Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A novel Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) system for in-home training of stepping ability: basic parameters of system use by older adults

Objective This series of studies was conducted to develop and establish characteristics of exercise videogame play in older adults. The videogame was a modified version of the popular Dance Dance Revolution (DDR; Konomi). Methods Participants aged ≥70 were asked to make simple step movements in response to vertically drifting arrows presented on a video screen. Step responses were detected by a modified USB DDR mat, and characteristics of stepping performance such as step timing, percentage of missed target steps and percentage of correct steps were recorded by purpose-built software. Drift speed and step rate of visual stimuli were modified to increase task difficulty. Results Significant linear relationships between stepping performance and stimulus characteristics were observed. Performance of older adults decreased as stimulus speed and step rate were increased. Optimal step performance occurred for a stimulus speed of 17° of visual angle per second and a step rate of one step every 2 s. At fast drift speeds (up to 35°/s), participants were more than 200 ms too slow in coordinating their steps with the visual stimulus. Younger adults were better able to perform the stepping task across a wider range of drift speeds than older adults. Conclusion The findings suggest that older adults are able to interact with video games based upon DDR but that stepping performance is determined by characteristics of game play such as arrow drift speed and step rate. These novel “exergames” suggest a low-cost method by which older adults can be engaged in exercises that challenge balance and which can be conducted in their own homes.
“I’m Not Married, Let’s Just All Look at Me”: SingleProfessional Malay Women’s Experience

Clearly for most people and most cultures, marriage is a pre-ordained path, the preferred social status and the sanctioned way. In Malay culture, most people cannot accept the idea that a never married ‘normal’ woman could be happy and satisfied with her life. To be an andartu (anak dara tua) or andalusia (anak dara lanjut usia) is still marginally acceptable in Malay culture. This paper explores the voices of single Malay women in Malaysia with 'single' being defined as never married and focus on the professional working women. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, 20 interviews were conducted using semi structured in-depth interviews. This research examines perspectives of these women on being single and thus highlights some of the negative emotional consequences of being single. The analysis revealed that the emotional consequences include feelings of loneliness, feeling of incompleteness and inadequacy, regrets of missed opportunities and anger at perceived harassment. As the delayed marriage of women aged 30 years and over in Malaysia is a relatively recent phenomenon, the research outcomes will have important implications to the extant literature on professional Malay women who have not married by relating to Muslim women in general and Malaysia or South East Asia in particular.
Técnicas de pruebas automáticas para algoritmos evolutivos

Resumen—El uso de pruebas automáticas es una herramienta muy útil para detectar errores en el código, pero el comportamiento no-determinista de ciertos operadores de los algoritmos evolutivos impide que los resultados sean repetibles, con lo que se suele considerar que no son aplicables. En este trabajo se proponen nuevas estrategias de pruebas espećıficas para estos casos. Las estrategias propuestas permiten comprobar las caracteŕısticas de los operadores, y hacer pruebas de bajo nivel sobre los operadores a pesar del uso de números seudoaleatorios. Para demostar el uso estas estrategias, se aplican a un algoritmo genético estacionario, comprobando cómo se pueden realizar pruebas automáticas sobre los algoritmos evolutivos. Palabras clave— algoritmos evolutivos, tests, pruebas automáticas, no determinismo, behavior driven development
Perceptual headphone equalization for mitigation of ambient noise

An adaptive perceptual equalizer for headphones is introduced. It estimates the effect of auditory masking while considering the characteristics of the headphones, ambient noise, and music. The system utilizes a psychoacoustic masking model to estimate the level to which the music should be raised to have the same perceived tonal balance in noise as it has in a quiet environment. Prototype testing showed that the most important task is to make the music audible in each Bark band. The compensation of the partial masking further improves the perceived sound quality. The system uses a microphone of a headset to capture the ambient noise. The equalization is implemented using a high-order graphical equalizer that does not require subband decomposition of the music signal. The proposed equalizer also retains reasonable SPL levels: in an example case, the maximum gain in one Bark band was 11 dB while the overall SPL increase was only 2.5 dB.
LISSA: A Serious Game to learn Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is a ﬁrst aid key survival technique to recover victims from sudden cardiac arrest. In this paper we present the framework of LISSA which is a serious game designed to teach and learn CPR skills. LISSA combines in a single framework computer-based simulations of CPR emergencies with the functionalities of e-learning platforms. Using UML state machine, diﬀerent emergency scenario can be derived by instructor and presented as problems that the learner has to solve in a game mode. All the actions and all the cases are registered in a database that can be consulted at any moment by the in-structor. LISSA can be used as a substitute or a complement for traditional CPR classroom-based instruction. It can also be used to educate laypersons who might not otherwise be inclined to attend a CPR course. The adaptive learning supported by LISSA makes it suitable to refresh and improve CPR skill retention over time.
Background model based on intensity change similarity among pixels

Object detection is an important task for computer vision applications. Many researchers have proposed a lot of methods to detect the objects through the background modeling. Most of previous approaches model the background independently for each pixel and detect foreground objects based on it. Then, it is difficult for the background model to deal with illumination changes, which cause significant intensity changes as in the case that a foreground object appears. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a new background model considering the similarity in the intensity changes among pixels. In particular, we classify all the pixels into several clusters based on the similarity of their intensity changes. Then, focusing on each cluster, we can easily identify whether the significant intensity changes are caused by foreground objects or illumination changes. This is because, if the illumination changes, most of the pixels belonging to the same cluster exhibit the similar intensity changes.
The State of the Faculty Senate: Roles, Responsibilities, and Senate Leadership

ARCHIBALD, JAMES G, Ph.D., June 2011, Higher Education The State of the Faculty Senate: Roles, Responsibilities, and Senate Leadership (111 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Valerie M. Conley Faculty senates provide a forum for the discussion of all issues of concern to faculty members. Research and theoretical knowledge regarding faculty senates‟ involvement in campus decision-making is limited (Minor, 2004). The principal purpose of this study is to determine if there are differences in the responsibility areas of faculty senate by type of institution and type of senate. The following research questions were investigated in the study: What are the differences in the responsibility areas of faculty senates? ; what are the differences in the responsibility scores of faculty senates? what are the differences in the number of senate members in faculty senates? ; and to what extent does type of senate, type of institution, and number of senate members predict the responsibility score of faculty senate? The data used in this study were extracted from The Faculty Senate Leader Survey 2009 (FSLS:09). The FSLS:09 collected information from senate leaders regarding the characteristics of the faculty senate and critical issues of concern to faculty at their institution. The sample consists of 434 faculty senate leaders identified in the search and were invited to participate in the Faculty Senate Leader Survey. Approximately 207 senate leaders of master‟s institutions and doctoral institutions in the United States responded to the survey. A total of 105 senate leaders of master‟s institutions and 102 senate leaders of doctoral institutions completed the Faculty
R&D Performance, Collaborative Arrangements and the Market for Know-How: A Test of the "Lemons" Hypothesis in Biotechnology

This paper examines the relative performance of vertically integrated projects versus collaborative projects in the bio-pharmaceuticals industry. Using Akerlof’s (1970) model of the impact of asymmetric information on quality, this paper suggests that a potential “lemons” problem exists in the market-for-know-how. It hypothesizes that projects with poorer prospects for reaching the market tend to be licensed to collaborative partners while those with better prospects are commercialized internally. This hypothesis is tested with data on 260 bio-pharmaceutical projects that have either been successfully completed or terminated in progress over the past 15 years. After controlling for a variety of factors, the paper shows evidence of an apparent “lemons” problem in the market-for-know-how in biotechnology: the rate of termination for partnered projects is significantly higher than the failure rate of projects undertaken via vertical integration. Further empirical analysis also suggests that the higher rate of failure of partnered projects is attributable to ex ante project selection biases rather than differences in ex post execution of partnered versus nonpartnered projects. Implications for technology strategy and future research are discussed.
Comparing local search with respect to genetic evolution to detect intrusions in computer networks

The detection of intrusions over computer networks (i.e., network access by non-authorized users) can be cast to the task of detecting anomalous patterns of network traffic. In this case, models of normal traffic have to be determined and compared against the current network traffic. Data mining systems based on genetic algorithms can contribute powerful search techniques for the acquisition of patterns of the network traffic from the large amount of data made available by audit tools. We compare models of network traffic acquired by a system based on a distributed genetic algorithm with the ones acquired by a system based on greedy heuristics. Also we provide an empirical proof that representation change of the network data can result in a significant increase in the classification performances of the traffic models. Network data made available from the Information Exploration Shootout project and the 1998 DARPA Intrusion Detection Evaluation have been chosen as experimental testbed.
Abortable and query-abortable objects and their efficient implementation

We introduce abortable and query-abortable objects, intended for asynchronous shared-memory systems with low contention. These objects behave like ordinary objects when accessed sequentially, but may abort operations when accessed concurrently. An aborted operation may or may not take effect, i.e., cause a state transition, and it returns no indication of which possibility occurred. Since this uncertainty is problematic, a query-abortable object supports a QUERY operation that each process can use to determine its last non-QUERY operation on the object that caused a state transition, and the response associated with this state transition. Query-abortable objects can easily implement obstruction-free objects (introduced by Herlihy, Luchangco and Moir) and pausable objects (introduced by Attiya, Guerraoui and Kouznetsov). We present universal constructions for abortable and query-abortable objects that use only abortable registers -- registers that are strictly weaker than safe registers. Our universal constructions are novel and efficient in the number of registers used. Specifically, they are based on a simple time stamping mechanism for detecting concurrent executions, and in systems with n processes, they use only 2n abortable registers. It is worth noting that our results imply that any obstruction-free object and any pausable object can be implemented using only 2n abortable registers. Finally, we identify a potential problem with correctness properties based on step contention: with such properties, the composition of correct object implementations may result in an implementation that is not correct. In other words, implementations defined in terms of step contention are not always composable. To avoid this problem, we use interval contention to define the correct behaviour of abortable and query-abortable objects.
Virtual machine mapping policy based on load balancing in private cloud environment

The virtual machine allocation problem is the key to build a private cloud environment. This paper presents a virtual machine mapping policy based on multi-resource load balancing. It uses the resource consumption of the running virtual machine and the self-adaptive weighted approach, which resolves the load balancing conflicts of each independent resource caused by different demand for resources of cloud applications. Meanwhile, it uses probability approach to ease the problem of load crowding in the concurrent users scene. The experiments and comparative analysis show that this policy achieves the better effect than existing approach.
IMPLEMENTASI METODE MENDONGENG DALAM MENGEMBANGKAN POTENSI SISWA SD

ABSTRACT The purpose of research to determine the impact of storytelling to develop the potential of students, especially the moral potential. In grade 3 elementary school students. This research uses qualitative method. Data obtained through observation, interview and documentation. The research location is located at SDN 1 Sangiangtanjung, kp. Balepunah Rangkasbitung Lebak-Banten. The results show that effective storytelling methods to develop the potential that students have especially the moral potential. Through this method students learn the norms without feeling taught or lectured, they are doctrinated about good morals without feeling indoctrinated. Through the fairy tale method also the child's right brain honed to develop creativity, imagination, imagination. By sharpening the child's moral potential from an early age, we are creating a nation-state that is juju, creative, independent and dignified for a better Indonesia. Keywords : Fairy Tale, Potential ABSTRAK Tujuan penelitian untuk mengetahui dampak mendongeng untuk mengembangkan potensi yang dimiliki siswa, khususnya potensi moral. Pada siswa SD kelas 3. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif. Data yang diperoleh melalui observasi, wawancara dan dokumentasi. Lokasi penelitian terletak di SDN 1 Sangiangtanjung, kp. Balepunah Rangkasbitung Lebak-Banten. Hasil menunjukan bahwa metode mendongeng efektif untuk mengembangkan potensi yang siswa miliki khususnya potensi moral. Melalui metode ini siswa belajar norma-norma tanpa merasa diajari ataupun diceramahi, mereka didoktrin tentang moral yang baik tanpa merasa terdoktrin. Melalui metode dongeng pula otak kanan anak diasah untuk mengembangkan kreatifitas, imajinasi, daya khayal. Dengan mengasah potensi moral anak sejak dini, kita membentuk generasi bangsa yang juju, kreatif, mandiri dan bermartabat untuk Indonesia yang lebih baik. Kata kunci: Dongeng, Potensi
The Optimal Production of an Exhaustible Resource

This paper examines the optimal production of a resource such as oil when its price is determined exogenously (e.g. by a cartel such as OPEC), and is subject to stochastic fluctuations away frdm an expected growth path. We first examine the dependence of production on extraction cost, and show that the conventional exponential decline curve is indeed optimal if marginal cost is constant with respect to the rate of extraction but is a hyperbolic function of the reserve level. We next show that uncertainty about future price affects the optimal production rate in two ways. First, if marginal cost is a convex (concave) function of the rate of production, stochastic fluctuations in price raise (lower) average cost over time, so that there is an incentive to speed up (slow down) production. Second, the "option" value of the reserve, i.e. the ability to withhold production indefinitely and never incur the cost of extraction, provides an incentive to slow down the rate of production.
A Priority Based Bandwidth Reservation Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

In wireless mesh networks, when compared with traditional applications, multimedia application requires the need of inflexible Quality of services (QoS) for high speed digital audio and videos. Under such a condition, the need of proper resource allocation is extremely handy. In this paper, we propose to develop a Priority Based Bandwidth Reservation Protocol (PBRP) for wireless mesh networks. Our protocol consists of two phases namely Bandwidth Request phase and Bandwidth Reply phase. In the former Phase, a Bandwidth Request (BREQ) message is forwarded from the node that requests the admission of a new traffic flow to its destination. In the later Phase, a Bandwidth Reply (BREP) message proceeds backwards, hop-byhop, from the destination node to the node that originated the request along the path laid down by the corresponding (BREQ) message. The destination node precedes the reply according to the priority of traffic classes and reserves the bandwidth on the reply path. By simulation results, we show that our proposed protocol achieves high bandwidth utilization and throughput with reduced delay, when compared with existing technique.
A Traveling Salesman's Approach to Clustering Gene Expression Data

Given a matrix of values, rearrangement clustering involves rearranging the rows of the matrix and identifying cluster boundaries within the linear ordering of the rows. The TSP+k algorithm for rearrangement clustering was presented in [3] and its implementation is described in this note. Using this code, we solve a 2,467-gene expression data clustering problem and identify “good” clusters that contain close to eight times the number of genes that were clustered by Eisen et al. (1998). Furthermore, we identify 106 functional groups that were overlooked in that paper. We make our implementation available to the general public for applications of gene expression data analysis. Availability: C++ source code is freely available at http://www.climer.us and http://www.cse.wustl.edu/∼zhang/ projects/software.html. Contact: sharlee@climer.us, zhang@cse.wustl.edu. Supplementary information: Algorithm and implementation details can be found at http://www.climer.us/paper08.pdf.
Parallel virtual machines with RPython

The RPython framework takes an interpreter for a dynamic language as its input and produces a Virtual Machine (VM) for that language. RPython is being used to develop PyPy, a high-performance Python interpreter. However, the produced VM does not support parallel execution since the framework relies on a Global Interpreter Lock (GIL): PyPy serialises the execution of multi-threaded Python programs. We describe the rationale and design of a new parallel execution model for RPython that allows the generation of parallel virtual machines while leaving the language semantics unchanged. This model then allows different implementations of concurrency control, and we discuss an implementation based on a GIL and an implementation based on Software Transactional Memory (STM). To evaluate the benefits of either choice, we adapt PyPy to work with both implementations (GIL and STM). The evaluation shows that PyPy with STM improves the runtime of a set of multi-threaded Python programs over PyPy with a GIL by factors in the range of 1.87x up to 5.96x when executing on a processor with 8 cores.
Rate-achievability strategies for two-hop interference flows

We consider a basic model for two-hop transmissions of two information flows which interfere with each other. In this model, two sources simultaneously transmit to two relays (in the first hop), which then simultaneously transmit to two destinations (in the second hop). While the transmission during the first hop is essentially the transmission over a classical interference channel, the transmission in the second hop enjoys an interesting advantage. Specifically, as a byproduct of the Han-Kobayashi transmission scheme applied to the first hop, each of the relays (in the second hop) has access to some of the data that is intended to the other destination, in addition to its own data. As recently observed by Simeone et al., this opens the door to cooperation between the relays. In this paper, we observe that the cooperation can take the form of distributed MIMO broadcast, thus greatly enhancing its effectiveness at high SNR. However, since each relay is only aware of part of the data beyond its own, full cooperation is not possible. We propose several approaches that combine MIMO broadcast strategies (including ldquodirty paperrdquo) with standard non-cooperative strategies for the interference channel. Numerical results are provided, which indicate that our approaches provide substantial benefits at high SNR.
Determining Phenological Patterns Associated with the Onset of Senescence in a Wheat MAGIC Mapping Population

The appropriate timing of developmental transitions is critical for adapting many crops to their local climatic conditions. Therefore, understanding the genetic basis of different aspects of phenology could be useful in highlighting mechanisms underpinning adaptation, with implications in breeding for climate change. For bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), the transition from vegetative to reproductive growth, the start and rate of leaf senescence and the relative timing of different stages of flowering and grain filling all contribute to plant performance. In this study we screened under Smart house conditions a large, multi-founder “NIAB elite MAGIC” wheat population, to evaluate the genetic elements that influence the timing of developmental stages in European elite varieties. This panel of recombinant inbred lines was derived from eight parents that are or recently have been grown commercially in the UK and Northern Europe. We undertook a detailed temporal phenotypic analysis under Smart house conditions of the population and its parents, to try to identify known or novel Quantitative Trait Loci associated with variation in the timing of key phenological stages in senescence. This analysis resulted in the detection of QTL interactions with novel traits such the time between “half of ear emergence above flag leaf ligule” and the onset of senescence at the flag leaf as well as traits associated with plant morphology such as stem height. In addition, strong correlations between several traits and the onset of senescence of the flag leaf were identified. This work establishes the value of systematically phenotyping genetically unstructured populations to reveal the genetic architecture underlying morphological variation in commercial wheat.