Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Refugee education in countries of first asylum: Breaking open the black box of pre-resettlement experiences

The number of refugees who have fled across international borders due to conflict and persecution is at the highest level in recorded history. The vast majority of these refugees find exile in low-income countries neighboring their countries of origin. The refugee children who are resettled to North America, Europe, and Australia arrive with previous educational experiences in these countries of first asylum. This article examines these pre-resettlement educational experiences of refugee children, which to date have constituted a ‘black box’ in their post-resettlement education. Analysis is of data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, key informant interviews in 14 countries of first asylum, and ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in four countries. The article argues that contemporary conditions of conflict usefully inform conceptual understanding of refugee education globally, including the types of schools that refugees access in countries of first asylum and their rates of access. It further identifies three empirical themes that are common to the educational experiences of refugees in countries of first asylum: language barriers, teacher-centered pedagogy, and discrimination in school settings. The article examines the theoretical and practical relevance of these pre-resettlement educational experiences for post-resettlement education of refugee children.
BDNF Signaling during Olfactory Bulb Neurogenesis

One of the most prominent sites of cell renewal within the adult mammalian brain is the olfactory bulb. Newly born cells in the olfactory bulb originate in the subventricular zone and migrate through the rostral migratory stream into the core of the olfactory bulb ([Alvarez-Buylla and Garcia-Verdugo
Learning to use melodic similarity and contrast for narrative using a Digital Tabletop Musical Interface

This thesis investigates Digital Tabletop Musical Interfaces (DTMIs) in the context of music education. Digital tabletops have emerged in recent years, surrounded by much enthusiasm, and have found applications in a diversity of fields – from museum installations to engineering applications, from information systems, to music making. In particular, their ability to create a link between the physical and virtual world makes the digital tabletop an excellent way for beginners to approach music making. By allowing users to “touch” music, and experience it through various visual representations, in addition to its aural representation, digital tabletops provide an intuitively approachable way of making music that supports both beginners and experts, and allows them to collaborate and exchange knowledge and ideas. However, we still know little about the challenges and opportunities that DTMIs present, particularly their role in supporting music education. This thesis explores the challenges and opportunities presented by a bespoke DTMI in supporting people of different levels of musical experience in learning about some fundamental musical notions, and in learning how these can be used to compose music in an intentional way. This thesis covers three exploratory studies. In the first one, the notion of melodic contour, and its role as a visual metaphor for describing music, were explored by participants. A music composition task to describe a painting with music was presented to participants, and the ways in which participants described and composed music, in relation to melodic contour, were analysed. In the second study, the notions of melodic similarity and contrast, and their role in suggesting narrative, were explored by participants. Through a series of discussions and practical exercises, participants developed their understanding of melodic similarity and contrast, and learned how to use these notions to suggest narrative in melody. The third study followed directly from the second one, exploring again melodic similarity and contrast, but this time in a group setting. Groups of participants explored the musical notions using the DTMI as a discussion mediator. In these last two studies, the ways in which participants discussed the notions, and used them to compose music that suggested a narrative, were analysed. The findings suggest that it is possible to appropriately design a DTMI that can be used by both musically experienced and inexperienced people in order to create music in a way that is graspable for the novice, yet expressive for the expert, so that the two can discuss music with equal ease, and learn more about it.
Associational social capital and psychological type: an empirical enquiry among cathedral Friends in England

Abstract A sample of 1131 members of the Friends associations of six English cathedrals (616 women and 515 men) completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales (FPTS) and a modified version of the Williams Religious Social Capital Index (WRSCI). The data demonstrated that higher levels of religious social capital were found among extraverts (compared with introverts), sensing types (compared with intuitive types), and feeling types (compared with thinking types). No significant differences were found between judging types and perceiving types. The finding that extraverts displayed higher levels of religious social capital poses a challenge for the cathedrals, given that introverts outnumbered extraverts by nearly 2:1 in the Friends groups. Since religious social networks are known to influence generosity with time and money, it is suggested that cathedrals not only develop strategies to recruit more extravert Friends but also devise novel ways of encouraging introvert types to participate in associational activities where social capital will be generated.
Admissible velocity propagation: Beyond quasi-static path planning for high-dimensional robots

Path-velocity decomposition is an intuitive yet powerful approach to addressing the complexity of kinodynamic motion planning. The difficult trajectory planning problem is solved in two separate, simpler steps: first, a path is found in the configuration space that satisfies the geometric constraints (path planning), and second, a time-parameterization of that path satisfying the kinodynamic constraints is found. A fundamental requirement is that the path found in the first step must be time-parameterizable. Most existing works fulfill this requirement by enforcing quasi-static constraints during the path planning step, resulting in an important loss in completeness. We propose a method that enables path-velocity decomposition to discover truly dynamic motions, i.e. motions that are not quasi-statically executable. At the heart of the proposed method is a new algorithm – Admissible Velocity Propagation – which, given a path and an interval of reachable velocities at the beginning of that path, computes exactly and efficiently the interval of all the velocities the system can reach after traversing the path, while respecting the system’s kinodynamic constraints. Combining this algorithm with usual sampling-based planners then gives rise to a family of new trajectory planners that can appropriately handle kinodynamic constraints while retaining the advantages associated with path-velocity decomposition. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method on some difficult kinodynamic planning problems, where, in particular, quasi-static methods are guaranteed to fail.
Using survival analysis to explore female cardiac rehabilitation program adherence.

Heart disease continues to be the predominant cause of death in the United States. Traditionally, coronary heart disease (CHD) has been considered to be a male disorder, but it is also a significant cause of death and disability among older women. Cardiac rehabilitation offers valuable tertiary prevention after myocardial infarction and other cardiac events and has proven to decrease CHD death risk. This study used survival analysis as a means to incorporate time as a variable in the analysis of cardiac rehabilitation program adherence with a sample of female CHD patients. Implications for the management of female cardiac rehabilitation are discussed.
DRM: doesn't really mean digital copyright management

Copyright is a legal system embedded in a larger technological system. In order to examine the functions of copyright it is critical to examine the larger technological context of copyright: analog media and printed paper in particular. The copyright system includes both the explicit mechanisms implemented by law and the implicit mechanisms resulting from the technologically determinant features of paper and print. In order to prevent confusion between the legal, technical, and economic elements I refer to the whole as "copy accurate". Digital rights management design should explicitly address legal issue in copyright and economics of paper, technology of mass produced analog media, and print culture. An examination of that entire system (copy accurate) yields a return to first principles for the design of digital rights management systems.
Monitoring Plan Optimality Using Landmarks and Domain-Independent Heuristics

When acting, agents may deviate from the optimal plan, either because they are not perfect optimizers or because they interleave multiple unrelated tasks. In this paper, we detect such deviations by analyzing a set of observations and a monitored goal to determine if an observed agent’s actions contribute towards achieving the goal. We address this problem without pre-defined static plan libraries, and instead use a planning domain definition to represent the problem and the expected agent behavior. At the core of our approach, we exploit domain-independent heuristics for estimating the goal distance, incorporating the concept of landmarks (actions which all plans must undertake if they are to achieve the goal). We evaluate the resulting approach empirically using several known planning domains, and demonstrate that our approach effectively detects such deviations.
Using Choice Experiments to Assess People's Preferences for Railway Transports of Hazardous Materials

This article investigates whether the choice experiment approach can be used to assess people's preferences and the determinants of these preferences in order to estimate the costs and benefits of different configurations of the transport of hazardous materials by rail. Changes in the exposure to hazardous materials that people are subjected to are used rather than changes in accident risk. To the best knowledge of the author, this has not been done before in a study of people's preferences toward hazardous materials. A mail survey, carried out in two cities in Sweden, is used to obtain tentative estimates of the willingness to pay for a reduction in exposure as well as the willingness to accept an increase in exposure. Special attention is given to viability, since the complexity of the activity studied, transport of hazardous materials, and the method used pose particular challenges. The response rate and tests of validity and consistency indicate that this method can be applied. Moreover, the results suggest that studies of this kind may provide guidance on changes in the transport of hazardous materials, especially because policymakers may influence the attributes presented here. Referring to the exposure of hazardous materials highlights the importance of providing the respondents with adequate information regarding hazardous transports. An important finding is that the amount of background information may have some effect on the stated preferences.
Deriving ratings through social network structures

A review of existing approaches to recommendation in e-commerce systems is provided. A recommendation system is primarily used to identify services which may be of interest to a user based on a similarity in purchasing (or browsing) patterns with another user, or to filter services that have been returned as a result of a search. Existing systems primarily make use of collaborative filtering approaches or a semantic-annotation approach which tries to find similarity by matching on the definition of a service. However, such systems suffer from "sparseness" of ratings - as it is difficult to find enough ratings to help make a recommendation for a user. We therefore propose the use of a social network as the basis for defining how ratings can be aggregated, based on the structure of the network. We also suggest the use of product categories as the basis for aggregating ratings - and define this as a "context" in which a particular service is used. A model for a recommendation system that combines context-based rating with the structure of a social network has been suggested, along with an architecture for a system that implements the model.
Isothermal Amplification Methods for the Detection of Nucleic Acids in Microfluidic Devices

Diagnostic tools for biomolecular detection need to fulfill specific requirements in terms of sensitivity, selectivity and high-throughput in order to widen their applicability and to minimize the cost of the assay. The nucleic acid amplification is a key step in DNA detection assays. It contributes to improving the assay sensitivity by enabling the detection of a limited number of target molecules. The use of microfluidic devices to miniaturize amplification protocols reduces the required sample volume and the analysis times and offers new possibilities for the process automation and integration in one single device. The vast majority of miniaturized systems for nucleic acid analysis exploit the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification method, which requires repeated cycles of three or two temperature-dependent steps during the amplification of the nucleic acid target sequence. In contrast, low temperature isothermal amplification methods have no need for thermal cycling thus requiring simplified microfluidic device features. Here, the use of miniaturized analysis systems using isothermal amplification reactions for the nucleic acid amplification will be discussed.
HydroNode: an underwater sensor node prototype for monitoring hydroelectric reservoirs

The research of underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) is gaining attention due to its possible applications in many scenarios, such as ecosystem preservation, disaster prevention, oil and gas exploration and freshwater reservoirs management. The main elements of a UWSN are underwater sensor nodes (UWNs). In this paper we present HydroNode, an underwater sensor node prototype for monitoring hydroelectric reservoirs. The objective of this paper is to describe the design of HydroNode for Hydroelectric Reservoirs Monitoring. We only used commercial off-the-shelf components to build our underwater sensor node. Due to its multipurpose design, HydroNode can be used in different UWSNs, therefore aiding the research of UWSN system protocols, configurations and applications.
Building the Reality Deck

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2013 Extended Abstracts, April 27 May 2, 2013, Paris, France. ACM 978-1-4503-1952-2/13/04. Abstract We have constructed a gigapixel resolution display that offers a full 360 horizontal field-of-view. This system, called the Reality Deck, is the world’s most expansive large-format display and it is the largest resolution display ever built. It utilizes 416 LCD panels at 2560× 1440 resolution each, for a combined resolution of more than 1.5 gigapixels. In this paper, we present some of the design decisions and engineering challenges behind the creation of this large-scale visualization facility.
Real-Time Electrocardiogram Transmission from Mount Everest during Continued Ascent

The feasibility of a real-time electrocardiogram (ECG) transmission via satellite phone from Mount Everest to determine a climber’s suitability for continued ascent was examined. Four Taiwanese climbers were enrolled in the 2009 Mount Everest summit program. Physiological measurements were taken at base camp (5300 m), camp 2 (6400 m), camp 3 (7100 m), and camp 4 (7950 m) 1 hour after arrival and following a 10 minute rest period. A total of 3 out of 4 climbers were able to summit Mount Everest successfully. Overall, ECG and global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of climbers were transmitted in real-time via satellite phone successfully from base camp, camp 2, camp 3, and camp 4. At each camp, Resting Heart Rate (RHR) was transmitted and recorded: base camp (54–113 bpm), camp 2 (94–130 bpm), camp 3 (98–115 bpm), and camp 4 (93–111 bpm). Real-time ECG and GPS coordinate transmission via satellite phone is feasible for climbers on Mount Everest. Real-time RHR data can be used to evaluate a climber’s physiological capacity to continue an ascent and to summit.
First-order rate-based flow control with dynamic queue threshold for high-speed wide-area ATM networks

In this paper we present a new rate-based flow control scheme for ATM ABR services and analyze its performance. The proposed algorithm, which we refer to as First-order Rate- based Flow Control (FRFC) is the most single form of queue- length-based flow control. The asymptotic stability, the steady-state throughput, queue length and fairness, and the transient behavior are analyzed for case of multiple connections with diverse round-trip delays. We also consider a novel approach to dynamically adjust a queue threshold in the FRFC according to the changes in the available bandwidth, and the arrival and departure of connections. Simulations show that the simple FRFC with dynamic queue threshold effectively maintains high throughput, small loss and a desired fairness in these dynamic environments and is a promising solution for ABR flow control in ATM networks.
Social Instruments for Robust Convention Emergence

We present the notion of Social Instruments as mechanisms that facilitate the emergence of conventions from repeated interactions between members of a society. Specifically, we focus on two social instruments: rewiring and observation. Our main goal is to provide agents with tools that allow them to leverage their social network of interactions when effectively addressing coordination and learning problems, paying special attention to dissolving metastable subconventions. Our initial experiments throw some light on how Self-Reinforcing Substructures (SRS) in the network prevent full convergence to society-wide conventions, resulting in reduced convergence rates. The use of an effective composed social instrument, observation + rewiring, allow agents to achieve convergence by eliminating the subconventions that otherwise remained meta-stable.
Stabilization of collective motion in three dimensions: A consensus approach

This paper proposes a methodology to stabilize relative equilibria in a model of identical, steered particles moving in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Exploiting the Lie group structure of the resulting dynamical system, the stabilization problem is reduced to a consensus problem. We first derive the stabilizing control laws in the presence of all- to-all communication. Providing each agent with a consensus estimator, we then extend the results to a general setting that allows for unidirectional and time-varying communication topologies.
Human tracking using multiple-camera-based head appearance modeling

We propose an appearance-based method for tracking motions of multiple persons using an asynchronous multiple-camera system. In the proposed method, the head appearance of each target person is dynamically modeled using multiple-camera-based observations. Observed color (texture) information and the related reliability values are stored in the head model as a set of color patches distributed in 3-D space. The head appearance model can be easily produced from any view direction by using the stored information. Head-appearance-based tracking is, especially, useful for reducing the impact of human-human occlusions. We applied the proposed method to a human interaction scene that contains small inter-person distance where the motion-based (silhouette) method fails due to occlusions. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
FIV: from lentivirus to lentivector

Molecular virological understanding of the feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) life cycle is increasing, facilitating rational derivation of improved vectors from this non‐primate lentivirus. The packaging signal has been mapped, a central DNA flap has been identified, and class I integrase mutants have been validated. Vector systems with improved effectiveness and safety profiles are being applied by a number of laboratories in several pre‐clinical models, with demonstrated efficacy in human tissues. The comparative lentivirological research that facilitates FIV vector development may also yield insights into the still enigmatic molecular basis for a signature lentiviral property with pathogenetic and therapeutic importance: permanent transgene integration in non‐dividing cells. This review discusses virological aspects of lentiviral vector development, as well as some recent controversies and applications. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Towards a bio-mimetic flytrap robot based on a snap-through mechanism

This paper presents a bio-mimetic flytrap robot based on the Venus flytrap, which has rapid snap-through motion. The robot employs a bi-stable unsymmetrically laminated carbon fiber reinforced prepreg (CFRP) structure, which has a bi-stable mechanism that is similar to the Venus flytrap's passive elastic mechanism. By embedding shape memory alloy springs, large deformation is induced and bi-stable structure can be triggered to snap through. The robot's working performance shows that the leaves close in about 100ms, and this time for closure is almost the same as that of the Venus flytrap. This concept of the flytrap robot can be applied to rapid grippers of various sizes.
Is the Hayekian evolutionnism coherent

This paper tries to analyze one of the main problems Hayek offers to economists as well as to social scientists, that is to say his conception of the evo lution of human societies. Most criticisms to this conception concern the main elements of his evolutionary theory: the definition of the relevant unit of selec tion, the way a principle of selection is identified, and the processes of change and mutation that characterize this kind of evolution. In this paper my aim is to show that, if those critics are relevant per se, they forget to take into account the cornerstone of the Hayekian evolutionism, that is to say his subjectivism and the way it determines his conception of the evolution of human societies.
Should Children with ADHD be Routinely Screened for Motor Coordination Problems? The Role of the Paediatric Occupational Therapist

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is commonly comorbid with movement difficulties, including developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Compartmentalised service provision may result in children with ADHD not being screened, and assessed if necessary, for DCD and vice versa. In this study, 69 children attending an ADHD clinic were screened for movement problems, using the parent-completed Movement Assessment Battery for Children Checklist (Henderson and Sugden 1992). The results showed that 19% of the children with ADHD were defined as having a ‘movement problem’, with a further 16% defined as ‘at risk’. This paper discusses the results of the study and the implications for paediatric occupational therapy.