Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing Students’ Learning Achievement: An Evaluation

This research aimed to evaluate the use of alternative assessment, components of testing, and supplementary assessment by 127 lecturers (purposive sampling) of state and private universities in Pekanbaru, Indonesia in assessing students’ learning achievement. The CIPP Evaluation Model focusing on input and process served as a research design; and two sets of questionnaires served as data collection. The input factor contained knowledge on alternative assessment and components of testing while the process was concerned with the frequency of implementation and supplementary assessment. The research findings showed that the input factor was at a high level. In the process factor, the aspects of written, performance, self/peer, portfolio, rubric, validity, reliability, table of specification, test sources, and item analysis were at a moderate level; project, product, diligence, kinship, request, honesty, and try-out were at a low level; but attitude, reference, domain, participation, and attendance were at a high level. However, there was no significant difference on factors of input and process viewed from teaching experience except project assessment in terms of academic qualification. The implication of this research was that by having higher knowledge on alternative assessment and components of testing, the lecturers were encouraged to vary their types of assessment, increase the frequency of the implementation of testing components, and elaborate the factors of supplementary assessment. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015. v6n2p535
Lightweight, Scalable and OS-Transparent Remote Attestation of Runtime Program

Secure channel technologies alone can not provide the sufficient protection to the server data as long as the server can not guarantee the trustworthiness of the client program which accesses the server. The current Trusted Computing solution offers the guarantee on the trustworthiness of the client program by evaluating the integrity of all executable elements on the client platform. However, this solution may not work effectively in the monolithic legacy and commodity operating system. This paper considers the remote attestation of program execution on the untrusted legacy platform. We propose an architecture, which (1) collects the run-time information of the client program in a secure, scalable and OS-transparent way, and (2) reports to the remote server the collected run-time information of the client program in a lightweight and secure way. The architecture achieves these features by exploiting the system virtualization technology, the existing VMI tools, and the time stamping functionality in TCG TPM. We give the detailed description of the architecture.
Microbiotests in Aquatic Toxicology: The Way Forward

The industrial revolution has driven the need for ecotoxicology and shaped its evolution. Indeed, the increased use and transformation of (non)renewable resources for over a century to benefit mankind have had a downside and created a plethora of contaminants harmful to the receiving environments. With time, we have gone from an age of darkness in the 1950s (i.e., diagnostic ignorance in terms of recognizing and dealing with contamination) to one of enlightenment as the 21 century unfolds (i.e., use of tools and strategies to identify and correct environmental pollutions). Effects measurements, reflected by toxicity testing conducted at different levels of biological organization, have proven especially useful to achieve proper hazard/risk assessments of contaminants. Knowing why toxicity testing has been conducted over the past decades to protect and conserve freshwater environments is also essential to grasp the importance and breadth of this field. For this purpose, we have recently reviewed a substantial number of articles describing numerous bioanalytical endeavours undertaken to comprehend toxic effects associated with the discharge of xenobiotics to aquatic environments. Scrutiny of publications identified in our literature search has enabled us to uncover the various ways in which laboratory toxicity tests have been applied, many of which are small-scale in nature. In essence, freshwater toxicity testing has significantly focussed on liquid (complex environmental samples, chemical and biological contaminants) and solid media (sediments) assessment. For both media, miscellaneous studies/initiatives linked to toxicity testing applications have again promoted the development, validation, refinement and use of toxicity testing procedures. Bioassays are clearly an essential component of environmental management programs and several small-scale tests (microbiotests) can be employed to generate cost-effective toxicity data that assist decision-making.
TCT as a Rapid and Efficient Catalyst for the Synthesis of 1,5‐Benzodiazepines.

Due to the remarkable importance of benzodiazepines and their biological and pharmacological activities this class of compounds has received a great deal of attention. They are widely used as anti-anxiety, anti-convulsant, anti-depressive and hypnotic agents. 1,5-Benzodiazepines are employed as starting material for synthesis of fused ring benzodiazepine derivatives such as triazolo, oxazino or furano-benzodiazepines. These compounds have also found commercial use in photography industry and production of inflammatory agents. A number of ways have been reported in literatures for synthesis of 1,5-benzodiazepines that include condensation of o-phenylenediamine with α-β unsaturated compounds, β-halo ketones and ketones. In this connection many reagents such as BF3·OEt2, NaBH4, PPA-SiO2, MgOPOCl3, Yb(OTf)3, Al2O3-P2O5, SO4/ZrO2, I2, InBr3, Ag3PW12O40, HClO4/SiO2, NBS, Amberlyst15, and Sc(OTf)3 have been used. However, many of these cited reagents are accomplished with some deficiency including long reaction times, use of expensive reagent, and occurrence of several side products, low yield, and harsh conditions. Therefore, the development of the new methods for synthesis of these compounds is desirable. Recently considerable attention has been devoted to use of 2,4,6-trichloro-1,3,5-triazine (TCT) in organic synthesis. In this paper, we report that 1,5-benzodiazepines can be rapidly, conveniently and efficiently synthesized using TCT (10 mol%) at room temperature in acetonitrile (Scheme 1). We first examined the synthesis of 1,5-benzodiazepine from o-phenylenediamine and ketone in different solvents and found that acetonitrile was the best solvent when compared with DMF, DMSO, MeOH, CH2Cl2, CHCl3 and toluene based on reaction time and yield. Then, the ability of o-phenylenediamines and different ketones as precursors in one-pot 1,5-benzodiazepines synthesis was considered and the results were summarized in Table 1. Cyclic ketone as well as acyclic ketones took part in this condensation reaction in good yields at room temperature. These reactions were carried out within 15-30 min. The reaction in the absence of TCT under similar conditions proceeded sluggishly. The proposed mechanism of this reaction has been shown in Scheme 2. The amine of o-phenylenediamine is first activated by TCT and then attacks the carbonyl group of the ketone, giving intermediate diimine. A 1,3-shift of the hydrogen attached to the methyl group then occurs to form enamine which cyclized to afford the seven member ring. 1,5-Benzodiazepines were efficiently and conveniently synthesized from o-phenylenediamines and different ketones in the presence of catalytic amounts of TCT in acetonitrile at room temperature. Short reaction time, high yields, mild reaction conditions, use of inexpensive and stable catalyst are other advantages.
Semiautomatic coastline detection in remotely sensed images

Regarding the application of remote sensing and related data processing methodologies to the analysis and monitoring of the coastal environment, an innovative technique for the extraction of the coastline from space borne or aerial images has been developed. The interactive method proposed is based on the involvement of the local contextual information which is always present in remotely sensed data. The exploitability and reliability of the algorithm for the shoreline identification have been tested by processing images from different sensors. Some of the obtained results are shown.
Use of Bayesian belief networks to fuse continuous and discrete information for target recognition, tracking, and situation assessment

This paper describes the use of Bayesian belief networks for the fusion of continuous and discrete information. Bayesian belief networks provide a convenient and straightforward way of modeling the relationships between uncertain quantities. They also provide efficient computational algorithms. Most current applications of belief networks are restricted to either discrete or continuous quantities. We present a methodology that allows both discrete and continuous variables in the same network. This extension makes possible the fusion of information from, or inferences about, such diverse quantities as sensor output, target location, target type or ID, intent, operator judgment, behavior profile, etc.
CHROMA AND MFCC BASED PATTERN RECOGNITION IN AUDIO FILES UTILIZING HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS AND DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING

In this paper we present an algorithm to reveal the immanent musical structure within pieces of popular music. Our proposed model uses an estimate of the harmonic progression which is obtained by calculating beat-synchronous chroma vectors and letting a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) decide the most probable sequence of chords. In addition, MFCC vectors are computed to retrieve basic timbral information that can not be described by harmony. Subsequently, a dynamic programming algorithm is used to detect repetitive patterns in these feature sequences. Based on these patterns a second dynamic programming stage tries to find and link corresponding patterns to larger segments that reflect the musical structure.
Being Efficient About Efficacy Estimation

I consider Bob O’Neill's important role in promoting regulatory science and, in particular, through the very influential series of lectures he gave in Basel more than 20 years ago, the effect on statistics in European regulation and ultimately on regulatory science in the United States. I provide a simple model of disappointment in drug development. I consider three approaches to improving efficiency in drug development and conclude that there are simple things we could be doing to reduce the cost with which information is obtained in drug development.
Measuring Performance of Soft Real- Time Tasks on Multi-core Systems

Multi-core platforms are well established, and they are slowly moving into the area of embedded and real-time systems. Nowadays to take advantage of multi-core systems in terms of throughput, soft real-time applications are run together with general purpose applications under an operating system such as Linux. But due to shared hardware resources in multi-core architectures, it is likely that these applications will interfere and compete with each other. This can cause slower response times for soft real-time tasks. In order to investigate this problem, a number of memory intensive and computation intensive soft real-time tasks were co-scheduled with Linux SMP running a general purpose task on it. For performance measurement a test environment is created that uses hardware registers to count core, level-2 cache and memory bus events at run-time instead of having a simulator tool. In particular events related to L1 and L2 instruction and data cache, memory bus utilization and difference in response times of soft real-time tasks are measured. After completing this research, we can say that it is only possible for soft real-time applications to co-exist with Linux SMP cores running general purpose applications without major performance degradation, if the task on Linux is not much memory intensive. If it is memory intensive then there is a trade-off between number of cores running general purpose applications and the amount of tolerance an embedded system can have in response times.
Video Matching by One-Dimensional PSNR Profile

This paper addresses a compact framework to matching video sequences through a PSNR-based profile. This simplify video profile is suitable to matching process when apply in disordered undersea videos. As opposed to using color and motion feature across the video sequence, we use the image quality of successive frames to be a feature of videos. We employ the PSNR quality feature to be a video profile rather than the complex contend-based analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed approach permits accurate of matching video. The performance is satisfactory on determine correct video from undersea dataset.
A Switched-System Approach to Shared Robust Control and Obstacle Avoidance for Mobile Robots

We propose a shared control structure for nonholonomic mobile robots, in which a human operator can command motions that override autonomous operation, and the robot overrides either the teleoperation or autonomous controller if it encounters an obstacle. We divide the whole configuration, including orientation, space into an obstacle avoidance and an obstacle-free region. This enables a switched-system approach to switch between autonomous and teleoperation mode, or the obstacle avoidance and the obstacle-free region. To reject disturbances or noise present in the error dynamics, two different robust control laws are proposed using a high gain and a variable structure approach. Lyapunov-based stability analysis is provided. To rigorously test the approach under different circumstances, experiments have been conducted by two different research groups. The results from two groups show that the shared control approach works effectively both in the teleoperation mode and autonomous mode with different system settings and environments.Copyright © 2014 by ASME
Permission granted: open licensing for educational resources

Open licences are critical for defining Open Educational Resources. The goal of this article is to explain the logic of open licensing to teachers, funders, and educational policy‐makers – to explain the relatively simple but vital considerations that are necessary to build this global educational commons of free learning material. In particular, we will stress the importance of ensuring that supposedly ‘free’ materials are not restricted by seemingly reasonable licensing decisions.
Real-time frame-to-frame automatic contour detection on echocardiograms

A PC-based system for real-time left ventricular endocardial contour detection on echocardiographic images has been developed in our laboratories. The system consists of an IBM-compatible PC equipped with a commercially available frame grabber and the special-purpose Minimum Cost Contour Detector (MCCD) board developed for this project. The MCCD board uses 1 or 2 Intel i960 processors and receives digital images (512*512*8 bit) from the frame grabber over a digital video bar in real time. The contour detection algorithm is based on dynamic programming. Detected contours and other results are transferred to the host via the AT-bus. Processing time is short enough for real-time performance in a practical situation. Area of contours and regional areas in 8 segments are calculated in real time and displayed in graphs on the host system. The MCCD board is fully programmable and may be used for similar real-time contour detection applications, e.g. for X-ray angiography and intravascular ultrasound. <<ETX>>
A comparative study of spatial approaches for urban mapping using hyperspectral ROSIS images over Pavia City, northern Italy

Urban mapping techniques using high spectral and spatial resolution (HSSR) data were investigated. To this aim, this paper proposes a novel mean shift (MS)‐based multiscale method, and different spatial approaches are compared, including differential morphological profiles (DMPs), pixel shape index (PSI), the fractal net evolution approach (FNEA), and the proposed MS method. These spatial features were computed based on a dimensionally reduced representation that was obtained using the non‐negative matrix factorization (NMF) transform. The support vector machine (SVM) was then used for classification. These algorithms were evaluated using two HSSR datasets that were obtained by using the Reflective Optics System Imaging Spectrometer (ROSIS) sensor over the urban area of Pavia, northern Italy. The results show that the spatial approaches can effectively complement the spectral features for urban mapping, and the proposed MS‐based multiscale algorithm can give comparable or even better results than the FNEA, DMPs and other traditional algorithms.
An Improved infrared and visible image fusion algorithm based on the Second Generation Curvelet Transform

The fusion of infrared images and visible images can combine complementary information in an image, so we can better describe a scene, and it is helpful for some tasks such as target detection, target localization and environment recognition. In this paper, we use the Second Generation Curvelet Transform (SGCT) to decompose infrared images and grayscale visible images to propose a new image fusion algorithm. This algorithm uses a multi-resolution decomposition of different tools and different fusion rules implementation. The simulation results show that, compared with existing algorithms, this algorithm have improved to some extent in the evaluation of fused images. KeywordsImage Fusion; Multi-resolution Analysis; the Second Generation Curvelet Transform
Hexadecyltributylphosphonium Azide — A Highly Potent Reagent for the Synthesis of Unusual Azides

SYNTHESIS 2007, No. 22, pp 3431–3446xx.xx. 2007 Advanced online publication: 29.10. 2007 DOI: 10.1055/s-2007-990854; Art ID: E18307SS © Georg Thieme Verlag Stuttgart · New York Abstract: Hexadecyltributylphosphonium azide (QN3) is easily accessible and highly lipophilic, resulting in good solubility in nonpolar solvents like cyclohexane. The low melting point of this reagent allows convenient usage as a (supercooled) melt. Thus, extremely rapid nucleophilic substitution reactions and isolation of unstable products by simple re-condensation are possible. Utilizing these properties, the application of QN3 in the synthesis of organic azides is successful even in cases in which classical methods have failed. This is demonstrated in this review by several examples, including unstable starting materials and substrates with steric hindrance or i-strain, or dealing with rapid subsequent reactions, either desired or not, of the generated azides.
Wireless multicarrier communications

Relying on basic tools such as eigensignals of linear time-invariant systems, linear and circular block convolution, and fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), this article develops a systematic discrete-time framework and designs novel systems for single- and multiuser wireless multicarrier communications-a field rich in signal processing challenges that holds great potential in various applications including audio/video broadcasting, cable television, modem design, multimedia services, mobile local area networks, and future-generation wideband cellular systems. Wireless multicarrier (MC) communication systems utilize multiple complex exponentials as information-bearing carriers. MC transmissions thus retain their shape and orthogonality when propagating through linear time-dispersive media, precisely as eigensignals do when they pass through linear time-invariant (LTI) systems.
Structural Ambiguity and Lexical Relations

From a certain (admittedly narrow) perspective, one of the annoying features of natural language is the ubiquitous syntactic ambiguity. For a computational model intended to assign syntactic descriptions to natural language text, this seem like a design defect. In general, when context and lexical content are taken into account, such syntactic ambiguity can be resolved: sentences used in context show, for the most part, little ambiguity. But the grammar provides many alternative analyses, and gives little guidance about resolving the ambiguity.
An Energy Efficient Multipath Routing Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Network

Due to the energy and resource constraints of a wireless sensor node in a wireless sensor network (WSN), WSNs adequately need effective mechanisms for data forwarding to enhance the energy efficiency in networks. To solve this problem, Multipath routing protocols are often used to balance the network energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient multipath routing algorithm (EEMR) for WSN that considers wireless interference and load balancing. The algorithm establishes multiple paths with minimum interference between the source node and the destination node. In this way, the quality of wireless communication is improved because the effects of wireless interference can be reduced as much as possible. Meanwhile, the proposed algorithm allocates traffic load reasonably according to the total link cost of each path, which can prolong network lifetime. Simulation results show that the proposed routing algorithm achieves lower energy cost and longer network lifetime than that in the literature. Keywords—WSNs; multipath; energy efficient; load balancing
A genetic enhancement to the wrapper method

In the wrapper approach to feature subset selection the learning algorithm itself is used in the selection process, thus making the process sensitive to the bias of the learning algorithm. The approach introduces a useful framework within which search algorithms and classifiers can be compared. To date, search algorithms used in conjunction with the wrapper method have focused on greedy search techniques, i.e. those which direct their search according to increased accuracy arising from the addition/removal of individual features. It is argued that since the error rate of the classifier is non-monotonic such searches may prune valid areas of the search space. In addition, the combinatorial nature of greedy searches makes their use infeasible for large (>20) feature sets. An alternative form of search, based upon the principles of genetic algorithms, is proposed and related work is discussed. Results indicate that improvements reported with the wrapper method are maintained whilst the robustness and applicability of the approach is increased. (8 pages)
Distinguishing Engineers from Scientists-The Case for an Engineering Knowledge Community

Abstract This article makes the case for an engineering knowledge community. We begin by discussing the differences between science and technology. We next discuss the similarities and differences between engineers and scientists. Next, we analyze previous research into the information use behaviors of engineers. Finally, using the research results from the NASA/DoD Aerospace Knowledge Diffusion Research Project, we compare and contrast aerospace engineers and scientists as a means of developing similarities and differences between engineers and scientists in terms of their information-seeking behavior. The goal of this article is to demonstrate that engineers are not scientists and that knowledge production and use differ in engineering and science. We believe that the current model used to explain information-seeking behavior assumes no difference between the information-seeking of engineers and scientists. The distinctions between engineering and science, engineers and scientists and the information-seeking behaviors of engineers and scientists have multiple implications for providing information services, knowledge management, and diffusing knowledge. The message to libraries is “know thy customer. ”