Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Les expériences de victimisation des jeunes à travers le prisme de l’intersectionnalité

Le racisme, l’hétérosexisme et le cissexisme sont des formes d’oppression qui exposent les jeunes racisés, les jeunes de la diversité sexuelle et les jeunes trans ou en questionnement de leur identité de genre à de la violence. Nous inspirant de la théorie de l’intersectionnalité, nous avons exploré les expériences de victimisation vécues par les jeunes sur une période de 12 mois en fonction de ces formes d’oppression. L’échantillon analysé est composé de 2 276 personnes âgées de 14 à 23 ans recrutées à travers le Québec. Les résultats ont révélé que les personnes non hétérosexuelles, trans ou en questionnement étaient plus susceptibles de rapporter de la victimisation sur les sept indicateurs mesurés, et ce, d’autant plus si elles étaient racisées. Ces résultats révèlent la vulnérabilité de ces jeunes et illustrent la pertinence d’une approche intersectionnelle pour mieux appréhender leurs expériences de victimisation.
Nonverbal communication in multiplayer game worlds

In this paper, methods for nonverbal communication in digital games and virtual worlds are explored as alternatives to chat and other text-based forms of communication. Inspired by pre-linguistic societies and pictographic languages, the design of a new system called 'symbolchat' for virtual worlds is described. An online game is developed that uses this system at various levels in the game world. Reflecting upon the design and development of this system, and observation of it in use by players the application and role of nonverbal communication in digital games and virtual worlds is explored.
Constraint modeling for curriculum planning and validation

Curricula authoring is a complex process, involving different actors and different kinds of knowledge. Learners aim at acquiring expertise about some topic of their own interest, and need to perceive that the curriculum they attend will lead them toward their goal; when this does not happen, they become demotivated. Learners are all different, not only in their aims but also in their background knowledge and skills; curricula must carefully be tailored to the learner's individual traits: when this does not happen, curricula are not effective from a pedagogical perspective. On the other hand, it is not possible to leave learners alone in the design of a curriculum because this activity involves both knowledge about thetopics to teach, and knowledge about teaching itself. It is one of the tasks of the school to support curricula authoring so as to guarantee the correctness of the result w.r. t. the teaching goals and to pedagogical strategies. In this article, we face the problem of authoring personalized curricula and propose a modular, layered architecture that accounts for the representation of learning resources, of the domain model, of the learner, and of pedagogical constraints, with the aim of supporting different validation tasks. The representation combines a Semantic Web approach to annotation with a declarative representation in linear temporal logic. The validation layer of the proposed architecture includes different kinds of inter-conceptual, post-construction verifications, all of which can be realized by means of model checking techniques. The article also reports about a prototype implementation based on the Personal Reader for education, a framework that supplies to its users personalization functionalities implemented in a service-oriented fashion.
'Open' Disclosure of Innovations, Incentives and Follow-on Reuse: Theory on Processes of Cumulative Innovation and a Field Experiment in Computational Biology

Most of society's innovation systems – academic science, the patent system, open source, etc. – are “open” in the sense that they are designed to facilitate knowledge disclosure among innovators. An essential difference across innovation systems is whether disclosure is of intermediate progress and solutions or of completed innovations. We theorize and present experimental evidence linking intermediate versus final disclosure to an ‘incentives-versus-reuse’ tradeoff and to a transformation of the innovation search process. We find intermediate disclosure has the advantage of efficiently steering development towards improving existing solution approaches, but also has the effect of limiting experimentation and narrowing technological search. We discuss the comparative advantages of intermediate versus final disclosure policies in fostering innovation.
The gravitational wave background from star-massive black hole fly-bys

Stars on eccentric orbits around a massive black hole (MBH) emit bursts o f gravitational waves (GWs) at periapse. Such events may be directly resolvable in the Galactic centre. How­ ever, if the star does not spiral in, the emitted GWs are not resolvable for extra-galactic MBHs, but constitute a source o f background noise. We estimate the power spectrum o f this extreme mass ratio burst background (EMBB) and compare it to the anticipated instrumental noise of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). To this end, we model the regions close to a MBH, accounting for mass-segregation, and for processes that limit the presence o f stars close to the MBH, such as GW inspiral and hydrodynamical collisions between stars. We find that the EMBB is dominated by GW bursts from stellar mass black holes, and the magnitude o f the noise spectrum ( fSGW) 1/2 is at least a factor ~ 10 smaller than the instrumental noise. As an additional result o f our analysis, we show that LISA is unlikely to detect relativistic bursts in the Galactic centre. Key w ords: black hole physics — stellar dynamics — gravitational waves — Galaxy: centre
An Economic Analysis of Papain Production under Contract Farming in Western Zone of Tamil Nadu

papain contract farming and determinants of participation of contract farming in Erode and Dindigul districts of Tamil Nadu. The study reported that papain production was a profitable enterprise but there is a potential to further increase the profit. The stochastic frontier analysis for technical efficiency reveals that the mean technical efficiency of the papain farmers was 94.43 and labour was used most efficiently compared to other factors of production. The logit analysis for determinants of participation in papain contract farming shows that household size, age and economic status of farmers has a positive impact on farmers’ participation in papain contract farming. Contract farming of untraditional products like papain should be implemented under the close supervision of developmental department to avoid contract breach.
Advances in Ferrite Redundancy Switching for Ka-Band Receiver Applications

Previously limited to simple redundancy switching schemes, such as 2-for-1, a ferrite-based equivalent of the traditional 10-for-8 mechanical redundancy switch (R-switch) was developed. Standby redundancy of active components, such as low-noise amplifiers (LNAs), is essential for space missions, and the demand for Ka-band communications satellites is rapidly increasing. Advances in the reduction in size, mass, and insertion loss of higher complexity ferrite circulator switch networks have made ferrite switches a feasible alternative to mechanical switches for redundancy switching applications. This work set out to understand how these advances could be applied to a higher level of redundancy switching, such as 10-for-8, in order to meet the growing needs of the Ka-band satellite market. A prototype redundant LNA assembly was designed and manufactured. The results herein show that the reduced-size ferrite switch networks provide considerable bandwidth and insertion loss improvements over traditional ferrite switch networks. The 10-for-8 redundant LNA assembly, based on ferrite switching and developed by Honeywell (formerly EMS Technologies) provided excellent noise-figure performance of 2.1 dB at 25 °C in Ka-band. More significantly, the high level of integration in the ferrite switch rings and in the interface between the ferrite switches and LNAs results in size and mass savings of 50% over the mechanical R-switch approach, constructed of individual components.
Stimulating Participation in Wireless Community Networks

Wireless Community Networks (WCNs) are wide-area wireless networks whose nodes are owned and managed by volunteers. We focus on the provision of Internet access to mobile users through WCN-controlled wireless LAN access points (APs). We rely on reciprocity: a person participates in the WCN and provides ‘free’ Internet access to mobile users in order to enjoy the same benefit when mobile. Our reciprocity scheme is compatible with the distinctive structure of WCNs: it does not require registration with authorities, relying only on uncertified free identities (public-private key pairs). Users sign digital receipts when they consume service. The receipts form a receipt graph, which is used as input to a reciprocity algorithm that identifies contributing users using network flow techniques. Simulations show that this algorithm can sustain reciprocal cooperation. We have implemented our algorithm to run on common APs.
All in Its Proper Time: Monitoring the Emergence of a Memory Bias for Novel, Arousing-Negative Words in Individuals with High and Low Trait Anxiety

The well-established memory bias for arousing-negative stimuli seems to be enhanced in high trait-anxious persons and persons suffering from anxiety disorders. We monitored the emergence and development of such a bias during and after learning, in high and low trait anxious participants. A word-learning paradigm was applied, consisting of spoken pseudowords paired either with arousing-negative or neutral pictures. Learning performance during training evidenced a short-lived advantage for arousing-negative associated words, which was not present at the end of training. Cued recall and valence ratings revealed a memory bias for pseudowords that had been paired with arousing-negative pictures, immediately after learning and two weeks later. This held even for items that were not explicitly remembered. High anxious individuals evidenced a stronger memory bias in the cued-recall test, and their ratings were also more negative overall compared to low anxious persons. Both effects were evident, even when explicit recall was controlled for. Regarding the memory bias in anxiety prone persons, explicit memory seems to play a more crucial role than implicit memory. The study stresses the need for several time points of bias measurement during the course of learning and retrieval, as well as the employment of different measures for learning success.
Identifying Word Translations from Comparable Corpora Using Latent Topic Models

A topic model outputs a set of multinomial distributions over words for each topic. In this paper, we investigate the value of bilingual topic models, i.e., a bilingual Latent Dirichlet Allocation model for finding translations of terms in comparable corpora without using any linguistic resources. Experiments on a document-aligned English-Italian Wikipedia corpus confirm that the developed methods which only use knowledge from word-topic distributions outperform methods based on similarity measures in the original word-document space. The best results, obtained by combining knowledge from word-topic distributions with similarity measures in the original space, are also reported.
Assessing Performance of Bayesian State-Space Models Fit to Argos Satellite Telemetry Locations Processed with Kalman Filtering

Argos recently implemented a new algorithm to calculate locations of satellite-tracked animals that uses a Kalman filter (KF). The KF algorithm is reported to increase the number and accuracy of estimated positions over the traditional Least Squares (LS) algorithm, with potential advantages to the application of state-space methods to model animal movement data. We tested the performance of two Bayesian state-space models (SSMs) fitted to satellite tracking data processed with KF algorithm. Tracks from 7 harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) tagged with ARGOS satellite transmitters equipped with Fastloc GPS loggers were used to calculate the error of locations estimated from SSMs fitted to KF and LS data, by comparing those to “true” GPS locations. Data on 6 fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) were used to investigate consistency in movement parameters, location and behavioural states estimated by switching state-space models (SSSM) fitted to data derived from KF and LS methods. The model fit to KF locations improved the accuracy of seal trips by 27% over the LS model. 82% of locations predicted from the KF model and 73% of locations from the LS model were <5 km from the corresponding interpolated GPS position. Uncertainty in KF model estimates (5.6±5.6 km) was nearly half that of LS estimates (11.6±8.4 km). Accuracy of KF and LS modelled locations was sensitive to precision but not to observation frequency or temporal resolution of raw Argos data. On average, 88% of whale locations estimated by KF models fell within the 95% probability ellipse of paired locations from LS models. Precision of KF locations for whales was generally higher. Whales’ behavioural mode inferred by KF models matched the classification from LS models in 94% of the cases. State-space models fit to KF data can improve spatial accuracy of location estimates over LS models and produce equally reliable behavioural estimates.
Flow entry conflict detection scheme for software-defined network

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising networking paradigm that decouples the network control plane from the data forwarding plane. This separation makes it possible for network administrators to overcome the complexity caused by modern networking environment. OpenFlow is a great concept to realize SDN architecture. It simplifies the network and traffic management in enterprise and data center environments by utilizing flow-based control over OpenFlow switches and providing global view of the network status. It utilizes first-matching mechanism to forward the packets in the network, and uses a prefix-based value that have binary flags in the match. However, a problem may occur when a packet matches multiple flow entries with conflicting values for the action field. By applying the first-matching mechanism to match flow entries at a switch may not always produce the desire outcome. Therefore, this paper presents a flow entry conflict detection method called Reduced Bit Vector algorithm (RBV) for SDN. RBV uses the concept of bit vectors and adopt a Group Classification method that groups the flow entries with the same prefix length together and decreases the redundant bit in vectors. The experiment result shows RBV is more efficient than other methods in terms of less search time, lower memory cost requirement, and lower incremental update time.
Alterations to taste preference in mc4r haploinsufficiency manifest prior to dietary induced obesity and are accompanied by dendritic spine alterations to medium spiny neurons of the nucleus accumbens in adulthood

Moran for their assistance in data collection and analysis. ABSTRACT Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the United States and has become an increasing public health concern for developed nations. Haploinsufficiency of melanocortin receptor 4 has been identified as the single most common monogenetic cause of obesity in humans. Using the MC4R +/-haploinsufficient rat, we sought to determine potential alterations in body weight and morphology, locomotor activity, sucrose concentration preference, and progressive-ratio operant testing in a dietary-induced obesity environment. Rats were placed on four separate diets corresponding to 1.7% saturated fat with 12.2% total kcal/fat, 6% saturated fat with a 40% total kcal/fat, 12% saturated fat with a 40% total kcal/fat, and a 1.7% saturated fat with 12.2% total kcal/fat containing an inflammatory polyunsaturated fat ratio of 20:1 omega-6:omega-3 fatty acids. We found a significant interaction between genetic condition and diet in terms of body weight and waist circumference. Locomotor activity testing showed an increased level of activity for animals on the inflammatory diet, with lower levels of rearing for haploinsufficent animals on the high saturated fat diet. Normal PR schedules failed to produce significant results, but both varying the concentration and the addition of a distracting tone revealed significant effects on motivation for palatable rewards. Finally, we DiOlistically labeled medium spiny neurons in the nucleus accumbens to determine potential alterations to dendritic spine morphologies correlating to impulsive and compulsive behavior. Significant alterations in cumulative frequencies of spine length, spine head diameter, and spine volume are apparent and indicate functional iv alterations to the hedonic reward processing center of the brain under high fat, inflammatory, and haploinsufficient conditions. These findings provide insight to potential use of MC4R as a therapeutic target for early-onset dietary-induced obesity, and highlight the effects of inflammatory polyunsaturated fatty acids on hedonic motivational behavior.
Integrating lexical, syntactic and system-based features to improve Word Confidence Estimation in SMT

L’estimation des mesures de confiance (MC) au niveau des mots consiste a predire leur exactitude dans la phrase cible generee par un systeme de traduction automatique. Ceci permet d’estimer la fiabilite d'une sortie de traduction et de filtrer les segments trop mal traduits pour une post-edition. Nous etudions l’impact sur le calcul des MC de differents parametres : lexicaux, syntaxiques et issus du systeme de traduction. Nous presentons la methode permettant de labelliser automatiquement nos corpus (mot correct ou incorrect), puis le classifieur a base de champs aleatoires conditionnels utilise pour integrer les differents parametres et proposer une classification appropriee des mots. Nous avons effectue des experiences preliminaires, avec l’ensemble des parametres, ou nous mesurons la precision, le rappel et la F-mesure. Finalement nous comparons les resultats avec notre systeme de reference. Nous obtenons de bons resultats pour la classification des mots consideres comme corrects (F-mesure : 86.7%), et encourageants pour ceux estimes comme mal traduits (F-mesure : 36,8%).
Asymmetrically Weighted CCA And Hierarchical Kernel Sentence Embedding For Multimodal Retrieval

Joint modeling of language and vision has been drawing increasing interest. A multimodal data representation allowing for bidirectional retrieval of images by sentences and vice versa is a key aspect. In this paper we present three contributions in canonical correlation analysis (CCA) based multimodal retrieval. Firstly, we show that an asymmetric weighting of the canonical weights, while achieving a cross-view mapping from the search to the query space, it improves the retrieval performance. Secondly, we devise a computationally efficient model selection - crucial to generalization and stability - in the framework of the Bjork Golub algorithm for regularized CCA via spectral filtering. Finally, we introduce a Hierarchical Kernel Sentence Embedding (HKSE) that approximates Kernel CCA for a special similarity kernel between words distributions. State of the art results are obtained on MSCOCO and Flickr benchmarks when these three techniques are used in conjunction.
Analyst Career Concerns, Effort Allocation, and Firms’ Information Environment

Analysts strategically allocate more effort to portfolio firms that are relatively more important to their careers. Thus, the other firms the analysts cover indirectly affect a firm’s information environment. Controlling for analyst and firm characteristics, we find that an analyst makes more accurate, frequent, and informative earnings forecasts and recommendations for firms ranked higher within her portfolio based on proxies for importance to institutions. A firm’s relative rank widely varies across analysts, but its information environment improves when a larger proportion of analysts consider it to be relatively important. Analysts experience more favorable career outcomes when strategically allocating their efforts. Received August 23, 2017; editorial decision June 27, 2018 by Editor Lauren Cohen. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.
The intelligent pen: toward a uniform treatment of electronic documents

This paper introduces the intelligent pen metaphor, an approach to uniformly treat interaction with electronic documents, especially for marking and annotating a document. This enables an easier handling of electronic documents also for novice and inexperienced users. Interaction tasks are combined in one metaphor that is well known to the user from his or her daily work with paper documents. We also present a prototypical implementation that exploits an alternative user interface to offer additional support for these users. All information added to the document by a user is stored together with the original text allowing an easy document exchange and thus having influence on collaborative work. The main contribution of this paper is the support of interactive learning processes. This pertains to active reading as well as document navigation.
Backstepping Sliding Mode Controller Coupled to Adaptive Sliding Mode Observer for Interconnected Fractional Nonlinear System

Abstract: Performance control law is studied for an interconnected fractional nonlinear system. Applying a backstepping algorithm, a backstepping sliding mode controller (BSMC) is developed for fractional nonlinear system. To improve control law performance, BSMC is coupled to an adaptive sliding mode observer have a filtered error as a sliding surface. The both architecture performance is studied throughout the inverted pendulum mounted on a cart. Simulation result show that the BSMC coupled to an adaptive sliding mode observer have stable control law and eligible control amplitude than the BSMC.
Ultra-high energy cosmic ray production in the polar cap regions of black hole magnetospheres

We develop a model of ultra-high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) production via acceleration in a rotation-induced electric field in vacuum gaps in the magnetospheres of supermassive black holes (BHs). We show that if the poloidal magnetic field near the BH horizon is misaligned with the BH rotation axis, charged particles, which initially spiral into the BH along the equatorial plane, penetrate into the regions above the BH ‘polar caps’ and are ejected with high energies to infinity. We show that in such a model acceleration of protons near a BH of typical mass 3×108 solar masses is possible only if the magnetic field is almost aligned with the BH rotation axis. We find that the power of anisotropic electromagnetic emission from an UHECR source near a supermassive BH should be at least 10–100 times larger than the UHECR power of the source. This implies that if the number of UHECR sources within the 100 Mpc sphere is ∼100, the power of electromagnetic emission that accompanies proton acceleration in each source, 1042–43 erg s−1, is comparable to the typical luminosities of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the local Universe. We also explore the acceleration of heavy nuclei, for which the constraints on the electromagnetic luminosity and on the alignment of the magnetic field in the gap are relaxed.