Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Telecollaboration in multimodal environments: the impact on task design and learner interaction

With the development of new digital technologies and their gradual introduction into the language classroom, the Internet enables students to reach out beyond the confines of traditional teaching and learning settings, allowing previously non-existent access to foreign languages and cultures. On the one hand, the web allows learners to find authentic information and expand their knowledge; on the other, computer-mediated communication tools enable students to establish contact with target language learners and native speakers by engaging in telecollaborative exchanges. The tools at students' disposal are becoming increasingly more powerful, often combining different modes of communication in one single environment. In 2005, students of French at Carnegie Mellon University, US and French learners at the Open University, UK worked synchronously and asynchronously in online environments with native francophone students enrolled on a masters' programme in distance education at the Université de Franche Comté, France. Completing a set of three collaborative tasks, synchronous meetings took place over 10 weeks in the Open University's online audio-graphic tuition environment Lyceum, which provides multiple synchronous audio channels as well as synchronous text chat and several shared graphical interfaces. In addition to the output produced in this medium (oral, written and graphic) in the target languages (French and English), the project output, a shared reflection on cultural similarities and differences, took the form of several collaborative, asynchronous blogs. This contribution draws on data from pre- and post- treatment questionnaires, recordings of the online interactions, work published by the students in the blogs and discussions among learner and tutor participants exploring aspects of online partnership learning such as learning environment-specific affordances and their impact on task design as well as student and tutor perceptions of connectivity and interactivity.
Building an indigenous learning community through lesson study: challenges of secondary school science teachers

ABSTRACT Universalists believe that indigenous knowledge should not be studied since it excludes non-indigenous people. A qualitative method was used to explore the impact of lesson study on a science teacher at a secondary school. The research indicated that lesson study has positive impacts on teachers professionally by improving their science content knowledge, developing their teaching strategy and skill, enhancing their interest in working collaboratively, and creating a sense of an indigenous paradigm. The four categories of impact are interrelated and mutually influential. Through a lesson study, a relationship of mutual trust is well established in an indigenous learning community.
Transversals and Matroid Partition

Abstract : A matroid M = (E, F) is a finite set E of elements and a family F of subsets of E, called independent sets, such that (1) every subset of an independent set is independent, and (2) for every set A belonging to E, all maximal independent subsets of A have the same cardinality, called the rank r(A) of A. The concept of 'matroid' thus generalizes that of 'matrix' or, in particular, that of 'graph. ' This paper treats a variety of partition problems involving independent sets of matroids.
Video games and learning: Teaching and participatory culture in the digital age

In Video Games and Learning, Dr. Kurt Squire describes from personal experience numerous video games and the relationships they have created with learners. Squire's extensive knowledge and accomplishments permeate through his extensive examples of various games and their impact on social interactions, communities of learning, and culture. Dr. Kurt Squire is an associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Director of the Games, Learning and Society Initiative. He is acknowledged as a leading expert in the utility of games for educational purposes. Video Games and Learning is composed primarily of chronological journal entries of Squire's extensive studies and experiences in the planning , development, assessment, participation and integration of games for learning purposes. Squire begins with the question – why study video games? Squire takes the position that studying games can contribute enormously in the educational pursuit of reaching the digital age student. Squire agrees that games have a unique potential of teaching and learning unlike any other medium. Squire believes that play enables the intellectual and social growth of the participant over the long term and permeates into his or her learning repertoire. He believes that content, overlapping goals, continuous problem solving, social interactions and gaming cultures are critical aspects of learning through games. Squire proclaims that " any time that we turn a child off to learning rather than awakening their intellectual curiosity, we've failed " (Squire, 2011, pg. 15). According to Squire, the ability to identify and develop a good educational game is vital if a student is to remain engaged, excited, in
Book Review: European Social Integration and the Roma: Questioning Neoliberal Governmentality by Cerasela Voiculescu

study is very far from the mainstream, apolitical interpretations of critical theory tradition, which do not identify the negative and subversive character of the critical theorists. In my view, the weakness of the book is its length, which may discourage readers from engaging with it in its entirety. In this context, while interesting and informative, the chapter on Lukács seems not to be essential to the book’s main argument and could thus be ignored. This is not to say that Lukács is not relevant towards the development of a critical mode of thinking but rather that excluding him from this book would in no way reduce the strength of its argument. In the end, I would highly recommend this book both to professional academics and students of political and social philosophy, sociology and political science, and to everyone non-academic who would like to develop a critical perspective of modern societies and their various and enduring pathologies.
A static and dynamic model for a silicon carbide power MOSFET

Static C-V and I-V characteristics related dynamic behaviors of power MOSFET. Models for Si power MOSFET have already been obtained through the previous studies. Based on the model, a model for SiC power MOSFET is proposed that includes the physics of semiconductor, physical structures of the device, and extracted parameters from the measured C-V characteristics. The static I-V characteristics are also discussed with the C-V characteristics. It is clearly shown that the simulated results in switching behavior of the proposed model coincide with experimental results suitably in some conditions.
Design and Evaluation of an HPVM-Based Windows NT Supercomputer

We describe the design and evaluation of a 192-processor Windows NT cluster for high performance computing based on the High Performance Virtual Machine (HPVM) communication suite. While other clusters have been described in the literature, building a 58 GFlop/s NT cluster to be used as a general-purpose production machine for NCSA required solving new problems. The HPVM software meets the challenges represented by the large number of processors, the peculiarities of the NT operating system, the need for a production-strength job submission facility, and the requirement for mainstream programming interfaces. First, HPVM provides users with a collection of standard APIs like MPI, Shmem, Global Arrays with supercomputer class performance (13 μs minimum latency, 84 MB/s peak bandwidth for MPI), efficiently delivering Myrinet’s hardware performance to application programs. Second, HPVM provides cluster management and scheduling (through integration with Platform Computing’s LSF). Finally, HPVM addresses Windows NT’s remote access problem, providing convenient remote access and job control (through a graphical Java-applet front-end). Given the production nature of the cluster, the performance characterization is largely based on a sample of the NCSA scientific applications the machine will be running. The side-by-side comparison with other present-generation NCSA supercomputers shows the cluster to be within a factor of 2 to 4 of the SGI Origin 2000 and Cray T3E performance at a fraction of the cost. The inherent scalability of the cluster design produces a comparable or better speedup than the Origin 2000 despite a limitation in the HPVM flow control mechanism.
The development and validation of a neuropathy- and foot ulcer-specific quality of life instrument.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to develop a questionnaire that measures patients' perceptions of the impact of diabetic peripheral neuropathy and foot ulcers on their quality of life and to assess the psychometric properties of this instrument in a sample of patients with varying severity and symptomatology of diabetic peripheral neuropathy. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The neuropathy- and foot ulcer-specific quality of life instrument (NeuroQoL), generated from interviews with patients with (n = 47) and without (n = 15) diabetic peripheral neuropathy, was administered to 418 consecutive patients with diabetic peripheral neuropathy (35% with foot ulcer history) attending either U.K. (n = 290) or U.S. (n = 128) diabetes centers. Psychometric tests of NeuroQoL included factor analyses and internal consistency of scales; a series of multivariate analyses were performed to establish its criterion, construct, and incremental validity. Results were compared with those obtained using the Short Form (SF)-12 measure of health-related functioning. RESULTS Factor analyses of NeuroQoL revealed three physical symptom measures and two psychosocial functioning measures with good reliability (alpha = 0.86-0.95). NeuroQoL was more strongly associated with measures of neuropathic severity than SF-12, more fully mediated the relationship of diabetic peripheral neuropathy with overall quality of life, and significantly increased explained variance in overall quality of life over SF-12. CONCLUSIONS NeuroQoL reliably captures the key dimensions of the patients' experience of diabetic peripheral neuropathy and is a valid tool for studying the impact of neuropathy and foot ulceration on quality of life.
Interactive visualization of genealogical graphs

The general problem of visualizing "family trees", or genealogical graphs, in 2D, is considered. A graph theoretic analysis is given, which identifies why genealogical graphs can be difficult to draw. This motivates some novel graphical representations, including one based on a dual tree, a subgraph formed by the union of two trees. Dual trees can be drawn in various styles, including an indented outline style, and allow users to browse general multitrees in addition to genealogical graphs, by transitioning between different dual tree views. A software prototype for such browsing is described, that supports smoothly animated transitions, automatic camera framing, rotation of subtrees, and a novel interaction technique for expanding or collapsing subtrees to any depth with a single mouse drag
Self-locomotion and spatial language and spatial cognition: insights from typical and atypical development

Various studies have shown that occurrence of locomotion in infancy is correlated with the development of spatial cognitive competencies. Recent evidence suggests that locomotor experience might also be important for the development of spatial language. Together these findings suggest that locomotor experience might play a crucial role in the development of linguistic-cognitive spatial skills. However, some studies indicate that, despite their total deprivation of locomotor experience, young children with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) have the capacity to acquire and use rich spatial representations including good spatial language. Nonetheless, we have to be cautious about what the striking performances displayed by SMA children can reveal on the link between motor and spatial development, as the dynamics of brain development in atypically developing children are different from typically developing children.
Microtubule-dependent Plus- and Minus End–directed Motilities Are Competing Processes for Nuclear Targeting of Adenovirus

Adenovirus (Ad) enters target cells by receptor-mediated endocytosis, escapes to the cytosol, and then delivers its DNA genome into the nucleus. Here we analyzed the trafficking of fluorophore-tagged viruses in HeLa and TC7 cells by time-lapse microscopy. Our results show that native or taxol-stabilized microtubules (MTs) support alternating minus- and plus end–directed movements of cytosolic virus with elementary speeds up to 2.6 μm/s. No directed movement was observed in nocodazole-treated cells. Switching between plus- and minus end–directed elementary speeds at frequencies up to 1 Hz was observed in the periphery and near the MT organizing center (MTOC) after recovery from nocodazole treatment. MT-dependent motilities allowed virus accumulation near the MTOC at population speeds of 1–10 μm/min, depending on the cell type. Overexpression of p50/dynamitin, which is known to affect dynein-dependent minus end–directed vesicular transport, significantly reduced the extent and the frequency of minus end–directed migration of cytosolic virus, and increased the frequency, but not the extent of plus end–directed motility. The data imply that a single cytosolic Ad particle engages with two types of MT-dependent motor activities, the minus end– directed cytoplasmic dynein and an unknown plus end– directed activity.
(t, λ)-Uniqueness: Anonymity Management for Data Publication

Recent work has shown that the adversary's background knowledge is a very important factor in privacy-preserving data publishing. In this paper, we formalize background knowledge h of form "an individual X's sensitive value belongs to class C or range W. Through analyzing the drawbacks of previous approaches in dealing with this form of background knowledge, we develop a novel privacy criterion (tau, lambda)-uniqueness that sufficiently defends against attacks leveraging the background knowledge h. We accompany the criterion with an effective algorithm, which computes a privacy-guarded published table that permits retrieval of accurate aggregate information about the micro-data. We illustrate its advantages through theoretical analysis and experimental validation.
Analyzing and organizing the sonic space of vocal imitations

The sonic space that can be spanned with the voice is vast and complex and, therefore, it is difficult to organize and explore. In order to devise tools that facilitate sound design by vocal sketching we attempt at organizing a database of short excerpts of vocal imitations. By clustering the sound samples on a space whose dimensionality has been reduced to the two principal components, it is experimentally checked how meaningful the resulting clusters are for humans. Eventually, a representative of each cluster, chosen to be close to its centroid, may serve as a landmark in the exploration of the sound space, and vocal imitations may serve as proxies for synthetic sounds.
Effect of the tactile array density on the discrimination of edge patterns: Implications for tactile systems design

Tactile arrays are devices that can provide spatially distributed cutaneous signals delivering important information during haptic exploration and manipulation procedures. One of the key specifications to design a tactile array is the density of the array elements that is believed to directly affect the effectiveness of the device. Most of the systems developed so far use the generally accepted standard that matches the array density to the spatial resolution in the human fingertip. This work investigates the effect of the array density on the human capacity to discriminate edge patterns. Psychophysical experiments were performed to quantify subjects' tactile discrimination capacity and indicate that within this perception context, tactile arrays with lower spatial resolution than the one indicated in the fingertip are able to transmit pattern information accurately. This will allow the design of array systems with lower complexity (smaller number of elements) and still effective in conveying tactile cues of certain contexts.
Design of Ontologies for Dialogue Interaction and Information Extraction

In this paper we discuss how information extraction can be integrated in a dialogue system, with the focus on ontologies as domain knowledge sources. The requirements of domain ontologies are analysed in light of the tasks performed in the two areas, and implications for the design and construction of domain ontologies are presented. One of the most important features of a domain ontology to be used for both dialogue interaction and information extraction is that it should incorporate both the users’ conceptualisation of the domain and the conceptualisation present in the information sources. It is shown how this can be done and with the constructed ontology as a starting point more detailed design issues are considered.
Epidemiology and costs of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

SERIES “THE GLOBAL BURDEN OF CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE PULMONARY DISEASE” Edited by K.F. Rabe and J.B. Soriano Number 1 in this Series Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a leading but under-recognised cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide 1. The prevalence of COPD in the general population is estimated to be ∼1% across all ages rising steeply to >10% amongst those aged ≥40 yrs. The prevalence climbs appreciably higher with age. The 30-yr projections for the global increase in COPD from 1990–2020 are startling. COPD is projected to move from the sixth to the third most common cause of death worldwide, whilst rising from fourth to third in terms of morbidity within the same time-frame 2. The cofactors responsible for this remarkable increase are the continued use of tobacco, coupled with the changing demographics of the world, such that many more people, especially those in developing countries, are living into the COPD age range. COPD is under-diagnosed not only in its early stages, but even when lung function is severely impaired. This is perhaps surprising, since simple and inexpensive spirometers that are suitable in clinical practice are now available, and lung function is a powerful predictor of all-cause mortality, regardless of smoking status. No other disease that is responsible for comparable morbidity, mortality and cost is neglected by healthcare providers as much as COPD. It may well be that the true burden of the disease is not fully appreciated, and the message that COPD is both preventable and treatable has yet to be fully understood by most healthcare providers. The hope is that highlighting these facts will help to raise the profile of COPD and begin to change long-held attitudes. Up to 2001, only 32 prevalence surveys of COPD had been reported 3. This is remarkable given the hundreds …
Intrusion Detection Model Based on Support Vector Regression and Principal Components Analysis

To overcome the deficiencies of low accuracy and high false alarm rate in network intrusion detection system, an integrated Intrusion detection model based on support vector regression (SVR) and principal components analysis (PCA) is proposed in the paper. Utilizing the character that PCA algorithm can keep the discernability of original dataset after reduction, the reduces of the original dataset are calculated and used to train individual SVR classifier for ensemble, which increase the diversity between individual classifiers, and consequently, increase the detection accuracy. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, simulation experiments are performed based on the KDD 99 dataset. The results show that the proposed method is a promised ensemble method owning to its high diversity, high detection accuracy and faster speed in intrusion detection.
Indoor location tracking in non-line-of-sight environments using a IEEE 802.15.4a wireless network

Indoor location tracking of mobile robots or transport vehicles using wireless technology is attractive for many applications. IEEE 802.15. 4a wireless networks offer an inexpensive facility for localizing mobile devices by time-based range measurements. The main problems of time-based range measurements in indoor environments are errors by multipath and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) signal propagation. This paper describes indoor tracking using range measurements and an Extended Kalman Filter with NLOS mitigation. The commercially available nanoLOC wireless network is utilized for range measurements. The paper presents experimental results of tracking a forklift truck in an industrial environment.
Where to stop reading a ranked list?: threshold optimization using truncated score distributions

Ranked retrieval has a particular disadvantage in comparison with traditional Boolean retrieval: there is no clear cut-off point where to stop consulting results. This is a serious problem in some setups. We investigate and further develop methods to select the rank cut-off value which optimizes a given effectiveness measure. Assuming no other input than a system's output for a query--document scores and their distribution--the task is essentially a score-distributional threshold optimization problem. The recent trend in modeling score distributions is to use a normal-exponential mixture: normal for relevant, and exponential for non-relevant document scores. We discuss the two main theoretical problems with the current model, support incompatibility and non-convexity, and develop new models that address them. The main contributions of the paper are two truncated normal-exponential models, varying in the way the out-truncated score ranges are handled. We conduct a range of experiments using the TREC 2007 and 2008 Legal Track data, and show that the truncated models lead to significantly better results.
Simple atomic blocks

• Atomic Blocks should be kept separate from heavier transactional notions (e.g. aborts, rollbacks). • Separate efficiency from correctness. There should be a simple correct (though possibly inefficient) implementation scheme for atomic blocks. But the performance-focused programmer should be able to add extra information (via annotations [4]) which may improve performance, without compromising correctness.
Learnability of a class of Non-atomic Games arising on the Internet

In this paper we study a large class of non-atomic games arising from interactions on the Internet, such as many users sharing a network link, researchers accessing a database or web server, subscribers to a network services provider trying to gain access to the modem pool and many more. We provide simple and easily computable conditions under which these games are learnable by several models of learning, such as adaptive and sophisticated learning (Milgrom and Roberts 1991), calibrated learning (Foster and Vohra 1996), and reasonable learning (Friedman and Shenker 1997). Thus, using these methods one can evaluate the stability of such games on the Internet or in other settings in which players must learn over time.