Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PRISM (Polarized Radiation Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission): an extended white paper

PRISM (Polarized Radiation Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) was proposed to ESA in May 2013 as a large-class mission for investigating within the framework of the ESA Cosmic Vision program a set of important scientific questions that require high resolution, high sensitivity, full-sky observations of the sky emission at wavelengths ranging from millimeter-wave to the far-infrared. PRISM's main objective is to explore the distant universe, probing cosmic history from very early times until now as well as the structures, distribution of matter, and velocity flows throughout our Hubble volume. PRISM will survey the full sky in a large number of frequency bands in both intensity and polarization and will measure the absolute spectrum of sky emission more than three orders of magnitude better than COBE FIRAS. The data obtained will allow us to precisely measure the absolute sky brightness and polarization of all the components of the sky emission in the observed frequency range, separating the primordial and extragalactic components cleanly from the galactic and zodiacal light emissions. The aim of this Extended White Paper is to provide a more detailed overview of the highlights of the new science that will be made possible by PRISM, which include: (1) the ultimate galaxy cluster survey using the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect, detecting approximately 106 clusters extending to large redshift, including a characterization of the gas temperature of the brightest ones (through the relativistic corrections to the classic SZ template) as well as a peculiar velocity survey using the kinetic SZ effect that comprises our entire Hubble volume; (2) a detailed characterization of the properties and evolution of dusty galaxies, where the most of the star formation in the universe took place, the faintest population of which constitute the diffuse CIB (Cosmic Infrared Background); (3) a characterization of the B modes from primordial gravity waves generated during inflation and from gravitational lensing, as well as the ultimate search for primordial non-Gaussianity using CMB polarization, which is less contaminated by foregrounds on small scales than the temperature anisotropies; (4) a search for distortions from a perfect blackbody spectrum, which include some nearly certain signals and others that are more speculative but more informative; and (5) a study of the role of the magnetic field in star formation and its interaction with other components of the interstellar medium of our Galaxy. These are but a few of the highlights presented here along with a description of the proposed instrument.
Phytochemical screening, antibacterial and antioxidant activities of Asparagus laricinus leaf and stem extracts

The aim of this study was to investigate antioxidant activities, antibacterial activities and a phytochemical constituent of Asparagus laricinus stem and leaf extracts. Determination of antibacterial activity of extracts was assessed by agar dilution method and antioxidant properties by 2,2-diphenyl-1-picryl-hydrazyl (DPPH) assay. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of the leaf was at a concentration of 0.125 mg/mL against S. saprophyticus and E. cloacae , and at a concentration of 1 mg/mL against S. aureus and B. subtilis . There was no MIC of the stem extract at any concentration. The leaf extract showed effective free radical scavenging activity (72.1%), while stem extract had low activity. Qualitative phytochemical analysis of these plant extracts revealed the presence of tannins, saponins, flavonoids and phlobatannins. The leaf extract further confirmed the presence of glycosides, steroids, ternoids and carbohydrates. Our results indicate that, A. laricinus leaf extracts have potential antimicrobial and antioxidant activities. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.3329/bjp.v9i1. 16967 Bangladesh J Pharmacol 2014; 9: 10-14
CJ LrN ( NJ AN INVESTIGATION OF WISC-R ITEM BIAS WITH C \ J BLACK , CHICANO , NATIVE AMERICAN PAPAGO , AND C \ J WHITE CHILDREN : IMPLICATIONS FOR NONDISCRIMINATORY ASSESSMENT

Two psychometric approaches for the investigation of item bias were employed to examine the performance of four sociocultural groups on six subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children Revised (WISC-R). The sample of 950 students was from Pima County, Arizona. One approach involved the comparison of the psychometric indices of internal consistency reliability, which were reasonably high and comparable for the four groups; the rank order correlations of item difficulty, which were quite high and comparable for the four groups; and the rank order correlations of the.differences in the difficulty of adjacent items, which were less comparable for Native American Papagos suggesting possible items by group'interactions. A second approach involved the utilization of transformed item difficulties and a quantitative method of outlier analysis to identify specific items as biased (i.e., as manifesting an item by group interaction). Results were not interpreted as evidence of cultural bias, however, since the possible confounding effects of socioeconomic status and overall ability were not controlled. Further, the items identified did not appear to reflect aspects of the assumption of "interference" implicit in the notion of cultural bias. (Author/PH) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. CJ LrN (NJ AN INVESTIGATION OF WISC-R ITEM BIAS WITH C\J BLACK, CHICANO, NATIVE AMERICAN PAPAGO, AND C\J WHITE CHILDREN: IMPLICATIONS FOR NONDISCRIMINATORY ASSESSMENT Daniel J. Reschly Jane Ross-Reynolds Department of Psychology and Terrebonne Parish Schools Iowa State University Thibodaux, LA 70301 Ames, Iowa 50011
Comparative Experimental Study of Control Theoretic and Connectionist Controllers for Nonlinear Systems

This thesis compares classical nonlinear control theoretic techniques with recently developed neural network control methods based on the real time experimental control performance on a simple electro-mechanical system. The system has configurationdependent inertia and velocity squared terms, which contribute a substantial nonlinearity. The controllers being studied include PID control, sliding control, adaptive control, and Gaussian network control. Experimental results are given on the tracking performance and computation time for each controller. To establish a fair comparison among different controllers, the feedback bandwidth of each control method is chosen to be the same. The performance data for final comparison is collected using the same control frequency, i.e., the slowest pace of the four methods. These controllers are evaluated based on the amount of a priori knowledge required, tracking performance, stability guarantees, and computational requirements. The comparative study shows that for different control applications, appropriate control techniques should be selected depending on how much we know about the nonlinearity of the systems to be controlled and available computational resources. Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Dana R. Yoerger Associate Scientist Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Acknowledgments I greatly appreciate the efforts of my thesis advisor Dr. Dana Yoerger, who gave me the opportunity to study the interesting world of underwater robotics, control theory and neural networks. I thank Prof. Jean-Jacques Slotine for giving me insights in the Gaussian network control. My thanks also go to everyone at the Deep Submergence Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for all the help and support, especially from Dr. Louis Whitcomb, Ted Snow, Frank Weyer, Will Sellers, Tom Crook, Marty Marra, and Dr. Hanu Singh. I would like to thank Cindy Sullivan, Larry Flick, Prof. Arthur Baggeroer and other MIT/WHOI Joint Program staff, who assisted me in many ways during my studies here. Thank you, my friends in MIT Office 5-007, for all the helpful discussions. I thank my dear parents for their love. I thank my husband Xiaoou Tang, my brother Shan, and my good friends Dan Li and Changle Fang. Without their support and encouragement, I would not have been able to complete this thesis.
Metadata of the chapter that will be visualized in SpringerLink

Machine Learning components in safety-critical applications can perform some complex tasks that would be unfeasible otherwise. However, they are also a weak point concerning safety assurance. An aspect requiring study is how the interactions between machine-learning components and other non-ML components evolve with training of the former. It is theoretically possible that learning by Neural Networks may reduce the effectiveness of error checkers or safety monitors, creating a major complication for safety assurance. We present an initial exploration of this problem focused on automated driving
Largest-t selection of random sizes under a sumconstraint : comparisons by weak convergenceFrans

Let Y1; Y2; be a sequence of positive, independent, identically distributed random variables with distribution function G(x) and denote the order statistics of Y1; : : : ; Yn by Y1;n : : : Yn;n . For positive numbers (dn)n 1, the largestt o -line counting random variable N̂ e(dn) is de ned by N̂ e(dn) = maxfj : 1 j n and Yn;n + + Yn j+1;n dng if this set is nonempty and = 0 otherwise. In a bin-packing context, the r.v. N̂ e(dn) is the maximal number of objects with largest possible sizes (chosen from n objects sampled from distribution G) that can be packed into a bin of capacity dn. In the on-line situation the n objects with sizes Y1; : : : ; Yn arrive one-by-one, and a decision maker must either accept or reject each object immediately, without recall. A `good' on-line selection policy selects as few objects as possible with sizes as large as possible. In this paper, quantitative comparisons are given between the o -line count N̂ e(dn) and on-line counts N n(dn) associated with `good' policies . Speci cally, for such policies , under appropriate conditions on the distribution function G(x) and the constants (dn)n 1, we nd sequences of positive constants ( n)n 1, ( n)n 1 and ( 0n)n 1 such that n N̂ e(dn) n 1! ; 0n N n(dn) n 1 ! ) (W;W 0) as n! 1; for some nondegenerate r.v. 's W and W 0. 2
The “Similarity Index” as an Indicator of Shared Mental Models and Situation Awareness in Field Studies

The aim of this paper is to present a methodology where the extent of information sharing among team members is used as an indicator of shared mental models (SMM) and situation awareness (SA). Data collection procedures and probe materials are described for two field experiments performed among emergency management teams in the hydrocarbon industry. Methods are suggested for calculating a “similarity index” by comparing a team member’s responses with the average response in the team or with the responses of the team member assumed to be best informed. It is argued that similarity to team average could be a measure of SMM, whereas similarity to the best-informed team member could be argued to be an indicator of SA. The degree of compliance in responding to the probes is reported, as is the degree to which the extent of shared information differed between the probe questions or according to team positions. Lessons learned from the data collection are summarized, and the applicability of the similarity index as a measure of SA is discussed. Some advantages of the current approach are presented, as are challenges and inherent assumptions in future applications of this approach.
Internet Voting with Helios ∗

Helios is a voting system designed to enable practical open-audit, end-to-end verifiable elections with the only support of a web browser. Since 2009, Helios has been used by several hundreds of thousands of voters from various institutions: universities (including UCLouvain [4, 16] and Princeton [54]), associations (including the IACR [8] and the ACM [1]) and a number of private companies. The choice of making it possible to create, run and tally an election with the only support of a web browsers has several implications. The first is to bring end-to-end verifiable elections at reach from just anyone who can access the Internet. Using Helios does not require using any dedicated hardware, installing any specific software, or having a physical mail address. This is also true for the whole election audit process: all audit operations can be performed from a basic laptop. Any voter can verify that his vote is included, unaltered, in the tally, and anyone can verify that the tally is correct. These audit operations do not require any privileged access to some data or infrastructure: they only require the manipulation of public data. Furthermore, and contrary to traditional paper voting, the audit operations do not require any kind of continuous watch: there is no chain of custody that needs to be maintained in order to perform a meaningful audit. As a result, an independent audit of the tally can be performed by anyone and at any time after the end of an election, something that would be unfeasible in any large scale traditional paper election. We will elaborate on these various operations and guarantees later in this chapter. Helios guarantees the confidentiality of the votes by using distributed encryption (since version 2.0): votes are encrypted directly on the voter’s computer
Tracking known security vulnerabilities in third-party components

Known security vulnerabilities are introduced in software systems as a result of depending on third-party components. These documented software weaknesses are hiding in plain sight and represent the lowest hanging fruit for attackers. Despite the risk they introduce for software systems, it has been shown that developers consistently download vulnerable components from public repositories. We show that these downloads indeed find their way in many industrial and open-source software systems. In order to improve the status quo, we introduce the Vulnerability Alert Service, a tool-based process to track known vulnerabilities in software projects throughout the development process. Its usefulness has been empirically validated in the context of the external software product quality monitoring service offered by the Software Improvement Group, a software consultancy company based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Long memory in the R$ / US$ exchange rate: A robust analysis

This article shows that the evidence of long memory for the daily R$ /US$ exchange rate series after the implementation of the Real Plan is not robust when we analyze the existence of structural breaks in this series. We demonstrate that the long memory observed is caused by changes in the structure of variance, captured by a Markov Switching model in all the parameters. A Monte Carlo study shows that the long memory structure can be induced by changes in the unconditional variance parameters, and that the data generating mechanism is a short memory process.
A public choice perspective

This volume boasts important contributions to the literature employing interdisciplinary perspectives to advance legal scholarship. The approaches contained within this volume include economics, philosophy, history, evolutionary dynamics, comparative law, empiricism, and behavioral economics. No less so than ideological camps, opposing methodological groupings divide the legal academy. In both cases, this is unfortunate. As this volume amply demonstrates, a more fruitful approach benefits from synergies among an array of methodologies, and treats ideology as no more than a rough starting point that for the most thoughtful scholars invariably invites more complex and nuanced inquiries into law and legal policy. Where does public choice fit? First, we must provide a definition: Public choice is the application of economic tools to the subject matter of political science. The term “public choice” is sometimes used to describe a particular methodology, specifically interest group theory, and sometimes used more broadly as an umbrella or catch-all term covering an associated set of methodologies. In this chapter, I take the latter approach. Under the broad umbrella of public choice, I include interest group theory, social choice theory and elementary game theory, in addition to elements of price theory as is helpful in elucidating underlying concepts. Public choice liberally borrows assorted methodological tools from microeconomic theory and adapts them to sharpen the analytical focus on subjects of interest to students of politics and political theory. Because legal scholarship is necessarily concerned not only with substantive policy outcomes but also with generative processes that produce those outcomes, the study of public choice necessarily extends as well into the domain of law. Before illustrating how a public choice perspective illuminates particular questions of law and legal policy, it will be helpful to describe briefly the three main subdisciplines of public choice.
Stochastic Expectation Maximization with Variance Reduction

Expectation-Maximization (EM) is a popular tool for learning latent variable models, but the vanilla batch EM does not scale to large data sets because the whole data set is needed at every E-step. Stochastic Expectation Maximization (sEM) reduces the cost of E-step by stochastic approximation. However, sEM has a slower asymptotic convergence rate than batch EM, and requires a decreasing sequence of step sizes, which is difficult to tune. In this paper, we propose a variance reduced stochastic EM (sEM-vr) algorithm inspired by variance reduced stochastic gradient descent algorithms. We show that sEM-vr has the same exponential asymptotic convergence rate as batch EM. Moreover, sEM-vr only requires a constant step size to achieve this rate, which alleviates the burden of parameter tuning. We compare sEM-vr with batch EM, sEM and other algorithms on Gaussian mixture models and probabilistic latent semantic analysis, and sEM-vr converges significantly faster than these baselines.
Faktörler The Anxiety Levels of the Parents of Premature Infants and Related Factors

Premature delivery is a major critical problem that causes high perinatal morbidity and mortality rates (1-3). The World Health Organization reports that one of every 10 births is premature (2). In Turkey, the rate of premature delivery is reported to be 12% (4). Parents who are not psychologically ready for a preterm delivery, go through high levels of anxiety (5-7). The fact that a premature infant has more common health problems also affects the anxiety levels of the parents. Factors such as family and infant characteristics, the severity of the infant’s health condition, parent-infant relationship are related to the outcome of premature infants (8). The mother and father Amaç: Çalışma prematüre bebeği olan anne ve babaların kaygı düzeyleri ve ilişkili faktörleri belirlemek amacıyla yapıldı. Gereç ve Yöntemler: Karşılaştırmalı tanımlayıcı çalışma, Konya ili kent merkezinde yer alan, yenidoğan yoğun bakım ünitesi bulunan dört hastanede, Mart-Nisan 2012 tarihleri arasında yapıldı. Örneklem grubunu 97 prematüre bebeğin anne ve babası oluşturdu (n=194). Verilerin toplanmasında araştırmacılar tarafından oluşturulan Ebeveyn ve Bebek Bilgi Formu ve Durumluk-Sürekli Kaygı Ölçeği kullanıldı. Bulgular: Annelerin ve babaların durumluk kaygı puan ortalamaları benzer olduğu saptandı (p>0,05). Annelerin sürekli kaygı puan ortalamalarının babalara göre yüksek olduğu ve bu farkın istatistiksel olarak anlamlı olduğu bulundu (p<0,05). Sonuç: Prematüre bebeği olan anne ve babaların hafif düzeyde kaygı yaşadıkları görüldü. Anahtar Kelimeler: Anksiyete, anne-baba, prematüre, ilişkili faktörler, Durumluk-Sürekli Kaygı Ölçeği Aim: The aim was to determine the anxiety levels of parents with premature infants and related factors. Materials and Methods: This comparative descriptive study was conducted in the neonatal intensive care unit of four hospitals located in Konya, Turkey between March and April 2012 with the parents (n=194; 97 mothers, 97 fathers) of premature infants who were 32-37 weeks gestational. Data were collected using Parents and Infant Information Form prepared by the researchers, and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory Scale. Results: The mean state anxiety scores of the mothers and fathers were similar (p>0.05). The mothers had higher mean trait anxiety scores compared to the fathers and this difference was found to be statistically significant (p<0.05). Conclusion: It was observed that parents with premature infants experienced mild anxiety.
Pyrrolyl thiadiazoles as Mycobacterium tuberculosis inhibitors and their in silico analyses

License. The full terms of the License are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. Permissions beyond the scope of the License are administered by Dove Medical Press Limited. Information on how to request permission may be found at: http://www.dovepress. com/permissions.php Research and Reports in Medicinal Chemistry 2015:5 1–20 Research and Reports in Medicinal Chemistry Dovepress
Research Assessment in the UK and Italy: Costly and Difficult, But Probably Worth (at Least for a While)

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the development of the UK and Italian university research funding systems with a special focus on Peer Review-Based Research Assessment (PRBRA) and its cost. Much of the debate surrounding the value of performance-based allocation systems hinges on the disadvantages versus the benefits of their implementation, and there is very little evidence on either their absolute cost or their cost relative to other allocation systems. Our objective is to fill this gap, collating the best possible estimates of the costs of alternative research funding methods to inform the ongoing policy debate. First, we compare funding in the UK and Italy during the period 2005-2012 and analyze the development of performance-based allocation in the two systems. Second, based on public reports and documents collected from universities, we discuss the public agency and university costs of RAE2008 and REF2014 and provide some estimates for VQR2012. We find that RAE2008 costs accounted for less than 1% of the total performance allocation in the related period while the VQR2012 efficiency ratio is estimated at around 2.5%. Finally, we compare the costs and efficiency ratios of PRBRA with metrics-based assessment and Research Council allocations and show that costs increase going from metrics to PRBRA to Research Council allocation.