Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How do middle school girls of color develop STEM identities? Middle school girls’ participation in science activities and identification with STEM careers

Author(s): Kang, H; Calabrese Barton, A; Tan, E; D. Simpkins, S; Rhee, HY; Turner, C | Abstract: © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This study explores ways to support girls of color in forming their senses of selves in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) during the middle school years. Guided by social practice theory, we analyzed a large data set of survey responses (n = 1,821) collected at five middle schools in low-income communities across four states in the United States. Analyses focus on the extent to which key constructs that inform girls’ development of senses of self and relations among those indicators of STEM identities varied by their race/ethnicity. Though the means of indicators sometimes varied across racial/ethnic groups, multigroup structural equation modeling analyses indicate no significant racial/ethnic differences in the relations of STEM identities, suggesting that similar supports would be equally effective for all girls during the middle school years. Girls’ self-perception in relation to science was the strongest predictor of their identification with STEM-related careers, and this self-perception was positively and distinctively associated with their experiences with science at home, outside of school, and in school science classes. This study argues for strategically expanding girls’ experiences with science across multiple settings during middle school in a way that increases their positive self-perception in and with STEM.
Hybrid metaheuristic for multi-objective biclustering in microarray data

Biclustering is a well-known data mining problem in the field of gene expression data. It consists in extracting genes that behave similarly under some experimental conditions. As the Biclustering problem is NP-Complete in most of its variants, many heuristics and metaheuristics are defined to solve for it. Classical algorithms allow the extraction of some biclusters in reasonable time, however most of them remain time consuming. In this work, we propose a new hybrid multi-objective meta-heuristic H-MOBI based on NSGA-II (Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II), CC (Cheng and Church) heuristic and a multi-objective local search PLS-1 (Pareto Local Search 1). Experimental results on real data sets show that our approach can find significant biclusters of high quality.
On Solving Travelling Salesman Problem with Vertex Requisitions

We consider the Travelling Salesman Problem with Vertex Requisitions, where each position of the tour is given at most two possible vertices to pass. The problem is known to be strongly NP-hard. The proposed algorithm for this problem has smaller time complexity compared to the previously known one. In particular, almost all instances of the problem are solvable in O(n) time using the new algorithm, n being the number of vertices. The developed approach also helps in fast enumeration of a neighborhood in the local search and yields an integer programming model with O(n) binary variables for the problem under consideration.
Low rank matrix recovery from sparse noise by ℓ2,1 loss function

In the last decades, Robust Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been drawn much attention in the image processing, computer vision and machine learning communities and various robust PCA methods have been developed. This paper introduces a new generalized robust PCA with emphasizing on ℓ2, 1-norm minimization on loss function. The ℓ2, 1-norm instead of Frobenius norms based loss function is robust to outliers in data points. An efficient algorithm combine augmented Lagrange multiplier is develops. The experiments on both numerical simulated data and benchmark picture demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art because our method needs less iteration and more robust to outliers in data points.
Uncovering text mining: A survey of current work on web-based epidemic intelligence

Real world pandemics such as SARS 2002 as well as popular fiction like the movie Contagion graphically depict the health threat of a global pandemic and the key role of epidemic intelligence (EI). While EI relies heavily on established indicator sources a new class of methods based on event alerting from unstructured digital Internet media is rapidly becoming acknowledged within the public health community. At the heart of automated information gathering systems is a technology called text mining. My contribution here is to provide an overview of the role that text mining technology plays in detecting epidemics and to synthesise my existing research on the BioCaster project.
Axiomatic Theory of Design Modeling

In this paper, an axiomatic theory is established for studying design. Using this theory, a formal model of design is derived to represent the syntactic structure of hierarchical evolving design objects and the dynamic design process. The axiomatic theory can be used by design theorists and computer scientists as a formal logical tool to model design whereas the derived formal model can be used by designers to organize their design activities and by software developers to implement various CAD systems. The axiomatic theory includes two groups of axioms: axioms of objects and axioms of the human thought. They address the character of two central entities in the design process: nature and the human thought. Two important notions derived from the axioms are structure and range operations, which naturally represent basic thought processes, such as aggregation and generalization, in the design process. Related work is reviewed to show the history of the axiomatic approach to the modeling of design. The future directions are also given.
Human Centred UI Design for Remote Interviews

Video conferencing is a typical setting where users interact with computers in multimedia. However, most existing video conferencing systems provide users with a very primitive user interface, which cannot be used to support structured human computer interactions and human-human communications. In this paper, we examine several different approaches to the design of multimedia user interface, in the context of remote recruitment interviews. In particular, we present TRIUMF, a videoconference system that has been purposely designed for use in recruitment interviews, and discuss its multimedia user interface which has been designed specifically to support a variety of users. We demonstrate how multimedia interactions and communications can be utilised to overcome many of the difficulties currently associated with remote video interviews, such as the inadequate visual information and the lack of any physical contact.
Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid cytokine bead array profile for prognostication of ventilated trauma patients

Aim of Study: Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is a common cause of mortality in trauma patients admitted to Intensive Care Units. The outcome of such patients may be dependent on local host immune response, which may be best reflected in studies using bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid. The present study was conducted to ascertain the cytokine profile of BAL using the cytometric bead array (CBA) in a flow cytometer and to correlate the levels of Th-1/Th-2 cytokines in BAL with the clinical outcome of ventilated trauma patients. Patients and Methods: BAL was collected from the patients with suspected VAP. CBA was performed to assess the levels of interleukin-4 (IL-4), IL-6, IL-8, IL-1 β, interferon gamma (IFN-γ), and tumor necrosis factor-alpha in the BAL samples. After acquiring the BAL samples on the flow cytometer, the results were generated using FCAP Array™ software. The cytokine profile was correlated to clinical outcomes. Results: A total of forty patients were enrolled during the study period. Of these, 12 patients (30%) had confirmed VAP and 8 (20%) patients had a fatal outcome. The levels of IL-8 and IFN-γ correlated significantly with the development of VAP and elevated IL-6 in BAL was associated with a poor outcome. Conclusion: A proinflammatory response in the form of elevated IL-6 and IL-8 correlated poorly with the clinical outcome. Th-1 response was significantly reduced in patients with VAP. A proinflammatory response in the form of elevated IL-6 and IL-8 correlated poorly with the clinical outcome.
Discrepancies between Multi-Electrode LFP and CSD Phase-Patterns: A Forward Modeling Study

Multi-electrode recordings of local field potentials (LFPs) provide the opportunity to investigate the spatiotemporal organization of neural activity on the scale of several millimeters. In particular, the phases of oscillatory LFPs allow studying the coordination of neural oscillations in time and space and to tie it to cognitive processing. Given the computational roles of LFP phases, it is important to know how they relate to the phases of the underlying current source densities (CSDs) that generate them. Although CSDs and LFPs are distinct physical quantities, they are often (implicitly) identified when interpreting experimental observations. That this identification is problematic is clear from the fact that LFP phases change when switching to different electrode montages, while the underlying CSD phases remain unchanged. In this study we use a volume-conductor model to characterize discrepancies between LFP and CSD phase-patterns, to identify the contributing factors, and to assess the effect of different electrode montages. Although we focus on cortical LFPs recorded with two-dimensional (Utah) arrays, our findings are also relevant for other electrode configurations. We found that the main factors that determine the discrepancy between CSD and LFP phase-patterns are the frequency of the neural oscillations and the extent to which the laminar CSD profile is balanced. Furthermore, the presence of laminar phase-differences in cortical oscillations, as commonly observed in experiments, precludes identifying LFP phases with those of the CSD oscillations at a given cortical depth. This observation potentially complicates the interpretation of spike-LFP coherence and spike-triggered LFP averages. With respect to reference strategies, we found that the average-reference montage leads to larger discrepancies between LFP and CSD phases as compared with the referential montage, while the Laplacian montage reduces these discrepancies. We therefore advice to conduct analysis of two-dimensional LFP recordings using the Laplacian montage.
Efficient personal identification using multimodal biometrics

For recent years, the use of personal identity systems using multimodal biometrics has been increasing tremendously in number of fields. Although the Unimodal biometric systems serve well in various areas, it is notable that they have disadvantages regarding security and accuracy. Multimodal biometric systems focus on combining more than one possible biometric technology in order to secure the applications to a great extent. This in turn resulted in the improvement of performance and robustness against fraudulent attacks. Personal identification plays a major role in any information sharing process. For this, the identification systems must be designed in such a manner that it should minimize the system error rates, susceptibility mimics and false match rate. Considering these factors, we aim at providing a new personal identification system using multimodal biometrics. The proposed system uses three of the biometric technologies in the process of identification: (i) Face recognition; (ii) Fingerprint recognition; and (iii) Speech Recognition. Here we discuss about the methods of feature extraction, fusion and decision used in our system and their advantages over other biometric systems.
Elfen Scheduling: Fine-Grain Principled Borrowing from Latency-Critical Workloads Using Simultaneous Multithreading

Web services from search to games to stock trading impose strict Service Level Objectives (SLOs) on tail latency. Meeting these objectives is challenging because the computational demand of each request is highly variable and load is bursty. Consequently, many servers run at low utilization (10 to 45%); turn off simultaneous multithreading (SMT); and execute only a single service--wasting hardware, energy, and money. Although co-running batch jobs with latency critical requests to utilize multiple SMT hardware contexts (lanes) is appealing, unmitigated sharing of core resources induces non-linear effects on tail latency and SLO violations. We introduce principled borrowing to control SMT hardware execution in which batch threads borrow core resources. A batch thread executes in a reserved batch SMT lane when no latency-critical thread is executing in the partner request lane. We instrument batch threads to quickly detect execution in the request lane, step out of the way, and promptly return the borrowed resources. We introduce the nanonap system call to stop the batch thread's execution without yielding its lane to the OS scheduler, ensuring that requests have exclusive use of the core's resources. We evaluate our approach for colocating batch workloads with latency-critical requests using the Apache Lucene search engine. A conservative policy that executes batch threads only when request lane is idle improves utilization between 90% and 25% on one core depending on load, without compromising request SLOs. Our approach is straightforward, robust, and unobtrusive, opening the way to substantially improved resource utilization in datacenters running latency-critical workloads.
A lightweight indoor localization model based on motley-keenan and COST

This paper presents a novel approach to WLAN propagation models for use in indoor localization. The major goal of this work is to eliminate the need for in situ data collection to generate the Fingerprinting map, instead, it is generated by using analytical propagation models such as: COST Multi-Wall, COST 231 average wall and MotleyKeenan. As Location Estimation Algorithms kNN (K-Nearest Neighbour) and WkNN (Weighted K-Nearest Neighbour) were used to determine the accuracy of the proposed technique. This work is based on analytical and measurement tools to determine which path loss propagation models are better for location estimation applications, based on Receive Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). This study presents different proposals for choosing the most appropriate values for the models parameters, like obstacles attenuation and coefficients. Some adjustments to these models, particularly to Motley-Keenan, considering the thickness of walls, are proposed. The best found solution is based on the adjusted Motley-Keenan and COST models that allows to obtain the propagation loss estimation for several environments.Results obtained from two testing scenarios showed the reliability of the adjustments, providing smaller errors in the measured values values in comparison with the predicted values.
A Gender Gap in Party Congruence and Responsiveness?

Abstract Congruence and responsiveness between the policy preferences of citizens and elites are considered key characteristics of democracy. Although these relationships between citizens and elites have been thoroughly examined, little attention has been devoted to differences in the representation of women and men in studies of congruence and responsiveness. Herein, I evaluate the presence of a gender gap both in terms of party congruence and party responsiveness with respect to the relationship between female and male supporters and the party they voted for. In addition, I examine whether the presence of elected women in parties decreases the gender gap in party congruence and responsiveness. My analyses of the data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and several national elections studies indicate that parties are generally as close and as responsive to the preferences of male supporters as to those of female supporters on the left–right ideological scale. However, the presence of elected women in parties favors women's representation and may thus reduce inequality in gender representation.
Control and communication mechanisms of a SoftRouter

The requirements on IP routers are increasing for every new generation of designs. The driving forces are growing traffic volumes and demands for new services. We argue that The SoftRouter architecture that separates the implementation of control plane functions from packet forwarding functions would improve the scalability, flexibility and reliability of future routers. This paper presents the design and implementation of such a SoftRouter, focusing on the internal discovery protocols and reliable communication protocols. In particular, a novel hierarchy error recovery algorithm has been applied and evaluated in our experimental environments.
Interplay of Working Memory, Strategy Use, and Task Difficulty in L2 Reading Comprehension

In pursuit of the precise mechanism by which working memory (WM) functions in second language (L2) reading comprehension (RC), the current study examined whether strategy use or task difficulty influences the role of WM in L2 RC. Eighty Korean adult EFL learners participated, and their WM capacity, RC performance, and strategy use were measured. The variable of task difficulty was operationalized by the relative difficulty of texts on which RC items were based. The results showed that difference in strategy use brought about significant difference in RC performance when the readers with insufficient WM capacity had to comprehend difficult texts, whereas no such difference was found with easier texts or among L2 readers with more WM capacity. These findings not only illustrate intricate interrelationships among WM and other variables in L2 RC, but also provide a noteworthy implication for L2 reading instruction that L2 learners with deficient WM capacity could benefit from active strategy use when faced with a difficult L2 reading task. The compensatory role of strategy and the necessity of remedial strategy training for the learners with limited WM is further implicated for L2 reading classrooms.
Ginkgo and Welwitschia Mitogenomes Reveal Extreme Contrasts in Gymnosperm Mitochondrial Evolution.

Mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) of flowering plants are well known for their extreme diversity in size, structure, gene content, and rates of sequence evolution and recombination. In contrast, little is known about mitogenomic diversity and evolution within gymnosperms. Only a single complete genome sequence is available, from the cycad Cycas taitungensis, while limited information is available for the one draft sequence, from Norway spruce (Picea abies). To examine mitogenomic evolution in gymnosperms, we generated complete genome sequences for the ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba) and a gnetophyte (Welwitschia mirabilis). There is great disparity in size, sequence conservation, levels of shared DNA, and functional content among gymnosperm mitogenomes. The Cycas and Ginkgo mitogenomes are relatively small, have low substitution rates, and possess numerous genes, introns, and edit sites; we infer that these properties were present in the ancestral seed plant. By contrast, the Welwitschia mitogenome has an expanded size coupled with accelerated substitution rates and extensive loss of these functional features. The Picea genome has expanded further, to more than 4 Mb. With regard to structural evolution, the Cycas and Ginkgo mitogenomes share a remarkable amount of intergenic DNA, which may be related to the limited recombinational activity detected at repeats in Ginkgo Conversely, the Welwitschia mitogenome shares almost no intergenic DNA with any other seed plant. By conducting the first measurements of rates of DNA turnover in seed plant mitogenomes, we discovered that turnover rates vary by orders of magnitude among species.
On the diurnal variability of particle properties related to light absorbing carbon in Mexico City

The mass of light absorbing carbon (LAC) in indi- vidual, internally mixed aerosol particles was measured with the Single Particle Soot Photometer (SP2) in April of 2003 and 2005 and evaluated with respect to concentrations of carbon monoxide (CO), particle bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PPAH) and condensation nuclei (CN). The LAC and CO have matching diurnal trends that are linked to traffic patterns and boundary layer growth. The PPAH reaches a maximum at the same time as CO and LAC but returns rapidly back to nighttime values within three hours of the peak. The number of particles containing LAC ranges between 10% to 40% of all particles between 150 nm and 650 nm and the mass is between 5% and 25% of the total mass in this size range. The average LAC equivalent mass diameter varies between 160 and 230 nm and the thinnest coating of non-light absorbing material is observed during periods of maximum LAC mass. The coating varies between 10 nm and 30 nm during the day, but is a strong function of particle size. The mass absorption cross sections, abs, de- rived from the SP2, are 5.0±0.2 m 2 g 1 and 4.8±0.2 m 2 g 1 , dependent on the optical model used to describe LAC mix- tures. The LAC contributes up to 50% of the total light ex- tinction in the size range from 100 nm to 400 nm. The esti- mated emission rate of LAC is 1200 metric tons per year in Mexico City, based upon the SP2 measurements and correla- tions between LAC and CO.
Reducing Verification Costs through Practical Formal Methods: A Survey

Verification of software can be as much as 88% of the total cost to deliver a high dependability system. Significant manual effort is often required to produce required verification evidence. Formal methods are believed to hold promise by providing a more automatic means of verification. Advances have been made in theorem provers and model checkers aimed to support the verification efforts, however there are several challenges in producing verification evidence when the requirement and design specifications use nonlinear and floating point constraints mixed with linear, logical, and bit constraints. Some tools apply strategies to produce tests to support verification, but the fault-finding effectiveness of the generated tests is questionable. Finally, practical means for composing formal specifications is important for constructing specifications that scale to large systems. This paper discusses the challenges, summarizes needed capabilities of formal method technologies, provides a survey of tools, with experiments to assess and compare capabilities, and finally discusses future needs to address some of the challenges. Keyword: model-based testing, formal methods, theorem proving, test generation, constraint solving, model checking
Performance modeling and evaluation of Web systems with proxy caching

With the rapid expansion of Internet use and the recent development of multimedia, improving the quality of the Internet is becoming a crucial issue. To construct a network system with high performance for cost, an effective analysis must be made of the characteristics of the traffic flowing on the network, the processing performance of the Web server, and the processing performance of the proxy server with caching functions, and the resources must be allocated with good balance. In this paper, we present a modeling and performance evaluation of an entire Web system, including the Web server and proxy server. In particular, this paper presents basic data on the processing performance of the caching function of the proxy server acquired by benchmarking. A model of processing performance is presented. Then, taking account of past results, a performance evaluation model for the entire Web based on the newly constructed model is presented. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 86(4): 94–106, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.1161