Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hybrid logics: characterization, interpolation and complexity

Abstract Hybrid languages are expansions of propositional modal languages which can refer to (or even quantify over) worlds. The use of strong hybrid languages dates back to at least [Pri67], but recent work (for example [BS98, BT98a, BT99]) has focussed on a more constrained system called H(↓, @). We show in detail that (↓, @) is modally natural. We begin by studying its expressivity, and provide model theoretic characterizations (via a restricted notion of Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé game, and an enriched notion of bisimulation) and a syntactic characterization (in terms of bounded formulas). The key result to emerge is that (↓, @) corresponds to the fragment of first-order logic which is invariant for generated submodels. We then show that (↓, @) enjoys (strong) interpolation, provide counterexamples for its finite variable fragments, and show that weak interpolation holds for the sublanguage (@). Finally, we provide complexity results for (@) and other fragments and variants, and sharpen known undecidability results for (↓, @).
Differences between students’ learning behaviors and performances of adopting a competitive game-based item bank practice approach for learning procedural and declarative knowledge

ABSTRACT Competitive game-based learning has been widely discussed in terms of its positive and negative impacts on learners’ learning effectiveness and learning behavior. Although different types of games require different kinds of knowledge to accomplish the task via competition, few studies have considered that knowledge types, such as procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge, might play important roles in competitive game-based learning. Also, some studies have found that learners with high prior knowledge gain benefits from playing games, but tend to develop declarative rather than procedural knowledge. To address this problem, the independent sample t-test was used to analyze students’ learning effectiveness in order to explore how different knowledge types in a competitive game-based item bank practice system would influence learners. Lag sequential analysis was used to analyze the learners’ behavior. The results show that learners with procedural knowledge (web programming) scored significantly lower than those with declarative knowledge (English) on the pre-test. However, the learners with procedural knowledge improved their grades to achieve a similar level to that of students with declarative knowledge on the post-test. The behavior analysis indicated that learners with procedural knowledge tended to review the explanation of the question and re-answer it, and used the competitive game-based item bank practice system more than the learners with declarative knowledge. It is concluded that the competitive game-based item bank practice system had a positive impact on learning effectiveness, especially for learners with procedural knowledge.
atalog: A logic language for expressing search and optimization problems

Abstract This paper presents a logic language for expressing search and optimization problems. Specifically, first a language obtained by extending (positive) DATALOG with intuitive and efficient constructs (namely, stratified negation, constraints, and exclusive disjunction) is introduced. Next, a further restricted language only using a restricted form of disjunction to define (nondeterministically) subsets (or partitions) of relations is investigated. This language, called atalog, captures the power of DATALOG¬ in expressing search and optimization problems. A system prototype implementing atalog is presented. The system translates atalog queries into Optimization Programming Language (OPL) programs which are executed by the ILOG OPL Development Studio. Our proposal combines easy formulation of problems, expressed by means of a declarative logic language, with the efficiency of the ILOG System. Several experiments show the effectiveness of this approach.
Complicated Grief and Art Therapy

Complicated grief (CG) has come to be a common enough occurrence in mental health treatment to warrant research, literature, and discussion of markers, causes, prevalence, symptoms, measures, and treatment protocols. Art therapy presents one possible mode of treatment for individuals suffering from CG, and yet few art therapists know about CG or have training in this area. A systematic review of art therapy programs and educational requirements showed no current standards or training requirements for grief or CG. Art therapists are master‘s trained clinicians who work with people with a variety of mental health challenges, and training in CG may benefit the clients art therapists serve. Incorporating a unit on CG into graduate art therapy programs may be an effective way of addressing this relevant topic and introducing it into the education of art therapists. The aim of this research was to elicit recommendations for CG education for art therapists by engaging professional art therapists in a CG workshop. Ten participants attended the CG and art therapy workshop and focus group; three participants were professional art therapists, two were art therapy master‘s students, one was a high-school student, and four were counseling master‘s students. After the didactic part of the workshop, participants engaged in an art-making experience, completion of an individual questionnaire, and a focus group discussion. I coded data with preset themes I took from the literature on CG and with emergent themes. I used the findings to generate recommendations for the field, which include teaching a unit or module on CG to art therapists during their master‘s training. This module should include a history of grief theory, CG definition, causes, symptoms, prevalence, measures, interventions, differential diagnoses, current research, art therapy
Who Acts More Like a Game Theorist? Group and Individual Play in a Sequential Market Game and the Effect of the Time Horizon

Previous experimental results on one-shot sequential two-player games show that group decisions are closer to the subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium than individual decisions. We extend the analysis of intergroup versus interindividual decision-making by running both one-shot and repeated sessions of a simple two-player sequential market game (Stackelberg duopoly). Whereas in one-shot markets we find no significant differences in the behavior of groups and individuals, in repeated markets we find that the behavior of groups is further away from the subgame-perfect equilibrium of the stage game than that of individuals. To a large extent, this result is independent of the method of eliciting choices (sequential or strategy method), the matching protocol (random- or fixed-matching), and the econometric method used to account for observed first- and second-mover behavior. We discuss various possible explanations for the differential effect that the time horizon of interaction has on the extent of individual and group playersʼ (non)conformity with subgame perfectness.
A CONVERGENCE CRITERION FOR RECURRENT SEQUENCES WITH APPLICATION TO THE PARTITION LATTICE

We prove a fairly general convergence criterion for sequences satisfying a linear recurrence (defined by an infinite triangular matrix). We prove that every sequence of positive numbers satisfying a nearly convex linear recurrence with finite retardation and active predecessors converges to a positive limit. Informally, near convexity means the coefficients axe nonnegative and the sum of coefficients in each equation is approximately 1; finite retardation means low order terms have little weight; and active predecessors mean that the immediate predecessor carries a weight greater than a fixed positive constant. We present an application to the asymptotic number of not necessarily maximal chains in the partition lattice. The coefficients of the corresponding recurrence are the Stirling numbers of the second kind. AMS 1980 classification numbers: 40A05, 11B37, 05A15, 06C10, 11B73
Ultra Rapid Object Categorization: Effects of Level, Animacy and Context

It is widely agreed that in object categorization bottom-up and top-down influences interact. How top-down processes affect categorization has been primarily investigated in isolation, with only one higher level process at a time being manipulated. Here, we investigate the combination of different top-down influences (by varying the level of category, the animacy and the background of the object) and their effect on rapid object categorization. Subjects participated in a two-alternative forced choice rapid categorization task, while we measured accuracy and reaction times. Subjects had to categorize objects on the superordinate, basic or subordinate level. Objects belonged to the category animal or vehicle and each object was presented on a gray, congruent (upright) or incongruent (inverted) background. The results show that each top-down manipulation impacts object categorization and that they interact strongly. The best categorization was achieved on the superordinate level, providing no advantage for basic level in rapid categorization. Categorization between vehicles was faster than between animals on the basic level and vice versa on the subordinate level. Objects in homogenous gray background (context) yielded better overall performance than objects embedded in complex scenes, an effect most prominent on the subordinate level. An inverted background had no negative effect on object categorization compared to upright scenes. These results show how different top-down manipulations, such as category level, category type and background information, are related. We discuss the implications of top-down interactions on the interpretation of categorization results.
The Effect of Employees’ Perceived Fairness of Performance Appraisal Systems on Employees’ Organizational Commitment

Previous researchers have paid significant attention to the effect of employees’ perceived fairness on organizational commitment. However, only few have specifically examined the employees’ perceived fairness on the performance appraisal system practiced in the organizations. Drawing upon the Equity Theory and Social Exchange Theory, this study specifically investigated the relationship between employees’ perceived fairness of performance appraisal (procedural justice, distributive justice, and interactional justice) and their commitment towards organization. The instruments used to measure the variables have been adapted from the previous researchers. A pilot study has been carried out in determining the suitability of the instrument and the research. This research used the probability sampling technique that is simple random sampling. Out of 155 questionnaires that have been distributed to the non-executive employees in Malaysia’s oil and gas industry, only 108 have been completed and valid for this study. The data were codified and analyzed by using SPSS. The results were basically in the form of reliability, frequency, correlations and multiple regressions. From the finding, interactional justice of performance appraisal was the significant predictor towards employees’ organizational commitment behaviors. Thus, managerial implications and directions for further research are discussed.
Figure-Ground Segmentation Can Occur Without Attention

The question of whether or not figure-ground segmentation can occur without attention is unresolved. Early theorists assumed it can, but the evidence is scant and open to alternative interpretations. Recent research indicating that attention can influence figure-ground segmentation raises the question anew. We examined this issue by asking participants to perform a demanding change-detection task on a small matrix presented on a task-irrelevant scene of alternating regions organized into figures and grounds by convexity. Independently of any change in the matrix, the figure-ground organization of the scene changed or remained the same. Changes in scene organization produced congruency effects on target-change judgments, even though, when probed with surprise questions, participants could report neither the figure-ground status of the region on which the matrix appeared nor any change in that status. When attending to the scene, participants reported figure-ground status and changes to it highly accurately. These results clearly demonstrate that figure-ground segmentation can occur without focal attention.
Packet analysis using packet filtering and traffic monitoring techniques

Malicious attackers intended to annihilate the availability of network server with threats such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Synchronized (SYN) Flood. The attackers usually make the server exhausted and unavailable in order to complete the TCP three-way handshake mechanism. Detecting TCP SYN Flood in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main problem in this paper. Anomaly detection is used to detect TCP SYN flood attack focusing in payload and unusable area. The unusual three-way handshake mechanism is also being analyzed. The results show that the proposed detection method using the combination of packet filtering and traffic monitoring can detect TCP SYN Flood in the network.
On-chip ESD protection design with substrate-triggered technique for mixed-Voltage I/O circuits in subquarter-micrometer CMOS Process

A new electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection design, by using the substrate-triggered stacked-nMOS device, is proposed to protect the mixed-voltage I/O circuits of CMOS ICs. The substrate-triggered technique is applied to lower the trigger voltage of the stacked-nMOS device to ensure effective ESD protection for the mixed-voltage I/O circuits. The proposed ESD protection circuit with the substrate-triggered technique is fully compatible to general CMOS process without causing the gate-oxide reliability problem. Without using the thick gate oxide, the new proposed design has been fabricated and verified for 2.5/3.3-V tolerant mixed-voltage I/O circuit in a 0.25-/spl mu/m salicided CMOS process. The experimental results have confirmed that the human-body-model ESD level of the mixed-voltage I/O buffers can be successfully improved from the original 3.4 to 5.6 kV by using this new proposed ESD protection circuit.
SIMAP - The similarity matrix of proteins

Similarity Matrix of Proteins (SIMAP) (http://mips.gsf.de/simap) provides a database based on a pre-computed similarity matrix covering the similarity space formed by >4 million amino acid sequences from public databases and completely sequenced genomes. The database is capable of handling very large datasets and is updated incrementally. For sequence similarity searches and pairwise alignments, we implemented a grid-enabled software system, which is based on FASTA heuristics and the Smith-Waterman algorithm. Our ProtInfo system allows querying by protein sequences covered by the SIMAP dataset as well as by fragments of these sequences, highly similar sequences and title words. Each sequence in the database is supplemented with pre-calculated features generated by detailed sequence analyses. By providing WWW interfaces as well as web-services, we offer the SIMAP resource as an efficient and comprehensive tool for sequence similarity searches.
Subspace projection based blind channel order estimation of MIMO systems

In this paper, a novel algorithm based on subspace projections is developed for blindly estimating the discrete orders of a linear finite-impulse-response (FIR) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, the number of subsystems that attain each order as well as the total number of inputs. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm applies to single-input multiple-output (SIMO) system order estimation. Simulations in the context of blind channel order estimation show good performance in comparison to existing schemes developed for SIMO systems.
USE OF MULTIPLE FILTERS FOR NOISE REDUCTION IN INSAR PHASE IMAGES

This paper proposed a new filtering technique to re duc noise in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interfe rometric phase images. A general multiple-filter structure is described whic h nvolves the use of multiple filters to eliminate noise from the original signal and reintroduce some of the details that are lost durin g this process back into the signal. Both simulated an real data is used in the experiment. The results obtained using this techniq ue shows that the performance of this proposed filt ering technique is better than other widely used filtering techniques for interfer og ams when compared with the number of residues an d evaluated against ground truth.
What Undermines Aid's Impact on Growth?

We examine one of the most important and intriguing puzzles in economics: why it is so hard to find a robust effect of aid on the long-term growth of poor countries, even those with good policies. We look for a possible offset to the beneficial effects of aid, using a methodology that exploits both cross-country and within-country variation. We find that aid inflows have systematic adverse effects on a country's competitiveness, as reflected in a decline in the share of labor intensive and tradable industries in the manufacturing sector. We find evidence suggesting that these effects stem from the real exchange rate overvaluation caused by aid inflows. By contrast, private-to-private flows like remittances do not seem to create these adverse effects. We offer an explanation why and conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings.
Hardware accelerated rendering of CSG and transparency

This paper describes algorithms for implementing accurate rendering of CSG and transparency in a hardware 3D accelerator. The algorithms are based on a hardware architecture which performs front-to-back Z-sorted shading; a multiple-pass algorithm which allows an unlimited number of Z-sorted object layers is also described. The multiple-pass algorithm has been combined with an image partitioning algorithm to improve efficiency, and to improve performance of the resulting hardware implementation.
Resveratrol improves salivary dysfunction in a non-obese diabetic (NOD) mouse model of Sjögren’s syndrome

Resveratrol is a natural polyphenol produced by plants in response to environmental stress. This compound has been shown to have pharmacological effects against a wide range of diseases including neurological, hepatic, cardiovascular and autoimmune conditions. The non-obese diabetic (NOD) mouse, in which loss of lacrimal and salivary gland function occurs, has been studied as an animal model for Sjögren’s syndrome. In this study, we confirmed that administration of resveratrol results in increased secretion of saliva in NOD mice. Although resveratrol enhanced Sirt1 activity, inflammatory cell infiltration was not affected. Moreover, expression of the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10 in salivary glands was enhanced in the resveratrol-administered group. Thus, we confirmed a novel therapeutic effect for resveratrol on salivary dysfunction in Sjögren’s syndrome.
Timing of plasmid cytokine (IL-2/Ig) administration affects HIV-1 vaccine immunogenicity in HIV-seronegative subjects.

BACKGROUND To investigate the potential immunostimulatory effect of interleukin (IL) 2 as a human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) vaccine adjuvant, we conducted a study of a plasmid coding for a fusion protein of IL-2 and immunoglobulin (IL-2/Ig). METHODS This phase I trial evaluated an HIV-1 DNA vaccine with the plasmid cytokine adjuvant (IL-2/Ig) in 70 HIV-negative adults. Subjects received placebo (group C), adjuvant alone (group A), vaccine alone (group D), increasing doses of adjuvant concurrent with vaccine (groups T1-T4), or adjuvant given 2 days after vaccine (group T5). RESULTS No significant differences in adverse events were observed between treatment groups. Cellular immune responses to envelope protein EnvA peptides were detected by interferon (IFN) γ and IL-2 enzyme-linked immunospot (ELISPOT) assays in 50% and 40% of subjects, respectively, in T4, and in 100% and 80% in T5. The median responses for groups T4 and T5, respectively, were 90 and 193 spot-forming cells (SFCs)/10⁶ peripheral blood mononuclear cells (P = .004; T4 vs T5) for the IL-2 ELISPOT assay and 103 and 380 SFCs/10⁶ PBMCs (P = .003; T4 vs T5) for the IFN-γ ELISPOT assay. A trend to more durable cellular immune responses in T5 was observed at 1 year (T5 vs T4/D; P = .07). Higher anti-Env antibody responses were detected with T5 than with T4. CONCLUSIONS Plasmid IL-2/Ig significantly increased immune responses when administered 2 days after the DNA vaccine, compared with simultaneous administration. These observations have important implications for the development of cytokine augmentation strategies. CLINICAL TRIALS REGISTRATION NCT00069030.
A minimum interconnection direct storage model of a neural bidirectional memory

This paper proposes an efficient and improved model of a direct storage bidirectional memory, IBAM, which directly stores the X and Y, associated sets of M bipolar binary vectors, and does not store the complementary memories. It requires O(N) or about 15% of interconnections with weight strength ranging between ±1, and is computationally very efficient as compared to sequential, intraconnected, and other models of BAMs of outer-product type. The effect of concatenation of vectors being stored, retrieval constraints and orthogonality issues and restrictions on the length, in bits, and number of vectors to be stored are discussed. It is simple and robust in structure, VLSI realizable, modular and expandable neural network bidirectional associative memory model as the addition or deletion of a pair of vectors does not require changes in the strength of interconnections of the entire memory matrix. The stability analysis of the proposed model has been carried out, which shows its superior performance, faster convergence and retrieval time, when compared to traditional sequential and intraconnected bidirectional memories. The analysis of signal to noise ratio, storage capacity, and performance of the proposed model has been carried out. Its performance has been demonstrated by means of numericals.
Effective instruction scheduling with limited registers

Effective global instruction scheduling techniques have become an important component in modern compilers for exposing more instruction-level parallelism (ILP) and exploiting the ever-increasing number of parallel function units. Effective register allocation has long been an essential component of a good compiler for reducing memory references. While instruction scheduling and register allocation are both essential compiler optimizations for fully exploiting the capability of modern high-performance microprocessors, there is a phase-ordering problem when we perform these two optimizations separately: instruction scheduling before register allocation may create insatiable demands for registers; register allocation before instruction scheduling may reduce the amount of parallelism that instruction scheduling can exploit. In this thesis, we propose to solve this phase-ordering problem by inserting a moderating optimization called code reorganization between prepass instruction scheduling and register allocation. Code reorganization adjusts the prepass scheduling results to make them demand fewer registers (i.e. exhibit lower register pressure) and guides register allocation to insert spill code that has less impact on schedule length. Our new approach avoids the complexity of simultaneous instruction scheduling and register allocation algorithms. In fact, it does not modify either instruction scheduling or register allocation algorithms. Therefore instruction scheduling can focus on maximizing instruction-level parallelism, and register allocation can focus on minimizing the cost of spill code. We compare the performance of our approach with a particular successful register-pressure-sensitive scheduling algorithm, and show an average of 18% improvement in speedup for an 8-issue machine model with 32 integer registers. Moreover, we show that our approach is effective and feasible for the aggressive all-path scheduling approach that is otherwise difficult to make register-pressure-sensitive.