are estimated and the actual points, i.e. the analysis pitchmarks. In this paper we present our methodology for calculating the pitchmarks of a speech waveform, a pitchmark detection algorithm, which after thorough experimentation and in comparison with other algorithms, proves to behave better with our TD-PSOLA-based Text-to-Speech synthesizer (Time-Domain Pitch-Synchronous Overlap Add Text to Speech System).
DIWAN: A Dialectal Word Annotation Tool for Arabic

This paper presents DIWAN, an annotation interface for Arabic dialectal texts. While the Arabic dialects differ in many respects from each other and from Modern Standard Arabic, they also have much in common. To facilitate annotation and to make it as efficient as possible, it is therefore not advisable to treat each Arabic dialect as a separate language, unrelated to the other variants of Arabic. Instead, we make analyses from other variants available to the annotator, who then can choose to use them or not.
An Opportunity Spectrum Access Based on Multichannel Sensing

In this paper, we propose an Opportunity Spectrum Access (OSA) strategy based on multichannel sensing. CR users decide the number of the channels to be used according to their own business requirements. At the same time, the channels CR users can use are limited. In the scenario, here we considered, CR users only can sense part of the channels due to hardware constraints. For the node, more time to sense means more chances to find idle channels to use, but it will decrease the time for data transmission. Therefore, the node needs to choose the optimal sensing time to get the maximal throughput. We take this problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) to find the optimal sense time.
Fosmidomycin Uptake into Plasmodium and Babesia-Infected Erythrocytes Is Facilitated by Parasite-Induced New Permeability Pathways

Background Highly charged compounds typically suffer from low membrane permeability and thus are generally regarded as sub-optimal drug candidates. Nonetheless, the highly charged drug fosmidomycin and its more active methyl-derivative FR900098 have proven parasiticidal activity against erythrocytic stages of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Both compounds target the isoprenoid biosynthesis pathway present in bacteria and plastid-bearing organisms, like apicomplexan parasites. Surprisingly, the compounds are inactive against a range of apicomplexans replicating in nucleated cells, including Toxoplasma gondii. Methodology/Principal Findings Since non-infected erythrocytes are impermeable for FR90098, we hypothesized that these drugs are taken up only by erythrocytes infected with Plasmodium. We provide evidence that radiolabeled FR900098 accumulates in theses cells as a consequence of parasite-induced new properties of the host cell, which coincide with an increased permeability of the erythrocyte membrane. Babesia divergens, a related parasite that also infects human erythrocytes and is also known to induce an increase in membrane permeability, displays a similar susceptibility and uptake behavior with regard to the drug. In contrast, Toxoplasma gondii-infected cells do apparently not take up the compounds, and the drugs are inactive against the liver stages of Plasmodium berghei, a mouse malaria parasite. Conclusions/Significance Our findings provide an explanation for the observed differences in activity of fosmidomycin and FR900098 against different Apicomplexa. These results have important implications for future screens aimed at finding new and safe molecular entities active against P. falciparum and related parasites. Our data provide further evidence that parasite-induced new permeability pathways may be exploited as routes for drug delivery.
Doing Requirements Right the First Time

The criticality of correct, complete, testable requirements is a fundamental tenet of software engineering. The success of a project, both functionally and financially, is directly affected by the quality of the requirements. Also critical is the complete requirements-based testing of the final product. This article addresses three critical aspects of requirements: definition, verification, and management. Project data collected from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) by the Software Assurance Technology Center (SATC) will be used to demonstrate these concepts and explain how any project, large or small, can apply this information.
Identifying Verb Arguments and their Syntactic Function in the Penn Treebank

In this paper, we present a tool that allows one to automatically extract verb argument-structure from the Penn Treebank as well as from other corpora annotated with the Penn Treebank release 2 conventions. More specifically, we examine each possible sequence of tags, both functional and categorial and determine whether such a sequence indicates an obligatory argument, an optional argument or a modifier. We argue that this approach is more fine-grained and thus more satisfactory than the existing approaches which have aimed at determining argumenthood in the Penn Treebank. The goal of this work is to provide a set of sufficiently general and fine-grained rules as well as an implementation which will be reusable and freely available to the research community.
New cumulant matrices for DOA estimation

We address in this paper the bearing estimation problem in the presence of spatially correlated Gaussian color noise. Two fourth-order cumulant matrices are presented. Beamspace data are processed to calculate the diagonal slice matrix and the contracted quadricovariance matrix, as a result the computation can be reduced by downsizing the cumulant matrices. The estimation performance, however, can be improved. Simulation results are presented to show that the beamspace matrices have higher resolution and lower root mean square errors than their equivalent methods in the element domain.
novel cellulose – manganese oxide hybrid material by in situ soft chemical ynthesis and its application for the removal of Pb ( II ) from water

We report an in situ soft chemical synthesis of a novel hybrid material, cellulose–nanoscale-manganese oxide composite (C–NMOC), and its application for Pb(II) removal from aqueous solutions. For comparison, detailed Pb(II) adsorption studies were also performed with nanoscale-manganese oxide powder (NMO), prepared through a similar route. Various spectroscopic and microscopic techniques were used to characterize the as-synthesized materials. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopic (XPS) measurements confirmed the existence of Mn(IV) phase in NMO whereas C–NMOC showed largely the Mn(III) phase. The existence and uniform distribution of manganese oxide in cellulose fiber materials was confirmed
Generating Motion Descriptors from MPEG-2 Compressed HDTVVideo for Content-Based Annotation and Retrieval

EEcient content-based retrieval of image and video databases has become an important industrial and consumer application due to rapid and unprecedented proliferation of compressed image and digital video data on the Internet and corporate intranets, and due to the launch of high deenition television (HDTV) broadcast in 1998. We have developed the rst HDTV video content management system to date that automatically analyzes motion occurring in MPEG-2 encoded videos within the compressed domain itself, and produces video descriptors characterizing the global visual motion for content-based retrieval applications in a digital television studio. These motion-direction and magnitude based video labels can be directly incorporated as annotation indexes into a video database or be used to construct higher level event descriptions of videos. Results from our ongoing experiments with tens of thousands of frames obtained from several MPEG-1,2] video streams of various genres demonstrate the good performance of our system in terms of motion identiication accuracy and computational eeciency.
POLY: Mining Relational Paraphrases from Multilingual Sentences

Language resources that systematically organize paraphrases for binary relations are of great value for various NLP tasks and have recently been advanced in projects like PATTY, WiseNet and DEFIE. This paper presents a new method for building such a resource and the resource itself, called POLY. Starting with a very large collection of multilingual sentences parsed into triples of phrases, our method clusters relational phrases using probabilistic measures. We judiciously leverage ﬁne-grained semantic typing of relational arguments for identifying synonymous phrases. The evaluation of POLY shows signiﬁcant improvements in precision and recall over the prior works on PATTY and DEFIE. An extrinsic use case demonstrates the beneﬁts of POLY for question answering.
CMPack ’ 04 : Robust Modeling through Vision and Learning

The CMPACK’04 team follows our past teams CMPack’03, CMPack’02, CMPack’01, CMPack’00, CMTrio’99, and CMTrio’98 [7, 4, 11, 10]. In our research this year, we explored the capabilities of the new ERS-7 robotic platform; developed new ways of modeling the world, such as using accelerometer data to detect when the robot is entangled; and maintained our focus on robust behaviors and cooperation. In this paper, we will focus in detail on several recent components of the team. First, we will describe our local model, which traces radial lines across vision frames to efficiently construct a model of the environment [5]. Next, we will describe how accelerometer data can provide a rich source of information about the world; specifically, we will show how to use accelerometer data to detect when the robot is entangled, and, as an aside, how this same algorithm can be used to identify the surface under the robot [9]. Finally, we will describe how the robot learns the effects of its different kicks by experimentation and how it then applies this knowledge to select the appropriate kick from our behaviors [3].