Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Need for Cognition Scale for Children and Adolescents: Structural Analysis and Measurement Invariance

Need for Cognition (NFC) signifies “the tendency for an individual to engage in and enjoy thinking” (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982, p. 116). Up to now, no scale of sufficient psychometric quality existed to assess NFC in children. Using data from three independent, diverse cross-sectional samples from Germany, Luxembourg, and Finland, we examined the psychometric properties of a new NFC scale intended to fill in this gap. In all samples, across grade levels ranging from 1 to 9, confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the hypothesized nested factor structure based on Mussel’s (2013) Intellect model, with one general factor Think influencing all items and two specific factors Seek and Conquer each influencing a subset of items. At least partial scalar measurement invariance with regard to grade level and sex could be demonstrated. The scale exhibited good psychometric properties and showed convergent and discriminant validity with an established NFC scale and other noncognitive traits such as academic self-concept and interests. It incrementally predicted mostly statistically significant but relatively small portions of academic achievement variance over and above academic self-concept and interest. Implications for research on the development of NFC and its role as an investment trait in intellectual development are discussed.
Evaluation of The Effectiveness of Control Systems in Computerized Accounting Information Systems: An Empirical Research Applied on Jordanian Banking Sector

The objective of this study is to evaluate the level of Control Systems effectiveness in Computerized Accounting Information Systems (CAIS) that is implemented in the Jordanian banking sector to preserve confidentiality, integrity and availability of the bank's data and their CAIS. An empirical survey using self-administrated questionnaire has been carried out to achieve the above-mentioned objectives. The study results reveal that Jordanian domestic banks are using effective fraud and error reduction controls. The study also reveals that these banks lack in the application of other Control System dimensions (Physical access, Logical access, Data security, Documentation standard, Disaster Recovery, Internet, communication and E-Control and Output security controls). The study’s main recommendation is for Jordanian domestic banks to increase the CAIS control system strength for all dimensions, in order to avoid any possible threats that could threaten their CAIS.
The Mathematics Emporium: Infusion of Instructional Technology into College Level Mathematics and Psychosocial Factors of Learning.

This manuscript-based (European style) dissertation consisted of three different, but conceptually related manuscripts. The series of manuscripts examined psychosocial factors of learning including attitude towards mathematics, motivation to learn mathematics, and satisfaction from the mathematics instruction in both redesigned and traditionallytaught college algebra courses at one of the Midwest research universities. This was a quantitative research study that used various statistical methods including exploratory factor analysis, internal replicability analysis, paired-samples t-tests, hierarchical multiple regression analysis, reliability and validity statistics. The first manuscript was an inclusive literature review that focused on course redesign— mathematics Emporium—and infusion of instructional and learning technologies into college algebra. The second manuscript focused on developing a new inventory to measure students’ attitudes toward mathematics, motivation to learn mathematics, and satisfaction from the instructional practices specifically in a technology-supported mathematics education context. It focused on the psychometric properties—validity and reliability—of the Psychosocial Factors of Learning in Redesigned Introductory College Mathematics (PFL-RICM) scale. The third manuscript examined changes in psychosocial factors of learning not only in the redesigned context, but also in the traditionally-taught college algebra settings. Results of
Global Update and Trends of Hidden Hunger, 1995-2011: The Hidden Hunger Index

Background Deficiencies in essential vitamins and minerals–also termed hidden hunger–are pervasive and hold negative consequences for the cognitive and physical development of children. Methods This analysis evaluates the change in hidden hunger over time in the form of one composite indicator–the Hidden Hunger Index (HHI)–using an unweighted average of prevalence estimates from the Nutrition Impact Model Study for anemia due to iron deficiency, vitamin A deficiency, and stunting (used as a proxy indicator for zinc deficiency). Net changes from 1995–2011 and population weighted regional means for various time periods are measured. Findings Globally, hidden hunger improved (-6.7 net change in HHI) from 1995–2011. Africa was the only region to see a deterioration in hidden hunger (+1.9) over the studied time period; East Asia and the Pacific performed exceptionally well (-13.0), while other regions improved only slightly. Improvements in HHI were mostly due to reductions in zinc and vitamin A deficiencies, while anemia due to iron deficiency persisted and even increased. Interpretation This analysis is critical for informing and tracking the impact of policy and programmatic efforts to reduce micronutrient deficiencies, to advance the global nutrition agenda, and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, there remains an unmet need to invest in gathering frequent, nationally representative, high-quality micronutrient data as we renew our efforts to scale up nutrition, and as we enter the post-2015 development agenda. Funding Preparation of this manuscript was funded by Sight and Life. There was no funding involved in the study design, data collection, analysis, or decision to publish.
MONOTONE RELAXATION ITERATES AND APPLICATIONS TO SEMILINEAR SINGULARLY PERTURBED PROBLEMS

This paper deals with monotone relaxation iterates for solving nonlinear monotone difference schemes of elliptic type. The monotone ω-Jacobi and SUR (Successive Under-Relaxation) methods are constructed. The monotone methods solve only linear discrete systems at each iterative step and converge monotonically to the exact solution of the nonlinear monotone difference schemes. Convergent rates of the monotone methods are estimated. The proposed methods are applied to solving semilinear singularly perturbed reaction-diffusion problems. Uniform convergence of the monotone methods is proved. Numerical experiments complement the theoretical results.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Are They Related?

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Fibromyalgia remains an enigma, with current research focusing on numerous and varying aspects of the conditions. As noted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the US National Library of Medicine’s Medline Plus: “No one knows what causes CFS. It is most common in women in their 40s and 50s, but anyone can have it. It can last for years. There is no cure for CFS, so the goal of treatment is to improve symptoms” [1].
A Questionnaire Project: Integrating the Four Macro Skills with Critical Thinking.

2 0 0 7 N U M B E R 1 | E N G L I S H T E A C H I N G F O R U M Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) emphasizes the teaching of listening, speaking, reading, and writing within contentand task-based activities (Richards and Schmidt 2002). Numerous task-based projects are available to teachers who wish to teach a second language (L2) by involving their students in real-world, interesting activities that will expose them to a large amount of authentic language. One example is a questionnaire project, which is an excellent way to integrate language and other skills within a task-based activity. With a questionnaire project, students advance through stages of creating questions, collecting data, and analyzing and reporting results while developing their L2 skills through brainstorming, research, writing, problem solving, and group work. This article describes, from the viewpoint of both learners and instructors, the various linguistic and academic benefits to students as they learn to design and administer an effective survey project. (For purposes of this article, survey and questionnaire are used interchangeably.) A central focus of the article is to illustrate how students can use the four skills as a vehicle for building critical thinking, including improving their metacognitive strategies, i.e., the ability to evaluate their own learning (Richards and Schmidt 2002). We therefore specifically address some ways to help students develop their critical thinking ability (gain a nonlinguistic benefit) as they use the four macro skills to develop and administer a questionnaire.
A low power WiMAX LNA with noise cancellation

This paper presents a low noise amplifier (LNA) employing a noise cancellation technique for WiMAX applications. The design of LNA is based on the input impedance matching with noise cancellation in 0.35-mum standard SiGe BiCMOS process. The chip size is equal to 0.84 mm times 0.18 mm. The crucial simulated results include that the noise figure (NF) is below 2.1 dB in the frequency range of 2 GHz to 3 GHz, the gain is equal to 13.3 dB at 2.6 GHz, the input 1 dB compression point (IP1dB) is 11 dBm, and the input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) is 2.5 dBm. The power consumption is 13.2 mW from the supply voltage of 1.8 V. The NF is improved by 0.73 dB using a noise cancellation technique.
Reliability monitoring of digital circuits by in situ timing measurement

Recent technological advances in semiconductor industry have led to extreme scaling of CMOS devices. In such advanced technologies fulfilling application specific reliability requirements is not an easy task. This is a crucial issue particularly in case of safety-critical applications with strict reliability requirements. In this paper we propose accurate monitoring of reliability status of digital circuits through measuring the remaining timing slack of the system. Moreover, we propose and evaluate the optimized design and implementation of the required aging resistant circuitry in a low power 65nm technology. Besides the quantitative evaluations regarding the accuracy and robustness of the monitoring circuitry, we evaluate the power efficiency of the monitoring approach for a test circuit. Our studies support the applicability of the proposed monitoring methodology to fulfill application specific reliability requirements.
COMPUTING IN SCHOOLS: Computer science, computational thinking, programming, coding: the anomalies of transitivity in K-12 computer science education

of fundamental ideas, which was often mentioned in this column. That is, they looked for fundamental CS ideas—that by their fundamental nature, are relevant in many contexts across the CS secondary curriculum—which are relevant to data management as well. Through this prism, an updated data management course does not only play the role of covering upto-date topics of data management, but also offers an opportunity to demonstrate such big, fundamental ideas in the specific context of current data management. This IN THIS COLUMN I would like to share with you my impressions from a very interesting conference—the 9th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education (WiPSCE)—which took place at the Freie University in Berlin last November. As its name indicates, WiPSCE focuses only on K–12 CS education. It is a European conference, originally a German one, which became international in 2012, and appears to be a great meeting and discussion venue for those with deep interest in K–12 CS education. Like other conferences of similar size (such as ICER or Koli Calling), it enjoys the benefits of a small conference with no parallel sessions, enabling lively and contributing discussions. What I liked most was the current nature of K–12 computing education research, as depicted by the papers and posters presented at this conference (all available through the ACM digital library). Most (though not all) of the attendees and presenters were from different European countries, some of which have long experience with teaching CS in schools, and also long experience with K–12 CSE research. I saw high-level views of computing education, or better said—forest views, as opposed to tree views. For example, Andreas Grillenberger and Ralf Romeike [2] investigated teaching data management in secondary schools. Their rationale was that this area has deview echoes Bruner’s recommendation regarding fundamental ideas—revisiting them throughout the curriculum, in every context that lends itself to their use, demonstrating the two sides of the coin— their generality, the characteristics that are common to all of their appearances; and their expression in the specific context at hand. The same holistic curricular view was taken in the interesting poster by Michael Rücker and Niels Pinkwart [5], who described how Petri nets can be used as an expressive tool throughout the CS secondary school curriculum. Alexander Ruf, Andreas Mühling, and Peter Hubwieser [6] have also taken a high-level approach when comparing the environments of Scratch and Karel the Robot, in terms of their effect on learning outcomes and motivation. They did not consider the two environments as being interesting by themselves, but rather, as representing two types of environments intended for young novices. This view alleviates their study from a concrete study that applies to the two specific environments of Scratch and Karel the Robot, to a
Using XP in Telecommunication Software Development

In recent years agile software development methods have been used by software development teams. In this paper practical results of applying an agile software development methodology, extreme programming (XP), in the development of telecommunication software projects, are presented. Experience gained by applying XP rules are reported and each rule is scrutinized. Our conclusion is that XP could give better results provided that it is tailored for telecommunication software projects.
Compact Test Pattern Selection for Small Delay Defect

This letter proposes an algorithm that selects a small number of test patterns for small delay defects from a large N-detect test set. This algorithm uses static upper and lower bound analysis to quickly estimate the sensitized path length so that the central processing unit (CPU) time can be reduced. By ignoring easy faults, only a partial fault dictionary, instead of a complete fault dictionary, is built for test pattern selection. Experimental results on large International Test Conference benchmark circuits show that, with very similar quality, the selected test set is 46% smaller and the CPU time is 42% faster than that of timing-aware automated test pattern generation (ATPG). With the proposed selection algorithm, small delay defect test sets are no longer very expensive to apply.
Estimating the spatial and temporal distribution of snapping shrimp using a portable, broadband 3-dimensional acoustic array

Broadband systems operating in warm shallow waters are often significantly affected by snapping shrimp (Alpheus & Synalpheus) that are reported to produced signals up to 300 kHz with source levels up to 190 dB re 1 /spl mu/Pa at 1 m peak to peak level. Understanding the spatial and temporal distribution of these sources is crucial to their use either as insonifiers for ambient noise imaging to remove them as interfering noise for conventional sonar. The Acoustic Research Laboratory at the Tropical Marine Science Institute of Singapore has developed a high-bandwidth, compact 3-dimensional acoustic array that can localise these sources in time and space. It is a self-contained broadband system with four acoustic recording channels, each sampled at 500 kSa/s. The main advantage of the system lies in its compact, portable size, permitting it to be easily deployed in open waters far off shore. The overall array size is about 1 m with a cylindrical electronics housing of less than 230 mm diameter and 60 mm length. The system has been used to map high end of the frequency range. The system has been used to map high frequency noise sources within an area of some 20,000 m/sup 2/ from a single vantage point. An angular resolution of <1 degree has been achieved at the high end of the frequency range. The system has been deployed either as a surface-mounted (with spar buoy) or bottom-mounted (on a tripod) system with remote control capability over a cable or a stand-alone unit. The initial results show evidence of spatially clustered snapping. This paper presents the experimental results from deployments in 18-20 m water depths among sparse reef patches approximately 1 km offshore from the nearest islands and the estimated distribution of the snapping shrimp.
Detection of Defects in Wiring Networks Using Time Domain Reflectometry

A new technique is proposed to reconstruct faulty wiring networks from the time-domain reflectometry (TDR) response. The developed method is also for characterization of defects in the branches of the network. The direct problem (propagation along the cables) is modeled by RLCG circuit parameters computed by finite element method (FEM) and the finite-difference time domain (FDTD) method. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are used to solve the inverse problem. The proposed method allows to accurately locate wire faults. Some examples are presented to validate and illustrate the ability of this reconstruction method.
Consumer Data and Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing

The emergence of ubiquitous computing means new devices, sensors, and protocols around the society, and thus new sources of consumer data. The new data sources along with new means for individual identification constitute a personal privacy concern: what could and should not be done with personal data. Personal privacy issue is accompanied with corporate privacy when data mining tasks are applied to consumer databases. The ubiquitous computing environment will provide various data sources, these databases will be distributed among various agents. One of the emergent phenomenon that ubiquitous computing will create is context-awareness. The privacy-preserving perspective on data mining is relatively young area. The research done in the area is mainly theoretical, to best of our understanding no real-world applications exist. In this work we have tried to fill this cap. The current trend with growing amount of personalization in online services has created also applications for personalized marketing. Personalized marketing services use detailed information about the context and personal history of a customer. This needs sophisticated individual identification methods, which raise privacy concern. The novelty in privacy-preserving methods is that sensitive and distributed data could be used for data mining task and the privacy of individuals is preserved. This thesis has two objectives: first is to use consumer data from distributed sources and study how customer segmentation is possible while preserving the privacy. The idea is to conduct the customer segmentation in a way that the data need not leave the agent holding the data. The other objective is the value of the knowledge acquired from collectively conducted segmentation. We believe that collectively conducted segmentation produces knowledge that cannot be acquired otherwise. The results of this work show that privacy-preserving customer segmentation is possible and the collectively conducted segmentation produces new knowledge.
Channel estimation in asynchronous multibeam satellite communications

This paper deals with channel estimation in asynchronous multibeam communications. That technique allows estimation of propagation delays, amplitudes and phases of the active users' signals. An antenna array is considered at the receiver with a null steering beam former. After system model and beam forming mathematical presentation, the channel estimation method is developed. QPSK modulation is adopted with and FDMA physical resources sharing, under an AWGN environment. Evaluation of the proposed method is done with computer simulations. The obtained results show the good performance of this technique.
Muscle Wasting and Impaired Myogenesis in Tumor Bearing Mice Are Prevented by ERK Inhibition

Background The onset of cachexia is a frequent feature in cancer patients. Prominent characteristic of this syndrome is the loss of body and muscle weight, this latter being mainly supported by increased protein breakdown rates. While the signaling pathways dependent on IGF-1 or myostatin were causally involved in muscle atrophy, the role of the Mitogen-Activated-Protein-Kinases is still largely debated. The present study investigated this point on mice bearing the C26 colon adenocarcinoma. Methodology/Principal Findings C26-bearing mice display a marked loss of body weight and muscle mass, this latter associated with increased phosphorylated (p)-ERK. Administration of the ERK inhibitor PD98059 to tumor bearers attenuates muscle depletion and weakness, while restoring normal atrogin-1 expression. In C26 hosts, muscle wasting is also associated with increased Pax7 expression and reduced myogenin levels. Such pattern, suggestive of impaired myogenesis, is reversed by PD98059. Increased p-ERK and reduced myosin heavy chain content can be observed in TNFα-treated C2C12 myotubes, while decreased myogenin and MyoD levels occur in differentiating myoblasts exposed to the cytokine. All these changes are prevented by PD98059. Conclusions/Significance These results demonstrate that ERK is involved in the pathogenesis of muscle wasting in cancer cachexia and could thus be proposed as a therapeutic target.
Digital Control for Dynamic Performance Enhancement of DC-DC Switching Converters

In this paper, an overview of recent advances in digital control of lowto medium-power dc-dc switching converters is presented. Traditionally, analog electronics methods have dominated in controlling such dc-dc converters. However, with the steadily decreasing cost of ICs, the feasibility of digitally controlled dc-dc switching converters has increased significantly. This paper outlines a sample of digital solutions for dc-dc switching converters to enhance the dynamic performance of dc-dc switching converters. Furthermore, latest research activities pertaining to applications for dynamic performance improvement, such as controller auto-tuning, capacitor charge balance control, are discussed. These applications demonstrate the significant advantages and potentials of digital control.
Human face shape analysis under spherical harmonics illumination considering self occlusion

In this paper we present a novel method of considering self-occlusion when fitting faces under global illumination. The effects of self-occlusion under spherical harmonics (SH) illumination are predicted through the use of a a morphable model of faces. A linear function is precomputed which maps morphable model coordinates directly to surface irradiance values. We demonstrate that considering self-occlusion yields a clear improvement over an otherwise identical reconstruction where self-occlusion is neglected. Our method succeeds at reconstructing facial attributes that are visible primarily as a consequence of self-occlusion, such as the depth of the eye sockets and the shape of the nose.