Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stability of queueing networks and scheduling policies

Usually, the stability of queueing networks is established by explicitly determining the invariant distribution. However, except for product form queueing networks, such explicit solutions are rare. We develop here a programmatic procedure for establishing the stability of queueing networks and scheduling policies. The method uses linear or nonlinear programming to determine what is an appropriate quadratic functional to use as a Lyapunov function. If the underlying system is Markovian, our method establishes not only positive recurrence and the existence of a steady-state probability distribution, but also the geometric convergence of an exponential moment. We illustrate this method on several example problems. For an open re-entrant line, we show that all stationary nonidling policies are stable for all load factors less than one. This includes the well known first-come-first-served (FCFS) policy. We determine a subset of the stability region for the Dai-Wang example (1991), for which they have shown that the Brownian approximation does not hold. In another re-entrant line, we show that the last-buffer-first-served (LBFS) and first-buffer-first-served (FBFS) policies are stable for all load factors less than one. Finally, for the Rybko-Stolyar example (1992), for which a subset of the instability region has been determined by them under a certain buffer priority policy, we determine a subset of the stability region. <<ETX>>
EFFECTS OF AN INQUIRY-BASED SCIENCE PROGRAM ON CRITICAL THINKING, SCIENCE PROCESS SKILLS, CREATIVITY, AND SCIENCE FAIR ACHIEVEMENT OF MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS

This study investigated the impact of an inquiry-based science program on the critical thinking skills, science process skills, creativity, and science fair achievement of middle school students. Although research indicates the connection between inquiry and achievement, there is limited empirical research relating specific inquiry-based programs to critical thinking, creativity, and science fair achievement in middle school classrooms. The research took place in a small, suburban middle school in the northeast from November 2010 to May 2011. A sample of convenience was comprised of seventh and eighth grade students. The study was quasi-experimental in nature, with a pretest-posttest comparison group design using intact classrooms of students. Five instruments were administered related to the elements of science process skills, critical thinking, creative thinking, and science fair achievement. The scores of those students in the inquiry-based science program were compared to those students in the traditional science classroom to determine the impact of each method of delivering instruction. In the multivariate analysis of variance, the inquiry instruction group
Analysis of sequential physiology data with weighted naive Bayes

In this project, I describe how I address the ICML 2004 Physiological Data Modeling Contest. For the gender prediction task, I compressed the large entry-based dataset to small session-based dataset and manually devised 90 features using a histogram method. Weighted naive Bayes (WNB) which is an extension of naive Bayes was applied and Markov Chain Monte Carlo was combined to solve the weight updating problem. The performance between the WNB and naive Bayes was assessed. Also explicit feature selection based on fisher’s discriminant ratio was applied for the newly devised features and the contribution for the subset of features on the accuracy was assessed. My experiment showed that WNB trained to produce much higher test accuracy up to 89.2% compared with 67.5% that naive Bayes can achieve.
Who Needs to Be Targeted for HIV Testing and Treatment in KwaZulu-Natal? Results From a Population-Based Survey

Introduction:Identifying gaps in HIV testing and treatment is essential to design specific strategies targeting those not accessing HIV services. We assessed the prevalence and factors associated with being HIV untested, unaware, untreated, and virally unsuppressed in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Methods:Cross-sectional population-based survey. People aged 15–59 years were eligible. Interviews, HIV testing, and blood collection for antiretroviral drug presence test, CD4, and viral load were done at the participants' home. Results:Of the 5649 individuals included, 81.4% (95% CI: 79.8 to 82.9) had previously been tested. HIV prevalence was 25.2%. HIV-positivity awareness rate was 75.2% (95% CI: 72.9 to 77.4). Of all unaware, 73.3% of people were aged <35 years and 68.7% were women. Antiretroviral therapy coverage was 75.0% (95% CI: 72.0 to 77.8) among those eligible for treatment (CD4 < 350, PMTCT-B) and 53.1% (95% CI: 50.4 to 55.7) among all HIV-positive individuals. Viral load was <1000 copies per milliliter in 57.1% of all HIV-positive individuals. Although 66.3% and 71.7% of people with viral load ≥1000 copies per milliliter were people aged <35 years and women respectively, men had 4.4, 1.8, 1.6, and 1.7 times the odds of being untested, unaware, untreated, and virally unsuppressed. In addition, people with more than 1 sexual partner had 1.3, 2.2, and 1.9 times the odds of being untested, unaware, and untreated. Conclusions:The majority of HIV-positive people unaware of their status, untreated, and virally unsuppressed were individuals aged <35 years and women. However, men were disproportionately untested, unaware HIV positivity, untreated, and virally unsuppressed. In this context, HIV testing and treatment should be prioritized to target young people and women, whereas novel strategies are necessary to reach men.
Positional Match Demands of Professional Rugby League Competition

Sirotic, AC, Knowles, H, Catterick, C, and Coutts, AJ. Positional match demands of professional rugby league competition. J Strength Cond Res 25(11): 3076–3087, 2011—The purpose of this study was to examine the differences in physical performance and game-specific skill demands between 5 positional groups in a professional rugby league team. Positional groups consisted of the backs (n = 8), forwards (n = 8), fullback (n = 7), hooker (n = 8), and service players (n = 8). Time–motion analysis was used to determine physical performance measures (exercise intensity, distance travelled, time, frequency, and speed measures) and game-specific skill measures (ball carries, supports, ball touches, play the balls, and tackling indices) per minute of playing time. The main finding was that the fullback completed more very high–intensity running (VHIR) because of more support runs when compared to all other positional groups (p = 0.017). THe VHIR (p = 0.004) and sprinting indices (p < 0.002) were also greater in the second half of a match for the fullback than in any other positional group. The hooker spent more time jogging than the backs and forwards (p < 0.001) and touched the ball on more occasions than any other positional group (p < 0.001). The backs spent more time walking than the forwards, hooker, and service players (p < 0.001). The forwards, hooker, and service players completed more tackles per minute during a match than the backs and fullback (p < 0.001). The fullback and forwards also ran the ball on more occasions than the backs, hooker, and service players did (p < 0.001). These results show that positional roles play an important part in determining the amount of physical and game-specific skill involvement during match play.
Comparisons of routing protocols for child tracking in Wireless Sensor Network

One of the widespread types of crime is child kidnapping where the number of cases is increasing each year. With the modern telecommunication technology, the child protection should be better now than before. This paper presents a preliminary study on routing protocol for child tracking using combined infrastructure of Wireless Sensor Network and Cellular Network. The real-time application in these networks would help the related parties to track the location of the missing child. From proactive point of view, the application would act as a preventive tool for child kidnapping. When the sensors in a Wireless Sensor Network detect child's presence, they have to transmit the data to an Access Point or the sink node in the network. Many routing protocols have been developed in the past, and all of them have their advantages and disadvantages. This paper shows the selection of a few routing protocols that are suitable for child tracking in Wireless Sensor Network, which will be improved and suggested for the use in the application.
Recovery from sedation during regional anesthesia

The use of regional anesthesia has been increasing for various surgical procedures. Sedation is required to promote patient comfort and to avoid painful emotional and physical stimuli. In the case of inadequate analgesia even after regional anesthesia, sedation may be supplemented by an opioid or a non-opioid analgesic to improve surgical condition. Various intravenous hypnotic agents can be used for this purpose as in conscious sedation or "monitored anesthesia care (MAC)" for diagnostic and interventional procedures; the centrally active intravenous hypnotic agents such as benzodiazepines and propofol are preferred to provide optimum patient sedation. Additionally, an analgesia-based technique employing ultra-short acting remifentanil has also been used to ensure patient comfort with or without administering a hypnotic agent in the intensive care unit. Dexmedetomidine, a selective alpha-2 agonist, has recently been widely used for sedation in various clinical settings [1]. The choice and titration of dosage should be carefully planned by responding to a patient's status and type of surgery, and the degree of sedation should be maintained to allow the patient to communicate with anesthesiologists throughout the entire surgical procedure [2]. While understanding the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic effects of commonly used sedative and analgesic drugs is necessary to provide an acceptable degree of sedation, their residual effects should be considered to avoid prolonged post-procedural awakening.
Detecting Amino Acid Sites Under Positive Selection and Purifying Selection

An excess of nonsynonymous over synonymous substitution at individual amino acid sites is an important indicator that positive selection has affected the evolution of a protein between the extant sequences under study and their most recent common ancestor. Several methods exist to detect the presence, and sometimes location, of positively selected sites in alignments of protein-coding sequences. This article describes the “sitewise likelihood-ratio” (SLR) method for detecting nonneutral evolution, a statistical test that can identify sites that are unusually conserved as well as those that are unusually variable. We show that the SLR method can be more powerful than currently published methods for detecting the location of positive selection, especially in difficult cases where the strength of selection is low. The increase in power is achieved while relaxing assumptions about how the strength of selection varies over sites and without elevated rates of false-positive results that have been reported with some other methods. We also show that the SLR method performs well even under circumstances where the results from some previous methods can be misleading.
Extracellular matrix dynamics in development and regenerative medicine

The extracellular matrix (ECM) regulates cell behavior by influencing cell proliferation, survival, shape, migration and differentiation. Far from being a static structure, the ECM is constantly undergoing remodeling – i.e. assembly and degradation – particularly during the normal processes of development, differentiation and wound repair. When misregulated, this can contribute to disease. ECM assembly is regulated by the 3D environment and the cellular tension that is transmitted through integrins. Degradation is controlled by complex proteolytic cascades, and misregulation of these results in ECM damage that is a common component of many diseases. Tissue engineering strives to replace damaged tissues with stem cells seeded on synthetic structures designed to mimic the ECM and thus restore the normal control of cell function. Stem cell self-renewal and differentiation is influenced by the 3D environment within the stem cell niche. For tissue-engineering strategies to be successful, the intimate dynamic relationship between cells and the ECM must be understood to ensure appropriate cell behavior.
Willpower and Personal Rules

We develop a theory of internal commitments or “personal rules” based on self‐reputation over one’s willpower, which transforms lapses into precedents that undermine future self‐restraint. The foundation for this mechanism is the imperfect recall of past motives and feelings, leading people to draw inferences from their past actions. The degree of self‐control an individual can achieve is shown to rise with his self‐confidence and decrease with prior external constraints. On the negative side, individuals may adopt excessively rigid rules that result in compulsive behaviors such as miserliness, workaholism, or anorexia. We also study the cognitive basis of self‐regulation, showing how it is constrained by the extent to which self‐monitoring is subject to opportunistic distortions of memory or attribution, and how rules for information processing can themselves be maintained.
Learning operational requirements from goal models

Goal-oriented methods have increasingly been recognised as an effective means for eliciting, elaborating, analysing and specifying software requirements. A key activity in these approaches is the elaboration of a correct and complete set of opertional requirements, in the form of pre- and trigger-conditions, that guarantee the system goals. Few existing approaches provide support for this crucial task and mainly rely on significant effort and expertise of the engineer. In this paper we propose a tool-based framework that combines model checking, inductive learning and scenarios for elaborating operational requirements from goal models. This is an iterative process that requires the engineer to identify positive and negative scenarios from counterexamples to the goals, generated using model checking, and to select operational requirements from suggestions computed by inductive learning.
A Pareto-Based Symbiotic Relationships Model for Unconstrained Continuous Optimization

Symbiotic relationships are one of several phenomena that can be observed in nature. These relationships consist of interactions between organisms and can lead to benefits or damages to those involved. In an optimization context, symbiotic relationships can be used to perform information exchange between populations of candidate solutions to a given problem. This paper presents an information exchange model inspired by symbiotic relationships and applies the model to unconstrained single-objective continuous optimization problems. The symbiotic relationships are modelled using the Pareto dominance criteria inside a computational ecosystem for optimization. The Artificial Bee Colony algorithm is used to compound the populations of the ecosystem. Four models of relationships are analyzed: slavery, competition, altruism and mutualism. Thirty unconstrained single-objective continuous benchmark functions with high number of dimensions (d = 200) are tested and obtained results compared. Results suggest that the proposed model for information exchange favors the balance between exploration and exploitation leading to better results.
Under Consideration for Publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming the Rise and Fall of Semantic Rule Updates Based on Se-models *

Logic programs under the stable model semantics, or answer-set programs, provide an expressive rule-based knowledge representation framework, featuring a formal, declarative and well-understood semantics. However, handling the evolution of rule bases is still a largely open problem. The AGM framework for belief change was shown to give inappropriate results when directly applied to logic programs under a non-monotonic semantics such as the stable models. The approaches to address this issue, developed so far, proposed update semantics based on manipulating the syntactic structure of programs and rules. More recently, AGM revision has been successfully applied to a significantly more expressive semantic characterisation of logic programs based on SE-models. This is an important step, as it changes the focus from the evolution of a syntactic representation of a rule base to the evolution of its semantic content. In this paper, we borrow results from the area of belief update to tackle the problem of updating (instead of revising) answer-set programs. We prove a representation theorem which makes it possible to constructively define any operator satisfying a set of postulates derived from Katsuno and Mendelzon's postulates for belief update. We define a specific operator based on this theorem, examine its computational complexity and compare the behaviour of this operator with syntactic rule update semantics from the literature. Perhaps surprisingly, we uncover a serious drawback of all rule update operators based on Katsuno and Mendelzon's approach to update and on SE-models.
Automatic detection of learning styles in learning management system by using literature-based method and support vector machine

Each learner has their own preferences in the learning process. Differences in preferences are closely related to the learning style of each learner. Personalization of e-learning is an overview of online learning that has been customized content based on learning styles of each learner. Detecting learning style needs a technique that is effective and accurate. This study combines literature based method with Support Vector Machine (SVM) to detect students' learning styles. The data used is learning log data of Data Structures and Algorithms class at the Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia. The test results showed that SVM has better accuracy compared to Naive Bayes.
Presence of Native Prey Does Not Divert Predation on Exotic Pests by Harmonia axyridis in Its Indigenous Range

In China, two invasive pests, Bemisia tabaci MEAM1 (Gennadius) and Frankliniella occidentalis (Pergande), often co-occur with the native pest, Aphis gossypii (Glover), on plants of Malvaceae and Cucurbitaceae. All three are preyed on by the native ladybird, Harmonia axyridis (Pallas); however, the native predator might be expected to prefer native prey to the exotic ones due to a shared evolutionary past. In order to clarify whether the presence of native prey affected the consumption of these two invasive species by the native predator, field-cage experiments were conducted. A duplex qPCR was used to simultaneously detect both non-native pests within the gut of the predator. H. axyridis readily accepted both invasive prey species, but preferred B. tabaci. With all three prey species available, H. axyridis consumption of B. tabaci was 39.3±2.2% greater than consumption of F. occidentalis. The presence of A. gossypii reduced (by 59.9% on B. tabaci, and by 60.6% on F. occidentalis), but did not stop predation on the two exotic prey when all three were present. The consumption of B. tabaci was similar whether it was alone or together with A. gossypii. However, the presence of aphids reduced predation on the invasive thrips. Thus, some invasive prey may be incorporated into the prey range of a native generalist predator even in the presence of preferred native prey.
Social determinants of identity in communities: A social capital- and social categorization-based approach – findings from Latvia

The article investigates the relations, in the light of new paradigms of economic development, between trust and economic wealth at the micro level in the Republic of Latvia, by means of a structural equation modelling-based approach and a framework combining social capital and social identity theory, in a rationale of cross-fertilization between social and cognitive science. Results are also tested against control dimensions reflecting relevant divides in Latvian society (residence place dimensions; ethno-linguistic belongings; educational differences). General results support the hypothesis of the existence of a causal path connecting personal wealth, institutional trust, social engagement and trust towards people. Results are found to be highly sensitive to the geographical and educational divide (but not to the ethno-linguistic one).
Heterogeneous modeling and simulation of embedded systems in El Greco

This paper describes the functional specification and verification portions of El Greco, a system for high-level, heterogeneous functional specification, efficient compiled simulation, and software and hardware implementation. Specifications in the form of dataflow graphs, hierarchical finite state machines, or a mixture, are supported. These specifications can be arbitrarily nested, as in Ptolemy. When dataflow graphs are placed in a control context, the graph execution is fully controllable; its execution can be restarted or suspended and parameters can be changed. We describe system modeling and simulation generation in El Greco and compare to other approaches.
Searching for cross-cultural, moral and ethical reality: A case of bribery in an international and entrepreneurial context

Through the use of an international business example where contract negotiations are involved, the authors illustrate how legal, perceptual, and cultural differences influence the ethical and moral reality confronting global business leaders. Absolutism and situational ethics are scrutinized within a case context to demonstrate how opposing views of ethical and moral reality can arise, particularly in a situation involving bribery. An extensive and intensive debate occurs between a purchasing VP of a large Korean company and the sales director of a small, entrepreneurial firm from the heartland of USA. Personal and cultural values are counterpoised through these two corporate agents in order to challenge the absolutist position of “right and wrong or black and white. ”
Spatio-temporal Block Model for Video Indexation Assistance

In the video indexing framework, we have developed a user assistance system in order to define concept models (i.e semantic index) according to features automatically extracted from the video. Because the manual indexing is a long and tedious task, we propose to focus the user attention on pre-selected prototypes that a priori correspond to the searched concepts. The proposed system is decomposed in three steps. In the first one, some basic spatio-temporal blocks are extracted from the video, a particular block being associated to a particular property of one feature. In the second step, a Question/Answer system allows the user to define links between basic blocks in order to define concept block models. And finally, some concept blocks are extracted and proposed as prototypes of the concepts. In this paper, we present the two first steps, particularly the block structure, illustrated by an example of video indexing that corresponds to the concept running in athletic videos.