Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pragmatics of Uncertainty

Paleoethnobotany is the use of burnt plant remains to investigate certain types of activity at archaeological sites. Ethnographic studies are used to inform opinion on the various points in the processing, storing, and cooking of grains at which the plants might come into contact with fire. Combined with opinions about the relative decay rates of different species, botanical remains are thus used to update an archaeologist’s opinion of the activities carried out in various places at a prehistoric house in a large settlement. The extent of the shift from prior to posterior is a measure of the importance of botanical evidence in archaeological interpretation. The methods are applied to excavations at a prehistoric site in Perú.
Enhanced Detection Using Target Polarization Signatures in Through-the-Wall Radar Imaging

We consider the problem of through-the-wall radar imaging (TWRI), in which polarimetric imaging is used for automatic target detection. Two generalized statistical detectors are proposed which perform joint detection and fusion of a set of multipolarization radar images. The first detector is an extension of a previously proposed iterative target detector for multiview TWRI. This extension allows the detector to automatically adapt to statistics that may vary, depending on target locations and electromagnetic-wave polarizations. The second detector is based on Bayes' test and is of interest when target pixel occupancies are known from, e.g., secondary data. Properties of the proposed detectors are delineated and demonstrated by real data measurements using wideband sum-and-delay beamforming, acquired in a semicontrolled lab environment. We examine the performance of the proposed detectors when imaging both metal objects and humans.
The Role of Family Networks, Coyote Prices and the Rural Economy in Migration from Western Mexico: 1965-1994

The Mexico-U.S. wage gap alone cannot explain the large increases in migration from Mexico to the U.S. in the last three decades. This paper explores three alternative migration determinants: family migrant networks, the Mexican migrant-smuggling (coyote) industry and the rural economy. The premise of this paper is that successive cohorts of migrants and an expanding coyote industry have led to declines in the costs of migration partly through the formation of networks, while the long-term decline of the rural economy has led to increases in the gains to U.S. migration. Using unique, source-country data collected by the Mexican Migration Project from both migrant and non-migrant households in western Mexico, this paper estimates how the probability of migrating is influenced by the above determinants in two ways. First, the effect of coyote prices and economic output are estimated using an instrumental variables strategy in which coyote prices are instrumented for using border enforcement hours. Second, family network effects are estimated controlling for individual fixed effects. My findings suggest that sibling networks are by far the most significant determinant of initial migration, although falling coyote prices and worsened economic conditions have also been significant push/pull factors in out migration from western Mexico over this time period.
Testing of Trusted CMOS Data Converters

In this work, we present testing of trusted CMOS data converters using DeltaIDDQ and on-chip linear ramp histogram techniques. DeltaIDDQ technique can be efficiently used to detect faults taking process variation into effect. We present design for an on-chip testability of CMOS analog-to-digital converter using linear-ramp histogram technique. The paper discusses a brief overview of the histogram technique, the formulae used to calculate the ADC parameters, the design implemented in 0. 5μm n-well CMOS process, the results and effectiveness of the design. The on-chip linear ramp histogram technique can be seamlessly combined with DeltaIDDQ technique for improved testability, increased fault coverage and reliable operation.
Students Who Don't Understand Information Flow Should Be Eaten: An Experience Paper

Information flow is still relevant, from browser privacy to side-channel attacks on cryptography. However, many of the seminal ideas come from an era when multi-level secure systems were the main subject of study. Students have a hard time relating the material to today's familiar commodity systems. We describe our experiences developing and utilizing an online version of the game Werewolves of Miller's Hollow (a variant of Mafia). To avoid being eaten, students must exploit inference channels on a Linux system to discover "werewolves" among a population of "townspeople. " Because the werewolves must secretly discuss and vote about who they want to eat at night, they are forced to have some amount of keystroke and network activity in their remote shells at this time. In each instance of the game the werewolves are chosen at random from among the townspeople, creating an interesting dynamic where students must think about information flow from both perspectives and keep adapting their techniques and strategies throughout the semester. This game has engendered a great deal of enthusiasm among our students, and we have witnessed many interesting attacks that we did not anticipate. We plan to release the game under an open source software license.
The Bookstagram Effect: Adolescents' Voluntary Literacy Engagement on Instagram

This qualitative study is the first to explore bookstagram, a relatively new social media phenomenon whereby Instagram users dedicate their feed to showcasing books and reading-related activities. Specifically, this study explored adolescents' experiences of bookstagram to gain a better understanding of what motivates them towards voluntary literacy engagement. The bookstagram and reading experiences of 10 adolescent bookstagrammers were explored through semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire. The interviews were coded according to types of pleasure experienced in adolescents' free-choice reading (Wilhelm, 2016), related themes derived from the data, and themes informed by the literature on social media. The findings reinforced Wilhelm's finding that pleasure is at the heart of adolescents' free-choice reading, and further showed that bookstagram enriched adolescents' experiences of social pleasure connected to reading. The findings also revealed that bookstagram enhanced participants' literacy practices, leading them to read more, branch out into different genres, read more attentively, and embrace their enjoyment of reading. Self-presentation on bookstagram was found in participants' references to identity and self-expression on social media, and was considered in terms of its influence on participants' experiences of and motivations to bookstagram. The topics of followerships and sponsorships also emerged, although neither acted as motivations to bookstagram. Overall, this study illustrated that bookstagram gave adolescent readers an opportunity to enhance their pleasure in free-choice reading by exposing them to a community of book lovers who are as excited about reading as they are. Implications include integrating bookstagram in literacy curricula to appeal to adolescents' reading interests.
FT-Feasibility in Fixed Priority Real-Time Scheduling

Real-time systems typically have to satisfy complex requirements mapped to the timing attributes of the tasks that are eventually guaranteed by the underlying scheduler. These systems consist of a mix of hard and soft tasks with varying criticalities as well as associated fault tolerance (FT) requirements. Often time redundancy techniques are preferred in many embedded applications and hence it is extremely important to devise appropriate methodologies for scheduling real-time tasks under fault assumptions. Additionally, the relative criticality of tasks could undergo changes during the evolution of the system. Hence scheduling decisions under fault assumptions have to reflect all these important factors in addition to the resource constraints.In this paper we propose a framework for 'FTfeasibility', i.e., to provide a priori guarantees that all critical tasks in the system will meet their deadlines even in case of faults. Our main objective here is to ensure FTfeasibility of all critical tasks in the system and do so with minimal costs and without any fundamental changes in the scheduling paradigm. We demonstrate its applicability in scenarios where the FT strategy employed is re-execution of the affected tasks or an alternate action upon occurrence of transient faults or software design faults. We analyse a feasible set of tasks and propose methods to adapt it to varying FT requirements without modifications to the underlying scheduler. We do so by reassigning task attributes to achieve FT-feasibility while keeping the costs minimised.
MetaSPD: Metamorphic analysis for automatic Software Piracy Detection

This paper presents a novel approach to address the problem of automatic detection of the software that is pirated. Software piracy, which is the unauthorized reconstruction and distribution of licensed and copyrighted software, imposes high economical and commercial losses annually and is also considered as a drastic threat to the security of software systems. To overcome these issues, we mine the opcode graphs of the software to extract the frequent opcode sub-graphs of the software. In fact, these sub-graphs would act as micro-signatures of the original software and can be used to reason about the pirated versions of the software. Pirated software detection shares many characteristics of metamorphic malware detection where the structure of the code is morphed while the main functionality of the malware is preserved. We evaluated our approach using the same data and experimental setup as a state-of-the-art approach. In our experiments, the proposed approach outperformed the mentioned approach in terms of robustness and effectiveness.
Scaling Answer Type Detection to Large Hierarchies

This paper describes the creation of a state-of-the-art answer type detection system capable of recognizing more than 200 different expected answer types with greater than 85% precision and recall. After describing how we constructed a new, multi-tiered answer type hierarchy from the set of entity types recognized by Language Computer Corporations CICEROLITE named entity recognition system, we describe how we used this hierarchy to annotate a new corpus of more than 10,000 English factoid questions. We show how an answer type detection system trained on this corpus can be used to enhance the accuracy of a state-of-the-art question-answering system (Hickl et al., 2007; Hickl et al., 2006b) by more than 7% overall.
Evolving XML Summarization Strategies in DUC 2005

In the Document Understanding Conference for 2005, CL Research made some improvements in its summarization routines based on the use of massively XML-tagged documents containing increasingly richer characterizations of texts. We extended the Knowledge Management System to include an improved capability for identifying redundancy when adding extracted sentences to the summary and for improving the organization of the sentences. These minor improvements increased our ROUGE-1 scores from 0.30 to 0.35. However, we did not make further modifications to our routines, pending a further examination of the utility of the summarization task. We used DUC 2005 to assess the value of various metrics, concluding that the ROUGE metrics provided the most guidance for improving our system. We found the linguistic quality and responsiveness metrics to be of use. However, we found the pyramid method to be very difficult to use, although promising in theory. Overall, the metrics still beg the question of analyzing the crucial summarization questions of establishing semantic equivalence in the ways that content is expressed. Based on other summarization experiments performed in a demonstration project, we suggest that the solution to establishing equivalence and more specifically, when a concept represents an instantiation of a concept in a topic description, may be found in a richer ontological representation of documents.
IL18 haplotypes are associated with serum IL-18 concentrations in a population-based study and a cohort of individuals with premature coronary heart disease.

BACKGROUND Interleukin (IL)-18 is a proinflammatory cytokine that has been implicated in several diseases, including atherosclerosis, and increased circulating IL-18 concentrations increase risk of future coronary heart disease (CHD). We evaluated the effect of common variation within the IL18 gene on concentrations of circulating IL-18. METHODS We measured IL-18, by ELISA, in the population-based study group [Carotid Ultrasound Disease Assessment Study (CUDAS)] and a predominantly male cohort with premature cardiovascular disease [Carotid Ultrasound in Patients with Ischaemic Heart Disease (CUPID)]. Using a tagging single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) approach that captured >90% of genetic variation, we identified 4 common (>10%) haplotypes. RESULTS A common SNP was associated with differences in IL-18 concentrations; in CUDAS individuals carrying 2 copies of the rare allele, concentrations were 13% higher than in those with no copies (P = 0.002). Haplotypes were also associated with significant differences in IL-18 concentrations in CUDAS and CUPID. Haplotype GTATA (frequency 23%) was associated with significantly lower IL-18 than others. In CUDAS, those carrying 2 copies had IL-18 concentrations 15% lower than those carrying no copies (P = 0.002); in CUPID, the difference was 22% (P = 0.004). These associations remained significant after adjustment for age, sex, hypertension, HDL cholesterol, waist-to-hip ratio, and alcohol consumption. Despite being associated with differences in IL-18 concentrations, the haplotypes did not occur at different frequencies in those with or without carotid atherosclerotic plaques. CONCLUSIONS Variation within IL18 affects IL-18 concentrations in healthy and diseased individuals and thus may influence the pathophysiology of plaques at all stages of CHD progression.
Callback: Efficient synchronization without invalidation with a directory just for spin-waiting

Cache coherence protocols based on self-invalidation allow a simpler design compared to traditional invalidation-based protocols, by relying on data-race-free (DRF) semantics and applying self-invalidation on racy synchronization points exposed to the hardware. Their simplicity lies in the absence of invalidation traffic, which eliminates the need to track readers in a directory, and reduces the number of transient protocol states. With the addition of self-downgrade these protocols can become effectively directory-free. While this works well for race-free data, unfortunately, lack of explicit invalidations compromises the effectiveness of any synchronization that relies on races. This includes any form of spin waiting, which is employed for signaling, locking, and barrier primitives. In this work we propose a new solution for spin-waiting in these protocols, the callback mechanism, that is simpler and more efficient than explicit invalidation. Callbacks are set by reads involved in spin waiting, and are satisfied by writes (that can even precede these reads). To implement callbacks we use a small (just a few entries) directory-cache structure that is intended to service only these “spin-waiting” races. This directory structure is self-contained and is not backed up in any way. Entries are created on demand and can be evicted without the need to preserve their information. Our evaluation shows a significant improvement both over explicit invalidation and over exponential back-off, the state-of-the-art mechanism for self-invalidation protocols to avoid spinning in the shared cache.
Peer victimization and suicidality among LGBTQ youth: the roles of school belonging, self-compassion, and parental support

Abstract Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth’s experiences at school has largely focused on stigma, adversity, disparities, and peer victimization. Factors like school climate, individual differences, and social support have also garnered significant attention. However, there has been a dearth of research examining how they relate to both suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Our goal was to bolster the extant literature by examining the protective role of parental support and psychological mechanisms like school belonging and self-compassion among LGBTQ youth struggling with peer victimization and suicidality. A cross-sectional study was completed with a sample of 934 LGBTQ high school students. Structural equation modeling was employed to analyze direct and indirect effects. Peer victimization was positively associated with both forms of suicidality and negatively associated with school belonging and self-compassion. Psychological processes varied in their in prediction of suicidal ideation and attempts. Parental support did not moderate pathways between victimization and processes, but was associated with diminished suicidality and improved school belonging. Our findings illustrate the critical nature of further developing our understanding of the complexities of suicidality. School programs and interventions that are designed to cultivate belonging, self-compassion, and parental support may prove to be especially beneficial for victimized LGBTQ youth who struggle with suicidality.
Genetic Polymorphisms in Genes Related to Oxidative Stress (GSTP1, GSTM1, GSTT1, CAT, MnSOD, MPO, eNOS) and Survival of Rectal Cancer Patients after Radiotherapy

Radiotherapy exerts part of its antineoplastic effect by generating oxidative stress, therefore genetic variation in oxidative stress-related enzymes may influence survival of rectal cancer patients. We hypothesized that genetic polymorphisms associated with higher amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS) that exaggerate cytotoxic activity could improve survival after radiotherapy. We followed 114 rectal cancer patients who received radiotherapy for an average of 42.5 months. Associations between genotypes (GSTP1, GSTM1, GSTT1, CAT, MnSOD, MPO and eNOS) and overall survival were assessed using Kaplan-Meier curves and Cox proportional hazards regression. As hypothesized, patients carrying low ROS producing eNOS Glu298Asp asparagine allele showed an increased hazard of death compared to homozygous carriers of the glutamine allele (hazard ratio (HR): 2.10, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.01–4.38). However, carriers of low ROS producing MPO G463A A allele had a decreased hazard of death compared to patients homozygous for the G allele (HR: 0.44, 95% CI: 0.21–0.93) although patients homozygous for the A allele had a slightly increased hazard (HR: 1.12, 95% CI: 0.25–5.08). This explorative study provides first results and highlights the need for further, larger studies to investigate association between genetic variation in oxidative stress genes and survival of rectal cancer patients who received radiotherapy.
The dust disk of HR 4049 - Another brick in the wall

We present the Spectral Energy Distribution of HR 4049 based on literature data and new continuum measurements at 850 µm. The SED shows variable absorption in the UV, and a large IR excess, both caused by circumstellar dust. The shape of the IR excess from 1 µm all the way down to 850 µm can be nearly perfectly fitted with a single blackbody function at T ≈ 1150 K or alternatively with a sum of blackbodies in a narrow temperature range. The energy emitted in this IR continuum radiation is about one-third of the stellar luminosity. We show that this blackbody radiation must be due to the presence of a circumbinary disk with a large height. This disk must also be gas-rich, in agreement with the observations of molecular bands in the ISO-SWS spectrum. We present two possible scenario's for explaining the shape and the intensity of the IR excess. The first scenario involves large grains (a ≥ 1 mm) that each radiate like a blackbody. The second scenario argues that the blackbody radiation is due to a very optically thick circumbinary disk. We investigate if such a disk would indeed produce blackbody radiation by presenting results from radiative transfer calculations. We further quantify the properties of such a disk and its stability in the framework of (hydro)dynamics, grain settling, radiation pressure and grain drift. The virtues and shortcomings of both models for the origin of the IR blackbody are discussed by contrasting them with other observations and assessing them in the framework of (binary) (post-)AGB evolution.
Face as an interactional construct in the context of connectedness and separateness

In recent work, Arundale proposed a Face Constituting Theory based on the Conjoint Co-Constituting Model of Communication. His main concern is directed towards a shift from the individualistic conception of face and (im)politeness to a non-summative view on communication based on fundamental insights from conversation analysis. Based on two film shootings between German and Brazilian exchange students, which are part of the larger corpus NUCOI, we will take a closer look at moments in which face comes to the fore in the light of (dis)alignment and (dis)affiliation. While in the German example facework is negotiated metacommunicatively, in the Brazilian example facework is calibrated in more subtle ways represented by prosodic and visual cues, which are either given or held back by the co-participants. We will show that these two different patterns may be related to culture-specific construals of face.
The First Hour of Extragalactic Data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Spectroscopic Commissioning: The Coma Cluster

On 1999 May 26, one of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) fiber-fed spectrographs saw astronomical first light. This was followed by the first spectroscopic commissioning run during the dark period of 1999 June. We present here the first hour of extragalactic spectroscopy taken during these early commissioning stages: an observation of the Coma cluster of galaxies. Our data samples the southern part of this cluster, out to a radius of 1. °5 (1.8 h-1 Mpc, approximately to the virial radius) and thus fully covers the NGC 4839 group. We outline in this paper the main characteristics of the SDSS spectroscopic systems and provide redshifts and spectral classifications for 196 Coma galaxies, of which 45 redshifts are new. For the 151 galaxies in common with the literature, we find excellent agreement between our redshift determinations and the published values, e.g., for the largest homogeneous sample of galaxies in common (63 galaxies observed by Colless & Dunn) we find a mean offset of 3 km s -1 and an rms scatter of only 24 km s -1. As part of our analysis, we have investigated four different spectral classification algorithms: measurements of the spectral line strengths, a principal component decomposition, a wavelet analysis and the fitting of spectral synthesis models to the data. We find that these classification schemes are in broad agreement and can provide physical insight into the evolutionary histories of our cluster galaxies. We find that a significant fraction (25%) of our observed Coma galaxies show signs of recent star formation activity and that the velocity dispersion of these active galaxies (emission-line and poststarburst galaxies) is 30% larger than the absorption-line galaxies. We also find no active galaxies within the central (projected) 200 h-1 kpc of the cluster. The spatial distribution of our Coma active galaxies is consistent with that found at higher redshift for the CNOC1 cluster survey. Beyond the core region, the fraction of bright active galaxies appears to rise slowly out to the virial radius and are randomly distributed within the cluster with no apparent correlation with the potential merger or postmerger of the NGC 4839 group. We briefly discuss possible origins of this recent galaxy star formation.