Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Work Life Balance: What DO You Mean? The Ethical Ideology Underpinning Appropriate Application

This article categorizes definitions of work life balance (WLB) according to a framework of ethical ideologies. By understanding what perspective the definition of WLB is framed within, practitioners and academics will be better able to assess the suitability of that definition for a particular application. Although many current definitions are absolutist in nature, dictating a “right” balance that all should aspire to, the author argues that definitions reflecting a situationalist perspective are most valuable to academics and practitioners. Definitions from a situationalist perspective offer an opportunity to explore what factors contribute to attainment of WLB for particular groups of people. Once there are broadly agreed definitions of WLB for groups of people, relevant measures of WLB and WLB initiatives that respond to these definitions can be developed. This will provide a baseline for the comparative analysis of WLB programs. Implications for organization development interventions and change management practice are explored.
Physiological role of pyruvate oxidase in the aerobic metabolism of Lactobacillus plantarum

Under aerobic growth conditions Lactobacillus plantarum produced acetic acid in addition to lactic acid. It was found that lactic acid was predominantly produced at first, and then when the carbohydrate was nearly exhausted, lactic acid was metabolized further to acetic acid. The most likely enzyme involved in the aerobic metabolism of L. plantarum is pyruvate oxidase. Its activity is enhanced in the presence of oxygen and is reduced in the presence of glucose. The specific activity of pyruvate oxidase is highest at the beginning of the stationary-growth phase, where a strong increase in acetic acid production was also observed.
An empirical methodology for introducing software processes

There is a growing interest in empirical study in software engineering, both for validating mature technologies and for guiding improvements of less-mature technologies. This paper introduces an empirical methodology, based on experiences garnered over more than two decades of work by the Empirical Software Engineering Group at the University of Maryland and related organizations, for taking a newly proposed improvement to development processes from the conceptual phase through transfer to industry. The methodology presents a series of questions that should be addressed, as well as the types of studies that best address those questions. The methodology is illustrated by a specific research program on inspection processes for Object-Oriented designs. Specific examples of the studies that were performed and how the methodology impacted the development of the inspection process are also described.
Globalization and internationalization in higher education: theoretical, strategic and management perspectives

Globalization of education: Karnatakas Higher Education Globalization and the U.S. | Boundless US HistoryMigration and Globalization: Challenges and PerspectivesInternational Trade, Globalization and Economic THE CAUSES OF GLOBALIZATIONInternationalization of Higher Education: Potential What Is Globalization? Globalization ExplainedThe Growing Rivalry Between America and China and the Globalization: The Concept, Causes, and Consequences | PIIE(DOC) Chapter 01 Globalization True / False Questions Joel Kovel WikipediaCHAPTER
Belief Systems and Durable Inequalities: An Experimental Investigation of Indian Caste

If discrimination against an historically oppressed social group is dismantled, will the group forge ahead? The authors present experimental evidence that a history of social and legal disabilities may have persistent effects on a group's earnings through its impact on individuals' expectations. In the first experiment, 321 high-caste and 321 low-caste junior high school male student volunteers in rural India performed the task of solving mazes under economic incentives. There were no caste differences in performance when caste was not publicly revealed, but making caste salient created a large and robust caste gap. When a nonhuman factor influencing rewards (a random draw) was introduced, the caste gap disappeared. To test whether the low caste's anticipation of prejudicial treatment caused the caste gap, the authors conducted a second experiment that manipulated the scope for discretion in rewarding performance. When the link between performance and payoffs was purely mechanical, making caste salient did not affect behavior. Instead, it was in the case where there was scope for discretion and judgment in rewarding performance that making caste salient had an effect. The results suggest that when caste identity is salient, low-caste subjects expect that others will judge them prejudicially. Mistrust undermines motivation. The experimental design enables the authors to exclude as explanations of the caste gap in performance socioeconomic differences and a lack of self-confidence by low-caste participants.
TCP enhancement for transmission in a variable bandwidth wireless environment

In this paper, we propose a scheme that dynamically adjusts the slow start threshold (ssthresh) of TCP. The ssthresh estimation is used to set an appropriate ssthresh. A good ssthresh would improve the transmission performance of TCP. For the congestion avoidance state, we present a mechanism that probes the available bandwidth. We adjust the congestion window size (cwnd) appropriately by observing the round trip time (RTT) and reset the ssthresh after quick retransmission or timeout using the ssthresh estimation. Then the TCP sender can enhance its performance by using the ssthresh estimation and the observed RTT. Our scheme defines what is considered an efficient transmission rate. It achieves better utilization than other TCP versions. Simulation results show that our scheme effectively improves TCP performance. For example, when the average bottleneck bandwidth is close to 30% of the whole network bandwidth, our scheme improves TCP performance by at least 10%.
Radial force characteristics of a switched reluctance machine

The operation of a switched reluctance machine with eccentric rotor positions creates asymmetrical airgap flux distributions and results in unbalanced magnetic pull. This paper comprehensively investigates the static and dynamic radial force characteristics of an 18/12 switched reluctance machine with unbalanced operation. A powerful magnetic equivalent circuit (MEC) modelling approach is developed and allow fast and accurate force predictions with arbitrary excitation and position. The model calculates the instantaneous radial and tangential forces on the individual poles as well as the net forces on the rotor. The method is validated with finite element analysis (FEA) and against experimental results from a 12/8 machine. Static radial force characteristics are first developed. The MEC is then coupled with a time stepping algorithm to calculate the simultaneously varying electrical, mechanical, and magnetic variables for dynamic operation of the complete SR motor drive. Dynamic radial force behavior is examined, where parallel connected windings are found to naturally and significantly reduce the unbalanced magnetic pull. Variations of radial force with torque-speed operating point are also examined.
THE GALACTIC ENVIRONMENT OF THE Ne viii ABSORBER TOWARD HE0226 − 4110

We report the discovery of a small galaxy system in the vicinity of the Ne viii absorber at z = 0.20701 toward HE0226 − 4110. The galaxy system consists of two 0.25 L* disk galaxies and a 0.05 L* galaxy all within Δ v < 300 km s−1 and ρ ⩽ 200 h−1 physical kpc of the absorber. We consider various scenarios for the origin of the Ne viii absorption, including photo-ionized gas from an active galactic nucleus, a starburst-driven wind, a hot intragroup medium, hot gas in a galaxy halo, and a conductive front produced by cool clouds moving at high speed through a hot medium. We argue that the conductive front scenario is most likely responsible for producing the Ne viii feature, because it is consistent with the observed galactic environment around the absorber and because it naturally explains the multi-phase nature of the gas and the kinematic signatures of the absorption profiles. Although our preferred scenario suggests that Ne viii may not be directly probing the warm-hot intergalactic medium, it does imply the existence of an extended hot confining medium around a disk galaxy that may contain a significant reservoir of baryons in the form of hot gas.
Unbiased Causal Inference From an Observational Study: Results of a Within-Study Comparison

Adjustment methods such as propensity scores and analysis of covariance are often used for estimating treatment effects in nonexperimental data. Shadish, Clark, and Steiner used a within-study comparison to test how well these adjustments work in practice. They randomly assigned participating students to a randomized or nonrandomized experiment. Treatment effects were then estimated in the experiment and compared to the adjusted nonexperimental estimates. Most of the selection bias in the nonexperiment was reduced. The present study replicates the study of Shadish et al. despite some differences in design and in the size and direction of the initial bias. The results show that the selection of covariates matters considerably for bias reduction in nonexperiments but that the choice of analysis matters less.
Stretched horizon and entropy of superstars

Amongst the class of supergravity solutions found by Lin, Lunin and Maldacena, we consider pure and mixed state configurations generated by phase space densities in the dual fermionic picture. A one-to-one map is constructed between the phase space densities and piecewise monotonic curves, which generalize the Young diagrams corresponding to pure states. Within the fermionic phase space picture, a microscopic formula for the entropy of mixed states is proposed. Considering thermal ensembles, agreement is found between the thermodynamic and the proposed microscopic entropies. Furthermore, we study fluctuations in thermodynamic ensembles for the superstar and compare the entropy of these ensembles with the area of stretched horizons predicted by the mean fluctuation size.
A 130 nm generation logic technology featuring 70 nm transistors, dual Vt transistors and 6 layers of Cu interconnects

A leading edge 130 nm generation logic technology with 6 layers of dual damascene Cu interconnects is reported. Dual Vt transistors are employed with 1.5 nm thick gate oxide and operating at 1.3 V. High Vt transistors have drive currents of 1.03 mA//spl mu/m and 0.5 mA//spl mu/m for NMOS and PMOS respectively, while low Vt transistors have currents of 1.17 mA//spl mu/m and 0.6 mA//spl mu/m respectively. Technology design rules allow a 6-T SRAM cell with an area of 2.45 /spl mu/m/sup 2/, while array specific design rule give the densest SRAM reported to date, the 6-T cell has an area of only 2.09 /spl mu/m/sup 2/. Excellent yield and performance is demonstrated on a 18 Mbit CMOS SRAM.
Die Erfassung sozialer Phobie durch die Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) und die Social Phobia Scale (SPS)

Zusammenfassung. Die vorliegende Arbeit berichtet erste Analysen zur Reliabilitat und Validitat sowie klinische cut-off-Werte der deutschen Bearbeitung der Social Interaction Anxiety Scale und der Social Phobia Scale (Mattick & Clarke, 1989). Die Skalen wurden 43 Patienten mit Sozialer Phobie, 69 Patienten mit anderen psychischen Storungen und 24 Kontrollpersonen ohne psychische Storungen vorgelegt. Die ermittelten Werte fur die innere Konsistenz und Test-Retest-Korrelation sprechen fur eine sehr hohe Reliabilitat. Hinweise auf eine konvergente Validitat ergaben sich aus hohen Korrelationen mit konstruktnahen Mesinstrumenten zur Sozialen Phobie, wahrend die Korrelationen zu Depressions- und Angstmasen erwartungsgemas geringer ausfielen. Die beiden Skalen diskriminieren Soziophobiker sehr gut von Personen ohne psychische Storung und Angstpatienten, wahrend die Diskriminationsleistung von depressiven Patienten geringer ausgepragt ist. Die ermittelten cut-off-Werte liegen deutlich unter den amerikanischen We.
Developmental Changes in Arabic Babbling in Relation to English and French Babbling

Infant vocalization undergoes dramatic changes during the transition from newborn cooing and infant babbling toward the production of meaningful speech. However, the processes underlying these changes are not fully understood, particularly at the age at which ambient language input begins to influence infant babbling. The aim of this study was to describe the babbling produced by Arabic infants―using acoustic and phonetic metrics―and then examine the effects of linguistic environmental input on babbling by comparing the babble produced by Arabic infants to that produced by English and French infants. Speech samples were collected from infants learning Arabic (N = 31; age: 281-591 days), English (N = 20; age: 303-553 days) or French (N = 23; age: 311-566 days). Each utterance was transcribed according to the International Phonetic Alphabet and then coded according to infraphonological categories. Two studies were conducted. Study one aimed to describe the vowel space of Arabic infants and then compare it to the vowel space of English and French infants. First (F1) and second (F2) formant frequencies were identified in all vowels produced with full resonance, normal phonation, and speech-like duration. These F1 and F2 frequencies were used to calculate the compact-diffuse (F2 - F1) and grave-acute ([F2+F1]/2) values for each vowel so that the extreme corners of each infant's vowel space could be identified. Multiple regression and analysis of variance analyses were used to examine the effects of language and age on the infant vowel space (centre, corners, and area of the space). Developmental changes in the expansion of the vowel space toward the grave corner were observed in all language groups. In addition, a language-specific pattern of changes on the vowel space were observed with age: Arabic infants showed unchanged F1 and F2 values at the centre of the space, expansion toward the compact corner, a larger vowel space than infants in the other language groups at all ages studied; French infants showed a decreased F1 and unchanged F2 values at the centre, an expansion toward the diffuse corner, and a shrinking from the acute corner toward the center of the vowel space; and English infants showed decreased F2 values but unchanged F1 values at the centre of the vowel space. Study two aimed to describe the consonantal repertoires of Arabic infants and then compare these consonantal repertoires across three infant language groups. Infants were organized into three age groups (10-12, 12-15 and 15-18 months), and the consonants produced in canonical (CS) and marginal (MS) syllables with normal phonation were grouped into manner and place categories. Analysis of variance revealed no significant crosslinguistic differences in the frequency of production of any manner or place categories.This study showed developmental and language-specific changes in the infant vowel space when vowels were submitted to acoustic analysis. However, early crosslinguistic differences in vowel space were not accompanied by crosslinguistic…
Achievable regions for interference channels with generalized and intermittent feedback

In this paper, we first study a two-user interference channel with generalized feedback. We establish an inner bound on its capacity region. The coding scheme that we employ for the inner bound is based on an appropriate combination of Han-Kobayash rate splitting and compress-and-forward at the senders. Each sender compresses the channel output that is observes using a compression scheme that is à-la Lim et al. noisy network coding and Avestimeher et al. quantize-map-and-forward. Next, we study an injective deterministic model in which the senders obtain output feedback only intermittently. Specializing the coding scheme of the model with generalized feedback to this scenario, we obtain useful insights onto effective ways of combining noisy network coding with interference alignment techniques. We also apply our results to linear deterministic interference channels with intermittent feedback.
Member Failure Recovery Mechanism Using Context Ontology for Community Computing

Community computing is a new paradigm for building ubiquitous systems which can solve problems by collaborating between entities in ubiquitous environment. Community is a kind of collaborative group and members in the community interact with each other for achieving community goals - that is, seamless interaction is the key issue of the community computing. In this perspective, member failure is one of the most critical issues, because member failure interrupts interactions between members. The purpose of this paper is to solve the member failure problem. We suggest a new replication mechanism that community maintains all member statuses as replicas and replicates member using replica of failed member when member failure detected. And then, replicated member is transformed himself to take part in the community. For the fast and efficient recovery of the member failure, we define some ontologies representing context for community entities as well as replica of the member written in Web ontology language (OWL). As the experimental test, we simulate a plausible scenario on JADE platform and evaluate our approach in terms of cost and availability.
Piggyback: Using Search Engines for Robust Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition

We use search engine results to address a particularly difficult cross-domain language processing task, the adaptation of named entity recognition (NER) from news text to web queries. The key novelty of the method is that we submit a token with context to a search engine and use similar contexts in the search results as additional information for correctly classifying the token. We achieve strong gains in NER performance on news, in-domain and out-of-domain, and on web queries.
Aspect-Specific Ranking of Product Reviews Using Topic Modeling

We examine the problem of ranking different aspects of a product through examination of its customer reviews. For instance, a restaurant review may contain distinct and possibly differing opinions on the food, decor, service, and price. We present a ranking system that uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and a database of opinion-oriented words to predict the aspect-specific sentiment of individual reviews. We evaluate the ranker on a set of test reviews and compare our results to previous work in this area.
The Influence of Consensus Information and Prior Expectations on Dispositional and Situational Attributions

Summary The impact of consensus information (i.e., information about how most people behave) on causal inferences was investigated. In a questionnaire format, 165 men and women university undergraduates recorded their expectations about the likelihood of target behaviors, received consensus feedback, and made judgments about the dispositional and situational causes of the behaviors. Three kinds of dependent measures (separate rating scales, mutually exclusive choices, and weighted choices) were included in order to explore the influence of different response alternatives on attributional judgments. Dispositional attributions (from the rating scales) produced a significant linear trend—they were largest in the low consensus condition and smallest in the high consensus condition, with the control condition falling between the two extremes. In contrast, situational attributions were unaffected by the consensus manipulation. As predicted, prior expectations mediated the relationship among target behavior, con.
Approach to metric and discrimination of blur based on its invariant features

Blur metrics have been used in broad range of applications to quantify the amount of blur especially in images. The spatially varying blur due to defocus or camera shake is hard to estimate. It is observed that the existing blur metrics does not perform well for images having very few or many features. In this work, we present contrast based blur invariant features named as CBIF, which utilizes useful information available in different contrast levels. We further, used CBIF along with local standard deviation to formulate a no reference objective blur metric which shows better results compared with other existing blur metrics. Additionally, the proposed blur metric can be modified for perceptual quality assessment by implementing the scheme which takes advantage of a better correlation with human blur perception. Also, the blur metric can be modified to provide blur assessment in the presence of gaussian noise. The proposed metric is monotonic as well as accurate even for severely blurred images. The comparison of results with subjective scores of CSIQ and LIVE image databases also validated the superiority of our proposed metric over existing metrics. The applicability of our blur metric is also demonstrated for the assessment of JPEG distortions. The property of CBIF for being more sensitive to blur effected regions is also used for obtaining blur likelihood map which is further used in blur segmentation.
Contrast Polarities Determine the Direction of Café Wall Tilts

We propose an explanatory approach to Café Wall type illusions that is simple yet fairly comprehensive. These illusions are constructed out of basic elementary units in a jigsaw-like manner. Each unit, in general, contains both a solid body and a thin tail: the contrast polarity between the two determines the direction of the contributory illusory tilt produced by that element—according to a heuristic rule illustrated in figure 1. Ensembles of these elements exhibit illusory tilts only when the tails of the elements align along a common line in an additive manner. When elements of opposing polarity alternate, the illusion is cancelled. This approach extends and supersedes those presented in Pinna's illusion of angularity and Kitaoka's ‘acute’ corner effect. Furthermore, it appears to be, in part, compatible with existing mechanisms proposed to account for the emergence of local tilt cues, and it suggests several novel variations on the Café Wall theme.
DNA damage and cell cycle regulation of ribonucleotide reductase

Ribonucleotide reductase (RNR) catalyzes the rate limiting step in the production of deoxyribonucleotides needed for DNA synthesis. In addition to the well documented allosteric regulation, the synthesis of the enzyme is also tightly regulated at the level of transcription. mRNAs for both subunits are cell cycle regulated and inducible by DNA damage in all organisms examined, including E. coli, S. cerevisiae and H. sapiens. This DNA damage regulation is thought to provide a metabolic state that facilitates DNA replicational repair processes. S. cerevisiae also encodes a second large subunit gene, RNR3, that is expressed only in the presence of DNA damage. Genetic analysis of the DNA damage response in S. cerevisiae has shown that RNR expression is under both positive and negative control. Among mutants constitutive for RNR expression are the general transcriptional repression genes, SSN6 and TUP1. Mutations in POL1 and POL3 also activate RNR expression, indicating that the DNA damage sensory network may respond directly to blocks in DNA synthesis. A protein kinase, Dun1, has been identified that controls inducibility of RNR1, RNR2 and RNR3 in response to DNA damage and replication blocks. This result suggests that the RNR genes in S. cerevisiae form a regulon that is coordinately regulated by protein phosphorylation in response to DNA damage.