Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
International Perspectives on Urban School Leadership

This monograph focuses on educational leadership in urban schools in a broad range of international contexts and highlights findings from the International School Leadership Development Network, an international collaborative research project sponsored by the British Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society (BELMAS) and the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA). The authors begin by describing how global discourses are dominating the field of education, particularly at the school or campus level. The context of urban education is then examined, including promising ways urban school leaders are attempting to tackle the persistent problems facing their school systems. Next, research findings are presented from ISLDN team members who are exploring two interrelated topics germane to urban schools -leadership for social justice and leadership in highneeds schools. The authors explore how school leaders in different international settings strive to overcome economic and social disadvantages by examining the interface between macro-level policies and leadership practices at the institutional level. The monograph concludes by discussing the lessons that can be learned from international comparisons about urban leadership and examining the implications for preparing and developing leaders for urban schools.
Localization and Active Exploration in Indoor Underwater Environments

Autonomous underwater vehicles have the potential to inspect and map indoor underwater environments, such as spent nuclear fuel pools and ship ballast tanks. These environments are to be regularly monitored for structural integrity—existing manual methods are expensive, dangerous and slow. Employing an autonomous agent presents distinct challenges in SLAM and exploration. This thesis makes contributions in the domains of visual localization and active SLAM for these environments. First, we propose a novel through-water method for visual localization using landmarks above the water surface. With dead-reckoning, the vehicle pose estimate drifts and the errors propagate to the resultant map. Adopting methods from multimedia photogrammetry in our localization framework, we model refraction at the water-air interface. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first through-water method for underwater localization. We evaluate our method via both simulation and real-world experiments in a test-tank environment. The second work presents an active SLAM framework for sonar mapping of these environments. Accurate mapping requires jointly considering the robot trajectory with the state estimation problem. Building on previous work in mapping and planning, we devise an exploration policy that bounds pose uncertainty through revisit actions. A revisit policy is selected based on submap saliency, propagated pose uncertainty, and path information gain. We demonstrate the system in simulation and highlight the advantages over an uncertainty-agnostic framework.
Variations Aware Robust Transistor Sizing for Power-Delay Optimal CMOS Digital Circuit Design

Enormous increase in process variations (due to progressive CMOS technology scaling) along-with the temperature and supply voltage variations are severely degrading the fabrication outcome of digital circuits i.e. circuits are not accomplishing the specification bounds of the required performances. Therefore, process and operating variations aware optimization has become a very essential task in VLSI design. Moreover, many specifications in a circuit have challenging trade-offs, hence demand effective optimization skills. With this vision, this paper presents optimization algorithm based robust transistor sizing for various nanoscale CMOS digital circuits. The objective is to minimize the static i.e. leakage power without degrading the operating frequency (i.e. keeping the propagation delays in bound) and area. The reported results are shown for 32nm CMOS Metal gate High-k model parameters, however methodology is equally valid for further scaled technology nodes. The Overall reduction in leakage power obtained is up to 88% keeping bound on the critical path delay. The temperature range and supply voltage has been taken between −55◦C to +125◦C (for automotive applications) and 0.90V to 1.10V (±10% variations) respectively at 3-sigma design.
Practical Implications of Graphene-SGX Research Project 2 August 13 , 2019

Cloud computing is gaining widespread adoption, and with it, the trust that has to be placed in cloud providers is increasing. Intel Software Guard Extensions provide a solution to the issue of having to place this trust by allowing application developers to run their software in a trusted enclave on an untrusted Operating System. Adapting software to SGX in many cases requires significant development effort. Graphene-SGX provides a framework that instead allows running arbitrary unmodified Linux software in SGX enclaves, with the aim to reduce the required development effort. However, such software is often written with the notion that the OS is trusted, and this threat model misalignment with SGX gives rise to possible security issues. This study explores the implications of running arbitrary applications in Graphene-SGX. We explore both the security implications and the maturity. Furthermore, we aim to provide insight into the issues that exist when running applications in Graphene-SGX. We show that security implications indeed exist; time and date manipulation by an untrusted malicious OS can bypass security measures of the application in certain cases. Moreover, modification of environment variables also presents a possible tampering opportunity for the OS in specific applications. We conclude that Graphene-SGX is currently not at a maturity level that is ready for production environments. Getting arbitrary applications running in Graphene-SGX is not trivial, as there are various bugs and undocumented issues that may arise when attempting to do so.
Assignment Server in Group Group Pub Keys Onion Encryptor Entry Keys Relay Middle Keys Exit Keys

The Tor network relies on volunteer relay operators for relay bandwidth, which may limit its growth and scaling potential. TorCoin is an incentive scheme for Tor relying on end-to-end transmission throughput measurement to issue altcoins. However, the TorCoin protocol, by itself, is vulnerable to malicious attackers. To verify that a given TorCoin represents actual bandwidth transferred, we introduce TorPath, a decentralized protocol for assigning Tor circuits to clients such that each circuit is privately-addressable but publicly veriable. Torpath ensures that adversaries cannot assign themselves favourable routes to mine TorCoins at will.
Ti-5 Al-5 Mo-5 V-3 Cr and similar Mo equivalent alloys : First principles calculations and experimental investigations

Ti-5Al-5Mo-5V-3Cr and similar Mo equivalent alloys: First principles calculations and experimental investigations Premkumar Manda a, Ashish Pathak a, A. Mukhopadhyay a, Uday Chakkingal b, A.K. Singh a,∗ a Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory, Kanchanbagh P.O. , Hyderabad 500058, India b Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600 036, India
Algo-Trading Strategy for Intraweek Foreign Exchange Speculation Based on Random Forest and Probit Regression

In the Forex market, the price of the currencies increases and decreases rapidly based on many economic and political factors such as commercial balance, the growth index, the inflation rate, and the employment indicators. Having a good strategy to buy and sell can make a profit from the above changes. A successful strategy in Forex should take into consideration the relation between benefits and risks. In this work, we propose an intraweek foreign exchange speculation strategy for currency markets based on a combination of technical indicators. This system has a two-level decision and is composed of the Probit regression model and rules discovery using Random Forest. There are two minimum requirements for a trading strategy: a rule to enter the market and a rule to exit it. Our proposed system, to enter the currency market, should validate two conditions. First, it should validate Random Forest access rules over the following week while in the second one the predicted value of the next day using Probit should be positive. To exit the currency market just one negative warning from Probit or Random Forest is enough. This system was used to develop dynamic portfolio trading systems. The profitability of the model was examined for USD/(EUR, JYN, BRP) variation within the period from January 2014 to January 2016. The proposed system allows improving the prediction accuracy. This indicates a good prediction of the behavior market and it helps to identify the good times to enter it or to leave it.
Second screen effects on perceived candidate performance during a televised candidate debate

The second screen increasingly dominates how individuals consume television. While several studies have investigated the content of concurrent online discussions, it is much more challenging to capture effects of accompanying viewership on perceptions. This study makes an attempt at filling this gap. We analyze data from a panel study that was collected on the occasion of a televised candidate debate during the 2013 German federal election. The debate is arguably the most important event on the campaign trail. It is thus crucial to understand the factors that drive perceptions of candidate performance. We consider whether and how performance evaluations on the second screen shape perceptions of concurrent social media users. The results indicate a strong effect on candidate performance evaluations.
VARIETAL DIFFERENCES IN PROPERTIES OF RICE STARCH GRANULES Bienvenido

Cty�1allinity of native starch granules is now considered to be due to amy­ lopectin instead of amylose. The crystalline fraction (Lintner starch), resistant to conosion with 2.2 N HCl at 35°C, conelates positively with amylose content and gelatinization temperature of rice starch. Residual protem increases linearly with amylose content and is mainly the 60 k-Dalton waxy gene product whereas starch lipids are highest in intermediate and high amylose. Cooperative differential scan­ ning calorimetry (DSC) of rice starch thermal properties in water showed an ine­ versible melting behavior. Both annealing and recrysta.lli. zation take place during heating in the DSC. A three-phase model incorporating two distinct types of amorphous material and the crystalline domains of the amylopectin short-chain cl1.1sters was proposed to account for the thermal properties of granular starch/ water mixtures. Thermomechanical analysis (TMA) volume expansion curves showed a one-stage swelling for waxy starch and a two-stage swelling for nonwaxy rice. The first is associated with the onset of gelatinization pehnomena (glass tran­ sition and partial melting) and the second coincided with the melting of starch crystallites. Retrogradation during storage of starch gels is also due to amylopec­ tin.
Economic Development and Democracy: Predispositions and Triggers

Scholars continue to disagree about the relationship between economic development and democracy. I review the history of the debate and summarize patterns visible in data available today. I find a strong and consistent relationship between higher income and both democratization and democratic survival in the medium term (10–20 years), but not necessarily in shorter time windows. Building on several recent studies, I sketch out a new conditional modernization theory, which can account for such lags. The key idea is that the effect of development on democracy is triggered by disruptive events such as economic crises, military defeats, or—most generally—leader change. Political outcomes depend on both the development level and, at intermediate income ranges, how citizens coordinate. Waves of leader turnover in autocracies correlate with temporarily stronger links between income and democratization, which, in turn, coincide with the first two waves of democracy.
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF FOUR ELEMENT SERIES-FED TWO DIPOLE ANTENNA ARRAY FOR WLAN BASE STATION APPLICATIONS

Antenna design is the primary stage for development of wireless communication technology. In this paper, four element series-fed two dipole antenna array is developed for the WLAN base station applications. The proposed antenna operates at IEEE 802.11b standard 2.4GHz frequency band with reduced size and improved gain for supporting wireless local area network applications. A modified microstrip balun feeding is used for providing impedance matching. This antenna is designed on the FR4 substrate with dielectric permittivity of 4.4 and height of the substrate is 1.6mm and loss tangent of 0.002 to achieve lower return loss. The dimension of the proposed antenna is 160*105*160[mm]^3. This antenna is simulated in an integral based solver simulation software called CST Microwave studio v2018 and obtained results such as VSWR 1.3, Return loss -18dB with Bandwidth of 200MHz, Directivity of 12.5dBi, gain of 11.9dB, Port isolation is -16.5dB Efficiency of 90%. This antenna suitable for WLAN base stations used in larger coverage areas.
The International Conference on WI reless T echnologies embedded and intelligent S ystems ENSA of Fez 29-30 April

The growing complexity of current and future wireless communication systems makes power estimation a challenging task for designers. Nowadays, it is required to estimate power very fast in order to explore and validate design choices as soon as possible in the design flow. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic power estimation methodology for FPGA-based systems. Our methodology aims to provide accurate and fast power estimations of an entire system prior to any implementation. It also aims at making design space exploration easier. We introduce a scenario-level in order to facilitate the comparison of domain-specific algorithms. This methodology relies on an IP power characterisation phase and a behavioural simulation of the modeled system using SystemC. We show the effectiveness of our approach on typical wireless communication systems which leads to a maximum absolute error lower than 6% compared to classic estimations.
Adaptive Bayesian Networks : Exploratory Overview

Bayesian networks are directed acyclic graphs (DAGS) that represent dependencies between variables in a probabilistic model. Adaptive Bayesian Networks are often used for general world modeling, where legitimate conclusions can be drawn for any state in the world being modeling, given the current knowledge about the world. First, a brief introduction on conditional probability rules and Bayesian networks construction methods is given. The exact formulation of how Bayesian Networks are constructed is examined in the Methodology section. A small conclusion section adds a small discussion some of the recent work that has been done in terms of model selection.
Methods of ecological inference for disaggregation problems in operations research

Operations research techniques are widely used in business projects planning. Usually, a preliminary task of project planners is to assess the potential market for a business project, which involves defining the target population and evaluating its size. As the potential market is part of a larger aggregate of consumers, techniques for disaggregate data estimation (DDE) are often needed, and for long entropy optimization techniques have been used with this purpose. However, a line of research on DDE techniques displaying promising developments is Ecological Inference (EI). The paper presents a brief review of the recent literature on EI techniques, aiming at diffusing them among operations research analysts, and also a new method proposed by the author to make EI via the statistical technique known as EM Algorithm.
Detecting Ironic Speech Acts in Multilevel Annotated German Web Comments

Ironic speech act detection is indispensable for automatic opinion mining. This paper presents a pattern-based approach for the detection of ironic speech acts in German Web comments. The approach is based on a multilevel annotation model. Based on a gold standard corpus with labeled ironic sentences, multilevel patterns are determined according to statistical and linguistic analysis. The extracted patterns serve to detect ironic speech acts in a Web comment test corpus. Automatic detection and inter-annotator results achieved by human annotators show that the detection of ironic sentences is a challenging task. However, we show that it is possible to automatically detect ironic sentences with relatively high precision up to 63%. 1
Value Chain Innovation : A New Zealand example

Empirical research into innovation has tended to focus on secondary and tertiary industrial sectors at the expense of primary sectors such as agriculture and fisheries. Accordingly, we develop an in-depth case study of innovation in the value-chain of a leading, vertically integrated, export-oriented aquaculture company that is based in New Zealand. Acknowledgment: The author expresses his deep sense of gratitude to senior executives at NZ King Salmon for very graciously hosting his visit and for freely giving of their time in interviews and a plant-visit.
THE ROLE OF WIND CONDITIONS IN THE HORIZONTAL DISTRIBUTION OF SUMMER PHYTOPLANKTON IN A SHALLOW LAKE – A PRELIMINARY STUDY

The paper aimed to get the analysis of spatial horizontal distribution of summer phytoplankton in a small and shallow lake (Głębokie, Western Polesie, CE Poland) in relation to wind conditions occurring during the research period. The study was conducted in 2011 from 5 of July to 5 of September with eight sampling dates between. Water was sampled in the littoral zone from the depth of 0.5 m in four sites situated in different and opposite to one another lake shores. We analyzed the phytoplankton abundance by the way of chlorophyll a determination as well as the community taxonomic structure. Our research revealed that: a) the direction of the wind, which occurred during sampling might have an important role in the horizontal distribution of planktonic algal biomass within the lake; b) the geomorphology of lake surroundings probably mitigated the influence of wind on phytoplankton distribution; c) even weak or mild wind may influence phytoplankton horizontal differentiation.
Parents as Teachers and Guides of Their Children ’ s Social Skills

This study addressed the effects of parental support on children’s social competence and focussed on parents’ assessments of their children’s social skills. It analysed the methods parents use to teach these skills and their direct influence on social-emotional competence. The data for this study were collected from interviews with 55 parents living in Finland. Assessments of social skills and social skills teaching methods by parents of children with peer relationship issues were compared to those of parents of children with no such issues. The results showed differences in perceptions of children’s social abilities, as well as parental teaching and guidance methods, between parent groups. All parents indicated that their children’s prosocial and emotional skills should be developed more, but children with peer relationship issues also had wider social skill deficits. However, these children’s social skills were guided less by their caregivers than children without peer relationship issues. Also, the quality of parental patterns and childrearing practices in teaching social skills varied between the parent groups. Parents of children with peer issues used ineffective teaching methods. These findings highlight the need for carefully planned social skills interventions that involve parents.
Securing tenure through land use planning : conceptual framework , evidences and experiences from selected countries in Africa , Asia and Latin America

Land registration and cadaster play crucial roles in improving tenure security. However, they are not enough to guarantee secure tenure for all people with a legitimate claim to land. Often, land use planning exists but is not formally linked with tenure security in practice. This paper argues for other options for improving tenure security in developing countries. It reports on a study that employs three methodological aspects – in-depth review of literature, an Expert Workshop, and evidential case studies. Its conclusion is that a complementary initiative would be to use land use planning as a tool for widening the margins of tenure security improvements. By way of output, it presents a conceptual proposal and experiences of land use planning as a means of securing tenure. The paper is relevant in three ways. First, it provides a starting point for filling the gap that exists in literature concerning the utilization of land use planning as a tool for improving tenure security. Second, it embeds the idea of using land use planning as a means for tenure security in the global debate. Third (and most importantly), it contributes to scalable approaches to improving tenure security and advances with securing, or protecting land rights.
Hierarchical variance decomposition of fish scale growth and age to investigate the relative contributions of readers and scales

Correct estimation of interindividual variability is of primary importance in models aiming to quantify population dynamics. In a fisheries context, individual information such as age and growth is often extracted using scales; however, the rationale for using a given scalimetric method (i.e. number of scales per individual and number of readers) is rarely discussed, but different sources of variance may affect the results. As a case study, we used scale growth and age of brown trout (Salmo trutta) caught in the Kerguelen Islands. Based on a nested design (readings of four scales per fish by two independent readers), we decomposed variance in growth and age according to fish (interindividual level), scales (intraindividual level) and readers by using repeatability analysis. The results highlight that most variation is attributable to fish. Readers and scales contribute little to interindividual variance, suggesting that inference was insensitive to intraorganism biological variation. Using additional scales or readers was an inefficient use of sampling resources. We argue that variance decomposition should be widely used for studies aimed at modelling natural variability in life history traits. This would improve our knowledge of the implications of measurement error, helping rationalise and define appropriate sampling strategies.