Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exceptional Faculty Members Who Responsively Teach Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

The number of students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) seeking admission into college is rising. Little research exists on how to meet the unique learning needs of this student population in higher education classrooms. The purpose of this qualitative research study was to document the ways in which supportive faculty members responsively approach students with ASD in their teaching roles. The findings of this study suggest that faculty members who were nominated as exceptional teachers and advisors to students with ASD drew from experiences of prior connections with individuals with disabilities, a belief in student abilities, setting high expectations for students, the development of caring relationships with students with ASD, an authentic passion for teaching, and a commitment to social justice. The pedagogical approaches entailed structured scaffolding, differentiated instruction, comprehensive accommodations, and collaborative institutional support. The outcomes of this study contribute new information to a paucity of research investigating faculty contributions to the success of students with ASD in higher education. This study pinpoints practical ways in which faculty members seek to help their students. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.
Counting complex disordered states by efficient pattern matching: chromatic polynomials and Potts partition functions

Counting problems, determining the number of possible states of a large system under certain constraints, play an important role in many areas of science. They naturally arise for complex disordered systems in physics and chemistry, in mathematical graph theory, and in computer science. Counting problems, however, are among the hardest problems to access computationally. Here, we suggest a novel method to access a benchmark counting problem, finding chromatic polynomials of graphs. We develop a vertex-oriented symbolic pattern matching algorithm that exploits the equivalence between the chromatic polynomial and the zero-temperature partition function of the Potts antiferromagnet on the same graph. Implementing this bottom-up algorithm using appropriate computer algebra, the new method outperforms standard top-down methods by several orders of magnitude, already for moderately sized graphs. As a first application, we compute chromatic polynomials of samples of the simple cubic lattice, for the first time computationally accessing three-dimensional lattices of physical relevance. The method offers straightforward generalizations to several other counting problems.
Foveation by a pulse-coupled neural network

Humans do not stare at an image, they foveate. Their eyes move about points of interest within the image collecting clues as to the content of the image. Object shape is one of the driving forces of foveation. These foveation points are generally corners and, to a lesser extent, the edges. The pulse-coupled neural network (PCNN) has the inherent ability to segment an image. The corners and edges of the PCNN segments are similar to the foveation points. Thus, it is a natural extension of PCNN technology to use it as a foveation engine. This paper will present theory and examples of foveation through the use of a PCNN, and it will also demonstrate that it can be quite useful in image recognition.
Automated volumetric evaluation of stereoscopic disc photography

PURPOSE: To develop a fully automated algorithm (AP) to perform a volumetric measure of the optic disc using conventional stereoscopic optic nerve head (ONH) photographs, and to compare algorithm-produced parameters with manual photogrammetry (MP), scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) measurements. METHODS: One hundred twenty-two stereoscopic optic disc photographs (61 subjects) were analyzed. Disc area, rim area, cup area, cup/disc area ratio, vertical cup/disc ratio, rim volume and cup volume were automatically computed by the algorithm. Latent variable measurement error models were used to assess measurement reproducibility for the four techniques. RESULTS: AP had better reproducibility for disc area and cup volume and worse reproducibility for cup/disc area ratio and vertical cup/disc ratio, when the measurements were compared to the MP, SLO and OCT methods. CONCLUSION: AP provides a useful technique for an objective quantitative assessment of 3D ONH structures.
Matrix Factorization Methods for Recommender Systems

This thesis is a comprehensive study of matrix factorization methods used in recommender systems. We study and analyze the existing models, specifically probabilistic models used in conjunction with matrix factorization methods, for recommender systems from a machine learning perspective. We implement two different methods suggested in scientific literature and conduct experiments on the prediction accuracy of the models on the Yahoo! Movies rating dataset.
DKPro Agreement: An Open-Source Java Library for Measuring Inter-Rater Agreement

In this paper, we introduce a novel Java implementation of multiple inter-rater agreement measures, which we make available as open-source software. Besides assessing the reliability of coding tasks using S, , , , etc., we particularly support unitizing tasks by measuring U as the agreement of the boundaries of the identified annotation units. We provide a unified interface and data model for both tasks as well as multiple diagnostic devices for analyzing the results.
Fuzzy Control of Unstable Chaotic Systems

This paper focuses on modelling and controlling an unstable chaotic system defined by a set of input–output data. This approach works in two phases: a model of the system is determined, and then a control mechanism is activated to stabilize unstable fixed point and unstable periodic orbit embedded in the chaotic system. In the modelling phase, a Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy system with Gaussian fuzzy membership functions is used in conjunction with the Levenberg– Marquardt algorithm for the model parameters optimization. In the controller design phase, based on the fuzzy model above, a prediction-based controller is achieved for the stabilization on a fixed point or unstable periodic orbit. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for both fuzzy modelling and control phases, some simulation results are provided on the logistic equation.
Efficient Anchor Power Allocation for Location-Aware Networks

Many future wireless applications rely on the availability of position information for mobile wireless nodes (agents). Such information can be obtained through ranging and communication between agents and fixed infrastructure (anchors). Since the transmission power of the anchors affects network lifetime, throughput, and interference, in this paper we will investigate the problem of power allocation among anchors. We start with a formulation of minimizing the squared position error bound (SPEB), which characterizes the limits of location accuracy. However, the problem is difficult to solve due to its non-convexity. To address this issue, we leverage the insights obtained from the geometric interpretation of localization information and formulate the objective to maximum directional position error bound (DPEB). We first solve the problem for the single-agent case, and then extend the algorithm for the multiple-agent case. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves close-to-optimal solution but with much lower computational complexity.
Constraining Black Hole Spin via X-Ray Spectroscopy

We present an analysis of the observed broad iron line feature and putative warm absorber in the long 2001 XMM-Newton observation of the Seyfert 1.2 galaxy MCG -06-30-15. The new kerrdisk model we have designed for simulating line emission from accretion disk systems allows black hole spin to be a free parameter in the fit, enabling the user to formally constrain the angular momentum of a black hole, among other physical parameters of the system. In an important extension of previous work, we derive constraints on the black hole spin in MCG -06-30-15 using a self-consistent model for X-ray reflection from the surface of the accretion disk while simultaneously accounting for absorption by dusty photoionized material along the line of sight (the warm absorber). Even including these complications, the XMM-Newton EPIC pn data require extreme relativistic broadening of the X-ray reflection spectrum; assuming no emission from within the radius of marginal stability, we derive a formal constraint on the dimensionless black hole spin parameter of a = 0.989 at 90% confidence. The principal unmodeled effect that can significantly reduce the inferred black hole spin is powerful emission from within the radius of marginal stability. Although significant theoretical developments are required to fully understand this region, we argue that the need for a rapidly spinning black hole is robust to physically plausible levels of emission from within the radius of marginal stability. In particular, we show that a nonrotating black hole is strongly ruled out.
Different Patterns of Labor Market Integration by Migration Motivation in Europe: The Role of Host Country Human Capital

We study whether the acquisition of host country human capital, such as obtaining equivalent qualifications, good language skills, or naturalization, explains differences in labor market integration between migrants depending on their initial motivation. We use cross-national European data from the 2008 ad hoc module of the Labour Force Survey to analyze migrant gaps in labor market participation, employment, occupational status, and precarious employment. We find that different rates of and returns to host country human capital explain a substantial part of the improvements in labor market outcomes with years of residence, particularly for noneconomic migrants who experience faster growth on average.
Planning for healthy ageing: how the use of third places contributes to the social health of older populations

ABSTRACT In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on creating age-friendly cities to accommodate the changing needs of older people and to promote their overall health and wellbeing. This paper focuses on some of the urban planning implications related to maintaining the social health, as a main component of overall health and wellbeing, of older people. Specifically, we look at the role and accessibility of third places (popular public places where many people go to socialise) in relation to older people living in different neighbourhood built-form patterns, and how these factors impact on the formation of absent, weak and strong social ties. The data draw upon interviews with 54 older people living in different neighbourhood built-form patterns on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. Our findings demonstrate the significant role third places have in affording older people opportunities to engage in the social lives of their local communities, thus contributing to their social health and overall wellbeing. This research supports previous studies relating to the accessibility of amenities by re-emphasising the importance of planning for the provision of third places that are conveniently located and easily accessible by older people. The paper concludes by arguing for the planning of transport and third-place interventions in Australia's sprawling suburban landscapes to allow older people more opportunities to be socially connected.
Outcome of formocresol/ZOE sub-base pulpotomies utilizing alternative radiographic success criteria.

PURPOSE The purposes of this investigation were to 1) measure success of a primary tooth pulpotomy technique that applies formocresol in the sub-base without the common five-minute application of a formocresol impregnated cotton pellet; and 2) compare success rates of the pulpotomy procedure using traditional criteria found throughout the literature with new criteria recently established, excluding internal resorption as a radiographic failure. METHODS Clinical and radiographic data were collected from a retrospective chart review of patients receiving formocresol pulpotomies with the application of formocresol in the zinc oxide-eugenol sub-base. RESULTS Clinical and radiographic data were available for 196 primary molars in 122 children (followup=six to 103 months; mean=49 months). Traditional assessment of radiographic success and failure yielded a success rate of 79%. Alternative assessment excluding internal resorption as a failure yielded a 99% success rate. Most frequently observed pulpal responses were calcific metamorphosis and internal resorption. Overall clinical success was 99%. Two of the 196 teeth were extracted due to failure. A survival analysis demonstrated that the overall probability of survival remained high over time with a cumulative survival of over 95% after six years. CONCLUSIONS The overall success rates in this study indicate that the formocresol pulpotomy technique incorporating formocresol in the zinc oxide-eugenol sub-base is a very successful treatment modality for primary molars requiring pulp therapy.
Behavioral evaluation and analysis of a hypertext browser

Students performed a variety of tasks using a statistics text presented either in conventional printed form or via the text browser “SuperBook” (Remde, Gomez and Landauer [18]). Students using SuperBook answered more search questions correctly, wrote higher quality “open-book” essays, and recalled certain incidental information better than students using the conventional text. Subjective ratings overwhelmingly favored SuperBook. The advantage of SuperBook appears to be particularly strong for questions that are not anticipated by the author's organization of a text.
Exploiting Agent Ontologies in B2C Virtual Marketplaces

In the last few years, an overwhelming amount of agent-based systems for supporting business-to-customer (B2C) e-commerce activities have been proposed. In this context, the use of agent ontologies for modelling the realities of both customers and sellers may play an important role. This paper deals with a formal model of agent ontologies, capable of describing the entities involved in the above realities (products, product features, product categories) as well as the behaviour of customers and sellers in performing their activities. Furthermore, we present some techniques that exploit the proposed ontology model for supporting the various B2C e-commerce stages repre- sented in the Consumer Buying Behaviour (CBB) model. Finally, we briefly describe the OBA-B2C multi-agent architecture that implements in a JADE-based environment all the proposed techniques.
Crowd-sourced data coding for the social sciences : massive non-expert human coding of political texts

A large part of empirical social science relies heavily on data that are not observed in the field, but are generated by researchers sitting at their desks. Clearly, third party users of such coded data must satisfy themselves in relation to both reliability and validity. This paper discusses some of these matters for a widely used type of coded data, derived from content analysis of political texts. Comparing multiple “expert” and crowd-sourced codings of the same texts, as well as with independent estimates of the same latent quantities, we assess the extent to which we can estimate these quantities reliably using the cheap and scalable method of crowd sourcing. Our results show that, contrary to naive preconceptions and reflecting concerns that are often swept under the carpet, a set of expert coders is also a crowd. We find that deploying a crowd of non-expert coders on the same texts raises issues relating to coding quality that need careful consideration. If these issues can be resolved by careful specification and design, crowdsourcing offers the prospect of cheap, scalable and replicable text coding. While these results concern text coding, we see no reason why they do not extend to other forms of expert coded data in the social sciences. Paper prepared for presentation at the 70 Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association. Palmer House Hotel, Chicago. 12-15 April 2012. We thank Joseph Childress at CrowdFlower for assisting with the setup of the crowd-sourcing platform. This research was supported financially by the European Research Council grant ERC-2011-StG 283794-QUANTESS. Crowd-sourced data coding for the social sciences / 1
Low-Latency Caching for Cloud-Based Web Applications

Many Web applications are now hosted in elastic cloud environments where the unit of resource allocation is a virtual machine (VM) instance; entire VMs are added or removed to scale up or scale down. A variety of techniques can reduce the latency of communication between VMs co-located on the same server in, say, a private cloud. For example, paravirtualized network mechanisms (e.g., vhost and virtio in Linux KVM) can optimize the number of protection boundary crossings. Inter-VM shared memory can further reduce boundary crossings after setting up a shared region. We present the design, implementation, and an evaluation of Nahanni memcached, a port of the well-known memcached that uses inter-VM shared memory instead of a virtual network for cache reads. As a widely deployed cache for back-end datastores and databases, memcached’s latency is important to the performance of many well-known web sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and cloud platforms (e.g., Google’s App Engine). Although using shared-memory IPC is a well-known strategy, the recent introduction of the ivshmem inter-VM shared memory mechanism (also known as Nahanni) to Linux KVM makes the strategy practical for virtual machines. Using the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark, we confirm the intuition that Nahanni memcached can reduce the latency of cache read operations by up to 86%, and that given reasonable hit rates, this can reduce the total latency of read-related operations for a workload by up to 45% compared to standard memcached. When using the experimental paravirtualized vhost networking mechanism in Linux KVM, Nahanni memcached offers a smaller, but still significant, advantage of 29%.
Mass profiling‐directed isolation and identification of a stage‐specific serologic protein biomarker of advanced prostate cancer

Carcinoma of the prostate (CaP) is the second leading cause of cancer‐related mortality among American men. While high cure rates are associated with localized CaP, no cure exists for advanced recurrent disease. At present there are no known serologic biomarkers specific to this stage of the disease. Several groups have used mass spectrometry (MS) based mass profiling (MP) combined with multivariate analysis to identify diagnostically predictive protein peaks for CaP in serum and tissues. Nevertheless, an appreciable level of skepticism exists for MP attributed primarily to a lack of definitive protein characterization. To address this problem, we have applied an approach that combines MP with a whole‐protein based top‐down separation strategy for the identification of a stage‐specific marker in a group comprising 16 patients with CaP (metastatic and localized disease) and 15 healthy individuals. MP, combined with multivariate analysis, yielded 17 serum proteins specific to metastatic disease. A single protein detected at m/z 7771 was found to be significantly decreased in the sera of all the metastatic CaP patients but not in localized CaP or healthy individuals. This protein was therefore chosen as the primary candidate for further analysis. The complex nature of the serologic proteome necessitated an isolation strategy that included a C18 prefractionation, followed by multidimensional liquid chromatography and, finally, two‐dimensional gel electrophoresis. The separation process was monitored by UV‐Vis and matrix‐assisted laser desorption/ionization‐time of flight MS analysis. This strategy was found to greatly facilitate subsequent MS characterization of the unknown protein, which was identified as platelet factor 4, a chemokine with prothrombolytic and antiangiogenic activities. Confirmation was achieved using both Western blot analysis and enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay. With the growing interest in using MP for patient classification and diagnosis, our approach and its variations should be powerful in the separation and characterization of proteins following MP.
Accretion disc dynamics in extreme mass ratio compact binaries

An analysis is presented of a numerical investigation of the dynamics and geometry of accretion discs in binary systems with mass ratios q = M 2 /M 1 < 0.1, applicable to ultracompact X-ray binaries, AM CVn stars and very short period cataclysmic variables. The steady-state geometry of the disc in the binary reference frame is found to be quite different from that expected at higher mass ratios. For q ∼ 0.1, the disc takes on the usual elliptical shape, with the major axis aligned perpendicular to the line of centres of the two stars. However, at smaller mass ratios the elliptical gaseous orbits in the outer regions of the disc are rotated in the binary plane. The angle of rotation increases with gas temperature, but is found to vary inversely with q. At q = 0.01, the major axis of these orbits is aligned almost parallel to the line of centres of the two stars. These effects may be responsible for the similar disc structure inferred from Doppler tomography of the AM CVn star GP Com, which has q = 0.02. The steady-state geometry at low mass ratios is not predicted by an inviscid, restricted three-body model of gaseous orbits; it is related to the effects of tidal-viscous truncation of the disc near the Roche lobe boundary. Since the disc geometry can be inferred observationally for some systems, it is proposed that this may offer a useful diagnostic for the determination of mass ratios in ultracompact binaries.
Validation of Adaptive Conjoint Analysis ( ACA ) Versus Standard Concept Testing

Published evidence of the validity of conjoint analysis techniques has been sparse, rarely based on data collected for any real marketing purpose, and consisting mainly of unrealistically small simulation experiments (three to six attributes). This paper describes a successful validation of Sawtooth Software's Adaptive Conjoint Analysis (ACA) via independent concept testing. Across four different frequently purchased product categories, strong correlations were obtained between the consumer appeal derived from conjoint studies using ACA and the corresponding appeal obtained from standard concept tests known to be predictive of product success/failure in the real marketplace.
Comparison between Deprit and Dragt-Finn Perturbation Methods

In this paper, the relationship between the Dragt-Finn transform and the classical Lie transform introduced by Deprit is discussed. The relative performance of the algorithms used for the computations of the transformed functions is compared, and the relation between their generators is given. These generators produce the same transform which insures the construction of the same invariants. keywords: Lie methods, canonical transformations
ESTIMATION OF PEAK SUSTAINABLE POWER CONSUMPTION FOR SEQUENTIAL

The reliability and the cost of electronic circuits are closely connected to the maximum power dissipated by them. Tools for evaluating the worst case power consumption of sequential circuits is becoming a primal concern for designers of low-power circuits. In the paper the task of estimation of peak sustainable power for CMOS synchronous sequential circuit is considered when its automaton description in the form of Finite State Machine (FSM) is available. The method is based on finding out the simple directed cycles of FSM state transition graph closely related with test sequences for simulating the sequential circuit for sustainable power estimation.