Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Glance: generalized geometric primitives and transformations for information visualization in AR/VR environments

This paper outlines Glance, a unifying framework for exploring multidimensional, multivariate data in the context of AR/VR environments, along with specific implementation techniques that utilize programmable GPUs. The presented techniques extend the graphics pipeline through programmable shaders in order to support more general geometries and operations. Our point of departure from existing structural theories of graphics is a general spatial substrate, where data is encoded using higher-dimensional geometric primitives. From there, we define a series of processing stages, utilizing shaders to enable flexible and dynamic coordinate transformations. Furthermore, we describe how advanced visualization techniques, such as faceting and multiple views, can be integrated elegantly into our model. Bridging between Computer Graphics and Information Visualization theories, the elements of our framework are composable and expressive, allowing a diverse set of visualizations to be specified in a universal manner (see figure 1).
RF design methodologies bridging system-IC-module design

There has been a long-standing need to link the RF design domains into a connected, common design environment. Such a methodology is possible through implementing system-level behavioral models with different levels of abstraction that can be modelled or co-simulated at the IC circuit level. At module or board design, it is possible to link and simulate multiple chips with board-level components and parastics in an RFIC design environment. With today's more complex IC designs that are heading toward nanometer-scaled semiconductor processes, there is a desire to further understand the many subtle physical IC characteristics, such as layout and substrate parasitics, RF transistor models, IR drops, electromigration, elctromagnetics, and modelling of on-chip spiral inductors. Designers have entered into an era where they could benefit from a balance between analog, digital, and DSP design all in a fast and automated RFIC design environment. We present RF design methodologies that can bridge between system, IC, and module design, providing an efficient, thorough design flow using advanced EDA tools.
A Study on Approximation Algorithms for Constructing Rectilinear Steiner Trees

The Steiner tree problem is one of the complex, combinatorial optimization problems in the graph theory literature. Solving Steiner tree problem is of great importance since its application includes VLSI physical design, routing, wire length estimation etc. The variant of the Steiner tree called Rectilinear Steiner tree is used in the various phases of VLSI design and finding the Minimum Rectilinear Steiner tree is the problem that is in much research. Since the problem is NP-hard, a lot of research is focused in designing good heuristics and approximation algorithms. This paper is a brief study on the different approximation and heuristic algorithms for solving Rectilinear Steiner tree problem. Keywords— Rectilinear Steiner Trees, heuristic algorithms, VLSI physical design.
Social justice, equality and inclusion in Scottish education

Social justice, equality and inclusion are complex and inter-linked concepts and feature prominently in Scottish social policy rhetoric. This paper begins with an overview of the discourses surrounding these concepts and the ways in which they are used in Scottish education policy, which, in general, is founded on principles of universalism. The need for some degree of redistribution has been recognised for certain children, but less attention has been paid to recognising the identity of marginalised groups. Children with additional support needs are seen as a group requiring extra resources, but decisions on the nature of that support and which groups should be prioritised has been left to professionals, with little input from parents or children. Overall, there has been inadequate additional resourcing to support mainstreaming, which has made little progress despite having become the policy orthodoxy. There is also evidence to suggest that categories such as learning disabilities and social emotional and behavioural difficulties are applied disproportionately to children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, cementing rather than challenging their marginalisation. Major beneficiaries of inclusion policies, particularly in relation to disabled students in higher education, are students with a diagnosis of dyslexia, who are particularly likely to be male and middle class. The paper concludes by suggesting that children with additional support needs require more, rather than less, redistribution and recognition, but policies need to be couched within a discourse of rights, rather than individual needs.
Flexible AC transmission systems: technology for the future

A novel concept of power systems design and operation has been developed: flexible AC transmission systems (FACTS). FACTS technology can increase the loading on existing systems and assist in directing power flow in an interconnected network. The concept is based on the following view: systems are mechanically controlled for the most part, and the speed of response is slow. If control could be achieved at electronic speed with smart power electronic devices, great strides could be made in increasing loading of existing transmission systems and providing more flexible systems in the future where power flows could be controlled to facilitate business transactions among utilities. The first element in this work is to develop large semiconductors capable of handling power-class voltages and currents. A second area of research is now producing the smart devices. Controllers can be built to use the characteristics of these smart power electronic devices to perform functions such as controlling voltage, impedance, and phase angle. <<ETX>>
Experiments to Assess the Cost-Bene ts of Test-Suite ReductionGregg Rothermel

Test-suite reduction techniques attempt to reduce the cost of saving and reusing test cases during software maintenance by eliminating redundant test cases from test suites. A potential drawback of these techniques is that in reducing a test suite they might reduce the ability of that test suite to reveal faults in the software. Previous studies suggested that test-suite reduction techniques can reduce test suite size without signiicantly reducing the fault-detection capabilities of test suites. To further investigate this issue we performed experiments in which we examined the costs and beneets of reducing test suites of various sizes for several programs and investigated factors that innuence those costs and beneets. In contrast to the previous studies, our results reveal that the fault-detection capabilities of test suites can be severely compromised by test-suite reduction.
Spouses’ Gender Role Attitudes, Wives’ Employment Status, and Mexican-Origin Husbands’ Marital Satisfaction

Informed by Peplau’s theory of roles, this study examined the complex interplay between spouses’ gender role attitudes and wives’ employment status as a predictor of Mexican-origin husbands’ marital satisfaction. Dissonance between spouses’ gender role attitudes toward marital roles and wives’ employment status within couples was hypothesized to be inversely related to husbands’ marital satisfaction. Data were gathered during in-home interviews with 120 Mexican-origin couples living in North Carolina. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses identified a three-way interaction between wives’ employment and spouses’ gender role attitudes, indicating that in couples with nonemployed wives, wives’ more sex-typed gender role attitudes were more negatively associated with the marital satisfaction of husbands with more sex-typed attitudes than husbands with less sex-typed attitudes. Specifically, the three-way interaction showed that for couples with nonemployed wives, husbands’ marital satisfaction was lowest in marital contexts in which both spouses endorsed more sex-typed gender role attitudes.
Free hand interface for controlling applications based on Wii remote IR sensor

Wii remote, a remote controller device attached to Nintendo game console, provides an inexpensive and compact hardware solution with an embedded infrared camera and accelerometers useful for tracking objects in a 3D space. We present an approach for building a unified gesture-based interface with the Wii remote device. We adopt it for tracking a user's hand motions and using the tracked motions to control applications. For example, the user can easily browse pictures, read e-books, and make presentations via the unified free hand interaction (FHI) method based on the Wii remote device. When the user utilizes his/her hand for making a simple gesture in the proposed system, the gesture will be registered by the system for controlling applications. He/she can simultaneously hold another Wii remote by the other hand for making auxiliary operations, or he/she can edit some specific functions of the registered gestures such as zooming in and out, changing page, and confirming operations.
Limitations of dual-photopeak window scatter correction for brain imaging.

UNLABELLED A method for performing scatter corrections that would directly use the photopeak information and would be straightforward for use in clinical practice would be attractive in SPECT imaging. The dual-photopeak window method may be such a method. It relates the scatter fraction to the ratio of the lower to the total parts of a split-photopeak window. We investigated the use of this scatter correction method on a dedicated brain camera. METHODS Calibration curves for the Ceraspect, a dedicated brain imaging camera, were obtained for four split-window combinations using point sources in air and water. Simulations of the Ceraspect calibration curves at several energy resolution values were obtained using a Monte Carlo simulation of the instrument. RESULTS The calibration curves, experimental and simulated, revealed an ambiguous and unstable relationship between lower-to-total ratio and scatter fraction. CONCLUSION The unsatisfactory calibration curves can be attributed to the limited scatter produced in a brain-sized phantom during the calibration process and inherent stability problems in the calibration process. The dual-photopeak window method is not usable for small-field imaging systems and may even be unstable for larger-field systems.
A 101.4 GOPS/W reconfigurable and scalable control-centric embedded processor for domain-specific applications

Increasing the energy efficiency and performance while providing the customizability and scalability is vital for embedded processors adapting to domain-specific applications such as Internet of Things. In this paper, we proposed a reconfigurable and scalable control-centric architecture, and implemented the design consisting of two cores and an on-chip multi-mode router in 65 nm technology. The reconfigurability is enabled by the restructurable sequence mapping table (SMT) thus the reorganizable functional units. Owing to the integration of the multi-mode router, on-chip or inter-chip network for multi-/many-core computing can be composed for performance extension on demand even in the post-fabrication stage. Control-centric design simplifies the control logic, shrinks the non-functional units and orchestrates the operations to increase the hard are utilization and reduce the excessive data movement for high energy efficiency. As a result, the processor can both conduct general-purpose processing with 29% smaller code size and application-specific processing with over 10 times performance improvement when implementing AES by SMT. The dual-core processor consumes 19.7 μW/MHz with die size of 3.5 mm2. The achieved energy efficiency is 101.4GOPS/W.
Opinion leaders and opinion seekers: Two new measurement scales

The authors describe the development and validation of multiple-item self-report scales to measure opinion leadership and opinion seeking for specific product or service domains. The concepts of opinion leadership and opinion seeking are defined, previous attempts to measure them are critiqued, and the scale development process is described. Five separate studies using data from 1,128 student and adult respondents provide ample evidence for the unidimensionality, the reliability, and the construct and criterion-related validity of the resulting scales. Finally, implications for consumer theory and marketing practice are discussed.
Minimizing Power in Very-Low-Voltage Switched-Opamp Pipelined ADCs

In this paper, a design methodology for low-power design of very-low-voltage high-resolution switched-opamp ADCs (analog-to-digital converters) is presented. This methodology determines the optimum values of all stage capacitors, the compensation capacitors of the opamps and also the resolutions of the stages to minimize power consumption for an expected signal-to-noise ratio. The design procedure is applied to a 1-V 12-bit 10 MS/s pipelined ADC as a case study. The design challenges in very-low-voltage ADCs and the solutions are discussed. HSpice simulations of the 1-V ADC in a 0.18-¿m CMOS process confirm that the ADC effective number of bits is more than 11.1 bits for a 1.2-V 2-MHz input signal.
A Mixed-Decimation MDF Architecture for Radix- $2^{k}$  Parallel FFT

This paper presents a mixed-decimation multipath delay feedback (M2 DF) approach for the radix-2k fast Fourier transform. We employ the principle of folding transformation to derive the proposed architecture, which activates the idle period of arithmetic modules in multipath delay feedback (MDF) architectures by integrating the decimation-in-time operations into the decimation-in-frequency-operated computing units. Furthermore, we compare the proposed design with other efficient schemes, namely, the MDF and the multipath delay commutator (MDC) scheme theoretically and experimentally. Relying on the obtained expressions and statistics, it can be concluded that the M2DF design serves as an efficient alternative to the MDF scheme, since it achieves improved efficiency in the utilization of arithmetic resources without deteriorating the superiorities of feedback structures. In addition, the recommended design performs better in memory requirement and computing delay compared with the MDC approach.
Macroeconomic Impacts of the Korean Financial Crisis: Comparison with the Cross-Country Patterns

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic adjustment process of the Korean financial crisis in a broad international perspective. In particular, the impacts of the crisis on GDP growth, inflation, current account balance, and employment are analyzed using a cross­ country data set, which compiled 150 financial crisis episodes from all developing countries that have received conditional financial assistance from the IMF over the period from 1973 to 1994. The cross country patterns show that GDP growth rates sharply drop with the eruption of a crisis but then recover quickly to the pre­crisis level in two or three years, showing a v­ pattern of adjustment; inflation and current account deficit exhibit an inverse v­pattern, but they do not improve to the level of non­program period; employment growth is most sluggish in the recovery process compared with other macroeconomic variables. We find that the Korean case is in general consistent with these stylized patterns. However, the degree of initial contraction and following recovery has been far greater in Korea than what the cross­country evidence predicts. Cross­country comparison indicates that both the export­oriented structure and the swift adjustment of macroeconomic policies contributed to the speedy adjustment of the Korean economy.
Lexicon, Grammar, and Multilinguality in the Japanese FrameNet

This paper discusses findings of a frame-based contrastive text analysis, using the large-scale and precise descriptions of semantic frames provided by the FrameNet project (Baker, 2006; Fillmore, 2006). It points out that even though the existing FrameNet methodology allows us to compare languages at a more detailed level than previous studies (e.g. Talmy, 2003; Slobin, 2004), in order to investigate how different languages encode the same events, it is also necessary to make cross-references to grammatical constructions rather than limiting ourselves to analyzing the semantics of frame-bearing predicates. Based on a contrastive text analysis of an English-Japanese aligned parallel corpus and on the lexicon-building project of Japanese FrameNet (Ohara et al., 2006), the paper attempts to represent interactions between lexical units and constructions of Japanese sentences in terms of the combined lexicon and “constructicon,” currently being developed in FrameNet (Fillmore, 2006). By applying the idea to the analysis of Japanese in Japanese FrameNet, it is hoped that the study will give support to working out the details of the new FrameNet directions.
The Process of Forgiving: psychological aspects.

Man is a relational being and interacts with the world around him from birth. Wallon, observing that a newborn baby needs assistance every moment, states that he is essentially “social”: all his reactions need to be completed, compensated, interpreted; incapable of doing anything alone, he is manipulated by others and it is in others’ movements that his first behaviors will take shape. For man, therefore, being “social” is a deep-seated necessity, a genetic condition. Human beings spend much of their lives involved in significant relationships, interacting with people they care about. During social interactions, they inevitably perform actions that hurt others. The opportunities to hurt and be hurt are numerous, from the least to the most serious, but their impact varies considerably from person to person and from relationship to relationship. Interpersonal relations satisfy the deepest human needs of affiliation, but are also the source of the most painful wounds. When an offence occurs, negative emotions like anger and resentment are rather common reactions which create a potential breakdown of the relationship itself (Fincham, Paleari & Regalia, 2000). What creates further distress is the natural need to respond, through revenge, to the offence suffered, to get even for the insult. This feeling of revenge can degenerate into rancour: it is no longer the simple reparation of a violated right that is sought, but the harm that one can visit upon the offender in exchange for the offence suffered. Rancour is a passion that, on top of the suffering for the offence, accentuates its alienating character (Scabini & Rossi, 2000). A significant factor that can help to cope adaptively with the inevitable daily relational breakdowns, is the capacity to forgive. The willingness to forgive has important implications not only for the health of the relationship, but also for personal well-being. Forgiveness therefore represents a means that is available to man to safeguard a threatened relationship and to respond with trust and acceptance to a hurt inflicted on him. Ide (1997), quoting St.Thomas, writes: “Man is by nature inclined to harmony and to unity among men, forgiveness re-establishes the lost bond, the disturbed communion, there is a natural predisposition for forgiveness in the heart of every man”.
Operating Issue Networks On The Web

j INTRODUCTION Arguably, a small segment of organizations, governments and corporations have moved beyond ‘using’ to ‘operating’ the Internet. One of the beginnings of ‘Net operation’ lay in the emergence of Internet intelligence and monitoring companies. In 1995 the  rst of these companies was viewed in light of its ready off-Web comparison, the news-clipping service. Gradually, however, the companies have become known as Internet ‘surveillance’  rms, where the main services comprise actively ‘monitoring’ what’s being said on the Net by their competitors (on competitor websites), by their critics (on ‘rogue’ and other websites), and by ‘Chinese whisperers’ (on newsgroups, mailing lists and listservs) (New York Times, 8 March 1999). To their clients the monitoring companies send indices, largely in the well-known styles of Web and newsgroup search engine returns. Depending on the severity of the ‘word on the Net’, the surveillance companies also recommend some form of action to be taken, in order to quash the rumour or put a more permanent end to the mongering (see Figure 1). While much of the more serious recommended action appears to be of the legal variety, in the form of trademark infringement, unfair trade and/or liable law suits, the less severe falls into the realm of ‘media tactics’. Indeed, certain corporations under  re for their human rights and environmental records often engage in tactical Net media (Garcia and Lovink, 1999). Be it the rather standard discursive ‘greenwashing’ of products, the more subtle creation of anger venting Net ‘graf ti spaces’ such as the Shell forum, or the establishment of hyperlinks to one’s critics, such Net manoeuvring becomes immediately legible and trackable on the Internet knowledge maps, as we come to later in introducing new Web debate mapping
The Psychological and Physical Costs of Caregiving: The Canadian Study of Health and Aging

Persons with dementia and their caregivers were randomly identified as part of the Canadian Study of Health and Aging. The current study examines the interrelation among demographic and illness variables relative to various outcomes of caregiving (n = 181). From these analyses, two pairings of canonical variates emerge as significantly correlated: The first suggests an underlying affective construct related to activities of daily living and problematic behaviors; the second reflects a caregiver health construct composed of demographic variables, depressive affect, and diagnosis of the care-recipient. These findings suggest that negative caregiving outcomes may arise within distinct affective and physical health domains. Illness would appear to manifest within either system where a predisposition exists among caregivers faced with specific stressors.
What is Social Capital? the Determinants of Trust and Trustworthiness

Using a sample of Harvard undergraduates, we analyze trust and social capital in two experiments. Trusting behavior and trustworthiness rise with social connection; differences in race and nationality reduce the level of trustworthiness. Certain individuals appear to be persistently more trusting, but these people do not say they are more trusting in surveys. Survey questions about trust predict trustworthiness not trust. Only children are less trustworthy. People behave in a more trustworthy manner towards higher status individuals, and therefore status increases earnings in the experiment. As such, high status persons can be said to have more social capital.
Scaled-Distance-Transforms and Monotonicity of Autocorrelations

In this letter, we investigate the use of distance transforms in a scale space domain for the image (and signal) misalignment problem. We show that it is possible to build an autocorrelation function that is monotonic with respect to the amount of translation. This creates a new paradigm for image comparison and gives yet a new generalization of distance transforms to grey-level images. Its behavior is analyzed on a natural scene image and its robustness against noise is verified numerically.