Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved High-Rate Space-Time Trellis Codes via Orthogonality and Set Partitioning

In this paper, we propose a new technique for designing an improved high-rate space-time code. The proposed code construction is based on a typical concatenation of a space-time block code and an outer TCM encoder. However, unlike the existing STBC-TCM schemes which are rate-lossy, the proposed designs enable full-rate transmissions, which is possible by expanding the cardinality of the available orthogonal spacetime signal points before concatenating with the outer TCM encoder. The classic set partitioning technique is then employed to realize large coding gains. We present several design examples of the new full-rate space-time codes for a system with 2 transmit antennas. Simulation results show that the new spacetime codes considerably outperform the original ST-TCM designs. For example, the new 4-state 2-bits/sybol QPSK spacetime code performs even better than the original 32-state design, while performance of the new 32-state QPSK code is only 1.5 dB away from the outage probability limit. Decoding complexity of the proposed M-TCM construction is made relatively low by exploiting signal orthogonality.
Student Learning Outcomes and Attitudes When Biotechnology Lab Partners Are of Different Academic Levels

Courses teaching fundamental concepts and methodologies in biochemistry and molecular biology can be beneficial for both undergraduate and graduate students alike. Should these courses be taught differently and separately to students of different levels? Anecdotal evidence has shown that students prefer pairing with someone of the same academic level. However, retention of main ideas in a peer learning environment has been shown to be greater when partners have dissimilar abilities. In our “Manipulation and Expression of Recombinant DNA” course, which can be taught as an advanced Biochemistry/Molecular Biology course, we tested the hypothesis that there will be enhanced student learning when lab partners are of different academic levels. Learning outcomes were met by both undergraduate and graduate students, regardless of pairing. Average undergraduate grades on every assessment method increased when paired with graduate students. Many of the average graduate student grades also increased modestly when paired with an undergraduate. Attitudes toward working with partners dramatically shifted. The work presented here suggests that offering dual‐level courses benefit students of all levels. This format is useful for institutions that wish to offer “boutique” courses where student enrollment may be low, but specialized equipment and faculty expertise is needed.
Multi-font Arabic word recognition using spectral features

We present a new technique for recognising Arabic cursive words from scanned images of text. The approach is segmentation-free, and is applied to four different Arabic typeface, where ligatures and overlaps pose challenges to segmentation-based methods. We first transform each word into a normalised polar image, then we apply a two dimensional Fourier transform to the polar image. The resultant spectrum tolerates variations in size and rotation of displacement. Each word is represented by a template that includes a set of Fourier coefficients. The recognition is based on a normalised Euclidean distance from those templates.
Optimized GPU based simulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on a MAC grid

The paper introduces an optimized GPU based implementation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations which are solved using the artificial compressibility method. The numerical scheme is based on a finite difference method. The domain on which the simulations have been performed is a backward facing step problem and the discretizations have been carried out on a MAC grid. The most time consuming parts, i.e. the computations of the velocities and of the pressure values, have been moved onto the GPU. Two separate kernels have been defined because there is no communication between the blocks of the GPU grid. Several optimization strategies have incrementally increased the performance of the two kernels. The most important ones are: coalesced global memory, reduced read and copy operations and optimum usage of shared memory. The results of the comparison between the CPU and GPU performance indicate a speed-up which varies from just under one order of magnitude for the coarsest grid up to two orders of magnitude for the finest grid.
Positioning Teacher Candidates as Self-Regulated, Critically Thinking Learners and Teachers in an Elementary Writing Course With a Tutoring Component

Few interventions attempt to foster teacher candidates' self-regulated learning and teaching roles concurrently. This chapter explores 12 education majors' development of self-regulated, critical thinking skills related to learning and teaching as they participated in an elementary writing methods course with a tutoring component. The instructor of the course devised and offered a four-step model of intervention to stimulate the teacher candidates' self-regulatory dispositions. The teacher candidates perceived their responses to context-specific questions created by the instructor as most beneficial to their development of self-regulated attributes.
Production of strange particles at intermediate pT at RHIC

The recombination model is applied to the production of K , φ , Λ and Ω at all p T in central Au+Au collisions. The thermal-shower component of the recombination is found to be important for K and Λ, but only in a minor way for φ and Ω in the intermediate to high p T region. The normalization and inverse slope of the thermal partons in the strange sector are determined by ﬁtting the low- p T data. At higher p T the data of K , Λ, φ and Ω in the log scale are all well reproduced in our study that extends the thermal contribution and includes the shower contribution. The calculated result on the Λ /K ratio rises to a maximum of around 2 at p T ≈ 4 GeV/c, arching over the data in linear scale. The production of φ and Ω are shown to arise mainly from the recombination of thermal partons, thus exhibiting exponential p T dependences in agreement with the data. Their ratio, R Ω /φ , rises linearly to p T ≈ 4 GeV/c and develops a maximum at p T ≈ 5 . 5 GeV/c. It is argued that the p T spectra of φ and Ω reveal directly the partonic nature of the thermal source that characterizes quark-gluon plasma. Comments are made on the Ω puzzle due to the simultaneous observation of both the exponential behavior of the Ω spectrum in p T and the existence of low- p T particles associated with Ω as trigger.
Evaluating Group Recommendation Strategies in Memory-Based Collaborative Filtering

Group recommendation presents significant challenges in evolving best practice approaches to group modeling, but even moreso in dataset collection for testing and in developing principled evaluation approaches across groups of users. Early research provided more limited, illustrative evaluations for group recommender approaches, but recent work has been exploring more comprehensive evaluative techniques. This paper describes our approach to evaluate group-based recommenders using data sets from traditional single-user collaborative filtering systems. The approach focuses on classic memory-based approaches to collaborative filtering, addressing constraints imposed by sparsity in the user-item matrix. In generating synthetic groups, we model ‘actual’ group preferences for evaluation by precise rating agreement among members. We evaluate representative group aggregation strategies in this context, providing a novel comparison point for earlier illustrative memory-based results and for more recent model-based work, as well as for models of actual group preference in evaluation.
Financial Valuation and Risk Management Working Paper No . 839 Approximating Stochastic Volatility by Recombinant Trees

A general method to construct recombinant tree approximations for stochastic volatility models is developed and applied to the Heston model for stock price dynamics. In this application, the resulting approximation is a four tuple Markov process. The first two components are related to the stock and volatility processes and take values in a two dimensional Binomial tree. The other two components of the Markov process are the increments of random walks with simple values in {−1,+1}. The resulting efficient option pricing equations are numerically implemented for general American and European options including the standard put and calls, barrier, lookback and Asian type pay-offs. The weak and extended weak convergence are also proved.
Heap Graph Based Software Theft Detection

As JavaScript is becoming more and more popular, JavaScript programs are valuable assets to many companies. However, the source code of JavaScript programs can be easily obtained and plagiarism of JavaScript programs is a serious threat to the industry. There are techniques like code obfuscation and watermarking which can make the source code of a program difficult to understand by humans and prove the ownership of the program. However, code obfuscation cannot avoid the source code being copied and a watermark can be defaced. In this paper, we use a relatively new technique, software birthmark, to help detect code theft of JavaScript programs. A birthmark is a unique characteristic a program possesses that can be used to identify the program. We extend two recent birthmark systems that extract the birthmark of a software from the run-time heap. We propose a redesigned system with improved robustness and performed extensive experiments to justify the effectiveness and robustness of it. Our evaluation based on 200 large-scale websites showed that our birthmark system exhibits 100% accuracy. We remark that it is solid and ready for practical use.
Revisiting the learning and capability concepts –building learning systems in Thai auto component firms

Summary The paper reports on an ambitious study in the Thai auto component sector. It reviews as well as extends the important concepts of firm strategy, learning, and capability development as proposed on one hand by development economics and economic historians and on the other by the resource‐based strategic management academics. This study makes three important contributions. First, it studies in considerable detail the development of nine firms, combining the in‐depth case study approach with the comparative analysis potential of multi‐firm studies. Second, it develops an analytical framework based on the concepts and insights of both latecomer firm literature and the strategic management literature (and particularly that from the resource‐based perspective). Third, it aims to not only contribute to conceptual frameworks for research but to develop a framework that can be the basis for practical management strategy. Additionally, the paper also touches on the policy implications as related to nurture firm learning. Finally, the paper outlines an integrated framework for a firm learning system in which there is a dynamic alignment between competitive strategy, learning strategies, learning activities, and learning mechanisms.
EFFECTS OF SOCIAL INTERACTION ON MORPHINE CONDITIONED PLACE PREFERENCE IN ADOLESCENT MALE RATS

OF DISSERTATION EFFECTS OF SOCIAL INTERACTION ON MORPHINE CONDITIONED PLACE PREFERENCE IN ADOLESCENT MALE RATS The fact that adolescents commonly initiate drug use in social settings is well established. Both clinical and preclinical research has investigated how social interaction is altered by a variety of drugs of abuse. What is less understood is how the rewarding value of drugs of abuse is affected by the presence of social peers. This dissertation aimed to investigate the interaction of morphine and social play on conditioned place preference (CPP) in adolescent male Sprague Dawley rats, using both behavioral and immunohistochemistry (IHC) methods. Rats were exposed to morphine (0, 1, or 3 mg/kg; s.c.), social interaction, or a combination of both and tested in a modified CPP procedure. Behavioral results indicate that, while doses of morphine used produced only weak CPP across experiments, they were sufficient to reduce the rewarding effect of social interaction. IHC results suggest that this finding may be due to reduced activation in NAc shell. Taken together, the results of this dissertation may help to provide an explanation as to why persons with opioid use disorder spend less time interacting with social peers, compared to non-dependent persons.
Geoportal as decision support system with spatial data warehouse

There is increasing interest of organization for advanced presentation and data analysis for public users. This paper shows how to integrate data from enterprise data warehouse with spatial data warehouse, publish them together to online interactive map, and enable public users to perform analysis in simple web interface. As case study is used Business Intelligence System for Investors, where data comes from different sources different levels, structured and unstructured. This approach has three phases: creating spatial data warehouse, implementing ETL (extract, transform and load) procedure for data from different sources (spatial and non-spatial) and, finally, designing interface for performing data analysis. The fact, that this is a public site, where users are not known in advanced and not trained, calls for importance of usability design and self-evident interface. Investors are not willing to invest any time in learning the basics of a system. Geographic information providers need geoportals to enable access to spatial data and services via the Internet; and it is a first step in creating Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI).
Synthetic X-ray light curves of BL Lacs from relativistic hydrodynamic simulations

We present the results of relativistic hydrodynamic simulations of the collision of two dense shells in a uniform external medium, as envisaged in the internal shock model for BL Lac jets. The non-thermal radiation produced by highly energetic electrons injected at the relativistic shocks is computed following their temporal and spatial evolution. The acceleration of electrons at the relativistic shocks is parametrized using two different models and the corresponding X-ray light curves are computed. We find that the interaction time scale of the two shells is influenced by an interaction with the external medium. For the chosen parameter sets, the efficiency of the collision in converting dissipated kinetic energy into the observed X-ray radiation is of the order of one percent.
Isolation of Rhodospirillum centenumMutants Defective in Phototactic Colony Motility by Transposon Mutagenesis

ABSTRACT The purple photosynthetic bacterium Rhodospirillum centenum is capable of forming swarm colonies that rapidly migrate toward or away from light, depending on the wavelength of excitation. To identify components specific for photoperception, we conducted mini-Tn5-mediated mutagenesis and screened approximately 23,000 transposition events for mutants that failed to respond to either continuous illumination or to a step down in light intensity. A majority of the ca. 250 mutants identified lost the ability to form motile swarm cells on an agar surface. These cells appeared to contain defects in the synthesis or assembly of surface-induced lateral flagella. Another large fraction of mutants that were unresponsive to light were shown to be defective in the formation of a functional photosynthetic apparatus. Several photosensory mutants also were obtained with defects in the perception and transmission of light signals. Twelve mutants in this class were shown to contain disruptions in a chemotaxis operon, and five mutants contained disruptions of components unique to photoperception. It was shown that screening for photosensory defective R. centenumswarm colonies is an effective method for genetic dissection of the mechanism of light sensing in eubacteria.
Posttranslational Protein Modification in Archaea

SUMMARY One of the first hurdles to be negotiated in the postgenomic era involves the description of the entire protein content of the cell, the proteome. Such efforts are presently complicated by the various posttranslational modifications that proteins can experience, including glycosylation, lipid attachment, phosphorylation, methylation, disulfide bond formation, and proteolytic cleavage. Whereas these and other posttranslational protein modifications have been well characterized in Eucarya and Bacteria, posttranslational modification in Archaea has received far less attention. Although archaeal proteins can undergo posttranslational modifications reminiscent of what their eucaryal and bacterial counterparts experience, examination of archaeal posttranslational modification often reveals aspects not previously observed in the other two domains of life. In some cases, posttranslational modification allows a protein to survive the extreme conditions often encountered by Archaea. The various posttranslational modifications experienced by archaeal proteins, the molecular steps leading to these modifications, and the role played by posttranslational modification in Archaea form the focus of this review.
Sensor network for detecting human's thermal comfort considering of individuals

This paper presents the methodology how to utilize sensor networks in order to predict human's thermal comfort and sensation. The neural network was dynamically organized on the basis of correlations with the thermal sensation of the occupants and many other values in the sensor network, and the structure of the neural network was updated cyclically. In this paper, the air-conditioning system in an office is used as an example. We place 21 temperature sensors and subjects in the indoor environment, and conduct an experiment where the sensor readings and the thermal sensation of the subjects are associated. Finally, the experimental results are shown, where unspecified sensors are chosen properly and used for predicting the desired value.
An online cost sensitive decision-making method in crowdsourcing systems

Crowdsourcing has created a variety of opportunities for many challenging problems by leveraging human intelligence. For example, applications such as image tagging, natural language processing, and semantic-based information retrieval can exploit crowd-based human computation to supplement existing computational algorithms. Naturally, human workers in crowdsourcing solve problems based on their knowledge, experience, and perception. It is therefore not clear which problems can be better solved by crowdsourcing than solving solely using traditional machine-based methods. Therefore, a cost sensitive quantitative analysis method is needed. In this paper, we design and implement a cost sensitive method for crowdsourcing. We online estimate the profit of the crowdsourcing job so that those questions with no future profit from crowdsourcing can be terminated. Two models are proposed to estimate the profit of crowdsourcing job, namely the linear value model and the generalized non-linear model. Using these models, the expected profit of obtaining new answers for a specific question is computed based on the answers already received. A question is terminated in real time if the marginal expected profit of obtaining more answers is not positive. We extends the method to publish a batch of questions in a HIT. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method using two real world jobs on AMT. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms all the state-of-art methods.
An Efficient Signal-Matching Approach to Melody Indexing and Search Using Continuous Pitch Contours and Wavelets

We describe a method of indexing and efficiently searching music melodies based on their continuous dominant fundamental frequency (f0) contours without obtaining notelevel transcriptions. Each f0 contour is encoded by a redundant set of wavelet coefficients that represent its shape in level-normalized form at various locations and time scales. This allows a query melody to be exhaustively compared with variable-length portions of a target melody at arbitrary locations while accounting for differences in key and tempo. The method is applied in a Query-by-Humming (QBH) system where users may search a database of recorded pop songs by humming or singing an arbitrary part of the melody of an intended song. The system has fast retrieval times because the wavelet coefficients can be effectively indexed in a binary tree and a vector distance measure instead of dynamic programming is used for comparisons. Using automatic pitch extraction to obtain all f0 contours from acoustic data, the method demonstrates practical performance in an experiment with an existing monophonic data set and in a preliminary experiment with real-world polyphonic music.
Inherently self-managed networks: Requirements, properties and an initial model

The complexity and dynamicity of networks continue to increase. Furthermore, specialization of network operations, the de-regulation of vertically integrated network operators, new demands from end users, as well as new business models for Over-The-Top players, give rise to new challenges and emphasizes that networking becomes ever more dynamic and organic in nature. To address these trends the research community has been investigating how to integrate management capabilities into the networks in order to meet the foremost requirements on reduced OPEX, but also to enable faster responses to agile business operations for the support of new value chains, applications, and services. These management capabilities are however envisaged as an add-on to the existing functionality. This would impose scalability, performance, and extensibility issues when such capabilities are deployed incrementally and ad-hoc. In this paper, we give an overview of selected recent advances in network architectures supporting self-management capabilities, and identify both their strengths and their limitations. This analysis provides input for a definition of the requirements and core properties for networks to become inherently self-managed. We then outline a generic model termed the “Netcell” that seeks to support the identified requirements and core properties.
In-pipe inspection robot system with active steering mechanism

We present a robot system for in-pipe inspection of underground urban gas pipelines. The robot is configured as an articulated structure like a snake with a tether cable. Two active driving vehicles are located in front and rear of the system, and passive modules such as a control module are chained between the active vehicles. The proposed robot has outstanding mobility offered by a new steering mechanism, called double active universal joint, which makes it possible to cope with complicated configurations of underground pipelines. Characteristic features of the system are described and the construction of the system is briefly outlined.
Government as a Mobile Enterprise: Real-time, Ubiquitous Government

Mobile communication technologies include wireless broadband, 3G cellular networks, near field communications whilst mobile devices such as 3G phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) now have the computing power equivalent to small laptops. Governments are considered candidates as mobile enterprises as they seek ways to interact with their constituents in a fast, efficient and effective manner, anywhere and in real time. However, these advances also present challenges, such as security, privacy and legal issues including theft and loss of these handheld devices, password cracking, data interception and viruses. This paper presents a modified model for real-time, ubiquitous mobile government adapted from the stages of growth model and the five (5) stage framework to take into account the rapid expansion and uptake of wireless technologies