Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The permeability of tag questions in a language contact situation

In this paper, we utilize negative polarity tag questions in order to assess to what extent discourse-pragmatic variables are susceptible to language contact induced changes. Based on a comparison of forms and functions of negative tags in the varieties spoken by Portuguese-Spanish bilinguals in a community on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border with the one spoken by monolinguals in the Uruguayan capital, we aimed at assessing to what extent any differences in this variable behavior may be affected by contact with Portuguese. Our results indicate that, despite the high permeability of discourse-pragmatic features in contact situations attested in the literature and the presumed tendency for cognate languages to converge, the forms and functions of negative tags in bilingual Spanish did not radically differ from the monolingual variety. We found, instead, an intricate pattern of convergences and divergences that challenges the presupposed assumptions about extreme permeability of cognate discourse pragmatic systems in contact.
Empirical study of cartograms

We report on an empirical study investigating the effectiveness and efficiency of spatial inference making with contiguous (value-by-area) cartograms, compared to informational equivalent choropleth maps, combined with graduated circles. We find significant differences in people's inference-making performance dependent on the map type. Overall, results suggest that the choropleth map with graduated circles is more effective and more efficient than the cartogram for the analysis of population census data. However, map effectiveness and efficiency also significantly depends on the inference task complexity, and more surprisingly, on the shape characteristics of the depicted enumeration units. For simple tasks, cartograms seem as effective and efficient as the more traditional mapping method. For complex inference questions, inference performance with cartograms is significantly dependent on whether regular or irregular zones are distorted. As we know still very little about the perception and cognition of cartograms, we hope to shed new light for this intriguing mapping method with this empirical study.
Chilean Graders’ Behaviors and Perceptions of a Foreign Language Reschooling Program Towards Verbal Feedback on Pronunciation

This research study aims to provide graders of an EFL reschooling program with individual verbal feedback and analyze their behaviors and perceptions towards the intervention. This study follows an action research design conducted during three sessions in which 28 secondary school students had a dialogue with the teacher who commented on their pronunciation issues and provided with strategies in order to help them deal successfully with pronunciation issues. A field note and a semi-structured interview were used to collect data. The field note was used during the dialogue to observe students’ behavior towards the feedback; the semi-structured interview was implemented after the intervention in order to describe their perceptions towards the methodology and its effect on their learning process. Thematic analysis was used to identify certain patterns of meanings; the analysis showed findings leading to the conclusion that students felt more comfortable when facing speaking activities because of the practice and repetition during the individual verbal feedback stage. Future studies could include peer feedback, because this verbal feedback may be enhanced if students work in pairs. This type of strategy may favor discussion and clarification of doubts.
Does mode of administration impact on quality of data? Comparing a traditional survey versus an online survey via a Voting Advice Application

This paper compares two modes of administering an election survey: a traditional, door-to-door survey and an identical online version promoted via a Voting Advice Application. Whereas online political surveys are known to suffer from self-selection bias of politically interested respondents, traditional surveys are plagued with socially desirable responding and are susceptible to the effects of satisficing and other fatigue-related effects. Using a propensity score matching methodology, we examine the extent to which such differences exist between the two modes of administration. While we report mixed findings regarding the structure of respondents’ answer patterns, significant differences emerged in relation to social desirability bias with the offline group being more ‘affected’ than the online group.
Exploring the uncertainty of activity zone detection using digital footprints with multi-scaled DBSCAN

ABSTRACT The density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) method is often used to identify individual activity clusters (i.e., zones) using digital footprints captured from social networks. However, DBSCAN is sensitive to the two parameters, eps and minpts. This paper introduces an improved density-based clustering algorithm, Multi-Scaled DBSCAN (M-DBSCAN), to mitigate the detection uncertainty of clusters produced by DBSCAN at different scales of density and cluster size. M-DBSCAN iteratively calibrates suitable local eps and minpts values instead of using one global parameter setting as DBSCAN for detecting clusters of varying densities, and proves to be effective for detecting potential activity zones. Besides, M-DBSCAN can significantly reduce the noise ratio by identifying all points capturing the activities performed in each zone. Using the historic geo-tagged tweets of users in Washington, D.C. and in Madison, Wisconsin, the results reveal that: 1) M-DBSCAN can capture dispersed clusters with low density of points, and therefore detecting more activity zones for each user; 2) A value of 40 m or higher should be used for eps to reduce the possibility of collapsing distinctive activity zones; and 3) A value between 200 and 300 m is recommended for eps while using DBSCAN for detecting activity zones.
More interesting regions: an efficient road segmentation method based on vanishing point

Abstract. Accurate road segmentation is imperative for any effective advanced driver assistance system. Existing state-of-the-art methods are generally based on network architectures; however, high accuracy comes at the expense of abundant annotated data and high-computational cost. The inherently large amount of nonroad areas increases the running time and affects road segmentation accuracy. We propose a method based on the data enhancement of vanishing points (VPs) and deep learning to segment road areas. The VP serves as the location prior to remove redundant areas (e.g., sky and tall buildings). Contour maps reduce noise voters from background interference to mitigate the low VP estimation speed. A voting strategy is deployed to further accelerate the processing speed. After VP presegmentation, the remaining regions are fed into a multilayered extended semantic network (MultiNet), which consists of VGG16 and FCN. By combining VPs and MultiNet, the proposed method reveals discriminative features for road segmentation better than the original MultiNet. The convergent speed of training the MultiNet model is 25% faster than the original network owing to the location priors. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms several other methods with regard to both efficiency and accuracy.
Dual Relational Model of Perceived Overqualification: Employee's Self‐Concept and Task Performance

Drawing upon self&#8208;representation theory and using a relationship perspective, we constructed a dual&#8208;path&#8208;moderated mediation model to examine the relationship between employees&#8217; perceived overqualification and task performance. We tested this model with data from a sample of 242 subordinate&#8208;supervisor dyads in Shanghai, China. The results suggested that perceived overqualification had a negative indirect effect on task performance through perceived insider status (PIS), and popularity moderated the negative association between perceived overqualification and PIS. In addition, the relationship between perceived overqualification and task performance via organization&#8208;based self&#8208;esteem was positive when supervisor&#8208;subordinate guanxi was high but negative when it was low. The implications, limitations, and future research directions of these findings are discussed.
The influence of caffeine on lymphocyte activation after prolonged high intensity exercise

Many athletes consume caffeine for its known ergogenic effects. Since being legitimised by its 2004 removal from the World Anti-Doping Agency prohibited list of substances, caffeine s ability to enhance performance has led to its widespread use amongst the athletic population. However, despite caffeine s prevalence, little research has focused on the effect of caffeine ingestion on immune function both at rest and in response to exercise in humans. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to investigate the influence of typically-used doses of caffeine (typical daily intake in training and competition doses) on aspects of innate and acquired immunity in response to prolonged exercise. At rest both a high (6 mg kg-1) and low dose (2 mg kg-1) of caffeine had little effect on antigen-stimulated T (CD4+ and CD8+) or natural killer (NK) lymphocyte activation, while a high dose of caffeine only increased the number of antigen-stimulated NK cells expressing CD69 1 h following caffeine ingestion (Chapter 4). In response to prolonged high intensity continuous cycling both high and low doses of caffeine increased the natural state of activation as well as the antigen-stimulated activation of NK cells 1 h after exercise cessation (Chapters 5 and 6). However, at the same time-point a high dose of caffeine decreased CD4+ and CD8+ cell activation (Chapter 5). One hour after high intensity intermittent shuttle running, a high dose of caffeine attenuated the exercise-induced increase in NK cell activation both in terms of the number of cells expressing CD69 and their geometric mean fluorescence intensity expression of CD69 (Chapter 7). These effects did not occur in response to intermittent exercise when 2 mg kg-1 caffeine was instead ingested in 3 repeated doses throughout the day (Chapter 7). In conclusion, the findings of this thesis demonstrate the complex actions of caffeine on antigen-stimulated T and NK lymphocyte activation 1 h after prolonged intensive exercise. However, the biological significance of these findings in terms of caffeine s potential to alter an individuals susceptibility to infection following prolonged high intensity exercise are yet to be determined.
Quality of life in inflammatory bowel disease: the interaction of disease activity with psychosocial function.

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the disease-specific and psychological factors that influence quality of life (QOL) in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) as measured by the recently developed IBD disease-specific QOL measure the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire (IBDQ). METHODS Twenty-two patients (eight males and 14 females) were studied, 16 with Crohn's disease and six with ulcerative colitis (mean age 32 yr). Patients' disease activity was measured with the Dutch Crohn's activity index and the St. Mark's colitis activity index, and QOL was measured by the IBDQ. All patients completed self-report questionnaires for psychological function, which included the Sickness Impact Profile (SIP), the Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL), and the Self-Control Schedule (SCS). RESULTS By combining the psychological measures and the disease activity into a single variable, this composite variable significantly predicted QOL (r = 0.53, p < 0.02), but disease activity alone did not predict overall QOL. Improved psychosocial functioning (Sickness Impact Profile) predicted greater overall QOL (IBDQ total: r = -0.49, p < 0.05) and better social functioning (r = -0.65, p < 0.01). Greater psychological distress (SCL) and disease activity predicted more systemic symptoms [SCL-Positive Symptom Total (PST): r = -0.48, p < 0.05; disease activity: r = -0.65, p < 0.03) and poorer emotional functioning (SCL-PST: r = minus] 0.75, p < 0.001; disease activity: r = -0.82, p < .03). Disease type, gender, age of onset, and psychological coping (SCS) were not predictive of disease-specific QOL, but coping (SCS) was significantly correlated with psychological distress (r = -0.58, p < 0.05 for the SCL-90-PST). CONCLUSION This study confirms the importance of psychological functioning in determining QOL of IBD patients and must be considered jointly with disease activity.
Weight Estimation of Wheat by Using Image Processing Techniques

Today, image processing applications in agriculture seems to spread rapidly. Image processing in agriculture are used in many areas such as classification of products, the detection of weeds, crop yields and weight estimation. In this study weight estimation of bread wheat and durum wheat in different amounts was performed by using image processing techniques. Image processing techniques were applied by using Matlab software. The counting of wheat kernels in image and weight estimation was carried out. Success rates were determined by comparing estimated weights of wheat kernels and their actual weight. 
OFMTL-SEC: State-based Security for Software Defined Networks

Dynamic network security services have been proposed exploiting the benefits of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies. However, many of these services rely on controller interaction, which presents a performance and scalability challenge, and a threat vector. To overcome the performance issue, stateful data-plane designs have been proposed. Unfortunately, these solutions do not offer protection from attacks that exploit the SDN implementation of network functions such as topology and path update, or services such as the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP). In this work, we propose state-based SDN security protection mechanisms. Our stateful security data plane solution, OFMTL-SEC, is designed to provide protection against attacks on SDN and traditional network services. Specifically, we present a novel data plane protection against configuration-based attacks in SDN and against ARP spoofing. OFMTL-SEC is compared with the state-of-the-art solutions and offers increased security to SDNs with negligible performance impact.
Essays on the recruitment and retention of teachers

Teachers are among the most important school inputs for pupil attainment (Hanushek, 2011). Despite this, economically-advanced countries experience recurring shortages of teachers, resulting in sub-optimal hiring and deployment of teachers and reduced pupil attainment. This thesis investigates the determinants of entry to and exit from the teaching profession in order to understand how these shortages can be reduced. Very little is known about the correlates of entry to the teaching profession. Non-cognitive skills and personality-type have been shown to be important predictors of occupational choice in general (Cobb-Clark & Tan, 2011; Nieken & Stormer, 2010). However, these have not been used to model entry to the teaching profession. Chapter 2 of this thesis uses rich data from a household panel survey to model entry to the profession. The model identifies groups of people who are up to four times more likely to enter teaching than the typical graduate. This information can be used to target recruitment efforts. Retaining teachers is also important for ensuring sufficient supply. Research using administrative data generally finds the proportion of disadvantaged pupils in a school to be the strongest correlate of turnover. However, recent literature suggests that working conditions are important omitted variables in such analysis. Chapter 3 uses data on teachers from thirty-five countries to develop a rich set of working conditions measures and uses these to model teacher job satisfaction and intention to quit. The results highlight the importance of school leadership and assigning teachers to subjects in which they have been trained. Chapter 4 builds on this analysis by evaluating the impact of a subject-specific professional development intervention for science teacher retention. Double- and triple-difference models suggest that participation in the programme improves retention in the profession, though not in the participant’s original school.
Application of model predictive control for the optimization of thermo-hygrometric comfort and energy consumption of buildings

The use of tools of simulation in every field of engineering is in the last years widely spreading. Lot of them can be used and a large amount of simulators can be found on the market in order to perform every kind of analysis and prediction. In the field of building/plant system, tools based on white, grey and black box approaches are often used as a function of accuracy and reliability. Several tools were developed according to mathematical models and transient analysis in order to perform Building Energy Simulations. The lumped capacitance models have a potential in terms of both data reliability and low computational cost. The Resistance-Capacitance models can be realized with different orders to improve the dynamic thermal behavior of building and coupled with model-based design tools. Dymola with Modelica language can provide a useful tool for engineers to design a thermohygrometric comfort model optimizing the energy consumptions. The paper describes a calculation method developed with the aid of an outdoor test cell, based on a second order Lumped parameters model coupled with a hygrometric model and a Model Predictive Control thanks to a library for real time control and management of energy consumptions and thermal comfort. RÉSUMÉ. L'utilisation d'outils de simulation dans tous les domaines de l'ingénierie s'est largement répandue ces dernières années. Beaucoup d'entre eux peuvent être utilisés et une grande quantité de simulateurs peuvent être trouvés sur le marché afin d'effectuer tout type d'analyse et de prévision. Dans le domaine des systèmes de bâtiments / installations, les outils basés sur les approches de boîte blanche, grise et noire sont souvent utilisés en fonction de la précision et de la fiabilité. 376 I2M. Volume 17 – n° 3/2018 Plusieurs outils ont été développés selon des modèles mathématiques et des analyses transitoires afin de réaliser des simulations d'énergie du bâtiment. Les modèles de capacité concentrée ont un potentiel en termes de fiabilité des données et de faible coût de calcul. Les modèles Résistance-Capacité peuvent être réalisés avec différents ordres pour améliorer le comportement thermique dynamique du bâtiment et associés à des outils de conception basés sur des modèles. Dymola avec le langage Modelica peut fournir aux ingénieurs un outil utile pour concevoir un modèle de confort thermo-hygrométrique optimisant les consommations d'énergie. L'article décrit une méthode de calcul développée à l'aide d'une cellule de test extérieure, basée sur un modèle à paramètres concentrées de second ordre associé à un modèle hygrométrique et à une commande prédictive, grâce à une bibliothèque pour le contrôle en temps réel et la gestion des consommations d'énergie et du confort thermique.
Errors in Probabilistic Reasoning and Judgment Biases

Errors in probabilistic reasoning have been the focus of much psychology research and are among the original topics of modern behavioral economics. This chapter reviews theory and evidence on this topic, with the goal of facilitating more systematic study of belief biases and their integration into economics. The chapter discusses biases in beliefs about random processes, biases in belief updating, the representativeness heuristic as a possible unifying theory, and interactions between biased belief updating and other features of the updating situation. Throughout, I aim to convey how much evidence there is for (and against) each putative bias, and I highlight when and how different biases may be related to each other. The chapter ends by drawing general lessons for when people update too much or too little, reflecting on modeling challenges, pointing to areas of economics to which the biases are relevant, and highlighting some possible directions for future work.
Fraud, plot, or collective delusion?: Social media and perceptions of electoral misconduct in the 2014 scottish independence referendum

Abstract Online discussions of electoral fraud are becoming an increasingly important aspect of the electoral landscape in many contexts, as cyberspace is one of the few places where concerns about electoral conduct can be aired openly and freely. But it is often difficult to assess what this online activity tells us about actual electoral processes. This article analyzes a surge of tweets about electoral fraud at the time of the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 in order to ascertain whether this online activity reflected: (a) actual offline fraud observed by the social media users, (b) a concerted effort to undermine confidence in electoral administration, or (c) a collective delusion. Data mining and machine learning techniques are deployed in this analysis, which comes out strongly in favor of the collective delusion hypothesis.
VREVAL - A BIM-based Framework for User-centered Evaluation of Complex Buildings in Virtual Environments

The design of buildings requires architects to anticipate how their future users will experience and behave in them. In order to do this objectively and systematically user studies in Virtual Environments (VEs) are a valuable method. In this paper, we present a framework for setting up, conducting and analysing user studies in VEs. The framework is integrated in the architectural design process by using BIM as a common modeling and visualisation platform. In order to define the user studies simple and flexible for the individual purposes we followed a modular concept. Modules thereby refer to different kinds of user study methods. Currently we developed three modules (Wayfinding, Spatial Experience and Qualitative Annotations), each having their individual requirements regarding their setup, interaction method and visualisation of results. In the course of a architectural design studio, students applied this framework to evaluate their building designs from a user perspective.