Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cross-age tutoring and the development of three thinking strategies in additiion

This study explored the effects of cross-age tutoring as an instructional mode in the development of thinking skills in Mathematics. Six mixed-ability Grade One students were tutored by six high-ability Grade 6 students in three thinking strategies in addition. A tutoring model was developed to facilitate more effective tutoring of the thinking skills. The tutors modelled, rehearsed, allowed their students to apply the strategy and encouraged students to reflect on what they had done. This model was later modified as a result of the research findings. Subjects were tutored daily over a four week period in the `min' model, Near Doubles and Build to Ten strategies. Tutor-student interactions were recorded. A Tutoring Scaffolds Protocol was developed to categorise tutors' scaffolds. A significant similarity was found in the techniques that tutors use to correct students' responses. To assist in developing understandings of the tutoring process tutor responses were placed within the six scaffolded functions proposed in the work of Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976). A model of tutors' repair strategies was proposed to explain tutors' scaffolding functions. It was concluded that tutoring was an effective method for teaching thinking skills when it was used with other activities that encourage the development of shared understandings of the learning process. It was proposed that repair strategies offered by the tutors could be taught in tutor training sessions, thereby fostering the metacognitive understandings of students involved in tutoring programs.
Computational models of visual processing

Part 1 The task of vision: the plenoptic function and the elements of early vision, Edward H.Adelson and James R.Bergen. Part 2 Receptors and sampling: learning receptor positions, Albert J.Ahumada, Jr a model of aliasing in extrafoveal human vision, Carlo L.M. Tiana et al models of human rod receptors and the ERG, Donald C.Hood and Davic G.Birch. Part 3 Models of neural function: the design of chromatically opponent receptive fields, Peter Lennie et al spatial receptive field organization in monkey V1 and its relationship to the cone mosaic, Michael J.Hawken and Andrew J.Parker neural contrast sensitivity, Andrew B.Watson spatiotemporal receptive fields and direction selectivity, Robert Shapley et al nonlinear model of neural responses in cat visual cortex, David J.Heeger. Part 4 Detection and discrimination: a template matching model of subthreshold summation, Jacob Nachmias noise in the visual system may be early, Denis G.Pelli pattern discrimination, visual filters and spatial sampling irregularity, Hugh R.Wilson. Part 5 Color and shading: a bilinear model of the illuminant's effect on color appearance, David H.Brainard and Brian A.Wandell shading ambiguity - reflectance and illumination, Michael D'Zumara transparency and the cooperative computation of scene attributes, Daniel Kersten. Part 6 Motion and texture: theories for the visual perception of local velocity and coherent motion, Norberto M.Grzywacz and Alan L.Yuille computational modeling of visual texture segregation, James R.Bergen and Michael S.Landy complex channels, early local nonlinearities, and normalization in texture segregation, Norma Graham orthogonal distribution analysis - a new approach to the study of texture perception, Charles Chubb and Michael S.Landy. Part 7 3D Shape: shape from X - psychophysics and computation, Heinrich H.Bulthoff computational issues in solving the stereo correspondence problem, John P.Frisby and Stephen B.Pollard stereo, surfaces, and shape, Andrew J.Parker et al.
Blind diversity combining equalization for short burst wireless communications

Previously, we proposed a dual mode blind equalizer based on the constant modulus algorithm (CMA). The blind equalizer is designed for short burst transmission formats used in many current wireless TDMA systems. It overcomes common problems associated with most blind algorithms, i.e., slow convergence and ill convergence. Thus, it eliminates the overhead associated with training sequences which can be significant for short burst transmission formats. We extend the blind equalizer to a two branch diversity combining blind equalizer. A new initialization scheme for fractionally spaced blind equalizers is introduced. This scheme greatly reduces the probability of ill convergence associated with CMA, by improving the symbol timing recovery. Through simulations with time-varying frequency selective wireless channels, the performance of the proposed equalizer is compared to selection diversity, CMA with the conventional initialization and equalizers with short training sequences. The results indicate that its performance is far superior to that of selection diversity alone and comparable to the performance of equalizers with short training sequences. Thus, the training overhead can be removed with no performance degradation for fast time-varying channels, and with slight performance degradation for static channels.
All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference

WINNER OF THE 2005 DEGROOT PRIZE! This book is for people who want to learn probability and statistics quickly. It brings together many of the main ideas in modern statistics in one place. The book is suitable for students and researchers in statistics, computer science, data mining and machine learning. This book covers a much wider range of topics than a typical introductory text on mathematical statistics. It includes modern topics like nonparametric curve estimation, bootstrapping and classification, topics that are usually relegated to follow-up courses. The reader is assumed to know calculus and a little linear algebra. No previous knowledge of probability and statistics is required. The text can be used at the advanced undergraduate and graduate level.
Map Design Evaluation for Mobile Display

How to effectively represent spatial information on handheld mobile devices is a key question, given the increasing use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cell phones concurrent with the development of location-based services. The mobile use of digital maps on small displays presents new capabilities and challenges that differ from using paper maps in a mobile setting or viewing digital maps on a desktop computer. This research addresses these issues through a study that evaluated maps on a mobile device used for a field-based navigation task. Map representations at two levels of generalization were compared by analyzing subject performance in a pedestrian route-following task, in which a handheld computer was used as a navigation aid. Subject time and accuracy as well as interaction with the mobile device during the task were measured. The results carry implications for map design for small, mobile displays and identify factors that affect the use of maps while moving. Maps are and will increasingly be used on small displays in mobile contexts for a variety of purposes and in many different environments. The requirements and preferences of mobile users, as well as how these maps are used in different contexts, must be understood in order to inform more effective designs.
Stone age or plastic age?

Ingold starts his critique with a claim to find recent writing and talking about material culture essentially obscure and orientated to fashion. If one reads Ingold's own writing you will find plenty of references to philosophical figures such as Heidegger and to phenomenology. I find such writing often incomprehensible and obscure, and much of its contemporary use pretentious. I would hope a reader would find that my own recent books, on the cell phone (Horst and Miller 2006), materiality (Miller 2005) and the sari (Banerjee and Miller 2003), are written in just as straightforward a style as those of Ingold, which I much admire, both eschewing unnecessary jargon. Clearly we happen to find very different theories more or less congenial and comprehensible. But I do not think the implication of his opening remarks is a fair one, and I would hope that readers would judge this for themselves.
Similarity and Frequency in Phonology

Similarity and Frequency in Phonology Stefan Frisch This thesis focuses upon parallels between phonology and phonological processing. I study phonological speech errors and a phonotactic dissimilarity constraint, demonstrating they have analogous similarity and frequency effects. In addition, I show that abstract phonological constraints are influenced by the phonological encoding of lexical items. The results of this thesis are based on a metric of similarity computed using the representations of STRUCTURED SPECIFICATION (Broe 1993). This metric is quantitatively superior to traditional metrics of similarity which are based on feature counting. I also employ a probabilistic model of a gradient linguistic constraint which is based on categorical perception. In this model, the acceptability of a form is gradient, and acceptability is correlated with frequency. The most acceptable forms in a language are the most frequent ones. This constraint model provides a better fit to gradient phonotactic data than traditional categorical linguistic constraints. Together, the similarity metric and gradient constraint model demonstrate that statistical patterns in language can be relevant, principled, and formally modeled in linguistic theory. Using the gradient constraint model, I show that similarity effects in phonotactics are stronger word initially than later in the word. A parallel pattern is experimentally demonstrated for speech errors. I claim that the effect for speech errors follows from the fact that production of segmental material in a lexical item is inherently temporal. I argue that segmental information in lexical representations is sequentially accessed even for abstract phonological purposes, like phonotactics. The effects of word position on similarity in both speech production and phonotactics are accounted for in a connectionist model of lexical access, which does not differentiate the storage of a representation from its use. Structured specification is incompatible with UNDERSPECIFICATION (Kiparsky 1982, Archangeli 1984). In underspecification, features are left blank in a linguistic representation to capture redundancy relationships and phonological markedness. I demonstrate that models of similarity in phonotactics and speech errors which use underspecification do not model the data as well as the similarity metric based on structured specification. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Proportional integral tuning rules for adaptive neural networks

Tuning rules for adaptive neural networks have featured Lyapunov-based approaches in recent years. Although these have some desirable qualities they have led to complex tuning procedures. In order to take more advantage of the power of adaptive neural networks less complex and computationally expensive tuning rules are desirable. In addition, tuning rules should be simple and provide for rapid, reliable convergence. In this paper a proportional-integral approach to adaptive neural network tuning rules is studied. Simulation on a nonlinear system is used for a demonstration.
Managerial Skills Acquisition: A Case for Using Business Policy Simulations

The purpose of this study is to assess the educational value of simulation gaming in business policy courses. It examines and compares student and practitioner perceptions of simulation effectiveness in enhancing participants' appreciation of and skills in, such areas as interpersonal relationships, theory application to real-world problems, planning, decision making/problem solving, conceptualization/integration of business functional issues, and environmental analysis.
J - The Natural Language for Analytic Computing

J is a computer language which first emerged in about 1990, and which is remarkable for the way in which it allows technical instructions for computing to be expressed with great conciseness using constructs and syntax which closely mirror those of natural language. The software concerned is available for free download, thereby giving both professionals and general users access to all the facilities of the language. J is also a fully integrated computing systems with development environment, library utilities and interfaces to a full range of mainstream computing applications such as graphics and data-bases. With J, which only uses the symbols available on every keyboard, a much closer bridge has been constructed between computer and human language than ever before.
A half-micron manufacturable high performance CMOS technology applicable for multiple power supply applications

A half-micron, manufacturable, high-performance CMOS technology that facilitates the transition from 5 V to 3.3 V product design by offering a common technology base with similar performance for applications at either power supply is described. Process integration and device design requirements that meet the following objectives are described: (1) a common process and device design base for VLSI (very-large-scale integration) circuit designs with 3.3 V and 5 V power supply applications without loss of performance at 3.3 V; (2) a performance improvement of 1.5* to 2* over preceding generations of CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) technology; (3) manufacturability; and (4) improved reliability of devices and gate dielectric. The common process base features improved process margin and key parameter control coupled with improved device design and selective scaling to yield 0.5- mu m- and 0.7- mu m-channel-length devices at 3.3 V and 5 V, respectively. Process variation from the common base is limited only to changes in oxide thickness and polysilicon gate width to meet dual power supply design compatibility. As examples a high-performance SRAM (static random-access memory) with sub-10-ns access and logic with sub-250-ps gate delay (<450 ps loaded) are presented. <<ETX>>
Towards a substantive theory of project decisions in software development project-based organizations: A cross-case analysis of IT organizations from Brazil and Portugal

Although the ability to make right decisions is considered a main indicator of organizational project management professionalism, many project, program, and portfolio managers are unwilling to try to improve the quality of their decisions. This ongoing research aims to develop a substantive theory about the decision-making processes considering four elements: cognitive biases, tools and techniques, emotions and organizational factors in the context of software development project-based organizations considering the three levels of project governance: project, program, and portfolio. This paper presents the first results of the research and proposes to shed light on the susceptibility of IT project managers to cognitive biases and how they deal with them, including techniques and tools they use to minimize their negative effects. This study evaluates eight cognitive biases: anchoring bias, exposure effect, hindsight bias, halo effect, planning fallacy, sunk-cost fallacy, availability-related bias, and Parkinson's law effect. The qualitative approach was based on semi-structured interviews with project managers from IT organizations from Brazil and Portugal. Agile practices and knowledge management activities were cited as good practices.
Towards the experimental study of usability

Abstract Usability is presented as a concept which can limit the degree to which a user can realize the potential utility of a computer system. A field study is presented to illustrate the manner in which usability problems inhibit usage. The study examined a banking system which provided staff with 36 ways of extracting information from a customer's account. The usage log shows that four ‘codes’ accounted for 75% of usage and many codes’, although designed specifically for known banking tasks, were virtually unused. An investigation was undertaken in 15 branches to identify what happened when staff were confronted by tasks for which unused facilities had been designed. The results showed that staff were able to use a small set of well-known facilities for most purposes, albeit inefficiently and sometimes ineffectively. The strategy adopted was to avoid searching unknown facilities except as a last resort. From this and other field studies a framework is presented to summarize the variables affecting the .
Numerical investigation of zoomable holographic projection without a zoom lens

Holographic projection is for laser displays and has the merits of being aberration free, producing high‐contrast images, having the ability of color reconstruction with one spatial light modulator, and so on. In this paper, we propose a zoomable holographic projection without using a zoom lens and verify the proposed method by using numerical simulation. Although such a system can be readily realized to use the features of holography, which is capable of recording a large image exceeding the hologram size, the required calculation is very time consuming. For acceleration, we used shifted Fresnel diffraction for setting different sampling rates on a hologram and projected image. The proposed method can project any zoom‐in and zoom‐out image between zeroth‐order and first‐order lights, and the processing time and required memory for the zoom are constant.
LOTOS Symbolic Semantics in Maude

We present a formal tool where LOTOS specifications without restrictions in their data types can be executed. The reflective feature of rewriting logic and the metalanguage capabilities of Maude make it possible to implement the whole tool in the same semantic framework, and have allowed us to implement the LOTOS semantics and to build an entire environment with parsing, pretty printing, and input/output processing of LOTOS specifications.
Motion planning for manipulation with heuristic search

Heuristic searches such as A* search are a popular means of finding least-cost plans due to their generality, strong theoretical guarantees on completeness and optimality, simplicity in implementation and consistent behavior. In planning for robotic manipulation, however, these techniques are commonly thought of as impractical due to the high-dimensionality of the planning problem. As part of this thesis work, we have developed a heuristic search-based approach to motion planning for manipulation that does deal effectively with the high-dimensionality of the problem. In this thesis, I will present the approach together with its theoretical properties and show how to apply it to single-arm and dual-arm motion planning with upright constraints on a PR2 robot operating in non-trivial cluttered spaces. Then I will explain how we extended our approach to manipulation planning for n-arms with regrasping. In this work, the planner itself makes all of the discrete decisions such as which arm to use for the pickup, the putdown, whether handoffs are necessary and how the object should be grasped at each step along the way. An extensive experimental analysis in both simulation and on a physical PR2 shows that, in terms of runtime, our approach is on par with some of the most common sampling-based approaches. In addition, the experimental analysis shows that due to its deterministic cost-minimization, the approach generates motions that are of good quality and are consistent, i.e. the resulting plans tend to be similar for similar tasks.
Personalized EigenTrust with the Beta Distribution

This letter presents an enhancement of EigenTrust. Using the beta distribution, local trust values can be more correctly evaluated. Simulation shows that the proposed scheme calculates the local trust more correctly by up to 8%. For personalization, the proposed scheme provides cumulative transitive values from the local trust to the global trust with mathematically guaranteed convergence.
Task Analysis and Kinematic Design of a Novel Robotic Chair for the Management of Top-Shelf Vertigo

The present work addresses the task analysis and the kinematic design of a novel robotic chair to be used for diagnosing and treating Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV). The task analysis process is based on: 1) Direct specifications given by well-trained doctors; 2) Theoretical considerations built upon a mathematical model describing BPPV dynamics. BPPV is the most frequent cause of vertigo and it is characterized by intense symptoms of dizziness and nausea of short duration which are induced by a postural variation of the patient. A common name for BPPV is "top-shelf vertigo", since dizziness often occurs when tilting back the head, such as when looking at objects on the top shelf. In the elder patients, it represents a frequent cause of equilibrium loss and consequent possible traumatic injuries. Sometimes BPPV symptoms disappear spontaneously but more often they tend to last for months or even years if not adequately treated. It was estimated that 20% of the patients that complain about dizziness are affected by BPPV (approximately 64 in 100,000 people per year in Northern America (Baloh et al., 1989; Froehling et al., 1991; Honrubia et al., 1996)). BPPV is a malfunction of the vestibular system which is the sensory structure that mainly contributes to the equilibrium. The vestibular system is situated inside the cranium and comprises three fluid-filled semicircular canals (SCC) namely Horizontal Canal (HC), Posterior Canal (PC) and Anterior Canal (AC) (Figure 1(a)) whose duty is the perception of the body’s angular motion. Even though data relating SCC’s mutual orientation are sparse, multiple studies of inter-SCC angles concluded that canals are close to perpendicular. Anyway, the relative orientation of the SCC is characterized by a certain degree of disparity within the population of individuals and it can be described by a mean value and its standard deviation (Della Santina et al., 2005; Shinichiro et al., 2005). In media, AC lies on a plane inclined approximately 45◦ with respect to the body’s sagittal plane, PC lies on a plane inclined 45◦ but in the opposite direction, HC is perpendicular to the other two canals and it is inclined approximately 15-20◦ with respect to the body’s horizontal plane (Figure 1(b)). The body rotation is sensed through a sensory membrane (cupola) which is deflected by the action of the fluid contained in the SCC. Two identical sensory structures are symmetrically disposed with respect to the body’s saggital plane (six SCC in total). 29
Energy conservation in wireless sensor networks

A Wireless Sensor Network is a wireless network that consists of spatially distributed devices called sensor nodes. Each node monitors physical or environmental conditions and communicate with nearby nodes via radio broadcast (network). These sensor nodes are miniature devices and operate on a tiny, non-replaceable battery. Energy is the scarcest resource of wireless sensor network nodes which determines their lifetime. The lifetime of a sensor node can be maximized by minimizing the energy consumption. Hence, energy conservation in wireless sensor nodes has posed a big problem and limits the applications and deployment of wireless sensor networks.