Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How does living with a disability affect resident worry about environmental contamination? A study of a long-term pervasive hazard

ABSTRACT While a growing body of research within the environmental hazards scholarship examines how disability affects human responses to major, sudden-onset environmental disasters, little attention has been given to understanding how disability affects responses to long-term, pervasive environmental hazards. Research analysing human responses to land and groundwater legacy contamination in residential areas has identified the significance of demographic and psychosocial determinants of worry, however the question of how living with a disability affects resident worry about contamination remains unanswered. This article provides a cornerstone study for exploring the relation between worry about environmental contamination and disability. A study of 486 adults living in 13 urban residential areas in Australia affected by a range of contaminants was undertaken in 2014. Ordinal logistic regression analysis found respondents with a disability were significantly more likely to worry about contamination than those without. People living with a disability had significantly higher amounts of worry about the contamination than those living without. Changes to residents’ daily habits in response to the contamination and perceptions of personal control over exposure to the contamination present important considerations for understanding the implications of worry for people living with and without a disability in the environmental contamination context.
Digital Games to Teach News Literacy to Children

Studying news media literacy and finding ways to improve it is extremely important in an age of infor - mation crisis. Games are a tool which allows teaching children in news making scenarios in an enjoy - able way. Some researchers have been studying how games can contribute to improve news literacy. However most of those studies only consider games for college students (Aayeshah, 2012; Bogost, Ferrari, & Schweizer, 2010; Cameron, 2004; Frasca, 2003). There is a lack in the literature examining news literacy games for younger children, even though a few of those games exist too. This paper proposes to do a qualitative formative evaluation of six news literacy games for children, displayed at the Newseum in Washington D.C. (Digital Stemworks, 2013). We examined how game elements were incorporated to teach news literacy. We were particularly interested in seeking if the learning principles for news literacy education suggested by Renee Hobbs (2010) were followed and how. Our findings show that most of those principles were indeed present. For example, some games use real live case scenarios establishing a bridge between the learning experience and the world. With the renovated and growth interest in news literacy education, people may expect that more games of this sort will be created. Our work extends knowledge of how news literacy is being approached in interactive digital platforms and, ultimately, how those approaches can be improved.
Age-dependent changes in electrophysiology and calcium handling – implications for pediatric cardiac research

Rationale The heart continues to develop and mature after birth and into adolescence. Accordingly, cardiac maturation is likely to include a progressive refinement in both organ morphology and function during the postnatal period. Yet, age-dependent changes in cardiac electrophysiology and calcium handling have not yet been fully characterized. Objective The objective of this study, was to examine the relationship between cardiac maturation, electrophysiology, and calcium handling throughout postnatal development in a rat model. Methods Postnatal rat cardiac maturation was determined by measuring the expression of genes involved in cell-cell coupling, electrophysiology, and calcium handling. In vivo electrocardiograms were recorded from neonatal, juvenile, and adult animals. Simultaneous dual optical mapping of transmembrane voltage and calcium transients was performed on isolated, Langendorff-perfused rat hearts (postnatal day 0–3, 4-7, 8-14, adult). Results Younger, immature hearts displayed slowed electrical conduction, prolonged action potential duration and increased ventricular refractoriness. Slowed calcium handling in the immature heart increased the propensity for calcium transient alternans which corresponded to alterations in the expression of genes encoding calcium handling proteins. Developmental changes in cardiac electrophysiology were associated with the altered expression of genes encoding potassium channels and intercalated disc proteins. Conclusion Using an intact whole heart model, this study highlights chronological changes in cardiac electrophysiology and calcium handling throughout postnatal development. Results of this study can serve as a comprehensive baseline for future studies focused on pediatric cardiac research, safety assessment and/or preclinical testing using rodent models.
Analyse et évaluation de structures orientées document

De nos jours, des millions de sources de donnees differentes produisent une enorme quantite de donnees non structurees et semi-structurees qui changent constamment. Les systemes d'information doivent gerer ces donnees tout en assurant la scalabilite et la performance. En consequence, ils ont du s'adapter pour supporter des bases de donnees heterogenes, incluant des bases de donnees No-SQL. Ces bases de donnees proposent une structure de donnees sans schema avec une grande flexibilite, mais sans separation claire des couches logiques et physiques. Les donnees peuvent etre dupliquees, fragmentees et/ou incompletes, et ils peuvent aussi changer a mesure des besoins de metier.La flexibilite et l’absence de schema dans les systemes NoSQL orientes documents, telle que MongoDB, permettent d’explorer des nouvelles alternatives de structuration sans faire face aux contraintes. Le choix de la structuration reste important et critique parce qu’il y a plusieurs impacts a considerer et il faut choisir parmi des nombreuses d’options de structuration. Nous proposons donc de revenir sur une phase de conception dans laquelle des aspects de qualite et les impacts de la structure sont pris en compte afin de prendre une decision d’une maniere plus avertie.Dans ce cadre, nous proposons SCORUS, un systeme pour l’analyse et l’evaluation des structures orientes document qui vise a faciliter l’etude des possibilites de semi-structurations orientees document, telles que MongoDB, et a fournir des metriques objectives pour mieux faire ressortir les avantages et les inconvenients de chaque solution par rapport aux besoins des utilisateurs. Pour cela, une sequence de trois phases peut composer un processus de conception. Chaque phase peut etre aussi effectuee independamment a des fins d’analyse et de reglage. La strategie generale de SCORUS est composee par :1. Generation d’un ensemble d’alternatives de structuration : dans cette phase nous proposons de partir d’une modelisation UML des donnees et de produire automatiquement un large ensemble de variantes de structuration possibles pour ces donnees.2. Evaluation d’alternatives en utilisant un ensemble de metriques structurelles : cette evaluation prend un ensemble de variantes de structuration et calcule les metriques au regard des donnees modelisees.3. Analyse des alternatives evaluees : utilisation des metriques afin d’analyser l’interet des alternatives considerees et de choisir la ou les plus appropriees.
Does living in the vicinity of heritage tourism sites influence residents’ perceptions and attitudes?

Abstract This study investigates whether the perceptions and attitudes of residents living within the vicinity of heritage tourism sites differ from those living further afield. It examines residents’ attitudes toward tourism development; community attachment; environment and culture attitudes; economic gain; and involvement, alongside the moderating role of distance from heritage tourism sites. In doing so, it investigates how the aforementioned factors influence residents’ perceptions of tourism development in their city. Data was collected from inhabitants of Kashan and Tabriz, two historic cities couched within Iran’s growing heritage tourism sector, and analyzed using partial least squares - structural equation modeling. The findings demonstrate significant differences between the perceptions of tourism impacts, economic gain, environmental and cultural attitudes, and involvement between residents living within the vicinity of heritage tourism sites and those living further afield. However, these findings contradicted the hypotheses; identifying higher positive perceptions, environmental and cultural attitudes, economic gain, and involvement for residents living far from heritage tourism sites. Further, the findings did not support the moderating role of distance for the effects of influencing factors on residents’ perceptions. Therefore, this study proffers significant theoretical contributions and practical implications with regards to developing sustainable tourism in Iran.
Calibrating Short-Rate Models to Market-observed Inflation Rates

This paper looks at calibrating the volatility parameter in the Hull-White short rate model to observed CPI inflation to better estimate interest rates from 1990 to 2007. Short rate models have the attractive feature of being very simple to implement but as typically used have the weakness of ignoring all macroeconomic state variables in forecasting interest rates. Interest rate models that have been developed since have been highly complex and difficult to implement. This paper thus attempts to bridge the gap between the two paradigms of interest rate models by incorporating inflation, a macroeconomic state variable, into the parameter estimation of a short rate model. To that end, the volatility parameter of the Hull-White model was calculated directly from observed rates of inflation. This volatility parameter was then used in the estimation of the mean-reversion parameter of the same model, thus involving inflation in the estimates of the two parameters of the Hull-White model. Forecasts were then compared at various horizon levels with equivalent forecasts where the parameters were estimated on the Federal Funds rate as opposed to inflation rates, representing a more typical method of calibrating these models. In comparison there was weak evidence that the use of inflation improved forecasting estimates at the 3-year horizon, but there was no evidence at other horizon levels. Further research will be required to determine if other models could benefit from the use of inflation in parameter estimation or if short-rate models could benefit further from a forward-looking as opposed to past-looking measure of inflation.
REMOTE SENSING UAV/DRONE TECHNOLOGY AS A TOOL FOR URBAN DEVELOPMENT MEASURES IN APCRDA

Abstract. Now-a-days, collecting accurate and meaningful information about the urban localities/environment with the maximum efficiency in terms of cost and time has become more relevant for urban, rural and city level development planning and administration. This work presents a technical procedure for automatic extraction of building information and characterization of different urban building types within the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority (APCRDA) jurisdiction areas using UAVs. The methodology consists of a number of sequential processes of acquisition and generation of high resolution Orthomosaic images, creation of 3D point cloud data, and image classification algorithm for feature extraction using exclusively the geometric coordinates. The main parameters of the urban structures/buildings assessed in this work are site area of the building, built-up area, and building dimensions, building setbacks and building height. Different geometric and appropriate metrics were automatically extracted for each of the elements, defining the urban typology. In this study, residential and commercial buildings were considered for the analysis and the measurements from Drone were validated with respective approved plans and manual inspections and showed positive results with threshold parameters like setbacks and height as per building bye-laws of Andhra Pradesh Government Order (G.O) 119. Based on the results, measurements from Drone are used for the buildings occupancy permissions following the State government building rules. This automated system would replace physical inspections and manual reports and significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency. As an important component in this pilot study, visualisation of the building information were represented / displayed on a web application in an interactive mode. This added value of UAV technology with an automated system in comparison with traditional ways provides geospatial information and can also be considered as an essential Earth Observation indicator which has the potential to lead to next generation Urban Information Services and in the Smart cities development. The considerable potential use of these indicators in urban planning and development offers an opportunity in appropriate decision making in day to day urban planning measures.
Semantic Correlation Promoted Shape-Variant Context for Segmentation

Context is essential for semantic segmentation. Due to the diverse shapes of objects and their complex layout in various scene images, the spatial scales and shapes of contexts for different objects have very large variation. It is thus ineffective or inefficient to aggregate various context information from a predefined fixed region. In this work, we propose to generate a scale- and shape-variant semantic mask for each pixel to confine its contextual region. To this end, we first propose a novel paired convolution to infer the semantic correlation of the pair and based on that to generate a shape mask. Using the inferred spatial scope of the contextual region, we propose a shape-variant convolution, of which the receptive field is controlled by the shape mask that varies with the appearance of input. In this way, the proposed network aggregates the context information of a pixel from its semantic-correlated region instead of a predefined fixed region. Furthermore, this work also proposes a labeling denoising model to reduce wrong predictions caused by the noisy low-level features. Without bells and whistles, the proposed segmentation network achieves new state-of-the-arts consistently on the six public segmentation datasets.
Image Steganography Based On Hill Cipher with Key Hiding Technique

In today's digital world invisible ink and paper have been replaced by much more versatile and practical covers for hiding messages - digital documents, images, video, and audio files. As long as an electronic document contains irrelevant or redundant information, it can be used as a "cover" to hide secret messages. Cryptography is the study of encoding and decoding secret messages where as Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message. In this paper we implement Hill Cipher algorithm, for hiding our text behind the cover image and decrypt the cover image to get original text. The highlight of this paper is that, the key is encrypted and scrambled within the cover image.
Recurrence in Ergodic Theory and Combinatorial Number Theory

Topological dynamics and ergodic theory usually have been treated independently. H. Furstenberg, instead, develops the common ground between them by applying the modern theory of dynamical systems to combinatories and number theory.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Natural language and spatial reasoning

Making systems that understand language has long been a dream of artificial intelligence. This thesis develops a model for understanding language about space and movement in realistic situations. The system understands language from two real-world domains: finding video clips that match a spatial language description such as "People walking through the kitchen and then going to the dining room" and following natural language commands such as "Go down the hall towards the fireplace in the living room. " Understanding spatial language expressions is a challenging problem because linguistic expressions, themselves complex and ambiguous, must be connected to real-world objects and events. The system bridges the gap between language and the world by modeling the meaning of spatial language expressions hierarchically, first capturing the semantics of spatial prepositions, and then composing these meanings into higher level structures. Corpus-based evaluations of how well the system performs in different, realistic domains show that the system effectively and robustly understands spatial language expressions. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
Obstacles and Opportunities Experienced by Adult Stepchildren in Later Life Stepfamilies

ABSTRACT The present study examined adult stepchildren’s perspectives regarding their later life stepfamilies. Twenty-six adult stepchildren who experienced parental divorce and remarriage in adulthood, defined as 18 years of age or older, participated in semi-structured, qualitative interviews. Results revealed that adult stepchildren experienced both obstacles and opportunities in their later life stepfamily. Challenges encompassed “feeling caught,” terms of address, and balancing family membership. Opportunities reflected stepparent’s positive impact and positive stepsibling and extended family relationships. Results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical contributions.
INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE

AbstractKogut and Zander (1992) have speculated that information systems simplify the replication of knowledge and by implication codify the knowledge. This leads to further speculation that information systems may be forms of organizational knowledge. The authors of this paper 1) extend the concepts of Kogut and Zander to describe knowledge and organizational knowledge, 2) identify a taxonomy of IS, and 3) offer a model of information systems as objectified organizational process knowledge surrounded by layers of human process knowledge. Areas for future research are outlined as well.
Research on the Dispositional Optimism and Forgiveness of Middle School Teachers in the Naxi Area

To do research on the dispositional optimism category and forgiveness of the middle school teachers in the Naxi Area, a questionnaire survey was conducted against 3,786 middle school teachers in the Naxi Area by the means of dispositional optimism scale and forgiveness scale. The dispositional optimism and forgiveness of the middle school teachers in the Naxi Area were scored as 3.49±0.49 and 4.68± 0.64, respectively. The forgiveness of the middle school teachers with various dispositional optimism types in the Naxi Area was scored as below: 4.95±0.62 for Typical Optimism Category, 4.37 ±0.55 for Typical Pessimism Category, 4.56±0.60 for Undefined Category, and 4.71±0.60 for Double Category. The dispositional optimism and forgiveness of the middle school teachers in the Naxi Area were both in the middle upper level as a whole, but there was a little pessimistic tendency. The middle school teachers in the Naxi Area were involved in Typical Optimism Category, Typical Pessimism Category, Undefined Category and Double Category. There was a positive correlation between the optimistic tendency & forgiveness scale and the subscale. The middle school teachers in Typical Optimism Category in the Naxi Area showed the highest level of forgiveness. Keywords—Middle school teachers; Dispositional optimism; Forgiveness; Naxi area
Cloud feedback studies with a physics grid

During this project the investigators implemented a fully parallel version of dual-grid approach in main frame code ICON, implemented a fully conservative first-order interpolation scheme for horizontal remapping, integrated UCLA-LES micro-scale model into ICON to run parallely in selected columns, and did cloud feedback studies on aqua-planet setup to evaluate the classical parameterization on a small domain. The micro-scale model may be run in parallel with the classical parameterization, or it may be run on a "physics grid" independent of the dynamics grid.
Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich manuscript

Abstract The text of the Voynich manuscript exhibits relationships between neighboring words that have not formally been explored. The last and first glyphs of adjacent words show some dependency, and certain glyph combinations are more or less likely to occur. The patterns of preferences for glyph combinations demonstrate the existence of higher-level glyph groups. The behavior of the glyph combinations may arise due to changes in a glyph caused by its neighbor.
Adaptive Formation Control of Cooperative Multi-Vehicle Systems

The literature comprises many approaches and results for the formation control of multivehicle systems; however, the results established for the cases where the vehicles contain parametric uncertainties are limited. Motivated by the need for explicit characterization of the effects of uncertainties on multi-vehicle formation motions, we study distributed adaptive formation control of multi-vehicle systems in this thesis, focusing on different interrelated sub-objectives. We first examine the cohesive motion control problem of minimally persistent formations of autonomous vehicles. Later, we consider parametric uncertainties in vehicle dynamics in such autonomous vehicle formations. Following an indirect adaptive control approach and utilizing the features of the certainty equivalence principle, we propose control laws to solve maneuvering problem of the formations, robust to parametric modeling uncertainties. Next, as a formation acquisition/closing ranks problem, we study the adaptive station keeping problem, which is defined as positioning an autonomous mobile vehicle A inside a multi-vehicle network, having specified distances from the existing vehicles of the network. In this setting, a single-integrator model is assumed for the kinematics for the vehicle A, and A is assumed to have access to only its own position and its continuous distance measurements to the vehicles of the network. We partition the problem into two sub-problems; localization of the existing vehicles of the network using range-only measurements and motion control of A to its desired location within the network with respect to other vehicles. We design an indirect adaptive control scheme, provide formal stability and convergence analysis and numerical simulation results, demonstrating the characteristics and performance of the design. Finally, we study re-design of the proposed station keeping scheme for the more challenging case where the vehicle A has non-holonomic motion dynamics and does not have access to its self-location information. Overall, the thesis comprises methods and solutions to four correlated formation control problems in the direction of achieving a unified distributed adaptive formation control framework for multi-vehicle systems.