Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Persuasion in Practical Argument Using Value-based Argumentation Frameworks

In many cases of disagreement, particularly in situations involving practical reasoning, it is impossible to demonstrate conclusively that either party is wrong. The role of argument in such cases is to persuade rather than to prove, demonstrate or refute. Following Perelman, we argue that persuasion in such cases relies on a recognition that the strength of an argument depends on the social values that it advances, and that whether the attack of one argument on another succeeds depends on the comparative strength of the values advanced by the arguments concerned. To model this we extend the standard notion of Argumentation Frameworks (AFs) to Value-based Argumentation Frameworks (VAFs). After defining VAFs we explore their properties, and show how they can provide a rational basis for the acceptance or rejection of arguments, even where this would appear to be a matter of choice in a standard AF . I n particular we show that in a VAF certain arguments can be shown to be acceptable however the relative strengths of the values involved are assessed. This means that disputants can concur on the acceptance of arguments, even when they differ as to which values are more important, and hence that we can identify points for which persuasion should be possible. We illustrate the above using an example moral debate. We then show how factual considerations can be admitted to our framework and discuss the possibility of persuasion in the face of uncertainty and disagreement as to values.
The Intracellular Pathogen Rhodococcus equi Produces a Catecholate Siderophore Required for Saprophytic Growth

ABSTRACT Little is known about the iron acquisition systems of the soilborne facultative intracellular pathogen Rhodococcus equi. We previously reported that expression of iupABC, encoding a putative siderophore ABC transporter system, is iron regulated and required for growth at low iron concentrations. Here we show that disruption of iupA leads to the concomitant accumulation of catecholates and a chromophore with absorption maxima at 341 and 528 nm during growth under iron-replete conditions. In contrast, the wild-type strain produces these compounds only in iron-depleted medium. Disruption of iupU and iupS, encoding nonribosomal peptide synthetases, prevented growth of the corresponding R. equi SID1 and SID3 mutants at low iron concentrations. However, only R. equi SID3 did not produce the chromophore produced by the wild-type strain during growth at low iron concentrations. The phenotype of R. equi SID3, but not that of R. equi SID1, could be rescued by coculture with the wild type, allowing growth at low iron concentrations. This strongly suggests that the product of the iupS gene is responsible for the synthesis of a diffusible compound required for growth at low iron concentrations. Transcription of iupU was constitutive, but that of iupS was iron regulated, with an induction of 3 orders of magnitude during growth in iron-depleted compared to iron-replete medium. Neither mutant was attenuated in vivo in a mouse infection model, indicating that the iupU- and iupS-encoded iron acquisition systems are primarily involved in iron uptake during saprophytic life.
Phase difference estimation methods for linear array

The performance of array may be seriously degraded by the difference of phase responses between the array elements. Thus it is important to compensate these differences by means of precise phase estimation. In this paper, two methods for phase difference estimation between linear array elements are presented. The first one works by applying the cost function to search the optimal source position before the phase difference is obtained. The other one establishes the observation equation at first, and then solves it by least-squares method. Algorithms for both methods proposed here are very simple, while the required experimental equipments are also not very complicated. Simulation results and experiment results show that both methods have sufficient accuracy and are easy for application.
A telemetry-instrumentation system for monitoring multiple subcutaneously implanted glucose sensors

An implantable potentiostat-radiotelemetry system for in vivo sensing of glucose is described. An enzyme electrode sensor measures the oxidation current of hydrogen peroxide formed by the stoichiometric conversion of glucose substrate and oxygen cofactor in an immobilized glucose oxidase layer. The sensor current is converted to a frequency and transmitted at programmable intervals (4, 32, 256 s) to a remote receiver. Low power CMOS circuitry is employed and device operation for up to 1.5 years is predicted using two series connected 250 mAh lithium cells. Crystal controlled RF frequencies uniquely identify each sensor allowing over 10 sensors within the same 10 m radius. A custom interface card allows a PC to program the receiver and handle the transmitted sensor data using software written in Microsoft C and QuickBasic. Software control allows on-the-fly sensor addition or subtraction to the sensor group being monitored. Over 10 sensors can be tracked long-term using the longest transmit interval, or four sensors can be tracked during short-term infusion studies when the transmit interval is reduced to 4 s. The design, construction, operation, and performance of the system hardware and software are described and evaluated. <<ETX>>
Student Ratings of Instruction and Student Achievement: A Meta-analysis of Multisection Validity Studies

The present study used meta-analytic methodology to synthesize research on the relationship between student ratings of instruction and student achievement. The data for the meta-analysis came from 41 independent validity studies reporting on 68 separate multisection courses relating student ratings to student achievement. The average correlation between an overall instructor rating and student achievement was . 43; the average correlation between an overall course rating and student achievement was . 47. While large effect sizes were also found for more specific rating dimensions such as Skill and Structure, other dimensions showed more modest relationships with student achievement. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that rating/achievement correlations were larger for full-time faculty when students knew their final grades before rating instructors and when an external evaluator graded students’ achievement tests. The results of the meta-analysis provide strong support for the validity of student ratings as measures of teaching effectiveness.
Convergence in Diversity: New York City School Food and the Future of the Food Movement

In the context of a global food system that has given rise to widespread concerns for food security and sustainability, reformative efforts have emerged, expanded and multiplied worldwide. To enhance understanding of the multi-faceted nature of this food movement and its scope for convergence and consolidation, in this article we propose frame alignment and alliance-building as a theoretical and analytical framework. Using New York City as a case study, we explore how school food reform may act as a particularly powerful platform for coalescing the interests and goals of diverse food system actors. We conclude with a call to interrogate school food and other reform activities with specific attention to the opportunities they pose for finding ‘convergence in diversity’ — in other words, for aligning the diverse and often fragmented efforts of the ‘food movement’ around an integrated and shared agenda with heightened potential for impact.
A Novel Approach to Reducing Number of Sensing Units for Wearable Gait Analysis Systems

Gait analysis methods to estimate spatiotemporal measures, based on two, three or four gyroscopes attached on lower limbs have been discussed in the literature. The most common approach to reduce the number of sensing units is to simplify the underlying biomechanical gait model. In this study, we propose a novel method based on prediction of movements of thighs from movements of shanks. Datasets from three previous studies were used. Data from the first study (ten healthy subjects and ten with Parkinson's disease) were used to develop and calibrate a system with only two gyroscopes attached on shanks. Data from two other studies (36 subjects with hip replacement, seven subjects with coxarthrosis, and eight control subjects) were used for comparison with the other methods and for assessment of error compared to a motion capture system. Results show that the error of estimation of stride length compared to motion capture with the system with four gyroscopes and our new method based on two gyroscopes was close ( -0.8 ±6.6 versus 3.8 ±6.6 cm). An alternative with three sensing units did not show better results (error: -0.2 ±8.4 cm). Finally, a fourth that also used two units but with a simpler gait model had the highest bias compared to the reference (error: -25.6 ±7.6 cm). We concluded that it is feasible to estimate movements of thighs from movements of shanks to reduce number of needed sensing units from 4 to 2 in context of ambulatory gait analysis.
University systems in the Arab East: Publish globally and perish locally vs publish locally and perish globally

This article attempts to demonstrate how the university system and the system of social knowledge production greatly influence elite formation in the Arab East (in Egypt, Syria, the Palestinian territory, Jordan and Lebanon) by focusing on three intertwined factors: compartmentalization of scholarly activities, the demise of the university as a public sphere and the criteria for publication that count towards promotion. Universities have often produced compartmentalized elites inside each nation-state and they don’t communicate with one another: they are either elite that publish globally and perish locally or elite that publish locally and perish globally. The article pays special attention to elite universities.
CMOS Anti-Self-Biasing effect and its implication in analog/RF circuit design

Large-signal power performance of RF CMOS devices is investigated. Uncommon DC current variation with input power level under large-signal operation of the devices, which is defined as "anti-self-biasing effect", is firstly reported in this paper. The anti-self-biasing effect, different from the commonly observed self-biasing effect in bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) is found to be dependent on DC bias voltages. At low VD bias, when VG bias is high, the drain current decreases when increasing the input power. When VG bias is low, the drain current increases with the increase input RF power level. This unique phenomenon is explained with dynamic load lines and its implication to analog and RF circuit design is discussed. By optimizing DC bias, significantly improved large-signal power performances of the RF CMOS devices are obtained.
The curious robot - Structuring interactive robot learning

If robots are to succeed in novel tasks, they must be able to learn from humans. To improve such human-robot interaction, a system is presented that provides dialog structure and engages the human in an exploratory teaching scenario. Thereby, we specifically target untrained users, who are supported by mixed-initiative interaction using verbal and non-verbal modalities. We present the principles of dialog structuring based on an object learning and manipulation scenario. System development is following an interactive evaluation approach and we will present both an extensible, event-based interaction architecture to realize mixed-initiative and evaluation results based on a video-study of the system. We show that users benefit from the provided dialog structure to result in predictable and successful human-robot interaction.
ICAM-1 (CD54): a counter-receptor for Mac-1 (CD11b/CD18)

While the leukocyte integrin lymphocyte function-associated antigen (LFA)-1 has been demonstrated to bind intercellular adhesion molecule (ICAM)-1, results with the related Mac-1 molecule have been controversial. We have used multiple cell binding assays, purified Mac- 1 and ICAM-1, and cell lines transfected with Mac-1 and ICAM-1 cDNAs to examine the interaction of ICAM-1 with Mac-1. Stimulated human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs), which express a high surface density of ICAM-1, bind to immunoaffinity-purified Mac-1 adsorbed to artificial substrates in a manner that is inhibited by mAbs to Mac-1 and ICAM-1. Transfected murine L cells or monkey COS cells expressing human ICAM-1 bind to purified Mac-1 in a specific and dose-dependent manner; the attachment to Mac-1 is more temperature sensitive, lower in avidity, and blocked by a different series of ICAM-1 mAbs when compared to LFA-1. In a reciprocal assay, COS cells cotransfected with the alpha and beta chain cDNAs of Mac-1 or LFA-1 attach to immunoaffinity- purified ICAM-1 substrates; this adhesion is blocked by mAbs to ICAM-1 and Mac-1 or LFA-1. Two color fluorescence cell conjugate experiments show that neutrophils stimulated with fMLP bind to HUVEC stimulated with lipopolysaccharide for 24 h in an ICAM-1-, Mac-1-, and LFA-1- dependent fashion. Because cellular and purified Mac-1 interact with cellular and purified ICAM-1, we conclude that ICAM-1 is a counter receptor for Mac-1 and that this receptor pair is responsible, in part, for the adhesion between stimulated neutrophils and stimulated endothelial cells.
Sub-corpora Impact on System Effectiveness

Understanding the factors comprising IR system effectiveness is of primary importance to compare different IR systems. Effectiveness is traditionally broken down, using ANOVA, into a topic and a system effect but this leaves out a key component of our evaluation paradigm: the collections of documents. We break down effectiveness into topic, system and sub-corpus effects and compare it to the traditional break down, considering what happens when different evaluation measures come into play. We found that sub-corpora are a significant effect. The consideration of which allows us to be more accurate in estimating what systems are significantly different. We also found that the sub-corpora affect different evaluation measures in different ways and this may impact on what systems are considered significantly different.
Radial basis function neural networks in variable structure control of a class of biochemical processes

Biochemical processes often display a complicated dynamic behavior, the detailed understanding of which frequently constitutes a barrier between the theoretical foundations and practical implementations. One way of handling the complexity is to use intelligent approaches in the design of controllers. The paper presents an analytic approach to design controllers based on radial basis function neural networks (RBFNN) with particular emphasis on the extraction of the error measure to be used in parameter tuning. The simulation studies stipulate that the control system exhibits a highly robust behavior against disturbances and sharp changes in the command signal. The most important contribution of the paper is that the method presented does not require the analytical details describing the plant dynamics available.
Analytic evaluation of human-robot system for collaboration in cellular manufacturing system

The development in this work is to evaluate analytically human-robot system for collaboration based on performance requirements in cellular manufacturing system. This work continues from a previous task modeling study to further evaluate quantitatively the collaboration planning of the human-robot system. The analysis study is based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach. Four criteria (productivity, quality, human fatigue, and safety) are defined as a set of balance performance measurements for a human-centered production system. Pairwise comparison method is used for the calculation of both criteria and alternatives priorities. The evaluations are conducted from the total system and further into task level collaboration task. Comparison of safety criterion focus that changes from total system evaluation to task level evaluation has proven the adaptability of the proposed method to accommodate system requirement changes. The development is working parallel with a case study on an actual cable harness assembly in a cellular manufacturing system. Actual system evaluations were conducted on both manual setup (human system) and collaboration setup (human-robot system) to validate the proposed work.
Hispanic Persons in Business: Is There Cause for Optimism?

An investigation was undertaken to assess whether Hispanic persons have cause for optimism in their quest to compete for managerial business positions. Using three instruments, statistical analysis of data from 262 students graduating with Master of Business Administration degrees indicated that 109 respondents perceived Hispanic managerial candidates no differently in comparison with white managers than 153 students saw black managerial candidates in comparison with white managers. Given that black managerial candidates have experienced difficulty in achieving high organizational status, Hispanic people may experience similar barriers.
Mastery and challenge seeking: Two dimensions within learning goals?

The study examined the existence of two distinct dimensions within learning goals: A mastery dimension and a challenge seeking dimension. A French version of Roedel, Schraw, and Plake's (1994) Goals Inventory was administered to 305 psychology undergraduates. Confirmatory factor analyses testing a two-factor vs. a three-factor measurement model supported the distinction between the two dimensions of learning goals. Relations between goal orientations and reported strategy use and self-regulation were analyzed. The mastery and challenge dimensions within learning goals were differentially related to performance goals and strategy use.
Wavelet Features Extraction for Medical Image Classification

Abstratct: In this paper, we present a method for classification of medical images. Wavelet features of different modalities of medical images are extracted. Then mean and standard deviation of extracted wavelet features are computed. We utilize KNearest Neighbor classifier to classify medical imaging modalities as X-ray, MRI and CT. Experiments are conducted on medical database containing 4,500 images. We achieve 99.96% classification accuracy which presents the efficiency of our proposed approach.
Unbounded Length Contexts for Ppm Ppm*c Model after Processing the String

\Compression of individual sequences via variable rate coding", IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 24(5), 530{536. [] a[] abra[] abrac ac ad bra[] brac c d ra[] rac a r d [] r c a a a a b b []abracadabra a[]abracadabr abra[]abracad abracadabra[] acadabra[]abr adabra[]abrac bra[]abracada bracadabra[]a cadabra[]abra dabra[]abraca ra[]abracadab racadabra[]ab abracadabra[] []abracadabra a[]abracadabr ra[]abracadab bra[]abracada abra[]abracad dabra[]abraca adabra[]abrac cadabra[]abra acadabra[]abr racadabra[]ab bracadabra[]a M M' I L sort M'' L rearrange FIGURE 6. BW compression of the string abracadabraa]. Figure 6, then sort the strings alphabetically to produce M 0. Two parameters are extracted from the sorted matrix. The rst, I, is an integer that records which row number corresponds to the original string. The second, L, is the character string that constitutes the last column. In this example, I = 4 and L = ard]rcaaaabb. Strange as it may seem, the input string is completely speciied by I and L: the reverse transformation for reconstructing the original is explained in (Burrows & Wheeler, 1994). Moreover, L can be transmitted very economically because it has the property that the same letters often fall together into long runs. M 00 is the same as M 0 but with L highlighted and symbols not needed to form unique contexts suppressed. It is clear then that the unique strings in M 00 correspond one-to-one with the leaves of the trie in Figure 5. The characters in L are those that lie immediately before each of the unique contexts { thus BW can be seen as very similar to the process of predicting from right to left { always predicting the next character to the left and using the same contexts as PPM*. In summary, whereas BW can be viewed as exploiting contexts of unbounded length by sorting them after the whole input string has been processed, PPM* works adaptively by predicting the next character from previous , unbounded-length, contexts. 6. CONCLUSIONS A new lossless compression mechanism, PPM*, has been described. Its major contribution is that it shows that the full information available by considering all substrings of the input string can be eeectively used to generate high quality predictions. The information in the PPM* model subsumes that used in many current high quality models including the LZ family Signiicant work remains in eeectively extracting this information, however. In another paper in this issue, Bunton (1997) shows a number of signiicant improvements to the …
BOTANICAL INSECTICIDES , DETERRENTS , AND REPELLENTS IN MODERN AGRICULTURE AND AN INCREASINGLY REGULATED WORLD

■ Abstract Botanical insecticides have long been touted as attractive alternatives to synthetic chemical insecticides for pest management because botanicals reputedly pose little threat to the environment or to human health. The body of scientific literature documenting bioactivity of plant derivatives to arthropod pests continues to expand, yet only a handful of botanicals are currently used in agriculture in the industrialized world, and there are few prospects for commercial development of new botanical products. Pyrethrum and neem are well established commercially, pesticides based on plant essential oils have recently entered the marketplace, and the use of rotenone appears to be waning. A number of plant substances have been considered for use as insect antifeedants or repellents, but apart from some natural mosquito repellents, little commercial success has ensued for plant substances that modify arthropod behavior. Several factors appear to limit the success of botanicals, most notably regulatory barriers and the availability of competing products (newer synthetics, fermentation products, microbials) that are cost-effective and relatively safe compared with their predecessors. In the context of agricultural pest management, botanical insecticides are best suited for use in organic food production in industrialized countries but can play a much greater role in the production and postharvest protection of food in developing countries.
Explaining happiness

What do social survey data tell us about the determinants of happiness? First, that the psychologists' setpoint model is questionable. Life events in the nonpecuniary domain, such as marriage, divorce, and serious disability, have a lasting effect on happiness, and do not simply deflect the average person temporarily above or below a setpoint given by genetics and personality. Second, mainstream economists' inference that in the pecuniary domain “more is better,” based on revealed preference theory, is problematic. An increase in income, and thus in the goods at one's disposal, does not bring with it a lasting increase in happiness because of the negative effect on utility of hedonic adaptation and social comparison. A better theory of happiness builds on the evidence that adaptation and social comparison affect utility less in the nonpecuniary than pecuniary domains. Because individuals fail to anticipate the extent to which adaptation and social comparison undermine expected utility in the pecuniary domain, they allocate an excessive amount of time to pecuniary goals, and shortchange nonpecuniary ends such as family life and health, reducing their happiness. There is need to devise policies that will yield better-informed individual preferences, and thereby increase individual and societal well-being.