Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Images of excellence: constructions of institutional prestige and reflections in the university choice process

Here, the narratives of a group of non‐traditional students who entered traditional UK universities are examined. A number of participants felt there was a kind of romance or exotic quality to the sights, sounds and smells of traditional institutions, which constituted part of the attraction. The process of becoming a student at an elite or traditional institution involved an oscillation between anxiety and ambition. Occasionally, students would become disillusioned with particular traditional universities, usually due to an act of rudeness—for example, a ‘snotty letter’ that deflected them. Yet their choices remained within the traditional sector. The participants subscribe to what Bourdieu called the ‘doxa’ or the largely unwritten rules of the overall game. The results confirm the recent interest in intra‐class differences and affirm the need to make sense of how individuals’ habituses can be transformed to accommodate the changes accompanying the move to university.
Scaling the Feeding Mechanism of Captive Alligator mississippiensis from Hatchling to Juvenile

Small changes in size can lead to potential performance consequences and may influence an organism’s ability to utilize resources in its environment. As the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) transitions between neonate, juvenile and adult habitats (ontogenetic niche shifts), there are inevitably dynamic changes in their feeding performance. This study sought to investigate the scaling of the feeding mechanism and its performance from hatchling to juvenile size classes in A. mississippiensis. Feeding events were recorded during March 2011 at Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge (Grand Chenier, Louisiana). Thirty-six captive individuals were randomly sampled, ranging from 30.5 cm to 91.5 cm total length, and feeding events were recorded using a high speed camera at a rate of 300 fps. Results indicated that many linear, angular and timing kinematic variables scale allometrically with cranium length; whereas maximum gape velocity and duration of feeding bout do not scale with cranium length and remain constant between these size classes. Although it has been shown that there is an isometric relationship between cranial elements and body size in A. mississippiensis, this relationship is not transferred to linear and timing variables of prey-capture events. These allometric relationships echo other investigations of scaling relationships such as bite-force production and terrestrial locomotion.
Long-term effectiveness of exercise therapy in patients with osteoarthritis of the hip or knee: a systematic review.

OBJECTIVE To determine the long-term effectiveness (>/=6 months after treatment) of exercise therapy on pain, physical function, and patient global assessment of effectiveness in patients with osteoarthritis (OA) of the hip and/or knee. METHODS We conducted an extensive literature search in PubMed, EMBase, CINAHL, SciSearch, PEDro, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. Both randomized clinical trials and controlled clinical trials on the long-term effectiveness of exercise therapy were included. The followup assessments were at least 6 months after treatment ended. Methodologic quality was independently assessed by 2 reviewers. Effect estimates were calculated and a best evidence synthesis was performed based on design, methodologic quality, and statistical significance of findings. RESULTS Five high-quality and 6 low-quality randomized clinical trials were included. Strong evidence was found for no long-term effectiveness on pain and self-reported physical function, moderate evidence for long-term effectiveness on patient global assessment of effectiveness, and conflicting evidence for observed physical function. For exercise programs with additional booster sessions, moderate evidence was found for long-term effectiveness on pain, self-reported physical function, and observed physical function. CONCLUSION The positive posttreatment effects of exercise therapy on pain and physical function in patients with OA of the hip and/or knee are not sustained in the long term. Long-term effectiveness was only found for patient global assessment of effectiveness. However, additional booster sessions after the treatment period positively influenced maintenance of beneficial posttreatment effects on pain and physical function in the long term.
Constructions of rural childhood: challenging dominant perspectives

This article reviews research on the lives and experiences of children and young people living in rural Minority world environments. The literature reviewed has focused on constructions of rurality in relation to children's experiences, most notably the rural idyll. Alternative constructions of rural childhood, characterised by dullness, horror and deprivation, are also apparent, and associated with insufficient rural activities, resources and transport, marginalisation and social exclusion. The more recent inclusion of children's perspectives on rural living provides a deeper understanding of rural childhood and challenges the dominant perspectives.
Measures of auditory-visual integration in nonsense syllables and sentences.

For all but the most profoundly hearing-impaired (HI) individuals, auditory-visual (AV) speech has been shown consistently to afford more accurate recognition than auditory (A) or visual (V) speech. However, the amount of AV benefit achieved (i.e., the superiority of AV performance in relation to unimodal performance) can differ widely across HI individuals. To begin to explain these individual differences, several factors need to be considered. The most obvious of these are deficient A and V speech recognition skills. However, large differences in individuals' AV recognition scores persist even when unimodal skill levels are taken into account. These remaining differences might be attributable to differing efficiency in the operation of a perceptual process that integrates A and V speech information. There is at present no accepted measure of the putative integration process. In this study, several possible integration measures are compared using both congruent and discrepant AV nonsense syllable and sentence recognition tasks. Correlations were tested among the integration measures, and between each integration measure and independent measures of AV benefit for nonsense syllables and sentences in noise. Integration measures derived from tests using nonsense syllables were significantly correlated with each other; on these measures, HI subjects show generally high levels of integration ability. Integration measures derived from sentence recognition tests were also significantly correlated with each other, but were not significantly correlated with the measures derived from nonsense syllable tests. Similarly, the measures of AV benefit based on nonsense syllable recognition tests were found not to be significantly correlated with the benefit measures based on tests involving sentence materials. Finally, there were significant correlations between AV integration and benefit measures derived from the same class of speech materials, but nonsignificant correlations between integration and benefit measures derived from different classes of materials. These results suggest that the perceptual processes underlying AV benefit and the integration of A and V speech information might not operate in the same way on nonsense syllable and sentence input.
Towards ASR Based on Hierarchical Posterior-Based Keyword Recognition

The paper presents an alternative approach to automatic recognition of speech in which each targeted word is classified by a separate binary classifier against all other sounds. No time alignment is done. To build a recognizer for N words, N parallel binary classifiers are applied. The system first estimates uniformly sampled posterior probabilities of phoneme classes, followed by a second step in which a rather long sliding time window is applied to the phoneme posterior estimates and its content is classified by an artificial neural network to yield posterior probability of the keyword. On a small vocabulary ASR task, the system still does not reach the performance of the state-of-the-art system but its conceptual simplicity, the ease of adding new target words, and its inherent resistance to out-of-vocabulary sounds may prove significant advantage in many applications
Automatic Test Generation from UML Sequence Diagrams for Android Mobiles

Automatic generation of test cases for functional testing is a challenging task. It involves complex sub tasks such as capturing user scenarios, parsing user scenarios to generate test cases, ensuring test coverage criteria, test script generation from test cases, test execution and report generation. In this paper, a method is proposed to generate test cases after parsing Sequence diagram and thereafter generating XML based test cases, and subsequently APK based test scripts for Android mobiles. A tool called Virtual Test Engineer (VTE) has been developed based on this method, which is used for testing several Android applications. In this paper it is explained how navigation through menu tree of Android mobile is achieved through a menu tree data base. The effectiveness of this method is discussed from experimental results. Comparison has been made of the proposed method with others and the proposed method has been found to be more effective.
A Chaos MIMO Transmission Scheme for Secure Communications on Physical Layer

A secure communication is achieved by upper layer applications such as common key or public key cryptosystems in current transmission systems. However, the security is never exclusive and the multiplexing of security schemes is highly effective, so a secure transmission scheme on physical layer is also important. One of the typical physical-layer schemes is a chaos transmission which produces a secure, safe, wired or wireless communication. However, the main drawback of the chaos scheme is an error-rate performance degradation. We proposed a chaotic convolutional code which improved the performance in the tradeoff with decoding complexity increase. Here, in this paper, we focus on the diversity property of multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) and propose a chaos MIMO transmission scheme to achieve the secure on physical layer, low error-rate, and low complexity transmission. The joint MIMO detection and chaos decoding is done by maximum likelihood decoding (MLD) at the receiver. We will evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme by computer simulations.
Learner Control, Cognitive Load and Instructional Animation

SUMMARY In order to investigate the influence of learner-controlled pacing in educational animation on instructional efficiency, three versions of an audio-visual computer animation and a narration-only presentation were used to teach primary school students the determinants of day and night. The animations were either system-paced using a continuous animation, learner-paced using discrete segments or learner paced using ‘stop’ and ‘play’ buttons. The two learner-paced groups showed higher test performance with relatively lower cognitive load compared to the two system-paced groups, despite the fact that the ‘stop’ and ‘play’ buttons were rarely used. The significant group differences regarding test performance were obtained only for more difficult, high element interactivity questions but not for low element interactivity questions. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Impact of Government Intervention in Pre‐school Provision

This paper looks at the impact of government intervention, the introduction of a voucher system, intended to expand pre‐school provision. Drawing on research designed to examine the impact of the Pre‐school Education Initiative during the pilot year in Scotland the authors argue that there have been significant changes in provision for under 5s and for the culture in which that provision is embedded. The paper identifies four kinds of changes. The first relates to what appears to be a substantial shift in what goes on in the playroom, in terms of prescriptions for practice and the curriculum. The second kind of change relates to the expectations which providers, parents and policy makers have for the purposes or outcomes of the provision. Thirdly there was a change in the parental role in pre‐school education and finally there were changes in the requirements for quality assurance and accountability.
Modeling Ideational Creativity in Groups: Connecting Cognitive, Neural, and Computational Approaches

Many creative activities take place in a group context, whether in short-term meetings, work teams, or by means of electronic interaction. The group creative process necessarily involves the exchange of ideas or information. Recent models of group creativity have focused on the cognitive underpinnings of this type of group creative process, primarily based on the group brainstorming literature. The authors describe an elaborated computational version of their cognitive model of group creativity and related computational models, and highlight some plausible neural bases for various involved processes. The major findings and theoretical perspectives in this literature are summarized and some potentially fruitful empirical and theoretical directions are highlighted. It is hoped that this comprehensive treatment can be a basis for integrating the present literature and providing useful predictions for further research on this topic.
An adopted child in analysis

SUMMARY In this paper I shall describe something of the analysis of a 12-year-old boy who was adopted at the age of 3 1/2 months, and I hope to be able to illustrate some of the difficulties that may arise in adoption. I shall describe the overall picture of adoption in this country, and how it has changed.
.... Mantanis, Lykidis: Evaluation of Weathering of Furfurylated Wood Decks after a 3-year..

Furfurylation is a modifi cation process carried out in order to improve the biological resistance and dimensional stability of wood. In this research work, a three-year outdoor weathering test of furfurylated wood was performed using the following wood materials: a deck of furfurylated radiata pine (Pinus radiata), a deck of furfurylated maple (Acer spp.), a deck of furfurylated southern yellow pine (Pinus spp.), and a control deck of Ipê wood (Handroanthus spp.) that was used for comparative reasons. The decks, without any protection or fi nishing, were exposed for 36 months in Karditsa, Greece in order to evaluate some physical and structural properties of wood such as colour, staining, distortion, surface cracking and end splitting. All tested decks exhibited colour changes that were perceptible by the naked eye and much higher during the fi rst twelve months of weathering. The three furfurylated wood decks showed smaller total colour changes as compared to those of Ipê control deck. In respect to surface cracking, furfurylated radiata pine deck generally showed minor surface cracks, while furfurylated maple deck presented the lowest degree of surface and end splitting. In overall, the furfurylated wood decks tested performed very well and showed no signs of black staining (except for the southern yellow pine deck) and no fungal or mould decay after three years of outdoor exposure.
Minimizing Converter Requirements of Inductive Power Transfer Systems With Constant Voltage Load and Variable Coupling Conditions

This paper proposes a combined design and control method for inductive power transfer systems that eliminates the need for overrating the converters in applications where the coupling conditions vary significantly during operation. The method is developed for series-series compensated systems with only one active power electronic converter and a diode rectifier connected directly to a constant voltage dc bus or a battery. The worst-case voltampere requirements are minimized by shaping the frequency characteristics of the system. Rated power flow during coupling variations is achieved by frequency control at constant voltage. Design guidelines are given to achieve close to unity power factor, constant current amplitude, and minimum switching losses for the converter over the whole coupling range. Due to the simple system configuration requiring only one active converter with minimum rating, the method is deemed particularly suited for high-power applications. The properties of the investigated system configuration are demonstrated by theoretical analysis and time-domain simulations. Effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method are also validated by experimental measurements from a small-scale laboratory prototype.
The Illusion of Post Hoc Autonomy

Veljko Dubljević (2013) resolves the “quixotic” nature of autonomy by drawing a distinction between autonomy as a political construct and free will as a metaphysical abstraction. According to Dubljević, while individuals are never entirely free from coercion (pressure from external influences) or compulsion (pressure from internal influences), this does not threaten the minimal or basic autonomy that is necessary for the exercise of self-determination; he explicitly states that only under total coercion and total compulsion is autonomy unrealizable. Dubljević is to be commended for clarifying the discussion in the bioethical literature on autonomy. However, his understanding of autonomy, particularly surrounding unconscious choice, remains worrisome. I argue that while a basic kind of autonomy may be all that is necessary for agency, unconscious influences on decision making remain a serious threat to autonomy. Dubljević holds that all actions that align with an individual’s long-term interests are necessarily considered autonomous actions, even if they are not the result of conscious awareness. Relying on perspectives rooted in political philosophy, he asserts that choices are voluntary if they can later be validated by informed critical reflection: “The long-term rational life-plans and intentions could actually be automatically (i.e., nonconsciously) followed, but if they could be endorsed after a period of informed critical reflection there is no reason to treat them as irrational or contrary to autonomy” (Dubljević 2013). But Dubljević’s conception of autonomy fails to capture the disingenuous nature of efforts to justify behavior. Post hoc rationalizations that play no role in motivating an action do not and cannot make the original decision autonomous. A theory of autonomy that relies heavily on post hoc rationalizations is problematic, since choices often exist in some gray territory of being incompletely free and can usually be rationalized one way or another. Let us consider the example of a patient named Jimmy who has been recently diagnosed with clinically localized prostate cancer. Jimmy has two options: active surveillance and immediate treatment. Active surveillance of the disease avoids side effects associated with treatment but leaves open the possibility of his cancer spreading or worsening. On the other hand, immediate treatment provides a permanent cure to his cancer but comes with the risk of long-lasting urinary, bowel, and/or sexual dysfunction. Jimmy may have equally salient reasons for both courses of action; indeed, either can be well supported by his long-term rational life-plans (e.g., to avoid reductions in daily quality of life or to live without the risk and fear of early death from cancer). Now, imagine that his physician pressures him with subtle framing tactics of survival rates into choosing immediate treatment.
cdpop: A spatially explicit cost distance population genetics program

Spatially explicit simulation of gene flow in complex landscapes is essential to explain observed population responses and provide a foundation for landscape genetics. To address this need, we wrote a spatially explicit, individual‐based population genetics model (cdpop). The model implements individual‐based population modelling with Mendelian inheritance and k‐allele mutation on a resistant landscape. The model simulates changes in population and genotypes through time as functions of individual based movement, reproduction, mortality and dispersal on a continuous cost surface. This model will be a valuable tool for the study of landscape genetics by increasing our understanding about the effects of life history, vagility and differential models of landscape resistance on the genetic structure of populations in complex landscapes.
Psychological capital: A review and synthesis

Summary The concept of psychological capital (PsyCap) has attracted a great deal of interest from both academics and practitioners and has been linked to employee attitudes, behavior and performance at different levels of analysis. Yet, the nature of the concept, its measurement, the factors that influence its development, and when and how it influences individual-level, team-level and organizational-level outcomes are the subject of continued debate in the literature. This article offers a detailed and focused review of the existing literature on PsyCap, with the aim of developing an agenda for future research. In particular, we call for researchers to pay greater attention to possible multi-level applications of PsyCap research, examine the underlying mechanisms by which PsyCap influences individual-level, team-level and organizational-level outcomes, and identify possible factors that may moderate the relationship between PsyCap and its outcomes. In doing this, we provide a roadmap for scholars to progress the development of the field. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Resilient routing scheme in mobile networks

In wireless mobile networks including vehicular networks, interference on communication links can repeatedly destroy routing paths due to mobility of nodes or sources of interference such as mobile jammers. This results in continual data loss and service interruption. To ensure long-lasting stable data delivery in the presence of interference in mobile environments, we present a resilient routing scheme that avoids high-risk nodes.
A multi-core based parallel streaming mechanism for concurrent video-on-demand applications

In this paper, we design a novel Multi-Core based Parallel Streaming Mechanism for concurrently streaming the scalable extension of H.264/AVC videos, which is called MCPSM. MC-PSM is able to serve lots of heterogeneous users who may utilize distinct terminals through distinct network interfaces to get on-demand videos from an ISP streaming server at meanwhile. With the concept of CPU scheduling- SJF (Shortest- Job-First) and multi-core based parallel programming, multiple streaming tasks can be executed in parallel using a proposed task dispatcher based on network connection speeds, video bit-rate and users' waiting time. Comparing with a normal-threading streaming approach, the average execution time can decrease effectively and CPU resources can be utilized more fully.