Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding English Through Pictures : The Graded Direct Method of I.A. Richards

With the Graded Direct Method (GDM) learners explore the four skills of language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The Language Through Pictures (LP) materials provide an organic sequence of situations with which learners discover the language. Students learn verbal and pictorial literacies while observing sentences and pictures change together in developing situations. GDM teachers and learners create situations that exemplify the use of words in statements. The statements explored in GDM classrooms have the same structure as the sentences illustrated in English Through Pictures (EP) materials. These sentence choices result from decades of work in language teaching. For the beginning learner these sentences exhibit the greatest lucidity and offer the widest utility. In properly designed situations learners see the needs for, senses in, and uses of the language’s key words and structures. There is no need for the mother tongue or adhoc explanations. I will argue that the EP materials and GDM techniques (EP/GDM) facilitate a worthy (and necessary) education appropriate for the twenty-first century media environment. Understanding EP/GDM frees English instruction from the clutches of Commercial Coursebooks (CC) and the Communicative Approach (CA, CC/CA) and directs the venture towards an education of value in the humanities. Due to journal length constraints illustrations from EP learning materials and CC page layouts will have to wait for inclusion in following papers.
Semantic Game Worlds

The visual quality of game worlds increased massively in the last three decades. However, the closer game worlds depict reality, the more noticeable it is for gamers when objects do not behave accordingly. An important problem is that the data of a game world is often scattered across different components of the game engine. What lacks is a common semantic representation that can act as the glue between these components. In this thesis we define semantic game worlds as game worlds that are populated with objects enriched with semantics. They offer game programmers a consistent representation that can be shared by game engine components. Moreover, this representation offers designers a way to moderate conflicts between procedural content generation techniques and it enables them to specify object behavior in a generic manner.
Schaum's Outline of Fluid Mechanics

Study faster, learn better--and get top grades with Schaum's Outlines Millions of students trust Schaum's Outlines to help them succeed in the classroom and on exams. Schaum's is the key to faster learning and higher grades in every subject. Each Outline presents all the essential course information in an easy-to-follow, topic-by-topic format. You also get hundreds of examples, solved problems, and practice exercises to test your skills. Use Schaum's Outlines to: Brush up before tests Find answers fast Study quickly and more effectively Get the big picture without spending hours poring over lengthy textbooks Fully compatible with your classroom text, Schaum's highlights all the important facts you need to know. Use Schaum's to shorten your study time--and get your best test scores! This Schaum's Outline gives you: A concise guide to the standard college course influid dynamics 480 problems with answers or worked-out solutions Practice problems in multiple-choice format like thoseon the Fundamentals of Engineering Exam
Reconstruction of the Spy II Neandertal with biomechanical analysis

Tara Chapman, Fédor Moiseev, Victor Sholukha, Stéphane Louryan Marcel Rooze Patrick Semal, and Serge Van Sint Jan Laboratory of Anatomy, Biomechanics and Organogenesis (LABO), Faculty of Medicine, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, http://homepages.ulb. ac.be/~labo. Department of Radiology, ULB Erasme hospital, Brussels, Belgium.Belgium Laboratory of Anthropology and Prehistory, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), Brussels, Belgium.
Document and Image Classification withTopic Ngram Model

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a popular probabilistic model for information retrieval. Many extended models based on LDA have been introduced during the past 10 years. In LDA, a data point is represented as a bag (multiset)of words. In the text case, a word is a regular text word, but other types of data can also be represented as words (e.g. visual words). Due to the bag-of-words assumption, the original LDA neglects the structure of thedata, i.e., all the relationships between words, which leads to information loss. As a matter of fact, the spatial relationship is important and useful. In order to explore the importance of the relationship, we focus on an extensionof LDA called Topic Ngram Model, which models the relationship among adjacent words. In this thesis, we first implement the model and use it in for text classification. Furthermore, we propose a 2D extension, which enables us to model spatial relationships of features in images.
Design and implementation of the AGTS Probabilistic Tagger

The last ten years have seen the development of several probabilistic taggers, such as the PARTS program (Church 1988), the De Rose tagger (De Rose 1991), the Brill tagger (Brill and Marcus 1992) and the Xerox tagger (Cutting et al 1993). The AGTS (The Automatic Grammatical Tagging System) Tagger was a key project funded by China Social Science Academy. It was undertaken at the laboratory for Computational Linguistics of the Institute for Natural Language Processing of Jiao Tong University in Shangha, from 1987 to 1990. The basic techniques of the AGTS tagger are very similar to the CLAWS tagger in terms of the principles of Constituent Likelihood Grammar (Atwell 1987). One the of purposes of the AGTS project is to tag the JDEST (Jiao Da English for Science and Technology) Corpus, which consists of one million words. The JDEST Corpus was built up by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai in 1985. The JDEST Corpus collected English texts covering ten subject areas in science and technology: physics, nuclear energy, metallurgy, computer science, aeronautics, mechanics, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, architectural engineering and shipbuilding. The texts were randomly selected from theses, textbooks, academic works, popular science and science digests, published in the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries. The corpus consists of 2,000 units of about 500 words each. The size of the JDEST Corpus is over 1,000,000 words. The sizes of the units and the entire corpus are very similar to those of the Brown Corpus of American Written English. The AGTS has experienced changes of its programming languages from BASIC to SNOBOL, and then to Turbo C.
Modelling FMRI motion artifacts using a simulated scanner

2 0 − = γ γ ρ where 0 M is the transverse magnetisation following the last RF excitation, ρ is the average spin density of this tissue type in this voxel, ) (t sc G is the applied gradient vector (in the scanner coordinate frame) at time t, and ) (t Bz is the field (along the z direction) at the origin, which can include any inhomogeneities. This integral can be evaluated analytically over the voxel giving
A Concept-Centric Environment for Software Evolution in an Agile Contextards an Open Adaptive Development Environment

Evolving a software implementation requires that the developer has a good understanding of what the system does. In practice however a lot of domain knowledge about the software that was available when the system was first conceived is only available to the current developer in an implicit form. Furthermore, even when the domain knowledge is available in an explicit form, the developer also needs to know to which part of the implementation the knowledge applies to. Unfortunately this knowledge is often detached from the implementation which forces the developer to re-establish the link retroactively. Moreover, as a result of short term development economics, developers will often neglect to document and couple the domain knowledge about a system in favor of writing code. This results in a passive source of documentation that will quickly become out-of-date. This dissertation presents a concept-centric environment which is based upon a symbiotic integration of the programming environment (code level) and the domain knowledge environment (concept level). It allows a developer to capture domain knowledge in an explicit form, which is coupled to the corresponding implementation. Moreover it enables the active participation of the domain knowledge in providing the functionality of the software. This installs a bi-directional interaction between the concept level and the code level which can be used to create a documented and malleable implementation of a software system.
Disjunctions in forward chaining logic programming

approved: Redacted for Privacy Thomas G. Dietterich A forward-chaining logic programming system (FORLOG) has been developed at Oregon State University. This system coupled with an assumption-based truth maintenance system (ATMS), provides an alternative to the logic programming paradigm of backward-chaining with Horn clauses. To compare FORLOG to this paradigm, we define a subset of FORLOG, called mini-FORLOG, with a restricted syntax. This syntax is derived in a straight forward manner from a Horn clause program. We prove that mini-FORLOG is procedurally isomorphic to Horn clause programming. Logic programs derived from Horn clause programs contain implications with disjunctive consequences. Each disjunct may either lead to a solution or to a contradiction. We want FORLOG to choose only those that lead to solutions. In an attempt to remove the nondeterminism inherent in this choice, FORLOG compiles implications into several simpler ones, all void of disjunctions. Even with compilation, FORLOG often must pursue each nondeterministic choice, some of which may turn out to be contradictory. This requires FORLOG to handle discovered inconsistencies. With traditional logic, the existence of an inconsistency invalidates all deductions made. FORLOG uses the ATMS to maintain consistency of its database of facts. One alternative in a disjunction might not terminate. It turns out that FORLOG can use contradictions discovered during computation to avoid some of these cases. This process involves resolving the disjunctions with discovered contradictions. Disjunctions in Forward Chaining Logic Programming by Daniel R. Corpron A Thesis submitted to Oregon State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Completed November 26, 1986 Commencement June 1987
Context in Collaborative Structures - Transdisciplinarity

Holistic approach in many disciplines assumes that each component actually contains information about the whole as a unit. A holistic view of an interorganizational collaboration structure should provide a description based on simple laws of all connections between entities (nodes) and network external universe. This approach is claimed on the basis that each entity reflects and contains the network and this, in turn, contains the entire footprint. Biology, chemistry and physics base their theories on a specific law of evolution of man, human group or physic-chemical structure. These sciences state that everything is evolving and suffers constant changes, the human evolution, the evolution of society - and social groups in particular - going through a succession of continue or choppy innovations. Sometimes, a phase or a situation seems new just because the context is changed. Innovation is viewed in a holistic way, so just as a new perception of those involved in the innovative process, just a different aspect of how to see and feel the world. The rules and regularities of the whole are constant presences. Life, social and economic systems, in all their complexity, are subjected to the same laws of evolution being processes of continuous innovation. In terms of innovative process, decisions are not taken between good and evil, or between right and wrong, but between good and better. Although it is applied correctly, an effective process of selecting ideas that will be transformed into innovations is not a prerequisite for choosing the best variant. Once introduced into the process of launching and exploitation in the market, an innovation that can bring profit to companies may actually be an incremental innovation that eliminated the possibility of being selected a better innovation, a radical innovation.
Relative Interlevel Set Cohomology Categorifies Extended Persistence Diagrams

The extended persistence diagram introduced by Cohen-Steiner, Edelsbrunner, and Harer is an invariant of real-valued continuous functions, which are F-tame in the sense that all open interlevel sets have degree-wise finite-dimensional cohomology with coefficients in a fixed field F. We show that relative interlevel set cohomology (RISC), which is based on the Mayer–Vietoris pyramid by Carlsson, de Silva, and Morozov, categorifies this invariant. More specifically, we define an abelian Frobenius category pres(J ) of presheaves, which are presentable in a certain sense, such that the RISC h(f) of an F-tame function f : X → R is an object of pres(J ), and moreover the extended persistence diagram of f uniquely determines – and is determined by – the corresponding element [h(f)] ∈ K0(pres(J )) in the Grothendieck group K0(pres(J )) of the abelian category pres(J ). As an intermediate step we show that pres(J ) is the abelianization of the (localized) category of complexes of F-linear sheaves on R, which are tame in the sense that sheaf cohomology of any open interval is finite-dimensional in each degree. This yields a close link between derived level set persistence by Curry, Kashiwara, and Schapira and the categorification of extended persistence diagrams.
Smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations using graphics processing units

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a fully Lagrangian, particle-based technique for fluid-flow modeling. As a gridless method, it appears to be a natural approach to simulate multi-phase flow with complex geometries. Since SPH involves a large set of shortrange particle-particle interactions, numerical implementations present a high degree of spatial data locality and a significant number of independent computations. Therefore, the numerical code can be easily written in a massively parallel manner. The main purpose of this study is to discuss the issues related to the implementation of the SPH method for computation using Graphics Processing Units (GPU). The study is supported by two-dimensional validation cases: the lid-driven cavity and oscillation of a droplet. The obtained results show a good accuracy of the method, as well as, high numerical efficiency of its GPU implementation.
Optimum equalization and synchronization of broadband multicarrier systems

approved: Sayfe Kiaei The application of information theory and digital signal processing techniques to digital communication has resulted in robust methods for reliable high speed data transmission over noisy channels environments. Among these methods, multicarrier systems have become a viable solution for exploiting maximum spectral efficiency over both wideband highly dispersive static and time-varying dynamic channels. However, there remains many problems in this field to maximize performance and efficiency of such systems. Among these problems, equalization and synchronization are the major focus of this thesis. The contibution of this thesis on equalization is to optimize performance of equalizer from two different aspects: computational complexity and system capacity. A new fast equalization algorithm is developed to obtain near optimum setting of the equalizer under minimum mean square error criterion. Furthermore, a mathematical framework for analysis of maximum capacity equalization is developed. It is shown that the optimum equalization of multi-carrier system can be viewed as a constrained optimization problem where the constraint set exhibits identifiable geometric characteristic. Using these properties, a descent gradient search method for optimum equalization of multi-carrier systems is proposed. In synchronization domain, the contribution of this thesis is the development and statistical analysis of a new class of cyclic based estimators: maximum likelihood and minimum variance unbiased and moment estimator for both symbol timing error and carrier frequency offset estimation of multicarrier systems. Redacted for Privacy
Bayesian Quadratic Reinforcement Learning

The idea of using “optimistic” evaluations to guide exploration has been around for a long time, but has received renewed interest recently thanks to the development of bound-based guarantees [Kolter and Ng, 2009]. Asmuth et al. [2009] have recently presented a way to construct optimistic evaluations by merging sampled MDPs. Their BOSS algorithm is polynomial in the size of the state-action-space of the merged MDP, and thus a multiple of the size of the actual state space. The success of BOSS raises the question whether it might be possible to avoid the sampling step and instead use an approximate parametrization of the belief over values. To test this idea, we construct an approximate Gaussian (i.e. log quadratic) joint posterior over the values of states under a given policy. Our derivation ignores the effect of future expected experience (in contrast to a fully Bayesian treatment as in the BEETLE algorithm [Poupart et al., 2006]). On a discrete state-space environment described by a vector of expected rewards r (i.e. the expected reward from the state-action pair (s, a)i is ri), transition dynamics described by a matrix T (i.e. p(sj ∣(s, a)i) = Tij), and a policy Π (i.e. p((s, a)j ∣si) = Πij), the values q of state-action pairs are determined by Bellman’s equation Π(I − TΠ)q = ΠT r. Using, for example, conjugate prior inference with a Dirichlet prior on T and a Gaussian prior on r, leads to a belief over q which, while obviously not analytically Gaussian, can often be characterized reasonably well by a mean vector and covariance matrix. We draw inspiration from the Expectation Propagation algorithm [Minka, 2001], using moment matching to construct an approximate Gaussian marginal. Unfortunately, the structure of Bellman’s equation makes it difficult to perform moment matching directly on the marginal of q. But it is straight-forward to do so on r, from which an approximate Gaussian message to q can be constructed. The resulting approximate belief over q provides optimistic point estimates as a function of the policy Π, e.g. as ∥ q + eq∥, where eq is the eigenvector associated with the largest eigenvalue of the joint belief over q. We compared this approach to BEETLE and BOSS, on the widely used Chain environment. Our simplistic, parametric, approximate approach significantly outperforms the two more expensive contemporary algorithms on the most challenging, “full” setup, and shows an instructive disadvantage to them in the “semi-tied” setup. (The “tied” setup is too simple, all algorithms perform well on it). This suggests that there is scope for the application of light-weight probabilistic algorithms based on approximate message-passing, as solvers for general Reinforcement Learning Problems. Their modular structure, allows for the explicit modeling of environment structure and thus for increased performance on real-world problems.
Changing sociolinguistic identities of young, middle-class 'Coloured' people in post-apartheid Cape Town

This study set out to examine the sociolinguistics of social change amongst a group of··' young, middle-class coloured people who were educated in a predominantly white school environment. The demise of the apartheid system in the early 1990s led to a situation in which racial mixing in government-run schools was permitted for the first time. I conducted s ciolinguistic interviews with 20 self-identified 'coloured' Cape Town residents, wh attended schools that were formerly open only to white children . I analysed the data on two levels. Firstly, an analysis of accent, focusing on three salient phonetic markers of South African English, namely the GOOSE, BATH and PRICE lexical sets (Wells 1982). Acoustic analysis of these vowels was done using a computer software programme, Praat, to record a total of 4410 tokens for the 20 speakers. The second level of analysis investigated how the informants constructed social identities in those unprecedented educational circumstances. I used three theories of identity to do this: Speech Accommodation Theory (Giles 1973), Social Identity Theory (Tajfel 1972) and the Linguistic Market (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1975). Comparing the results of the phonetic and sociological analyses, I found that the two levels of analysis supported the same conclusion: the young coloured people in the sample subscribe to a coloured social identity, but have clear links with the white community. This suggests that they occupy an intermediate space between the two race groups, which is not surprising given the significant contact they had with members of both communities. There is some evidence of a separation between the coloured community and the typical 'coloured' accent, however, suggesting that one does not need to sound 'typically coloured' in order to be part of the coloured community. It is likely that we are witnessing the formation of an upper middle-class within the coloured middle-class community.
Analysis using a modified Luo-Rudy model of ventricular action potentials

To elucidate the subcellular mechanism underlying the after effects of high-intensity DC shocks, a small pore, which mimics reversible dielectric breakdown of the cell membrane (electroporation), was incorporated into a modified Luo-Rudy (L-R) model of ventricular action potentials. In normal myocytes, the pore formation results in a decay of repolarization of the shocked action potential which is followed by prolonged depolarization and oscillation of membrane potential like early after depolarization (EAD). Time- and voltage-dependent changes in delayed-rectifier K/sup +/ current (I/sub k/) in combination with those of L-type Ca/sup 2+/ current (I/sub C/a) and ion flux through the pore (I/sub pore/) are responsible for the prolonged depolarization with EAD-like oscillation of membrane potential. Spontaneous excitation forms the oscillation and depends on an activation of I/sub Ca/. In myocytes of Ca/sup 2+/ overload secondary to 90% inhibition of Na/sup +//K/sup +/ pump, the pore formation results in a delay of repolarization of the shocked action potential, which is followed by slower cyclic depolarization in response to spontaneous release of Ca/sup 2+/ from the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR). The delay after depolarization (DAD)-type oscillation is abolished by complete block of SR Ca/sup 2+/ release channels. These findings suggest that strong shocks will cause arrhythmogenic responses through a transient rupture of sarcolemma with different subcellular events in ventricular cells under normal and pathological conditions.
Event recognition under uncertainty and incomplete data

Symbolic event recognition systems have been successfully applied to a variety of application domains, extracting useful information in the form of events, allowing experts or other systems to monitor and respond when significant events are recognised. In a typical event recognition application, however, these systems often have to deal with a significant amount of uncertainty. In this thesis, we address the issue of uncertainty in logic-based event recognition by extending the Event Calculus with probabilistic reasoning. The temporal semantics of the Event Calculus introduce a number of challenges for the proposed model. We show how and under what assumptions we can overcome these problems. Additionally, we study how probabilistic modelling changes the behaviour of the formalism, affecting its key property, the inertia of fluents. Furthermore, we demonstrate the advantages of the probabilistic Event Calculus through examples and experiments in the domain of activity recognition, using a publicly available dataset for video surveillance.