Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Cross-Country Comparison of Crowdworker Motivations

Crowd employment is a new form of short term employment that has been rapidly becoming a source of income for a vast number of people around the globe. It differs considerably from more traditional forms of work, yet similar ethical and optimization issues arise. One key to tackle such challenges is to understand what motivates the international crowd workforce. In this work, we study the motivation of workers involved in one particularly prevalent type of crowd employment: micro-tasks. We report on the results of applying the Multidimensional Crowdworker Motivation Scale (MCMS) in ten countries, which unveil significant international differences.
Fuzzy weighting function dependent RHC design for TS fuzzy systems with input constraints

We present a state-feedback receding horizon control (RHC) for discrete-time fuzzy systems with input constraints. The models of the fuzzy systems are of Takagi-Sugeno type, which is suitable to model a large class of nonlinear systems. To find the control, we first derive an optimization problem involving parameterized linear matrix inequalities (PLMIs) that depend on the current and one-step past information on the time-varying fuzzy weighting functions. Since the PLMIs need to be checked for all values of the weighting functions, for solvability, we convert the PLMIs into a finite number of LMIs by suggesting a special structures for the variables of the PLMIs. Then, it is shown that the closed-loop system with the designed control is stable if the converted optimization problem is feasible at the initial time. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the performance of the controller.
Design and Performance Analysis of Mobility Management Schemes Based on Pointer Forwarding for Wireless Mesh Networks

We propose efficient mobility management schemes based on pointer forwarding for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with the objective to reduce the overall network traffic incurred by mobility management and packet delivery. The proposed schemes are per-user-based, i.e., the optimal threshold of the forwarding chain length that minimizes the overall network traffic is dynamically determined for each individual mobile user, based on the user's specific mobility and service patterns. We develop analytical models based on stochastic Petri nets to evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes. We demonstrate that there exists an optimal threshold of the forwarding chain length, given a set of parameters characterizing the specific mobility and service patterns of a mobile user. We also demonstrate that our schemes yield significantly better performance than schemes that apply a static threshold to all mobile users. A comparative analysis shows that our pointer forwarding schemes outperform routing-based mobility management protocols for WMNs, especially for mobile Internet applications characterized by large traffic asymmetry for which the downlink packet arrival rate is much higher than the uplink packet arrival rate.
Effectiveness of Fluticasone Furoate-Vilanterol for COPD in Clinical Practice.

BACKGROUND Evidence for the management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) comes from closely monitored efficacy trials involving groups of patients who were selected on the basis of restricted entry criteria. There is a need for randomized trials to be conducted in conditions that are closer to usual clinical practice. METHODS In a controlled effectiveness trial conducted in 75 general practices, we randomly assigned 2799 patients with COPD to a once-daily inhaled combination of fluticasone furoate at a dose of 100 μg and vilanterol at a dose of 25 μg (the fluticasone furoate-vilanterol group) or to usual care (the usual-care group). The primary outcome was the rate of moderate or severe exacerbations among patients who had had an exacerbation within 1 year before the trial. Secondary outcomes were the rates of primary care contact (contact with a general practitioner, nurse, or other health care professional) and secondary care contact (inpatient admission, outpatient visit with a specialist, or visit to the emergency department), modification of the initial trial treatment for COPD, and the rate of exacerbations among patients who had had an exacerbation within 3 years before the trial, as assessed in a time-to-event analysis. RESULTS The rate of moderate or severe exacerbations was significantly lower, by 8.4% (95% confidence interval, 1.1 to 15.2), with fluticasone furoate-vilanterol therapy than with usual care (P=0.02). There was no significant difference in the annual rate of COPD-related contacts to primary or secondary care. There were no significant between-group differences in the rates of the first moderate or severe exacerbation and the first severe exacerbation in the time-to-event analyses. There were no excess serious adverse events of pneumonia in the fluticasone furoate-vilanterol group. The numbers of other serious adverse events were similar in the two groups. CONCLUSIONS In patients with COPD and a history of exacerbations, a once-daily treatment regimen of combined fluticasone furoate and vilanterol was associated with a lower rate of exacerbations than usual care, without a greater risk of serious adverse events. (Funded by GlaxoSmithKline; Salford Lung Study ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01551758 .).
Identifying useful project management practices: A mixed methodology approach

This paper describes a mixed methodological research approach for identifying practitioner perceptions of the most useful project management (PM) practices to improve project management performance. By identifying the perceived most useful tools and techniques, as having the most potential for increased contribution to project management performance, practitioners and organizations can select their priorities when improving PM practices. The research involved a programme of thirty interviews with Project Management professionals in Portugal, followed by a global survey. Completed questionnaires were received from 793 practitioners worldwide, covering 75 different countries. The results showed that the top twenty of the list of the most useful tools and techniques is composed of very well-known and widely used tools, such as: progress report; requirements analysis; progress meetings; risk identification; and project scope statement. PM practices in the top of list cover the overall PM life cycle from initiation to project closing, but particular relevance is given to tools and techniques from planning. The areas of knowledge, scope, time, risk, communication and integration, assume a high relevance, each with at least three PM practices on the top of the list.
Feedback-controlled resource sharing for predictable eScience

The emerging class of adaptive, real-time, data-driven applications is a significant problem for today's HPC systems. In general, it is extremely difficult for queuing-system-controlled HPC resources to make and guarantee a tightly-bounded prediction regarding the time at which a newly-submitted application will execute. While a reservation-based approach partially addresses the problem, it can create severe resource under-utilization (unused reservations, necessary scheduled idle slots, underutilized reservations, etc.) that resource providers are eager to avoid. In contrast, this paper presents a fundamentally different approach to guarantee predictable execution. By creating a virtualized application layer called the performance container, and opportunistically multiplexing concurrent performance containers through the application of formal feedback control theory, we regulate the job's progress such that the job meets its deadline without requiring exclusive access to resources even in the presence of a wide class of unexpected disturbances. Our evaluation using two widely-used applications, WRF and BLAST, on an 8-core server show our approach is predictable and meets deadlines with 3.4 % of errors on average while achieving high overall utilization.
A-Cell: graphical user interface for the construction of biochemical reaction models

SUMMARY A-Cell is a tool for constructing models of complex and complicated biochemical reactions. An important feature of A-Cell is its graphical user interface for constructing biochemical reactions. In addition, it has a capability of importing previously constructed models, combining them, and constructing a comprehensive model. The simulation program for the model is automatically generated by A-cell.
Measuring Resemblance in Sequence Data: An Optimal Matching Analysis of Musicians' Careers

This article introduces a method that measures resemblance between sequences using a simple metric based on the insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one sequence into another. The method, called optimal matching, is widely used in natural science. The article reviews the literature on sequence analysis, then discusses the optimal matching algorithm in some detail. Applying this technique to a data set detailing careers of musicians active in Germany in the 18th century demonstrates the practical steps involved in the application of the technique and develops a set of typical careers that successfully categorize most of the actual careers studied by the authors.
Dissecting spatiotemporal patterns of functional diversity through the lens of Darwin's naturalization conundrum

Abstract Darwin's naturalization conundrum describes the paradigm that community assembly is regulated by two opposing processes, environmental filtering and competitive interactions, which predict both similarity and distinctiveness of species to be important for establishment. Our goal is to use long‐term, large‐scale, and high‐resolution temporal data to examine diversity patterns over time and assess whether environmental filtering or competition plays a larger role in regulating community assembly processes. We evaluated Darwin's naturalization conundrum and how functional diversity has changed in the Laurentian Great Lakes fish community from 1870 to 2010, which has experienced frequent introductions of non‐native species and extirpations of native species. We analyzed how functional diversity has changed over time by decade from 1870 to 2010 at three spatial scales (regional, lake, and habitat) to account for potential noninteractions between species at the regional and lake level. We also determined which process, environmental filtering or competitive interactions, is more important in regulating community assembly and maintenance by comparing observed patterns to what we would expect in the absence of an ecological mechanism. With the exception of one community, all analyses show that functional diversity and species richness has increased over time and that environmental filtering regulates community assembly at the regional level. When examining functional diversity at the lake and habitat level, the regulating processes become more context dependent. This study is the first to examine diversity patterns and Darwin's conundrum by integrating long‐term, large‐scale, and high‐resolution temporal data at multiple spatial scales. Our results confirm that Darwin's conundrum is highly context dependent.
Combining audio-based similarity with web-based data to accelerate automatic music playlist generation

We present a technique for combining audio signal-based music similarity with web-based musical artist similarity to accelerate the task of automatic playlist generation. We demonstrate the applicability of our proposed method by extending a recently published interface for music players that benefits from intelligent structuring of audio collections. While the original approach involves the calculation of similarities between every pair of songs in a collection,we incorporate web-based data to reduce the number of necessary similarity calculations. More precisely,we exploit artist similarity determined automatically by means of web retrieval to avoid similarity calculation between tracks of dissimilar and/or unrelated artists. We evaluate our acceleration technique on two audio collections with different characteristics. It turns out that the proposed combination of audio-and text-based similarity not only reduces the number of necessary calculations considerably but also yields better results, in terms of musical quality, than the initial approach based on audio data only. Additionally, we conducted a small user study that further confirms the quality of the resulting playlists.
Title Adaptive interleaving for OFDM in TDD systems

We proposed a novel interleaving technique, namely ada,ptive interleaving, which can break the bursty channel errors more effectively than traditional block interleaving. This new scheme resequences the transmitted symbols adaptively according to the instantaneous subcarrier channel state information. In this way, the bursty errors introduced by the channel can be broken more effectively, thus a better BER performance can be achieved. This technique is well-suited to OFDM systems because the CSI values of the whole frame could be estimated at once when transmitted symbols are framed in the frequency dimension. Computer simulation shows that significant SNR gains can be achieved, compared with traditional block interleaving.
A boundary integral equation method in short-wavelength-to-period diffraction on multilayer 1D gratings and rough mirrors

Diffraction problems by 1D multilayer structures having arbitrary border profiles including edges are considered at smallest wavelength-to-period ratios. The integral equation theory is so flexible that one can point out a few areas of its modifiability. In this work special attention is paid to physical models and low-level details, as well as to the generalization of the power balance criterion for the case of absorbing gratings. In the case of shallow gratings and mirrors, introducing speed-up terms produces an adverse numerical effect because of the ensuing uncontrolled growth of coefficients in analytically improved asymptotic estimations.
Quality Assessment Lessons from Australia and New Zealand

This article describes two recent efforts to rank the quality of higher education institutions in Australia and New Zealand. After a brief discussion of goals, methods, and results, the author evaluates each ranking using the following questions: Does this methodological approach achieve its objective? Can other countries use the methodology by extension? What can we learn about a country's higher education system using this approach? The aim is to provide readers with a framework for thinking critically about rankings, and about the role they might play in measuring and influencing higher education quality on a global scale. 1. This article is based on a paper given at the first working group meeting for the project, “Higher Education Ranking Systems and Methodologies: How They Work, What They Do”, organized by the Institute for Higher Education Policy and the UNESCO‐European Centre for Higher Education, Washington D.C., U.S.A. , 10–11 December, 2004. The author acknowledges with gratitude the Spencer Fou.
Enhanced Flat Broadband Optical Chaos Using Low-Cost VCSEL and Fiber Ring Resonator

Low-cost vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) and semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) have been explored experimentally in a setup with a fiber ring resonator to generate flat broadband chaos. The effect of the frequency detuning between the fiber grating frequency and the free-running VCSEL's frequency, and the bias current of the SOA on the bandwidth of chaos has been studied. The results show that the bandwidth of the chaos is strongly dependent on the frequency detuning and the bias current of the SOA. Using the conventional definition of chaos bandwidth, the bandwidth of chaos with the fiber ring resonator can be about three times greater than that with a conventional mirror. In order to consider the flatness of the chaos spectra, the flat bandwidth of chaos is redefined as the frequency range between dc and the frequency where the power fluctuation is within ±3 dB. With this definition, the flat bandwidth of chaos with the fiber ring resonator is >10 times higher than that with conventional mirror feedback.
A Serendipitous Galaxy Cluster Survey with XMM : Expected Catalog Properties and Scientific Applications

This paper describes a serendipitous galaxy cluster survey that we plan to conduct with the XMM X-ray satellite. We have modeled the expected properties of such a survey for three di†erent cosmological models, using an extended Press-Schechter formalism combined with a detailed characterization of the expected capabilities of the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC) camera on board XMM. We estimate that, over the 10 yr design lifetime of XMM, the EPIC camera will image a total of ^800 deg2 in Ðelds suitable for the serendipitous detection of clusters of galaxies. For the presently favored low-density model with a cosmological constant, our simulations predict that this survey area would yield a catalog of more than 8000 clusters, ranging from poor to very rich systems, with around 750 detections above z \ 1. A low-density open universe yields similar numbers, though with a di†erent redshift distribution, while a critical-density universe gives considerably fewer clusters. This dependence of catalog properties on cosmology means that the proposed survey will place strong constraints on the values of and The survey would also facilitate a variety of follow-up projects, including the quan) 0 " tiÐcation of evolution in the cluster X-ray luminosity-temperature relation, the study of high-redshift galaxies via gravitational lensing, follow-up observations of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich e†ect, and foreground analyses of cosmic microwave background maps. Subject headings : cosmology : miscellaneous È galaxies : clusters : general È X-rays : galaxies
A framework for migrating procedural code to object-oriented platforms

With the rapid growth of the Internet and pervasive computing activities, the migration of back-end legacy systems to network centric environments has become a focal point for researchers and practitioners alike. To leverage back-end legacy services into Web-enabled environments, this paper proposes an incremental and iterative migration framework where legacy procedural source code is reengineered into an object-oriented platform. The reengineering framework allows for the representation of the legacy source in the form of XML based annotated abstract syntax trees. Consequently, the extraction of an object-oriented model from the original source code is based on the analysis of source code features in the original system that can be used to identify classes, associations, aggregations, and polymorphic patterns in the new target system.
Adopting High-Involvement Human Resource Practices

Results from a survey of 107 organizations suggested that the organizational process of bench-marking mediates the effects of munificence on high-involvement human resource (HR) practices. The weak relationship between munificence and HR practices observed in past studies might be explained by the failure to account for this organizational process. Implications for HR managers and practitioners interested in the role that benchmarking plays in organizations are highlighted.
A leaky blood–brain barrier, fibrinogen infiltration and microglial reactivity in inflamed Alzheimer’s disease brain

This study has used immunohistochemical examination of tissue obtained from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) brains and rat hippocampus injected with Aβ1‐42 peptide to determine effects of induced inflammatory reactivity on integrity of blood–brain barrier (BBB) and viability of neurons. Tissue from AD, but not non‐demented, brains exhibited a diffuse pattern of staining for fibrinogen and immunoglobulin (IgG) indicative of BBB leakiness with considerable fibrinogen immunoreactivity (ir) appearing in association with Aβ deposits. Immunostaining for the endothelial cell specific glycoprotein, von Willebrand factor, showed morphological evidence for altered blood vessels in AD tissue. AD brains also demonstrated extensive areas of fibrinogen ir in association with microglial reactivity. In vivo, intra‐hippocampal injection of Aβ1‐42 caused time‐dependent (1–7 days after injection) increases in double staining of fibrinogen with areas of microgliosis. Two independent pharmacological strategies were employed to examine how Aβ1‐42 stimulation (7 days injection) may be linked to neurodegeneration. The defibrinogenating compound, ancrod, reduced inflammatory reactivity, levels of parenchymal fibrinogen and IgG, and was neuroprotective. These results prompted use of Aβ1‐42 plus fibrinogen as a novel in vivo inflammatory stimulus and this combination significantly enhanced inflammatory reactivity, vascular perturbations and neuronal damage compared to Aβ1‐42 alone. A second approach, using anti‐Mac‐1 (antibody for antigen CD11b) to block activation of microglia, was highly effective in attenuating effects of Aβ1‐42 plus fibrinogen amplification of inflammatory and vascular responses and conferred significant neuroprotection. The overall findings from study of AD tissue and in vivo in Aβ1‐42 and Aβ1‐42 plus fibrinogen stimulated rat hippocampus suggest microglial responses to promote increased extravasation of blood protein as a critical component in amplifying inflammatory reactivity and causing neuronal damage in inflamed AD brain.
Entertainment education theory and practice in HIV/AIDS communication: a South Africa/United Kingdom comparison

Abstract Within development communication, gaps remain in theory and practice: communication innovations are taking place which either do not incorporate theory or fail to challenge the assumptions of development communication and HIV/AIDS theory. This can lead to the implementation of unsuccessful interventions that lack theoretical frameworks or to uninformed practice, making it difficult to replicate. Further, research has demonstrated that entertainment education (EE) interventions have a measurable impact on behaviour in areas such as HIV/AIDS prevention. Given the transitions in EE practice and evidence of its impact, EE theory and practice can contribute insight into these challenges. A pilot study investigated these dilemmas within the context of the monitoring and evaluation of development communication. Framing this discussion is the concept of south–north dialogue, using comparative analysis of EE interventions to distil lessons through contrasting experiences in two diverse settings. It holds as a principle that lessons from the experience of EE in the southern context can inform lessons for the north. Further, comparison of the case studies can generate insights for the broader development communication field. The authors present four case studies, informed by key informant interviews, of EE interventions in the United Kingdom and South Africa. They address how communication is defined in planning, implementation and evaluation, highlighting how it often misses the importance of ‘listening’. The case studies show that HIV/AIDS communication, and development communication more broadly, has not internalised ideas of evaluation and listening in communication. Successes in the case studies can be partially attributed to responsiveness and context-specificity, rather than following rigid planning templates, such as those found in some development communication literature. This indicates the importance of flexibility and responsiveness to context for both development communication and HIV/AIDS communication.