Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards the Discovery of Person-Level Data - Reuse of Vocabularies and Related Use Cases

The Linked Data and the Social Science data communities developed the DDI-RDF Discovery Vocabulary, an ontology of the Data Documentation Initiative, in order to support the discovery of person-level data and its metadata. The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an acknowledged international standard for the documentation and management of data from the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Within the context of DDI-RDF Discovery Vocabulary, we reuse well elaborated and accepted vocabularies to a large extend. Vocabularies like DCMI, FOAF, ORG, ADMS, PROV-O, SKOS and XKOS, DCAT, and Data Cube. This paper focuses on the description of how other vocabularies are reused reasonably and on the description of use cases which are associated with the usage of the DDI-RDF Discovery Vocabulary.
Generalized Hedge Ratio Estimation with an Unknown Model

Myers and Thompson (1989) noted that the model specification could have a large impact on the hedge ratio estimated. A huge literature exists on estimating hedge ratios, but the literature is lacking a formal treatment of model specification uncertainty. This research accomplishes that task by taking a Bayesian approach to hedge ratio estimation, where specification uncertainty is explicitly modeled. The methodology is applied to data on hedging of corn and soybeans and on cross-hedging of corn oil using soybean oil futures. Results show the potential benefits and insights gained from such an approach.
Sleep, Workload and Boredom

As human spaceflight evolves toward long duration space missions (LDSM), it becomes increasingly important to design mission specifications and crew schedules that account for fluctuations in cognitive and psychomotor workload. Such schedules should optimize both sleep and workload to maintain high levels of mission performance. Effective sleep and workload scheduling tools are thus imperative for success, as they facilitate enhanced sleep quality and adjustable workload profiles for superior task performance. Here we examine issues related to sleep in space by taking two approaches: (1) completion of a systematic literature analysis, and (2) completion of interviews with Subject Matter Experts. Both of these approaches are summarized, with key findings and implications discussed.
Paving the way for development?: The impact of transport infrastructure on agricultural production and poverty reduction in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Given its vast land resources and favorable water supply, the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC's) natural agricultural potential is immense. However, the economic potential of the sector is handicapped by one of the most dilapidated transport systems in the developing world (World Bank 2006). Road investments are therefore a high priority in the government's investment plans and those of its major donors. Although these are encouraging signs, very little is known about how the existing road network constrains agricultural and rural development, and how proposed new road investments would address these constraints. To inform this issue, the present paper primarily employs geographic information system (GIS)-based data to assess the impact of market access on agricultural and rural development in the DRC. Compared to existing work, however, the paper employs a number of innovations to improve and extend the generic techniques used to estimate the importance of market access for agricultural and rural development. We then use our derived results to run simulations of how proposed infrastructure investments would affect market access, and how market access would in turn affect agricultural production and household wealth. We find highly significant and negative elasticities between travel times to sizable cities (50,000 or 100,000 population), although we also find that these elasticities are small relative to those of similar cross-country tests. Moreover, city access by itself is less important than access to cities and ports. This finding strongly suggests that increasing investment in ports in the DRC should be a priority in the infrastructure investment portfolio.
Testing a basic assumption of shrubland fire management: how important is fuel age?

This year's catastrophic wildfires in southern California highlight the need for effective planning and management for fire-prone landscapes. Fire frequency analysis of several hundred wildfires over a broad expanse of California shrublands reveals that there is generally not, as is commonly assumed, a strong relationship between fuel age and fire probabilities. Instead, the hazard of burning in most locations increases only moderately with time since the last fire, and a marked age effect of fuels is observed only in limited areas. Results indicate a serious need for a re-evaluation of current fire management and policy, which is based largely on eliminating older stands of shrubland vegetation. In many shrubland ecosystems exposed to extreme fire weather, large and intense wildfires may need to be factored in as inevitable events.
Stability of networked control systems with random buffer capacity

Stability of the discrete-time networked control systems is analysed, where the controller is updated with the buffered sensor information at stochastic intervals and the amount of the buffered data for transmission under the buffer capacity constraint is time-varying. The adopted controller switches between open-loop and closed-loop modes to estimate the plant behaviour. The sufficient condition for the Lyapunov stability with the generic arbitrary transmission is derived, and the sufficient conditions for the mean square stability with the Markovian transmission are also established. An example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Violent Childhood Experiences and Intimate Partner Violence Among Married U.S. Soldiers Who Deployed to Iraq

ABSTRACT The association between intimate partner violence perpetration and violent adverse childhood experiences has not been established among Active Duty soldiers who have served in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In this study, 691 Active Duty soldiers were surveyed anonymously 6 months after they returned from Iraq. Results show that 9.8% of soldiers (n = 67) perpetrated intimate partner violence in the past year and that experiencing childhood physical abuse and sexual abuse were independently associated with intimate partner violence after adjusting for other risk factors. The findings of this study may help fill gaps in the understanding of this association and can help better identify soldiers at risk for perpetrating intimate partner violence.
A Discontinuity Meshing Algorithm for Accurate Radiosity1

We discuss the problem of accurately computing the illumination of a diffuse polyhedral environment due to an area light source. We show how umbra and penumbra boundaries and other illumination details correspond to discontinuities in the radiance function and its derivatives. The shape, location, and order of these discontinuities is determined by the geometry of the light sources and obstacles in the environment. We describe an object-space algorithm that accurately reproduces the radiance across a surface by constructing a discontinuity mesh that explicitly represents various discontinuities in the radiance function as boundaries between mesh elements. A piecewise quadratic interpolant is used to approximate the radiance function, preserving the discontinuities associated with the edges in the mesh. This algorithm can be used in the framework of a progressive refinement radiosity system to solve the diffuse global illumination problem. Results produced by the new method are compared with ones obtained using a standard radiosity system. 1Appeared in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 12, num. 6, November 1992, pp. 25–39.
Latent Support Vector Machine Modeling for Sign Language Recognition with Kinect

Vision-based sign language recognition has attracted more and more interest from researchers in the computer vision field. In this article, we propose a novel algorithm to model and recognize sign language performed in front of a Microsoft Kinect sensor. Under the assumption that some frames are expected to be both discriminative and representative in a sign language video, we first assign a binary latent variable to each frame in training videos for indicating its discriminative capability, then develop a latent support vector machine model to classify the signs, as well as localize the discriminative and representative frames in each video. In addition, we utilize the depth map together with the color image captured by the Kinect sensor to obtain a more effective and accurate feature to enhance the recognition accuracy. To evaluate our approach, we conducted experiments on both word-level sign language and sentence-level sign language. An American Sign Language dataset including approximately 2,000 word-level sign language phrases and 2,000 sentence-level sign language phrases was collected using the Kinect sensor, and each phrase contains color, depth, and skeleton information. Experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for sign language recognition.
A mobile application to improve the quality of life via exercise

Sensor enabled smartphones have become a common platform for researchers due to their availability and ability to collect and process large quantities of data. In this work, a solution is proposed to support the student's assessment process in physical education classes, through the use of accelerometry data collected from smartphones. This solution aims to deliver accurate and readily available information regarding student's activity using common technologies in order to develop a low-cost approach. To develop this solution, accelerometry data was collected from several students while performing a list of activities, using a smartphone and a developed mobile app. The collected accelerometry data is used for activity information extraction such as energy expenditure and activity recognition. This information is displayed in a developed web application along with analytic charts and student information. The student accelerometry data is summarized and made available as a means to aid and complement the teacher's assessment process and grading system. By engaging the students in the new class assessment system, the authors also hope to promote the practice of healthy exercise habits, by providing the students with visual information about their activity and allowing them to compare statistics between each other and, perhaps more importantly, evaluate their own evolution.
Neural Representation of Fat Texture in the Mouth

8.1 Summary . 198 8.2 Introduction . 198 8.3 Taste Processing in the Primate Brain . 199 8.3. 1 Pathways. 199 8.3. 2 The Primary Taste Cortex . 200 8.3. 3 The Secondary Taste Cortex . 200 8.3. 4 Five Prototypical Tastes, Including Umami . 200 8.3. 5 The Pleasantness of the Taste of Food . 200 8.3. 6 Sensory-Specifi c Satiety . 201 8.4 The Representation of Flavor: Convergence of Olfactory and Taste Inputs . 202 8.5 The Representation of the Pleasantness of Odor in the Brain: Olfactory and Visual Sensory-Specifi c Satiety, Their Representation in the Primate Orbitofrontal Cortex, and the Role of Sensory-Specifi c Satiety in Appetite . 203 8.6 The Responses of Orbitofrontal Cortex Taste and Olfactory Neurons to the Sight, Texture, and Temperature of Food . 203 8.7 The Mouthfeel of Fat: Orbitofrontal Cortex, Primary Taste Cortex, and Amygdala . 205 8.8 Activation of the Human Brain by Oral Signals, Including Fat Texture . 212 8.8.1 Taste . 212 8.8.2 Odor . 213 8.8.3 Olfactory-Taste Convergence to Represent Flavor, and the Infl uence of Satiety . 213 8.8.4 Oral Viscosity and Fat Texture . 214 8.8.5 The Pleasantness of the Flavor of Food . 217
Aletheia--Improving Industrial Service Lifecycle Management by Semantic Data Federations

It is expected that the amount of product information available from the Internet of Things and Services will be so tremendous, that the main challenge will be to provide the right information, at the right time, in the right place, and to the right people. This objective is addressed by Aletheia - a distributed information system that enables the federation and semantic integration of very heterogeneous information sources. This paper discusses the goals, functionality, and architecture of Aletheia, guided by a real-world case study in the industrial service sector and conducted in cooperation with ABB, a major company providing power and automation technologies, products, and services for utility and industry customers.
Integrals of Nonlinear Equations of Evolution and Solitary Waves

In Section 1 we present a general principle for associating nonlinear equations evolutions with linear operators so that the eigenvalues of the linear operator integrals of the nonlinear equation. A striking instance of such a procedure discovery by Gardner, Miura and Kruskal that the eigenvalues of the Schrodinger operator are integrals of the Korteweg-de Vries equation. In Section 2 we prove the simplest case of a conjecture of Kruskal and Zabusky concerning the existence of double wave solutions of the Korteweg-de Vries equation, i.e., of solutions which for |I| large behave as the superposition of two solitary waves travelling at different speeds. The main tool used is the first of remarkable series of integrals discovered by Kruskal and Zabusky.
New bounds on the expected length of one-to-one codes

We provide new bounds on the expected length L of a binary one-to-one code for a discrete random variable X with entropy H. We prove that L/spl ges/H-log(H+1)-Hlog(1+1/H). This bound improves on previous results. Furthermore, we provide upper bounds on the expected length of the best code as function of H and the most likely source letter probability.
Major similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese sympathy expressions

800x600 This study with a limited scope of research on English-Vietnamese similarities and differences in expressing sympathy is to help speakers of English reduce or avoid misunderstanding and inappropriateness in dealing with an essential part of everyday language- conducting sympathy, which leads to more successful cross-cultural communications. In addition, it is expected that Vietnamese learners of English would have a chance to get used to the natural way of expressing sympathy in English so as to be successful cross-cultural communicators. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:. 0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}
Model-Based Verification: Claim Creation Guidelines

Abstract : Model Based Verification (MBV) is a systematic approach to finding defects (errors) in software requirements, designs, or code. MBV involves creating essential models of system behavior and analyzing these models against formal representations of expected properties, known as claims. Claim generation has been identified as a particularly complex activity within model-based verification. This technical note describes a pattern-based approach to facilitate claim generation. The report includes a list of directly usable patterns for the most frequent expected properties found in system specifications.
Processing affective images in the absence of visual awareness

Given capacity limits, the visual system must prioritize the processing of sensory inputs that are most critical to successful interactions with the environment. Neurocognitive theories suggest that humans have evolved mechanisms that operate without awareness that selectively prioritize threatening stimuli in subsequent allocation of processing resources and access to awareness. Evidence for this ‘standard hypothesis’comes from paradigms that dissociate visual input from awareness. This thesis combines a narrative review, a meta-analytic review and three empirical studies to examine the extent to which emotionally salient stimuli are prioritized in the absence of awareness. A general introduction and review of the literature is provided in Chapter 1. The meta analysis of previous literature (Chapter 2) reveals that evidence for an unconscious processing bias for threat isundermined by insufficiently rigorous awareness measures and inadequate control of low-level confounds. Chapter 3 reveals that autonomic arousal and attentional orienting to visual threats are eliminated under conditions where observers are objectively unaware of stimuli. Chapter 4 reveals that prioritized processing of fearful faces is parsimoniously explained by effective contrast: the relationship betweentheir Fourier spectrum and the contrast sensitivity function. Importantly, this explanation does not require or involve unconscious processing mechanisms that are sensitive to threat. Chapter 5 reveals that prioritized processing of emotional face stimuli is restricted to conditions of awareness, and may be parsimoniously explained by simple low-level variability between emotional and neutral face stimuli. Previous and present findings and analyses are considered together in the discussion (Chapter 6). It is concluded that evidence for emotion-sensitive visual processing that operates without awareness is weak and that uncritical acceptance of the standard hypothesis is premature.
Negative Influence Minimizing by Blocking Nodes in Social Networks

Social networks are becoming vital platforms for the spread of positive information such as innovations and negative information propagation like malicious rumors. In this paper, we address the problem of minimizing the influence of negative information. When negative information such as a rumor emerges in the social network and part of users have already adopted it, our goal is to minimize the size of ultimately contaminated users by discovering and blocking k uninfected users. A greedy method for efficiently finding a good approximate solution to this problem is proposed. The comparison experimental results on the Enron email network dataset demonstrate our proposed method is more effective than centrality based methods, such as degree centrality, betweenness centrality and PageRank.
Exploring Turkish preservice teachers' mental models of the environment: Are they related to gender and academic level?

ABSTRACT The current study aimed to establish Turkish preservice teachers' mental models of the environment and to determine the relationship these models have with gender and grade level. The study group comprised 463 Turkish preservice teachers from primary school education and preschool education departments. The data from the study were collected from drawings made by the participants. The drawings were evaluated using the Draw-an-Environment Test Rubric (DAET-R). The results of the study revealed that preservice teachers provide only superficial and scientifically deficient descriptions of the environment and that they constructed their mental models by perceiving the environment not as a unity of systems but as an object. On the basis of the findings, which showed that many preservice teachers do not include humans in their drawings, or draw biotic factors without other elements, it was concluded that preservice teachers perceive the environment as “nature” only. Although no statistically significant difference was found between females and males with respect to their mental models, significant differences occurred between second-year and fourth-year students and between third-year and fourth-year students, in favor of second- and third-year students.
Regularized super-resolution for diffusion MRI

In this paper, we present a new regularized super-resolution method for finding accurate fibre orientations and volume fractions of fibre populations on a sub-voxel scale from a 3D diffusion MRI acquisition in order to distinguish between various fibre configurations such as fanning and bending, and ameliorate partial volume effects. We treat this task as a general inverse problem, which we solve by regularization and optimization, and demonstrate the method on human brain data.
Seamlessly portable applications: Managing the diversity of modern heterogeneous systems

Nowadays, many possible configurations of heterogeneous systems exist, posing several new challenges to application development: different types of processing units usually require individual programming models with dedicated runtime systems and accompanying libraries. If these are absent on an end-user system, e.g. because the respective hardware is not present, an application linked against these will break. This handicaps portability of applications being developed on one system and executed on other, differently configured heterogeneous systems. Moreover, the individual profit of different processing units is normally not known in advance. In this work, we propose a technique to effectively decouple applications from their accelerator-specific parts, respectively code. These parts are only linked on demand and thereby an application can be made portable across systems with different accelerators. As there are usually multiple hardware-specific implementations for a certain task, e.g., a CPU and a GPU version, a method is required to determine which are usable at all and which one is most suitable for execution on the current system. With our approach, application and hardware programmers can express the requirements and the abilities of the application and the hardware-specific implementations in a simplified manner. During runtime, the requirements and abilities are compared with regard to the present hardware in order to determine the usable implementations of a task. If multiple implementations are usable, an online-learning history-based selector is employed to determine the most efficient one. We show that our approach chooses the fastest usable implementation dynamically on several systems while introducing only a negligible overhead itself. Applied to an MPI application, our mechanism enables exploitation of local accelerators on different heterogeneous hosts without preliminary knowledge or modification of the application.