Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Erhöht eine Briefmarke den Rücklauf bei postalischen Befragungen

Im Rahmen der Langsschnittstudie Bildungsprozesse, Kompetenzentwicklung und Selektionsentscheidungen im Vorschul- und Schulalter (BiKS) wurde im schulischen Kontext experimentell untersucht, wie sich unterschiedliche Arten der Frankierung des Rucksendeumschlags fur Schulerfragebogen auf den Rucklauf auswirken. Dabei wurde die Stichprobe von N = 948 Sekundarschulern zufallig in drei Subgruppen geteilt, denen zur Rucksendung ihres Fragebogens je nach Bedingung ein portofreier Rucksendeumschlag, ein mit einer Automatenbriefmarke oder mit einer Sonderbriefmarke frankierter Ruckumschlag zur Verfugung stand (drei Bedingungen). Unsere Analysen zeigen einen signifikant positiven Effekt der Sonderbriefmarke auf die Rucksendequote, dies vor allem bei Familien mit geringer Teilnahmeneigung. (DIPF/Orig.) In the context of the educational longitudinal study Bildungsprozesse, Kompetenzentwicklung und Selektionsentscheidungen im Vorschul- und Schulalter (BiKS), the response to three different types of franking on return envelopes for student questionnaires was investigated experimentally. The sample of N = 948 students in secondary school, who had to return a paper questionnaire, was randomly divided into three different groups, who either received a postage-paid return envelope, an envelope with a normal stamp out of a vending machine or one with a special stamp (three conditions). Our analyses indicate a significant positive effect of the special stamp on the response rate, especially for families with a lower participation probability. (DIPF/Orig.)
Research of inphase arrays from rectangular microstrip antenna of microwave frequency

It is developed specified resonator model of single rectangular microstrip antenna (RMA). Matchings design values of resonance frequencies, input impedance of RMA on thick and thin substrates are carried out ( epsiv les 7) with the experimental data available in the literature, confirmed pinpoint accuracy of a used model suffices. With its help the optimal adjustment of numerical models of single RMA and lattices from them are retrieved in the program AWR Microwave Office. Designs of 32-element inphase lattices of RMA with vertical and horizontal polarization with a center frequency of 7.8 GHz on FLAN-3.8 substrate of width 2 mm are developed. Basic performances and the parameters of arrays confirmed with results of experimental researches are calculated.
Correlates of frailty in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment.

SIR—The global prevalence of dementia is rising with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) accounting for 50–60% of all cases and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) its precursor [1, 2]. Although the clinical hallmark of AD is progressive loss of memory and cognition, several studies have also shown changes in mobility and body composition suggesting frailty [3, 4]. Frailty represents age-related reduction in physiological reserve and resistance to stressors that can be delineated from comorbidity [5, 6]. It infers increased risk of health decline, disability and mortality regardless of concurrent illnesses. Intervention in the early stages may lead to reversal of frailty and prevent some of its adverse outcomes [6]. Individual components of frailty; impaired grip strength, slowed gait and low body mass index (BMI), have been shown to predict development of dementia and are associated with incident MCI [7–10]. The frailty syndrome within cognitively impaired patients may represent an important area for intervention that has yet been adequately investigated. A diagnosis of AD or MCI can mean considerable heterogeneity in terms of age, comorbidity, course of illness, cognitive impairment, functional limitations and abnormalities of behaviour. This study enables a consideration of the relation, if any, between frailty and these domains of clinical heterogeneity in a group of patients with AD and MCI.
Privately-Operated Water Utilities, Municipal Price Negotiation, and Estimation of Residential Water Demand: The case of France

This paper addresses the issue of price negotiation between a municipality and a private water utility operator, and its implications for residential water demand estimation. We use appropriate econometric procedures to estimate a water demand equation on a panel of French municipalities. We find evidence that negotiated water price depends on municipality's characteristics, causing endogeneity of price in the demand equation. The impact of average household income, housing, and system features such as metering is investigated both on municipal consumption and price. Estimated price and income elasticities are significant and close to previous household level studies.
Reactive Motion Planning for Unmanned Aerial Surveillance of Risk-Sensitive Areas

This paper proposes a reactive motion-planning approach for persistent surveillance of risk-sensitive areas by a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The planner, termed PARCov (Planner for Autonomous Risk-sensitive Coverage), seeks to: i) maximize the area covered by sensors mounted on each UAV; ii) provide persistent surveillance; iii) maintain high sensor data quality; and iv) reduce detection risk. To achieve the stated objectives, PARCov combines into a cost function the detection risk with an uncertainty measure designed to keep track of the regions that have been surveyed and the times they were last surveyed. PARCov reduces the uncertainty and detection risk by moving each quadcopter toward a low-cost region in its vicinity. By reducing the uncertainty, PARCov is able to increase the coverage and provide persistent surveillance. Moreover, a nonlinear optimization formulation is used to determine the optimal altitude for flying each quadcopter in order to maximize the sensor data quality while minimizing risk.
Motion-blur angle distortion correction algorithm for PMMW image

For the angle distortion appeared in the motion-blur angle estimation of passive millimeter wave image, this paper proposes a distortion correction algorithm for obtaining the accurate motion-blur angle. The correction algorithm can correct the distortion emerged in the traditional algorithm effectively and accurately. In this paper, we adopt the traditional Fourier-Radon algorithm to estimate the motion-blur angle; then the motion-blur angle distortion of rectangle image is corrected by utilizing the non-uniform quantization distortion mechanism; the mean square error value of corrected angle can keep lower than 1° which is greatly less than traditional error. Amount of experiments had been done to certificate the efficacy and robustness of our proposed approach.
A comparison on interactivity of three Linux schedulers in embedded system

This paper presents an comparison on interactivity of three Linux schedulers: O (1), CFS and MIOS [1], in an embedded system. We have ported the O (1) and MIOS into Linux 2.6. 32, and done the test in this framework. Different experiments in both high workload and low workload are done in a 0.16 millisecond accuracy. The result shows that a) CFS is not the best in interactivity comparing with O(1) and MIOS; b) CFS is more fair even in high workload; c) O(1) and MIOS differ very slightly on interactivity for sub-millisecond level tasks; d) MIOS works better on scalability testing of hackbench[6] than the other two. The experimental result shows the acceptable interactivity on these schedulers, but possible enhancements still can make, even on MIOS.
Regulatory Cytokine Expression and Preterm Birth: Case-Control Study Nested in a Cohort

Background Currently known risk factors explain only a small fraction of preterm birth (PTB). Previous PTB is one of the most important predictors. However, this information is not available in primiparous women. Few studies have looked at associations between regulatory cytokine expression (RCE) and PTB and the results are conflicting. Objective To investigate the association of RCE–Interleukin 10 (IL-10) and Transforming Growth Factor β (TGF-β)–with PTB, and to assess whether bacterial vaginosis (BV) is involved in this relationship. Methods This was a case-control study nested in a prospective cohort–called BRISA. Women with singleton pregnancies were interviewed from 22 to 25 weeks of gestational age (GA). Women were recruited from health services in São Luís, Brazil. A blood sample was collected and gynecological examination was performed. Serum IL-10 and TGF-β were determined using cytometric bead array. Nugent score >7 and/or the presence of clue cells were used for BV diagnosis. All PTB estimated by ultrasound dating performed before 20 weeks of gestational age were considered cases. Controls were selected by simple random sampling from the rest of the cohort, at a 2:1 ratio. Different models were tested, according to the main independent variable. Odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) were estimated by regression analyses. Results The study included 327 pregnant women, 109 cases and 218 controls. No associations were found between BV and PTB (P = 1.44; 95%CI: 0.51–3.77). Low levels of IL-10 (OR = 2.92 95%CI: 1.38–6.16) or TGF-β (OR = 16.90 95%CI: 6.42–44.51) or both simultaneously (OR = 77.16 95%CI: 7.99–744.88) were associated with increasing odds of PTB, even after adjustment for confounding. Conclusion Decreased RCE is a risk factor for PTB. This relationship, however, is not triggered by the presence of BV. Low IL-10/TGF-β levels from 22 to 25 weeks of GA could be used as early predictors of PTB. We suggest monitoring of these RCE, especially among primiparous women, for whom history of previous PTB is not available.
Acoustic-prosodic recognition of emotion in speech

Analysis of emotion in speech is manifested by the analysis of the vocal behavior of the nonverbal aspect of the speech. The basic assumption is that there is a set of objectively measurable voice parameters called prosodic aspects of speech, which can be assessed through computerized acoustical analysis. In this paper, we report results on recognizing emotional states (happy, sad, angry) from a corpus of short duration utterances using 18 acoustic-prosodic features. Four experiments were being conducted to perform correlations of the different prosodic-acoustic features and were evaluated against three different classifiers using a 10-fold cross-validation technique to estimate how accurately the classifier performs.
NUMA-Aware Multicore Matrix Multiplication

A user-level scheduling along with a specific data alignment for matrix multiplication in cache-coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access (ccNUMA) architectures is presented. Addressing the data locality problem that could occur in such systems potentially alleviates memory bottlenecks. We show experimentally that an agnostic thread scheduler (e.g., OpenMP 3.1) from the data placement on a ccNUMA machine produces a high number of cache-misses. To overcome this memory contention problem, we show how proper memory mapping and scheduling manage to tune an existing matrix multiplication implementation and reduce the number of cache-misses by 67% and consequently, reduce the computation time by up to 22%. Finally, we show a relationship between cache-misses and the gained speedup as a novel figure of merit to measure the quality of the method.
Holistic approach to Wep protocol in securing wireless network infrastructure

Constant increase in use of wireless infrastructure networks for business purposes created a need for strong safety mechanisms. This paper describes WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) protocol for the protection of wireless networks, its security deficiencies, as well as the various kinds of attacks that can jeopardize security goals of WEP protocol: authentication confidentiality and integrity. The paper, also, gives a summary of security improvements of WEP protocol that can lead to the higher level of wireless network infrastructure protection. Comparative analysis shows the advantages of the new 802.11i standard in comparison to the previous security solutions. A proposal of possible security improvements of RSNA (Robust Security Network Association) is presented.
An object-level gateway supporting integrated-property quality of service

As networks and the use of communications within applications continue to grow and find more uses, so too does the demand for more control and manageability of various "system properties" through middleware. An important component supporting an integrated property architecture is the concept of an object gateway, which is a quality-of-service (QoS)-aware element transparently inserted at the transport layer between clients and objects to provide managed communication behavior for the particular property being supported. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a QoS-oriented gateway to integrate a variety of QoS enforcement and implementation mechanisms controlling the underlying distributed interactions. We discuss the functions performed by such a component in achieving the desired overall end-to-end QoS, and the design considerations underlying our current implementation. We conclude with experiences to date with two variations of the gateway: one controlling managed latency and throughput using bandwidth allocation, and one controlling dependability through the coordination of object replicas.
Imatinib-resistant chronic myeloid leukemia (CML): Current concepts on pathogenesis and new emerging pharmacologic approaches

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a stem cell disease, in which the BCR/ABL oncoprotein is considered essential for abnormal growth and accumulation of neoplastic cells. During the past 10 years, the BCR/ABL tyrosine kinase inhibitor imatinib (STI571) has successfully been introduced in the treatment of the disease. However, intrinsic as well as acquired resistance against the drug have been described and have been recognized as an emerging problem and challenge in clinical practice, and a key issue in CML research. Most of the respective concepts focus on imatinib-resistant mutants of BCR/ABL that are detectable in a high proportion of cases. However, other factors also contribute to resistance against imatinib, including the genetic background, the biologic features of CML stem cells, gene amplifications, silencing of tumor suppressor genes, and various pharmacologic aspects. In this article, the mechanisms of resistance against imatinib and other BCR/ABL tyrosine kinase inhibitors in CML are discussed together with strategies to overcome and to prevent resistance with available drugs or with novel antileukemic approaches.
SKILL: a Lisp based extension language

This paper describes an experience with Lisp as an extension language for a large electronics CAD environment and the role it plays in software design automation. This paper is not about extension languages in general, for an analysis of extension languages in CAD, see, [HNS90] and [Bar89]. Cadence is a full range supplier of software based Electronics CAD tools.
A posteriori error estimators for linear reduced‐order models using Krylov‐based integrators

Reduced‐order models for linear time‐invariant dynamical systems are considered, and the error between the full‐order model and the reduced‐order model solutions is characterized. Based on the analytical representation of the error, an a posteriori error indicator is proposed that combines a Krylov‐based exponential integrator and an a posteriori residual‐based estimate. Numerical experiments illustrate the quality of the error estimator. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Green for God: Religion and Environmentalism by Cohort and Time

Previous research demonstrates that religion plays a significant role in understanding attitudes and behavior regarding the environment. In addition, studies also demonstrate value change across cohorts and time in postmaterialist attitudes. However, limited empirical evidence exists that considers both simultaneously. The advantage of the approach relied on here is that the model can estimate “true” change in “proenvironmental” attitude levels within each religious group by cohort and period while also testing the role of compositional effects on these trends. Our analyses demonstrate that support for environmental spending is the result of period effects rather than cohort-based change. Moreover, although support for environmental spending differs among religious denominations, changes are the result of periodic shifts that are experienced by all denominations. Thus, without any unique denominational shifts in support for environmental spending, the so-called “greening” of Christianity is not supported here.
The effectiveness of user-centric social interfaces on evaluating mobile recommendations

Many studies on recommender systems have focused on increasing their accuracy by enhancing the algorithms employed. Social perceptions, however, influence both satisfaction and perceived accuracy of mobile recommender systems. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the importance of including reasons for particular recommendations by examining the role of social presence and self-reference and their effects on user evaluations of mobile recommender systems. We performed a 2 x 2 experimental setting (Four experimental web pages with user-to-user and item-to-item collaborative filtering) which was used to manipulate customer perception of accuracy through social presence and self-reference. Social presence and self-reference were shown to be antecedents of perceived accuracy of mobile recommender systems. Additionally, perceived accuracy appeared to be a partial mediator of the relationship between social presence and satisfaction, whereas perceived accuracy appeared to be a full mediator of the relationship between self-reference and satisfaction.
Testing coupling relationships in object‐oriented programs

As we move toward developing object‐oriented (OO) programs, the complexity traditionally found in functions and procedures is moving to the connections among components. Different faults occur when components are integrated to form higher‐level structures that aggregate the behavior and state. Consequently, we need to place more effort on testing the connections among components. Although OO technologies provide abstraction mechanisms for building components that can then be integrated to form applications, it also adds new compositional relations that can contain faults. This paper describes techniques for analyzing and testing the polymorphic relationships that occur in OO software. The techniques adapt traditional data flow coverage criteria to consider definitions and uses among state variables of classes, particularly in the presence of inheritance, dynamic binding, and polymorphic overriding of state variables and methods. The application of these techniques can result in an increased ability to find faults and to create an overall higher quality software. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Semantic Interoperability on the Web of Things: The Semantic Smart Gateway Framework

The aim of this paper is to present authors' proposal regarding semantic interoperability for interconnected and semantically coordinated smart entities in a Web of Things. More specific, the paper presents a use case scenario and requirements related to the semantic registration, coordination and retrieval of smart entities. Motivated by these, the paper accentuates the need for, and emphasizes, a framework of Semantic Smart Gateways (SSGF) in the Semantic Web of Things (SWoT), proposing an ontology learning and an ontology alignment method respectively.
Groups' Actions Trump Injunctive Reaction in an Incidental Observation by Young Children

Children's ability to use social information to direct their behavior is key to their survival and development. However, in observing adult behavior, children are confronted with multiple forms of social information that may vary in reliability and adaptiveness. Two of the most well established biases influencing human behavior are: (1) following the majority (majority influence or conformity); and (2) the use of emotional signals. The current experiment aimed to evaluate how children respond when both information about the majority behavior of a group (descriptive norm) and attitudes of the group towards a behavior (injunctive norm, expressed through an emotional reaction) are present and what happens when they are in conflict. We used a method designed to mimic the manner in which children might observe group members' behavior during development. Novel apparatuses were constructed for which there were two discrete actions that could be performed to retrieve a reward. Three-year-olds observed four adults demonstrating one set of actions, followed by a fifth adult who presented an alternative set of actions. The first four adults' injunctive responses to this fifth adult's actions were manipulated between-groups: positive, negative, or neutral. It was found that children preferred to copy the majority action, regardless of the injunctive reaction of the group. We argue that this affirms the adaptive utility of copying the majority.
Accelerated Carbonation of Steel Slag Compacts: Development of High-Strength Construction Materials

Mineral carbonation involves the capture and storage of carbon dioxide in carbonate minerals. Mineral carbonation presents opportunities for the recycling of steel slags and other alkaline residues that are currently landfilled. The Carbstone process was initially developed to transform non-hydraulic steel slags (stainless steel slag and basic oxygen furnace slags) in high quality construction materials. The process makes use of accelerated mineral carbonation by treating different types of steel slags with CO2 at elevated pressure (up to 2 MPa) and temperatures (20 to 140°C). For stainless steel slags raising the temperature from 20 to 140°C had a positive effect on the CO2 uptake, strength development and the environmental properties (i.e. leaching of Cr and Mo) of the carbonated slag compacts. For BOF slags raising the temperature was not beneficial for the carbonation process. Elevated CO2 pressure and CO2 concentration of the feed gas had a positive effect on the CO2 uptake and strength development for both types of steel slags. In addition also the compaction force had a positive effect on the strength development. The carbonates that are produced in-situ during the carbonation reaction act as a binder, cementing the slag particles together. The carbonated compacts (Carbstones) have technical properties that are equivalent to conventional concrete products. An additional advantage is that the carbonated materials sequester 100 to 150 g CO2/kg slag. The technology was developed on lab scale by optimisation of process parameters with regard to compressive strength development, CO2 uptake and environmental properties of the carbonated construction materials. The Carbstone technology was validated using (semi-)industrial equipment and process conditions.