Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adverbs, events, and other things : issues in the semantics of manner adverbs

"Adverbs, Events, and Other Things" is a study about the meaning of manner adverbs. Part I investigates the subtle interplay of adverbial modification and event individuation, paying special attention to complex events. Part II treats the semantic effects of varying the syntactic position of adverbs in the sentence. A general theory of predication, word order, and intonation in German is presented, which gives semantic evidence in favour of the claim that adverbs in German have a base position.
Social policy on the web: The online institutional structure of social policy domains in the UK

Our traditional image of government is often of the Parliament or of bricks and mortar government service delivery offices, such as NHS hospitals or Benefits Agency sites. However, in an online world, government is increasingly seen and experienced through the internet. Moreover, in the online world, government websites can be readily connected into hyperlink networks. What do the online 'footprints' of social policy domains look like? And how do these online social policy networks relate to equivalent offline networks? This paper examines these questions in relation to three policy domains in the United Kingdom, namely: foreign affairs, health and education. It draws on large-scale web crawls and sophisticated web-metrics and Social Network Analysis techniques to map and compare the shapes of these different policy domains. It explores the shape, nature and make-up of these various online networks and the participants in them, including the relevant contribution of non-government and commercial websites. It considers whether or not online networks may reflect or contribute to social policy networks, or government ambitions of 'joined-up' service delivery, and whether jurisdictional boundaries are evident in the online world. In examining these topics, this paper seeks to provide an empirical and conceptual contribution to understanding 21 government and service delivery.
A mathematical framework for the analysis and modelling of memristor nanodevices

This work presents a set of mathematical tools for the analysis and modelling of memristor devices. The mathematical framework takes advantage of the compliance of the memristor’s output dynamics with the family of Bernoulli differential equations which can always be linearised under an appropriate transformation. Based on this property, a set of conditionally solvable general solutions are defined for obtaining analytically the output for all possible types of ideal memristors. To demonstrate its usefulness, the framework is applied on HP’s memristor model for obtaining analytical expressions describing its output for a set of different input signals. It is shown that the output expressions can lead to the identification of a parameter which represents the collective effect of all the model’s parameters on the nonlinearity of the memristor’s response. The corresponding conclusions are presented for series and parallel networks of memristors as well. The analytic output expressions enable also the study of several device properties of memristors. In particular, the hysteresis of the current-voltage response and the harmonic distortion introduced by the device are investigated and both interlinked with the nonlinearity of the system. Moreover, the reciprocity principle, a property form classical circuit theory, is shown to hold for ideal memristors under specific conditions. Based on the insights gained through the analysis of the ideal element, this work takes a step further into the modelling of memristive devices in an effort to improve some of the macroscopic models currently used. In particular, a method is proposed for extracting the window function directly from experimentally acquired input-output measurements. The method is based on a simple mathematical transformation which relates window to sigmoidal functions and a set of assumptions which allow the mapping of the sigmoidal to current-voltage measurements. The equivalence between the two representations is demonstrated through a new generalised window function and several existing sigmoidals and windows. The proposed method is applied on three sets of experimental measurements which demonstrate the usefulness of the window modelling approach and the newly proposed window function. Based on this method the extracted windows are tailored to the device under investigation. The analysis also reveals a set of nonidealities which lead to the introduction of a new model for memristive devices whose response cannot be captured by the window-based approach.
Effect of counting and tracking on verbal and production methods of time estimation

The effects of time estimation technique and task condition on the production and verbal estimation of time intervals ranging from 5 to 14 sec were investigated. The duration of time intervals during each task condition pretracking, tracking (subject performed a one-axis tracking), and posttracking was estimated by the subjects. The ratio of the subject's time estimate to actual interval length was computed for each trial. Productions were typically longer than verbal estimates of the same duration and produced durations were typically too long whereas verbal estimates were too short relative to the correct duration. A significant interaction was found between counting technique and tracking condition for both estimation methods. A significant effect could be attributed to the addition of a tracking task: produced durations increased in length, whereas verbal estimates decreased in length. The durations produced without counting were significantly less accurate and consistent with the addition of a tracking task. Verbal estimation mean accuracy, but not consistency, was adversely affected by the addition of a tracking task when the subjects were instructed not to count.
Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces

No component of graphic design has attracted as much interest or inspired as much innovation in recent years as lettering and type. These fundamentals of design, once the exclusive domain of professional typographers, have become an essential starting point for anyone looking for a fresh way to communicate. Practical information about creating letters and type often amounts to a series of guidelines for executing a particular process, font program, or style. But what makes lettering and type endlessly fascinating is the flexibility to interpret and sometimes even break these rules. Lettering & Type is a smart-but- not-dense guide to creating and bending letters to one's will. More than just another pretty survey, it is a powerful how-to book full of relevant theory, history, explanatory diagrams, and exercises. While other type design books get hung up on the technical and technological issues of type design and lettering, Lettering & Type features the context and creativity that shape letters and make them interesting. Authors and designers Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals examine classic design examples as well as exciting contemporary lettering of all stripes from editorial illustrations to concert posters to radical conceptual alphabets. Lettering & Type is ideal for anyone looking to move beyond existing typography and fonts to create, explore, and use original or customized letterforms. This latest addition to our best-selling Design Briefs seriesfeatures a foreword by Ellen Lupton and hundreds of images and examples of work by historical and contemporary designers, artists, and illustrators, including Marian Bantjes, Stefan Sagmeister, Matthew Carter, Christoph Niemann, Steve Powers (ESPO), House Industries, Christian Schwartz, Margaret Kilgallen, James Victore, Abbott Miller, Sibylle Hagmann, Ed Fella, and many more. Throughout the book interviews with type designers, artists, and graphic designers provide real-world perspective from contemporary practitioners. "
Computational Fourier Optics: A MATLAB Tutorial

Computational Fourier Optics is a text that shows the reader in a tutorial form how to implement Fourier optical theory and analytic methods on the computer. A primary objective is to give students of Fourier optics the capability of programming their own basic wave optic beam propagations and imaging simulations. The book will also be of interest to professional engineers and physicists learning Fourier optics simulation techniques-either as a self-study text or a text for a short course. For more advanced study, the latter chapters and appendices provide methods and examples for modelling beams and pupil functions with more complicated structure, aberrations, and partial coherence. For a student in a course on Fourier optics, this book is a concise, accessible, and practical companion to any of several excellent textbooks on Fourier optical theory.
Early Evaluation of the IBM BG/P

This paper describes early results of a performance evaluation of the IBM BG/P recently installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We use microkernels to determine computation and communication performance, both with and without contention. We use the Parallel Ocean Program to evaluate application scalability and to distinguish BG/P performance from other High Performance Computing systems.
Raonament sobre l'efecte dels esdeveniments estructurals en un esquema conceptual UML

[CATALA] L'objectiu d'aquest projecte es crear una aplicacio que sigui capac de, mitjancant un esquema conceptual, una base d'informacio i un conjunt d'esdeveniments a aplicar, retornar-nos els conjunts d'esdeveniments que, afegits als esdeveniments inicials, mantenen l'esquema conceptual consistent.
HOPS: A Hierarchical/object-oriented programming environment system

The concept of object-oriented programming is becoming an important paradigm in which programmers represent and solve problems. HOPS (Hierarchical / Object-oriented Programming Environment System), developed in this thesis project, employs this concept to represent and manipulate the resources of a programming environment. All the resource objects (such as files, directories, simple integer data and so on) are hierarchically arranged for easy access and management, as the user moves through a tree structure just as in the UNLX file system. HOPL (Hierarchical / Object-oriented Programming Language), whose grammar is similar to C language, has been designed so that the expression of resource objects can be directly embedded in a statement, which is translated into intermediate codes and then is executed. The system allows the user to store the intermediate codes as methods and to inherit methods from objects which already contain methods. HOPS, functioning now under the UNLX environment, can share the UNIX directories and files as its resources, so that it can be an object-oriented front-end processor for UNIX shell commands. An experimental screen editor, HOPE (Hierarchical / Object-oriented Programming Editor), has also been developed. It is written partly in HOPL to facilitate customization of some editing commands. Computing Review Subject Codes The following are the primary and secondary classification codes for this thesis, according to the ACM's Computing Reviews. The primary classification code: D 3.3 Language Constructs The secondary classification codes: F 3.3 Studies of Program Constructs E 2 DATA STORAGE REPRESENTATIONS
Off-line signature verification

In today’s society signatures are the most accepted form of identity verification. However, they have the unfortunate side-effect of being easily abused by those who would feign the identification or intent of an individual. This thesis implements and tests current approaches to off-line signature verification with the goal of determining the most beneficial techniques that are available. This investigation will also introduce novel techniques that are shown to significantly boost the achieved classification accuracy for both person-dependent (one-class training) and person-independent (two-class training) signature verification learning strategies. The findings presented in this thesis show that many common techniques do not always give any significant advantage and in some cases they actually detract from the classification accuracy. Using the techniques that are proven to be most beneficial, an effective approach to signature verification is constructed, which achieves approximately 90% and 91% on the standard CEDAR and GPDS signature datasets respectively. These results are significantly better than the majority of results that have been previously published. Additionally, this approach is shown to remain relatively stable when a minimal number of training signatures are used, representing feasibility for real-world situations.
Analysis method for the Measured Track Geometry Data using Wavelet Transform

The regularity of railway track alignment is a crucial component fur maintaining travel safety and the smoothness of passenger ride. The conventional spectral analysis has been considered to estimate the severity of the track irregularity from measured data. The time domain data used to be changed into the frequency domain by Fourier transform. Because the measuring points can be regarded as the time points, the spatial-frequency can be introduced instead of the time-frequency. Although FFT(Fast Fourier Transform) and/or PSD(Power Spectral Density) function could provide fairly localized information within frequency domain, but chronical configurations of data could be missed. In this study, we attempt to apply the Morlet wavelet transform for the purpose of a frequency-time-domain analysis rather than a frequency-domain analysis. The applicability of wavelet transform is examined for the estimation of the track irregularity with real measured track data on the section of Kyoung-bu line by EM-120 measuring vehicle. It is shown that the wavelet transform can be an effective tool to manage the track irregularity.
Segmentation et structuration d'un document vidéo pour la caractérisation et l'indexation de son contenu sémantique

Due to the large amount of multimedia documents either already existing or produced daily, we are faced with the problem of retrieving information from gigantic databases for which a purely manual indexing process is currently impossible. In this context, it has become necessary to design new techniques if not to extract the whole semantic content of a given document but at least to produce a first structure of it automatically. Dealing only with video documents, this thesis therefore proposes to build automatic tools that create such a structure in two steps As a result of the first linear part of the structuring, the video document is splitted into different entities that go from the scene to the object, through the shot, the part of shot and the key frame. The second and relational step consists in extracting relationships by establishing all kinds of semantic and syntactic links between the different types of entities. In addition to being general and automatic, the tools proposed were elaborated with respect to a precise methodology. According to this methodology, we only use simple and low level image processing criteria and in particular these from mathematical morphology. These criteria when combined together and also with logical rules of decision already enable us to obtain a structure which is consistent, efficient and representative of a content with a high semantic level. The choice of this methodology also leads to a very high speed as our tools work faster than real time. These tools are validated through numerous examples and applications based mainly on television news broadcasts documents.
Desenvolvimento de um sistema de levantamento de forma 3D usando visão por computador

The present dissertation is in the Computer Vision domain, to be specific, in the area of three-dimensional vision. The three-dimensional (3D) information on the surrounding environment perceived by human eyes is one of the most important kinds of information offered by sight. Thus it has been developed a large effort by the scientific community throughout time in the development of methods which make possible the acquisition of a scene (or object) using Computer Vision. Bearing always in mind the 3D information acquisition system being developed by the Optical and Experimental Mechanics Laboratory (LOME), which is based in a light structure technique designed for the acquisition of 3D information, still with no calibration method – in order to determine the camera/projector model used which transforms points into the three-dimensional space in points in the plain image of the camera (and vice-versa, when a projector is used) – nor any interactive system for 3D visualization of the acquired data, in this dissertation the following items have been established: 1) study, description and comparison of the main 3D information acquisition techniques; 2) study, description and comparison of some common methods used in cameras/projectors calibration; 3) implementation of two of those methods – a simpler one, the Pin Hole method, and a more precise and complex one, a version of the Tsai method – and of a internal geometry camera simulator based in these two models, with a friendly interface; 4) using the developed implementations, study of the influence of calibration parameters variation in the accuracy of the recovered 3D co-ordinates, the errors in the estimation of these parameters caused by the addition of noise to the 2D and/or 3D coordinates of the calibration points and consequent effect on the accuracy of the recovered 3D co-ordinates, and verification of the 3D field validity; 5) development of an application for 3D visualization of the reconstructed scene (or object). Thus, the work carried through in this dissertation tries to satisfy adequately these goals, having this publication as one of the final results. From the many experimental tests taken out, the main conclusion drawn has been that, for acceptable and identical variations of the calibration parameters and the 3D field considered in the calibration, the most complex and robust method (the one based on the Tsai method) presents the best results on the 3D recovered points. However, the use of this calibration method becomes less important, and probably unnecessary, when there are no adequate resolution tools to determine the 3D co-ordinates of the calibration points. This and other conclusions drawn are described in the last chapter of this dissertation, next to the works suggested as tasks to undertake throughout the research.
Evolutionary granular kernel machines

Kernel machines such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have been widely used in various data mining applications with good generalization properties. Performance of SVMs for solving nonlinear problems is highly affected by kernel functions. The complexity of SVMs training is mainly related to the size of a training dataset. How to design a powerful kernel, how to speed up SVMs training and how to train SVMs with millions of examples are still challenging problems in the SVMs research. For these important problems, powerful and flexible kernel trees called Evolutionary Granular Kernel Trees (EGKTs) are designed to incorporate prior domain knowledge. Granular Kernel Tree Structure Evolving System (GKTSES) is developed to evolve the structures of Granular Kernel Trees (GKTs) without prior knowledge. A voting scheme is also proposed to reduce the prediction deviation of GKTSES. To speed up EGKTs optimization, a master-slave parallel model is implemented. To help SVMs challenge large-scale data mining, a Minimum Enclosing Ball (MEB) based data reduction method is presented, and a new MEB-SVM algorithm is designed. All these kernel methods are designed based on Granular Computing (GrC). In general, Evolutionary Granular Kernel Machines (EGKMs) are investigated to optimize kernels effectively, speed up training greatly and mine huge amounts of data efficiently. Index words. Bioinformatics, Computational Intelligence, Data Mining, Evolutionary Granular Kernel Machines, Evolutionary Granular Kernel Trees, Genetic Algorithms, Granular Computing, Granular Kernel Tree Structure Evolving System, Machine Learning, Minimum Enclosing Ball, Statistical Learning, Support Vector Machines
Manual and Automated Line Generalization and Feature Displacement. Appendixes.

Abstract : The primary objective of this effort was to examine map compilation techniques used for manual and automated line generalization and feature displacement. Manual techniques used at several Defense Mapping Agency compilation sites are described in detail. An extensive survey of algorithms suggested in the cartographic, image processing, and computer science literature is provided. Possible criteria for evaluating algorithm performance are discussed and line generalization algorithms are ranked according to certain of these measures.
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions

More bling for the buck! The number 1 guide to American slang is now bigger, more up-to-date, and easier to use. This new edition of "McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions" offers complete definitions of more than 12,000 slang and informal expressions from various sources, ranging from golden oldies such as . golden oldie, to recent coinages like shizzle (gangsta), jonx (Wall Street), and ping (the Internet). Each entry is followed by examples illustrating how an expression is used in everyday conversation and, where necessary, International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciations are given, as well as cautionary notes for crude, inflammatory, or taboo expressions.This edition also features a fascinating introduction on "What is Slang? ," a Thematic Index that cross-references expressions by standard terms - such as Angry, Drunk, Food, Good-bye, Mess-up, Money, and Stupidity - and a Hidden Word Index that lets you identify and locate even partially remembered expressions and phrases.
A Clustering Based Approach to Creating Multi - Document Summaries

Multi-document summaries were constructed by utilizing complete sentences from the documents in the collection. Classic clustering techniques were employed in an attempt to partition the set of sentences into disjoint subsets or clusters, each of which contained sentences covering exactly one topic. Clusters are ranked by their similarity with the vector of the term frequencies of all terms appearing in the documents to be summarized. While the system performance appears to be poor, we believe that the method warrants future research.
Estudio de las tecnologías aplicadas para la recolección de energía solar, directrices para educación en ciencias

El presente estudio realizado a continuación presenta la forma de generación de luz a través de la energía solar, la cual puede ser aprovechada de dos maneras, sistemas térmicos y sistemas fotovoltaicos, la energía solar fotovoltaica hasta la actualidad ha tenido un desarrollo muy reducido en cuanto al abastecimiento de electricidad en el Ecuador y el mundo. Tomando en cuenta las condiciones climáticas del Ecuador las cuales permiten que se pueda obtener un rendimiento elevado con tecnologías aplicables o que pueden ser utilizadas para el aprovechamiento de la energía solar. Además de lo anteriormente explicado, se presenta el costo, la implementación en diferentes países del mundo y como estas tecnologías pueden ser aprovechadas tanto a nivel de proyectos macros y en usos domésticos.