Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Animated Pedagogical Agents in Multimedia Educational Environments: Effects of Agent Properties, Picture Features, and Redundancy

Two experiments explored the integration of animated agents into multimedia environments in the context of R. E. Mayer's (2001) cognitive theory of multimedia learning. Experiment 1 was a 3 (agent properties: agent only, agent with gesture, no agent) X 3 (picture features: static picture, sudden onset, animation) design. Agent properties produced no significant effects. Both sudden onset and animation conditions facilitated performance relative to the static-picture condition. In Experiment 2, we explored the effects of printed text, spoken narration, and spoken narration with the printed text, in a multimedia environment that included an agent, to investigate effects of redundancy. The spoken-narration-only condition outperformed the other 2, with no differences between printed text and printed text with spoken narration.
Efficiently exploiting memory level parallelism on asymmetric coupled cores in the dark silicon era

Extracting high memory-level parallelism (MLP) is essential for speeding up single-threaded applications which are memory bound. At the same time, the projected amount of dark silicon (the fraction of the chip powered off) on a chip is growing. Hence, Asymmetric Multicore Processors (AMP) offer a unique opportunity to integrate many types of cores, each powered at different times, in order to optimize for different regions of execution. In this work, we quantify the potential for exploiting core customization to speedup programs during regions of high MLP. Based on a careful design space exploration, we discover that an AMP that includes a narrow and fast specialized core has the potential to efficiently exploit MLP. Using the results of our analysis, we design an AMP with both an MLP and ILP specialized core, and we propose a hardware-level, application steering mechanism called Symbiotic Core Execution (SCE). SCE detects MLP phases by monitoring the L2 miss rate of the application, and it uses that information to steer the application to the best core. Interestingly, we show that L2 miss rates are important for deciding when an MLP region begins and when it ends. As a program runs, its execution migrates to a core customized for MLP during regions of high MLP; when the region ends, it is re-scheduled on the core that fits the application characteristics. Compared to a monolithic core optimized for both modes of operation, our AMP design provides a harmonic mean performance improvement of 5.3% and 6.6% for SPEC2000 and SPEC2006, respectively, with a maximum speedup of 14.5%. For the same study, it achieves a 18.3% and 21.1% energy delay2 reduction for SPEC2000 and SPEC2006, respectively. Our findings yield an important message for designing AMPs with specialized cores: core customization enables efficient exploitation of MLP, and application steering mechanisms for MLP are simple to implement and effective.
Impact of sex, age, and ethnicity/race on the survival of patients with rectal cancer in the United States from 1988 to 2012

Most studies report on colon and rectal cancers collectively, even though biologic and prognostic differences exist between these disease entities. Here, we investigated the effects of sex, age, and ethnicity/race on rectal cancer (RC) mortality by stage focusing on differences before and after 2004. Using the SEER database, we identified 105,511 patients diagnosed with RC from 1988-2012. Main outcomes were disease-specific survival (DSS) and overall survival (OS). In patients with stage I-III RC, women achieved a longer DSS (HR 0.87, P < 0.001) than men, independent of age, from 1988-2012. In stage IV disease, the sex disparity favoring women was limited to the age 18-44 yr cohort (DSS HR 0.79, P < 0.001). The sex difference in DSS (Pinteraction = 0.009) was significantly reduced from 2004 to 2012 across all ages. Hispanics and Native Americans with locoregional RC had inferior DSS relative to Whites from 1988-2003, but these differences were not evident from 2004-2012 (Pinteraction = 0.001). Additionally, Asians with stage I-III RC had superior DSS from 2004 on compared to Whites. Mortality in African American patients improved modestly overall and remained significantly higher than other ethnicities/races across all stages. Sex disparities have narrowed in patients with metastatic RC, but persist in patients with stage I-III disease. These differences are most evident among young patients (18-44 years), where sex disparities have even widened in stage I-III disease. While outcomes have improved for Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans with stage I-III rectal cancer, black-white disparities remain in all disease stages.
Follow the leader: Mimetic isomorphism and entry into new markets

Follow the Leader: Mimetic Isomorphism and Entry Into New Markets Heather A. Haveman Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 38, Issue 4 (Dec., 1993), 593-627. Stable URL: http://links.j stor.org/sici? sici=OO01—8392%28199312%2938%3A4%3C593%3AFTLMIA%3E2.0. CO%3B2—V Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of J STOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non—commercial use. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. Administrative Science Quarterly is published by Cornell University, Johnson Graduate School of Management. Please contact the publisher for further permissions regarding the use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/joumals/cjohn.html. Administrative Science Quarterly ©1993 Cornell University, Johnson Graduate School of Management JSTOR and the JSTOR logo are trademarks of JSTOR, and are Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. For more information on JSTOR contact jstor—info@umich.edu. ©2002 JSTOR http://www.j stor.org/ Mon Jan 21 17:34:52 2002
An Examination of Gender Differences in Work-Family Conflict

Dans le cadre de la presente etude, nous avons elabore et mis a l'essai un modele d'integration de la relation entre le travail et la famille. Ce modele a ete applique separement aux sous-echantillons d'hommes et de femmes de maniere a evaluer la moyenne des differences entre les sexes ainsi que les differences entre les sexes en fonction des variables. Les analyses s'appuyaient sur les donnees d'un questionnaire auxquels avaient repondu 320 participants, des employes professionnels travaillant a plein temps dans des organisations canadiennes. Nous avons observe des differences entre les sexes en ce qui a trait au lien entre les exigences familiales et l'interference de la famille dans le travail, tandis que les resultats obtenus en ce qui a trait a l'interference de la famille dans le travail et la satisfaction professionnelle, la satisfaction familiale et la satisfaction personnelle etaient ambigus. En regle generale, ces resultats viennent appuyer les conclusions d'une precedente recherche, qui indiquait qu'il existe encore une asymetrie entre les roles joues par les hommes et les femmes au travail et dans la famille. Les limites et les questions d'ordre pratique issues de ces conclusions sont abordees.
Intersubjectivity in the intrapsychic sexual scripting of gay men

Sexual scripting theory was utilized as a framework for conducting sexual history and multiple follow‐up diary interviews with 23 gay‐identified men in Houston, Texas. Longitudinal interviews were conducted concerning their sexual lives, behaviours, desires and fantasies. Analysis revealed that intersubjectivity, or what individuals thought others thought of them, is a common process in participants' intrapsychic sexual scripting. Respondents utilized social structures of gender, race, class and age to make sense of their sexual lives. Importantly, gay men do not use these categories as strict ‘scripts' handed to them, but rather, are active in the process of creating and employing such structures in their sexual lives.
How to Aggregate Multimodal Features for Perceived Task Difficulty Recognition in Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Currently, a lot of research in the ﬁeld of intelligent tutoring systems is concerned with recognising student’s emotions and aﬀects. The recognition is done by extracting features from information sources like speech, typing and mouse clicking behaviour or physiological sensors. Multi-modal aﬀect recognition approaches use several information sources. Those approaches usually focus on the recognition of emotions or aﬀects but not on how to aggregate the multimodal features in the best way to reach the best recognition performance. In this work we propose an approach which combines methods from feature selection and ensemble learning for improving the performance of perceived task diﬃculty recognition.
Event Evolution Tracking from Streaming Social Posts

Online social post streams such as Twitter timelines and forum discussions have emerged as important channels for information dissemination. They are noisy, informal, and surge quickly. Real life events, which may happen and evolve every minute, are perceived and circulated in post streams by social users. Intuitively, an event can be viewed as a dense cluster of posts with a life cycle sharing the same descriptive words. There are many previous works on event detection from social streams. However, there has been surprisingly little work on tracking the evolution patterns of events, e.g., birth/death, growth/decay, merge/split, which we address in this paper. To define a tracking scope, we use a sliding time window, where old posts disappear and new posts appear at each moment. Following that, we model a social post stream as an evolving network, where each social post is a node, and edges between posts are constructed when the post similarity is above a threshold. We propose a framework which summarizes the information in the stream within the current time window as a ``sketch graph'' composed of ``core'' posts. We develop incremental update algorithms to handle highly dynamic social streams and track event evolution patterns in real time. Moreover, we visualize events as word clouds to aid human perception. Our evaluation on a real data set consisting of 5.2 million posts demonstrates that our method can effectively track event dynamics in the whole life cycle from very large volumes of social streams on the fly.
Decentralized adaptive neural network sliding mode control for reconfigurable manipulators with data-based modeling

In this paper, a decentralized adaptive neural network sliding mode control scheme is proposed for trajectory tracking control problem of reconfigurable manipulators based on data-based modeling. This method can be implemented to reconfigurable manipulators with different configurations and degrees of freedom without modifying any control parameters. Different from the previous works, the proposed control strategy is applied to mechanism model and data-based model of reconfigurable manipulators, respectively. The data-based model which is more comprehensive and precise is trained by the BP neural network with sampled input-output data. The gradient descent method is used to attain higher identification precision. Then the asymptotical stability of the system is proved using the Lyapunov theorem. Simulations are presented to not only illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed decentralized control scheme, but make a detailed comparison for control performance of the two modeling methods.
Anti-Oxidative Activity of An Aqueous Suspension of Commercial Preparation of The Mushroom Coprinus comatus

In this study the effects of an aqueous suspension of a commercial preparation of the mushroom Coprinus comatus on oxidative stress induced in rats by alloxane and carbon tetrachloride was examined. The effects were estimated from changes in the biochemical parameters (xanthine oxidase, glutathione peroxidase and catalase activity, reduced glutathione content, and extent of lipid peroxidation) of liver homogenate as well as histological changes in the liver of the rats treated with alloxane and carbon tetrachloride. Two screening doses of alloxane sufficient to induce diabetes in rats did not have any significant effect on the examined biochemical parameters of liver homogenate or on the cytoarchitectonics of liver cross-sections. Treatment with carbon tetrachloride resulted in a significant increase in the intensity of lipid peroxidation and peroxydasis activity, as well as with decrease in catalase activity. Certain changes in liver cross sections were detected, such is lymphocyte infiltration of dilated sinusoid capillaries. Administration of Coprinus comatus suspension thus showed antioxidative potential, evidenced by an increase of antioxidative status of liver homogenate and prevention of histological changes in liver cross sections.
eGenPub, a text mining system for extending computationally mapped bibliography for UniProt Knowledgebase by capturing centrality

Abstract UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) is a publicly available database with access to a vast amount of protein sequence and functional information. To widen the scope of the publications associated with a protein entry, UniProt has introduced the computationally mapped additional bibliography section, which includes literature collected from external sources. In this article, we describe a text mining system, eGenPub, which selects articles that are ‘about’ specific proteins and allows automatic identification of additional bibliography for given UniProt protein entries. Focusing on plant proteins initially, eGenPub utilizes a gene normalization tool called pGenN, and a trained support vector machine model, which achieves a precision of 95.3%, to predict whether an article, based on its abstract, should be linked to a given UniProt entry. We have conducted a full-scale PubMed processing using eGenPub for eight common plant species. Altogether, 9025 articles are identified as relevant bibliography for 4752 UniProt entries, among which 5252 are additional papers not in the existing publication section. These newly computationally mapped additional bibliography via eGenPub is being integrated in the UniProt production pipeline, and can be accessed via the UniProtKB protein entry publication view.
Visual Tracking of Multiple Persons in a Heavy Occluded Space Using Person Model and Joint Probabilistic Data Association

This paper presents a new approach to the problem of image-based tracking of multiple persons in a heavy occluded space using a single camera. The presence of heavy occlusions results in uncertain measurement data. Examples of heavy occlusions are objects which impede the observation of a person, the overlap of multiple persons, etc. This measurement uncertainty can be partially by-passed if the process knows more about a person's expected size, i.e. person model. This way the observed measurement can be corrected using the introduced person model. Also the uncertainty of the measurements will be calculated with this person model. Subsequently, the corrected measurement is used to estimate the person's state (i.e. position and velocity) in the Kalman filter resulting in a more robust tracking. Next, tracking multiple persons jointly implies the need for a data association technique. This paper uses the joint probabilistic data association (JPDA) filter which calculates the a posteriori probabilities of the measurements having probably originated from the tracked persons. Finally, the approach has been implemented and tested on a single static camera bearing in mind that it will be applied on a mobile camera or robot. The approach presented here will verify whether the use of a single camera, wherefrom only 2D image-based data is gathered, delivers satisfactory tracking results using the Kalman and JPDA filter
A Unifying Probabilistic View of Associative Learning

Two important ideas about associative learning have emerged in recent decades: (1) Animals are Bayesian learners, tracking their uncertainty about associations; and (2) animals acquire long-term reward predictions through reinforcement learning. Both of these ideas are normative, in the sense that they are derived from rational design principles. They are also descriptive, capturing a wide range of empirical phenomena that troubled earlier theories. This article describes a unifying framework encompassing Bayesian and reinforcement learning theories of associative learning. Each perspective captures a different aspect of associative learning, and their synthesis offers insight into phenomena that neither perspective can explain on its own.
Reading Development Policy and Policy Analysis: On Framing, Naming, Numbering and Coding1

Reducing policy to writing, then expanding again through reading, are constitutive as well as interpretative acts. The focus of this study is on ‘emancipatory reading’ of development policy writing, which deserves its own place in the spectrum of methods of analysis in development policy studies. Particular attention is paid to discourse analysis of development policy's discursive activities. Singled out are the increasingly recognised stalwarts ‘framing’ and ‘naming'; in addition ‘numbering’ and ‘coding’ merit being added to these.
The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State

Overall, The Montreal Massacre is an extraordinary book, but in addition to the theoretical confusion mentioned above, there are perhaps three other weaknesses. First, the authors do not make any connection to sociological research on hate crimes, and that topic of inquiry would seem to parallel the topic examined in this text. Second, there is no formal discussion of the methodology. While it might be argued that the ethnomethodological approach is its own method, it might have served a diverse body of potential readers if the authors had clarified and formalized their approach. Finally, at times the lengthy direct quotes overshadow the analysis. But this criticism is hedged by pointing out the convention in ethnomethodology of showing the primary data to allow readers to examine them directly. Still, this might at times be an impediment to the readability of an otherwise well-written book. Nonetheless, Peter Eglin and Stephen Hester have brought something strikingly new to the table. Social scientists of both crime and mass media will appreciate this book for its groundbreaking approach.
Neural network based anomaly detection

Detecting anomalous traffic with low false alarm rates is of primary interest in IP networks management. To this aim it is essential to distinguish between the natural variability of traffic due to its bursty nature and attack-related anomalous events. In this paper we investigate the applicability of neural networks for traffic prediction, focusing on the multilayer feedforward architecture and comparing the performance of different back-propagation algorithms. Prediction is carried out for different random aggregates (obtained through reversible sketches, introduced to improve the scalability of the solution) of traffic flows and, after comparing the prediction error with a threshold, a voting procedure is used to decide about the nature of the current data (with the additional possibility of identifying anomalous flows thanks to the features of reversible sketches). The performance analysis, presented in this paper, demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method (in terms of low false alarm rates and convergence speed) for an adequate choice of the learning algorithm.
“Transductive Urbanism” A Method for the Analysis of the Relational Infrastructure of Malled Metropolitan Centres in Auckland, New Zealand

This article discusses the theoretical framework and methodology developed for research on comparative urbanism devoted to emerging phenomena in rapidly expanding cities. It focuses on problems related to the right to the city, particularly addressing questions of participation in the production of space. The exploration of progressive social and spatial fragmentation of urban environments concentrates on the peculiar changes occurring in the main nodes of Auckland, the largest polycentric urban area of New Zealand. Primary places of this urban transformation are the shopping malls of latest generation that dominate the newly formed metropolitan centres. The presented methodology aims to interpret the heterotopic spatial introversions of these centres and describe their specific forms of spatial transductions. Its specific analytical methods are designed to provide indications of the emerging transformation of the role of public space in the interpersonal sphere of sociability. This involves the exploration of the agency of new digital media as instruments for the emergence of independent and autonomous recombinant forms in the new urban condition. The methods are combined to analyse and compare conceptions and experiences of physical, social and eidetic spatialities. Their application is expected to provide empirical support to the theoretically hypothesised, strong correlation between the increasing dis-embedding strength of territorial infrastructure and the emergence of networked “representational” re-combinations occurring with the latest ‘malling’ form.
Authentic Assessment in the Informal Setting: How It Can Work for You

Abstract Recently, authentic assessments have been used extensively in the classroom setting; however, their use in informal settings, such as outdoor education centers, has been very limited. We review several classroom techniques and present examples that illustrate the use of authentic assessment at an ecology education center. We conclude with a discussion of general issues such as the correlation of learning objectives and program content, development and scoring, and other considerations associated with implementation of authentic assessment.
Most Vesicles in a Central Nerve Terminal Participate in Recycling

Studies over the last decade using FM dyes to label vesicles at many terminals, including the calyx-type nerve terminal, led to a well accepted “principle” that only a small fraction of vesicles (∼5–20%) participate in recycling under physiological conditions. This principle imposes a large challenge in maintaining synaptic transmission during repetitive firing, because the small recycling pool may limit the number of available vesicles for release and nerve terminals would have to distinguish the recycling pool from the reserve pool and keep reserve pool vesicles from being used. By recording the presynaptic capacitance changes and the postsynaptic EPSC at rat calyx of Held synapses in the absence or presence of transmitter glutamate in nerve terminals, we developed a new method to count functional recycling vesicles. We found that essentially all vesicles in calyces participated in recycling, challenging the small-recycling-pool principle established by FM dye labeling. Nerve terminals may use all available vesicles to maximize their ability in maintaining synaptic transmission during repetitive firing.
Convergence properties of analytical target cascading

Analytical target cascading (ATC) is a relatively new methodology for the design of engineering systems. ATC deals with the issue of propagating desirable top level product design specifications (or targets) to appropriate targets at lower levels in a consistent and ecient manner. Most existing problem formulations for multilevel design often exhibit convergence diculties. In this article, it is proved that under convexity assumptions the ATC process converges to the optimal solution of the original design target problem.