Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Feedback rate allocation of precoder and bit loading for MIMO systems with limited feedback

In this paper we consider feedback rate allocation for MIMO systems with limited feedback of both bit loading and precoder. Allocation of feedback rate is an essential problem when there are two or more kinds of feedback information. We address this issue by analyzing the performance loss due to quantization of precoder and bit loading. We first derive the increase in transmission power when precoder is quantized, and then the additional penalty when bit loading is also quantized. The analysis allows us to find the optimal feedback rate allocation that minimizes the power penalty. Simulations show that the system with proper feedback rate allocation can achieve a very good performance compared with systems that do not consider the feedback of precoder and bit loading jointly.
Neuromuscular characteristics of recreational and competitive male and female surfers

Surfing is one of the most popular sports among Australian athletes, yet data about the characteristics of its performers are sparse, most likely due to the difficulty of examining the skill during performance and the distance of the observer from the performer. To gain information about skilled surfers of both sexes, and how they differ from less skilled surfers, we assessed female and male competitive and recreational surfers, and non-surfers, on a series of laboratory tasks designed to be relevant to surfing. The findings revealed both surfing skill-related and sex-related differences. In both females and males, lower limb stiffness decreased systematically with increasing surfing expertise, consistent with the general finding on decreases in joint stiffness with increased motor skill. Leg power measured relative to body weight was substantially greater in males than females, but was not related to surfing expertise. A combined sex and skill-related kinematic difference was observed whereby recreational females used a shallower surfing crouch posture, with less knee flexion than their competitive counterparts, whereas there were no differences between recreational and competitive males. The findings call for further studies of kinematic and neuromuscular characteristics of female and male surfers at different levels of expertise.
The constraint negotiation process among female hunters: The role of self-efficacy, motivations, and social support

There is limited research about females and hunting. This paper examines a typology of female hunters and the factors that constrain participation and how females negotiate through constraints. A survey of Oregon hunters was conducted in the summer of 2010 to understand hunting characteristics. A typology of female hunters was created from the sample using experience preference items in a cluster analysis. Four clusters were identified and included less-engaged hunters, family oriented hunters, social-relax hunters, and all around enthusiast hunters. Differences existed between the four groups on both constraints and negotiation strategies. The less-engaged hunter was the least likely to perceive constraints and the least likely to utilize constraint negotiation strategies. The family oriented hunter was the most likely to perceive constraints and the most likely to utilize strategies. These typologies demonstrate how managers can create strategies for recruitment and retention of female hunters.
Shifting leadership out of the backyard: Expanding opportunities for women leading in higher education in the Solomon Islands

Abstract In the Solomon Islands, the paucity of women represented in educational leadership positions is an issue of social justice. This is an area of concern as, although women experience opportunities to practise leadership in a range of community contexts, their access to leadership in the field of education is restricted by a number of social and cultural discourses that marginalize women leaders. This qualitative research investigated the leadership experiences of ten women leaders located in one cultural context, the unique island of Santa Isabel in the Solomon Islands. Semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were engaged to explore women’s leadership perceptions and experiences and how these ideas were realized in the way they practised leadership. Findings indicated that women’s perceptions of, and participation in, leadership was immersed in a cultural context which was founded on a belief of matrilineal leadership culture providing opportunities for women to have power and respect in community contexts but not necessarily organizational contexts. However, the findings also illustrated the challenges met by these women when they sought to extend their leadership practices beyond the home and their close communities, into organizations. Although a complex concept to negotiate, extending the cultural discourses of matrilineal leadership into educational leadership contexts may provide an alternative and supporting mechanism to enhance the representation of women in formal educational leadership positions in the Solomon Islands.
Antimicrobial activity of natural photosensitizing anthraquinones

It was demonstrated that anthraquinone-rich extracts, obtained from the phototoxic vegetal species Heterophyllaea pustulata Hook f. (Rubiaceae), exhibited bacteriostatic activity on Micrococcus luteus ATCC 9341, selectively inhibiting both oxacillin-sensitive and resistant Staphylococcus aureus, and antifungal activity against important opportunist microorganisms and against those involved in superficial mycosis, all from nosocomial origin. The acute in vitro cytotoxicity evaluation of each anthraquinone (AQ) isolated from these bioactive extracts, on a mammalian eukaryotic cell line (Vero cells), allowed us to establish the non-cytotoxic concentration range, which was used to evaluate the antimicrobial effect. Four from nine AQs tested, soranjidiol, rubiadin, damnacanthal and (S)-5,5'-bisoranjidiol, showed in vitro bacteriostatic/bactericide activity against S. aureus. The action mechanism seems to involve an increase in the levels of superoxide anion and/or singlet oxygen molecular. Moreover, the effect of actinic irradiation as a boosting agent for the production of both reactive oxygen species as well as its influence on antibacterial effect was assessed.
Politics Of Ethnic Conflict In Manipur

This article analyses the conflict between the Kuki and Naga ethnic groups in the state of Manipur in North East India and attempts to understand why tensions arose in the first place and remain today between the two ethnic groups despite the formal cessation of hostilities in 1997. This ethnic conflict is shown to be a consequence of a lingering identity problem, aggravated by land disputes and equivocal responses of the state. It is argued that continued land disputes, the Nagas’ unwillingness to perform Kuki customary rites and the government’s indifference to the problem prevent these two groups from reaching a sustainable solution.
The Relationship between Language Proficiency of EFL Students and Their Strategy Use in Listening Comprehension

In response to the call for the replication of the researches carried out in the domain of strategy use and also in order to perform investigations within different cultural contexts, this study was conducted in Bandar Abbas, Iran, investigating the relationship between language proficiency of Iranian EFL learners and their strategy use in listening comprehension. In so doing, a general proficiency test, a listening comprehension test, and a listening strategy use questionnaire were used for data collection. The results indicated that there was a significant positive correlation between proficiency level and listening comprehension strategy use of the participants. Moreover, it was revealed that cognitive strategies were used more than any other strategy type by the participants. However, no relationship was found between gender of the participants and their listening strategy use. On the whole, it can be concluded that both teachers and learners need to be informed of the significance of these strategies in the betterment of this receptive skill.
Effort as a Moderator of the Attitude-Behavior Relationship: General Environmental Concern and Recycling

It is proposed that attitudes are stronger predictors of behavior when the amount of effort required for the behavior is high than when little effort is required. The first study found support for the effort hypothesis among undergraduates who participated in a high-effort recycling program. A second study of undergraduates found a strong positive relationship between attitudes of environmental concern and the amount of effort they were willing to exert to recycle. The third study, a meta-analysis of studies on the relationship between environmental concern and recycling, showed that studies conducted in (high-effort) dropoff recycling programs typically found a stronger relationship than studies conducted in (low-effort) curbside recycling programs. Across all three studies the results consistently support recent theoretical findings: Effort is a strong moderator of the attitude-behavior relationship.
Continuous recognition memory for spoken words in noise

Previous research has shown that talker variability affects recognition memory for spoken words [Palmeri et al., (1993)]. This study examines whether additive noise is similarly retained in memory for spoken words. In a continuous recognition memory task, participants listened to a list of spoken words mixed with noise consisting of a pure tone or of high-pass filtered white noise. The noise and speech were in non-overlapping frequency bands. In experiment 1, listeners indicated whether each spoken word in the list was “old” (heard before in the list) or “new. ” Results showed that listeners were as accurate and as fast at recognizing a word as old if it was repeated with the same or different noise. In experiment 2, listeners also indicated whether words judged as “old” were repeated with the same or with a different type of noise. Results showed that listeners benefitted from hearing words presented with the same versus different noise. These data suggest that spoken words and temporally overlapping but spectrally non-overlapping noise are retained or reconstructed together for explicit, but not for implicit recognition memory. This indicates that the extent to which noise variability is retained seems to depend on the depth of processing.
Anomaly Reconciliation in Electronic Discussion Groups

According to public goods theory, there should be a deficiency of knowledge shared in electronic discussion groups (EDG) because self-interested individuals would be motivated to receive others’ knowledge but not to share their own. A number of motivators (such as generalized reciprocity, altruism, and normative obligations) have been proposed to explain why people actually do share their knowledge in such settings, and empirical research has confirmed that people do express these motivations for sharing their knowledge. However, the simple picture of individuals sharing knowledge that is known to be true limits our ability to understand what actually is going on in EDG. This paper develops a typology of interactions that may arise in electronic discussion groups and argues that several of these types of interactions confer benefits onto participants that may well motivate them to contribute their knowledge, even in settings where traditional motivators may be weak or absent. In particular, the process whereby anomalies are reconciled and the provision of knowledge to conduct remote-controlled experiments both stand to generate returns to those who contribute that are not available to those who “lurk. ”
The Development of a Technique for the Measurement of Social-Emotional Climate in Classrooms

Rationale. --In the study1 proper a brief over view of current theories of learning from the associationist and field-theorist point of view precedes a statement of the major concepts, gleaned largely from the field-theorists, that guide the study. Certain postulates regarding the motivational factors in personality and re garding learning conditions are proposed. The primary motivational force of human behavior is postulated to be a drive toward self-actual ization. This drive is said to be influenced by:
Upper and Lower Error Bounds for Active Learning

This paper analyzes the potential advantages and theoretical challenges of ”active learning” algorithms. Active learning involves sequential, adaptive sampling procedures that use information gleaned from previous samples in order to focus the sampling and accelerate the learning process relative to “passive learning” algorithms, which are based on non-adaptive (usually random) samples. There are a number of empirical and theoretical results suggesting that in certain situations active learning can be significantly more effective than passive learning. However, the fact that active learning algorithms are feedback systems makes their theoretical analysis very challenging. It is known that active learning can provably improve on passive learning if the error or noise rate of the sampling process is bounded. However, if the noise rate is unbounded, perhaps the situation most common in practice, then no previously existing theory demonstrates whether or not active learning offers an advantage. To study this issue, we investigate the basic problem of learning a threshold function from noisy observations. We present an algorithm that provably improves on passive learning, even when the noise is unbounded. Moreover, we derive a minimax lower bound for this learning problem, demonstrating that our proposed active learning algorithm converges at the near-optimal rate.
Application and Evaluation of a Hierarchical Patch Clustering Method for Remote Sensing Images

In this paper, we apply and evaluate a modified Gaussian-test-based hierarchical clustering method for high-resolution satellite images. The purpose is to obtain homogeneous clusters within each hierarchy level which later allow the classification and annotation of image data ranging from single scenes up to large satellite data archives. After cutting a given image into small patches and feature extraction from each patch, k-means are used to split sets of extracted image feature vectors to create a hierarchical structure. As image feature vectors usually fall into a high-dimensional feature space, we test different distance metrics, to tackle the “curse of dimensionality” problem. By using three different synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical image datasets, Gabor texture and Bag-of-Words (BoW) features are extracted, and the clustering results are analyzed via visual and quantitative evaluations. We also compared our approach with other classic unsupervised clustering methods. The most important contributions of this paper are the discussion and evaluation of cluster homogeneity by comparing various datasets, feature descriptors, evaluation measures, and clustering methods, as well as the analysis of the clustering performances under various distance metrics. The results show that the Gaussian-test-based hierarchical patch clustering method is able to obtain homogeneous clusters, while Gabor texture features perform better than the BoW features. In addition, it turns out that a distance parameter ranging from 1.2 to 2 performs best. Also indicated by [1], our modified G-means algorithm is faster than the original algorithm.
Further evaluation of the construct, convergent and criterion validity of the Gambling Urge Scale with university-student gamblers

Abstract Background: Research has documented the prevalence of problem gambling among university students, and craving is one factor that may provoke and maintain episodes of gambling. Objectives: We designed this study to assess elements of construct, convergent and criterion validity of the Gambling Urge Scale (GUS) when administered to regularly gambling university students. Methods: Students (n = 250) recruited from three universities during the spring semester, 2012, were randomly assigned to one of four conditions to test the impact of cue exposure to one of two types of stimuli (gambling versus non-gambling activity), and two types of presentation format (photographic versus imagery scripts), on current craving to gamble. Results: Self-reported craving increased significantly following exposure to gambling cues, but not following exposure to engaging non-gambling cues, regardless of the format by which cues were presented. Among those exposed to gambling cues, GUS craving scores were significantly correlated with all three subscales of another measure of craving to gamble, gambling-related problems, passionate attachment to gambling, distorted gambling beliefs and gambling refusal self-efficacy. Conclusions: These findings provide further support for the construct, convergent and criterion validity of the GUS as a measure of subjective craving in university student gamblers.
Geographical Distribution Patterns of Iodine in Drinking-Water and Its Associations with Geological Factors in Shandong Province, China

County-based spatial distribution characteristics and the related geological factors for iodine in drinking-water were studied in Shandong Province (China). Spatial autocorrelation analysis and spatial scan statistic were applied to analyze the spatial characteristics. Generalized linear models (GLMs) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) studies were conducted to explore the relationship between water iodine level and its related geological factors. The spatial distribution of iodine in drinking-water was significantly heterogeneous in Shandong Province (Moran’s I = 0.52, Z = 7.4, p < 0.001). Two clusters for high iodine in drinking-water were identified in the south-western and north-western parts of Shandong Province by the purely spatial scan statistic approach. Both GLMs and GWR indicated a significantly global association between iodine in drinking-water and geological factors. Furthermore, GWR showed obviously spatial variability across the study region. Soil type and distance to Yellow River were statistically significant at most areas of Shandong Province, confirming the hypothesis that the Yellow River causes iodine deposits in Shandong Province. Our results suggested that the more effective regional monitoring plan and water improvement strategies should be strengthened targeting at the cluster areas based on the characteristics of geological factors and the spatial variability of local relationships between iodine in drinking-water and geological factors.
Hybrid Domain Compensation for Analog Impairments in OFDM Systems

In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with direct-conversion transceivers, transmission performance is severely degraded by analog impairments, typically, carrier frequency offset, transmitter/receiver I/Q imbalance, and DC offset. The existing research considered only part of these impairments. In this paper, we analyze the OFDM signal corrupted by all these impairments. Then, a hybrid domain compensation scheme consisting of the time-domain and frequency-domain compensation is proposed. For the purpose of practical implementation, we also propose a comparable preamble, with which the compensation coefficients can be obtained by a low- complexity acquisition algorithm.
Multi-label Learning for Protein Subcellular Location Prediction

Protein sub cellular localization aims at predicting the location of a protein within a cell using computational methods. Knowledge of sub cellular localization of proteins indicates protein functions and helps in identifying drug targets. Prediction of protein sub cellular localization is an important but challenging problem, particularly when proteins may simultaneously exist at, or move between, two or more different sub cellular location sites. Most of the existing protein subcellular localization methods are only used to deal with the single-location proteins. To better reflect the characteristics of multiplex proteins, we formulate prediction of subcellular localization of multiplex proteins as a multi-label learning problem. We present and compare two multi-label learning approaches, which exploit correlations between labels and leverage label-specific features, respectively, to induce a high quality prediction model. Experimental results on six protein data sets under various organisms show that our described methods achieve significantly higher performance than any of the existing methods. Among the different multi-label learning methods, we find that methods exploiting label correlations performs better than those leveraging label-specific features.
Binaural speaker recognition for humanoid robots

In this paper, an original study of a binaural speaker identification system is presented. The state of the art shows that, contrarily to monaural and multi-microphone approaches, binaural systems are not so much studied in the specific task of automatic speaker recognition. Indeed, these systems are mostly used for speech recognition, or speaker localization. This study will focus on the benefits of the binaural context in comparison with monaural techniques. It demonstrates the interest of the binaural systems typically used in humanoid robotics. The system is first tested with monaural signals, and then with a binaural sensor, in many signal to noise ratios, speech durations and speaker directions. Up to 11 percent of improvement in recognition ratios of 23 ms frames can be obtained. The used database is a set of audio tracks recorded for 10 speakers, and filtered by HRTFs to obtain binaural signals in the directions of interest, for the binaural training and testing steps. This way, we study the sensitivity of the system to the speaker's location in an environment where a maximum of 10 speakers is present.
On LoRaWAN scalability: Empirical evaluation of susceptibility to inter-network interference

Appearing on the stage quite recently, the Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) are currently getting much of attention. In the current paper we study the susceptibility of one LPWAN technology, namely LoRaWAN, to the inter-network interferences. By means of excessive empirical measurements employing the certified commercial transceivers, we characterize the effect of modulation coding schemes (known for LoRaWAN as data rates (DRs)) of a transmitter and an interferer on probability of successful packet delivery while operating in EU 868 MHz band. We show that in reality the transmissions with different DRs in the same frequency channel can negatively affect each other and that the high DRs are influenced by interferences more severely than the low ones. Also, we show that the LoRa-modulated DRs are affected by the interferences much less than the FSK-modulated one. Importantly, the presented results provide insight into the network-level operation of the LoRa LPWAN technology in general, and its scalability potential in particular. The results can also be used as a reference for simulations and analyses or for defining the communication parameters for real-life applications.
Group Rational Emotive Therapy Versus Usual Group Therapy in Residential Treatment of Alcoholism

The goal of this experiment was to determine whether group rational emotive therapy would prove superior to usual group therapy in improving the psychological functioning of male alcoholics in an inpatient treatment facility and to determine if memory dysfunction would impede therapeutic progress. Four areas of psychological functioning were discussed for their relevance to etiology, recidivism, and treatment evaluation; they were depression, self-conception, social anxiety, and cognitive functioning. Further, rational emotive therapy as a potentially superior treatment for alcoholism was discussed and outcome research was reviewed.