Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Psychological Testing from Early Childhood through Adolescence. A Developmental and Psychodynamic Approach

brief and well written. Although useful in highlighting important epidemiologic considerations for the purposes of assessing time trends, these summaries are not comprehensive evaluations of cancer epidemiology. The reviews of data quality are extremely important to the overall evaluation of temporal trends, and these sections appropriately point out artifacts in the data that may be manifested in the results of age-period-cohort modeling. The results and comment sections emphasize the qualitative aspects of the analyses, which make them particularly useful to readers without a statistical background. Of course, tables and figures provide a more quantitative representation of the results for those who are interested. Furthermore, parameter estimates for all of the models are provided in an appendix so that these models may be directly compared to models derived from other data. A second appendix examines trends in cancer risk factors in Connecticut and the United States. Although primarily descriptive in nature, this appendix is a useful reference for considering cancer trends in relationship to changes in some common risk factors. This appendix will, however, probably be less useful as a way to draw new etiologic inferences than it will be an effective aid to predicting future trends, since other types of studies can better establish etiologic relationships. Cancer Risk and Incidence Trends describes cancer trends in a consistent, organized fashion in both its form and substance. Since the authors chose to apply a broad statistical technique to a large number of cancer sites, the results for each site are interesting both in themselves and in relationship to the results from other sites. This fact makes the book particularly conducive to reading chapters in isolation or in combination with related chapters. Cancer Risk and Incidence Trends reflects important work in cancer epidemiology and provides a useful analysis and commentary on the relationship of time to this group of diseases. Although psychological testing has been around for some time, Miriam Siegel has written a refreshing and insightful guide to the testing of children and adolescents. Most notable is her illumination of the context in which such young subjects present themselves, specifically in terms of its effects on both administration and interpretation. Though the work is evidently written for clinicians, its clear style and case presentations make it a good introduction for interested students and other professionals. The book is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on the setting in which testing is …
Reimagining the past. Use of counterfactual trajectories in socio-hydrological modelling: The case of Chennai, India

The developing world is rapidly urbanizing. One of the challenges associated with this growth will be to supply water to growing cities of the developing world. Traditional planning tools fare poorly over 30–50 year time horizons because these systems are changing so rapidly. Models that hold land use, economic patterns, governance systems or technology static over a long planning horizon could result in inaccurate predictions leading to sub-optimal or paradoxical outcomes. Most models fail to account for adaptive responses by humans that in turn influence water resource availability, resulting in coevolution of the human–water system. Is a particular trajectory inevitable given a city's natural resource endowment, is the trajectory purely driven by policy or are there tipping points in the evolution of a city's growth that shift it from one trajectory onto another? Socio-hydrology has been defined as a new science of water and people that will explicitly account for such bi-directional feedbacks. However, a particular challenge in incorporating such feedbacks is imagining technological, social and political futures that could fundamentally alter future water demand, allocation and use. This paper offers an alternative approach – the use of counterfactual trajectories – that allows policy insights to be gleaned without having to predict social futures. The approach allows us to "reimagine the past"; to observe how outcomes would differ if different decisions had been made. The paper presents a "socio-hydrological" model that simulates the feedbacks between the human, engineered and hydrological systems in Chennai, India over a 40-year period. The model offers several interesting insights. First, the study demonstrates that urban household water security goes beyond piped water supply. When piped supply fails, users turn to their own wells. If the wells dry up, consumers purchase expensive tanker water or curtail water use and thus become water insecure. Second, unsurprisingly, different initial conditions result in different trajectories. But initial advantages in piped infrastructure are eroded if the utility is unable to expand the piped system to keep up with growth. Both infrastructure and sound management decisions are necessary to ensure household water security although the impacts of mismanagement may not manifest until much later when the population has grown and a multi-year drought strikes. Third, natural resource endowments can limit the benefits of good policy and infrastructure. Cities can boost recharge through artificial recharge schemes. However, cities underlain by productive aquifers can better rely on groundwater as a buffer against drought, compared to cities with unproductive aquifers.
Serious Games for Upper Limb Rehabilitation Following Stroke

Stroke is a leading cause of severe physical disability, causing a range of impairments. Frequently stroke survivors are left with partial paralysis on one side of the body and movement can be severely restricted in the affected side’s hand and arm. We know that effective rehabilitation must be early, intensive and repetitive, which leads to the challenge of how to maintain motivation for people undergoing therapy. This paper discusses why games may be an effective way of addressing the problem of engagement in therapy and analyses which game design patterns may be important for rehabilitation. We present a number of serious games that our group has developed for upper limb rehabilitation. Results of an evaluation of the games are presented which indicate that they may be appropriate for people with stroke.
Advanced Educational Technologies - Promise and Puzzlement

Enormous sums of money and human effort have gone into educational technologies over the past decade. Yet nagging questions surface as to whether this tremendous investment produces advantageous results. While we intuitively feel that the influence of technology should be substantial, little sound guidance exists as to what is effective and why or how to use it. We seem to have cleared several of the hurdles for building a computer-aided instruction infrastructure; now we must turn our attention to richer understandings of research into the impact of technologies in the classroom. This special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science focuses on assessment and evaluation practices. The six articles in this collection have been clustered around three major issues: (1) pragmatics -- cost estimations and product reviews, (2) measuring the effectiveness of theory-driven design, (3) extending paradigms for capturing more profound understanding of variables and outcomes. Category: K.3 - Computers and Education
Predicting Defect Types in Software Projects

Predicting software defects has been one of the mos t demanding tasks for software engineering researchers and practitioners. The work in this area resulted in producing various defect prediction models. Their common weakness is that they typically treat all defects equally. However, software companies need to catego rize defects found in their products to estimate user satisfaction and to prioritize which defects are supposed to be fixed first. Several classifications are supported by popular defect tra king systems, such as Bugzilla. The Defect Types Model introduced in this paper estimates prop ortions of defects of various types categorized by their severity for users. This model contains two groups of factors: controllable (process quality) and uncontrollable (features of s tware). It incorporates results from statistical analysis of the ISBSG project dataset a djusted by other reported results and expert knowledge. This model can be used either as a stand alo e model (predicting proportions of defects) or in combination with other defect predic tion model (predicting number of defects of different types).
On-Chip Electric Waves: An Analog Circuit Approach to Physical Uncloneable Functions

This paper proposes the use of Cellular Non-Linear Networks (CNNs) as physical uncloneable functions (PUFs). We argue that analog circuits o®er higher security than existing digital PUFs and that the CNN paradigm allows us to build large, unclonable, and scalable analog PUFs, which still show a stable and repeatable input output behavior. CNNs are dynamical arrays of locally-interconected cells, with a cell dynamics that depends upon the interconnection strengths to their neighbors. They can be designed to evolve in time according to partial di®erential equations. If this equation describes a physical phenomenon, then the CNN can simulate a complex physical system on-chip. This can be exploited to create electrical PUFs with high relevant structural information content. To illustrate our paradigm at work, we design a circuit that directly emulates nonlinear wave propagation phenomena in a random media. It e®ectively translates the complexity of optical PUFs into electrical circuits.
A Novel Approach to Hide Credentials

Credentials are useful in many applications. For example, automated trust negotiation can be attained through the exchange of credentials. However, credentials endure all kinds of attacks during the transport while credentials bring us a lot of benefits. At the same time, how to store credentials is still a key problem to manage trust management systems. Good credential-storage design can greatly reduce much overhead, such as easy to search credentials, less storage space, high application convenience and so on. In this paper, we propose a new approach to hide credentials, which satisfies all requirements of common credentials and provides a higher security as well without affecting the credentials transferring efficiency. It aims at attaining little storage space and high security.
Removal of corneal epithelium with phototherapeutic technique during multizone, multipass photorefractive keratectomy.

BACKGROUND The therapeutic mode of the VISX 20/20 excimer laser was used to remove the corneal epithelium prior to performing photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) with a multizone, multipass technique. METHODS A retrospective analysis was performed of 120 eyes of 90 patients that were treated for preoperative spherical refractive errors from -1.00 to -7.00 diopters (D) (mean -3.90 D, SD 1.54) by one surgeon (DGJ) over 7 months. RESULTS Six-month follow-up was obtained in 76 eyes (63%). Sixty-nine eyes (91%) achieved a spherical equivalent refraction within +/-1.00 D of emmetropia. Regression of effect averaged -0.35 D (SD 0.53 D) from 1 to 6 months after surgery. Mean postoperative uncorrected visual acuity at 6 months was 20/25 (range 20/15 to 20/200). Seventy-three eyes (96%) achieved uncorrected visual acuity of 20/40 or better, 67 (88%) achieved uncorrected visual acuity of 20/25 or better, and 76 (71%) achieved 20/20 or better. Three eyes (4%) lost one line of spectacle-corrected visual acuity; no eye lost more than one line. There were no significant surgical complications. CONCLUSION Removal of corneal epithelium with the Summit Excimed UV 200 LA excimer laser using multizone, multipass photoablation yields visual and refractive results that compare favorably with published PRK series with excellent short-term stability.
Three dimensional object tracking based on audiovisual fusion using Particle Swarm Optimization

In this paper a new method of detecting and tracking a human person in three dimensional space using audio and video data is proposed. A simple tracking system with two microphones and stereo vision is introduced. The audio information is resulting from the generalized cross correlation (GCC) algorithm, and the video information is extracted by the continuously adaptive mean shift (CAMshift) method. The localization estimates delivered by these two systems are then combined using a novel particle swarm optimization (PSO) fusion technique. In our approach the particles move in the 3D space and iteratively evaluate their current position with regard to the localization estimates of the audio and video module. This facilitates the direct determination of the objectpsilas three dimensional position. Compared to existing methods, this novel technique achieves faster tracking performance while being independent of any kind of model, statistic, or assumption.
Thresholding Strategies for Text Classifiers: TREC 2005 Biomedical Triage Task Experiments

We participated in the triage task of biomedical documents in the TREC genomic track. In this paper we describe the methods we developed for the four triage 1 subtasks. Logistic regression and support vector machine algorithms were first trained to generate ranked lists of test documents. Then a subset of the test documents was identified as positive instances by selecting the top-k documents of the ranked lists. Deciding on the ideal value for k requires a good thresholding strategy. In this paper we first describe two thresholding strategies based on i) logistic regression and ii) support vector machines. In addition to these methods, we describe a thresholding method that combines the outputs from logistic regression and support vector machine by applying a joint thresholding strategy.
Unity power factor control of grid connected SPV system using instantaneous symmetrical component theory

In this paper, simulation studies for unity power factor control of grid connected 8 kW solar photovoltaic (SPV) system are presented. The characteristics of photovoltaic system are studied under various load and atmospheric conditions. The six pulses for PV inverter are generated using instantaneous symmetrical component theory (ISCT) control algorithm. DC bus voltage is maintained at 800V using PI controller. Instantaneous symmetrical component theory (ISCT) is used with indirect control technique for controlling inverter current. The required powers for linear and non-linear load are maintained thereby balancing the source currents. Simulations are performed with MATLAB Simulink version 15.
Performance Comparison of transport protocols , UDP and UDP-Lite for transmission of Different Video Codecs over MANETs

Nowadays, the most widely used technologies for communication are, Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) and usage of multimedia. MANET is a self-configurable wireless network in which nodes communicate with each other without any centralized access points or base stations. It prefers to transport the data without any overhead of establishing a connection prior to send data to avoid network congestion. The recent trends in technology have shown that most of the contents (data) send over the Internet are interactive multimedia, which prefer to be delivered erroneous than being discarded, or arriving late. The transport protocol, UDP came as a solution to these problems. It provides no reliability and has low protocol processing overhead. An enhanced version of UDP, called UDP-Lite was also introduced almost a decade ago, which has been specifically designed for transmitting various multimedia applications more efficiently. The aim of this paper is to compare the performances of UDP and UDP-Lite for network delay, buffer overflow and network load for transmitting various video codecs by changing various network parameters.
Greece and EC membership evaluated

Part 1 Economics: fiscal policy, T. Georgakopoulos trade effects, the balance of payments and implications for the productive system, T. Giannitsis the common agricultural policy and Greek agriculture, N. Maraveyas monetary policy in Greece - the impact of EC membership, P. Alexakis, N. Apergis industrial policy, Joseph Hassid regional policy in Greece - ten years of structural funds intervention, Ilias Plaskovitis research and developmental policy, N. Vernardakis. Part 2 Politics, government and the legal system: the EC and the Greek political system - an overview, P.C. Loakimidis political parties, Kevin Featherstone central state-local government relations, Suzanne Verney law harmonization, N. Fragakis. Part 3 Foreign policy: security policy, J. Valinakis the Greek factor in EC-Turkey relations, Prodr. Yannis. Part 4 Culture and socialo policy: political culture, Nik. Ventouris consumer protection, N.C. Baltas social security policy, Aris Sissouras, Gabriel Amitsis health policies, E. Mossialos, K. Davaki. Part 5 Summary and Prospects, P. Kazakos, P.C. Loakimides.
Duality Versus Supersymmetry

We study the effect of S-duality and target-space duality tranformations of $N=4,d=4$ and $N=1,d=10$ supersymmetric configurations on their Killing spinors. We find that, under reasonable assumptions, the dual configurations are also supersymmetric and that the Killing spinors transform in a simple way.
Energy reduction techniques for caches and multiprocessors

E nergy consumption is a growing concern in many areas of computer architecture. Not only for the handheld embedded market, but also for desktop machines and high-end server facilities, there is a demand for ever increasing processing power while maintaining or even decreasing energy consumption. For processors embedded in battery-powered devices, consumers both demand an increasing number of features and an increase of battery lifetime. For commodity desktop and high-end server systems, the demand to reduce energy consumption is mostly fueled by cost, environmental issues, and the wish to have systems without noisy cooling systems. This dissertation studies several techniques that aim at reducing energy consumption in processors. Part of the techniques presented in this dissertation focusses at reducing energy consumption by decreasing the amount of data transferred between a processor and external memory. Since memory is one of the known bottlenecks in computer systems, manufacturers had to employ increasingly aggressive techniques in the past decades to increase performance. The techniques proposed in this dissertation target at improving or at least maintaining performance, while reducing the amount of energy dissipated in the memory subsystem. Another part of this dissertation focusses on reducing energy by lowering the speed of nodes in multiprocessor systems in combination with turning off some of these nodes. Multiprocessor systems have gained significant interest in the past years, mostly because power constraints have prevented further increasing clock frequencies and because instruction level parallelism has suffered from diminishing returns. Due to the way how energy is dissipated in semiconductor fabric, using multiple cores on a reduced frequency is an effective way to reduce energy consumption. Due to decreasing sizes of the components from which processors are built, it is expected that this energy model will change significantly in future years. Some of the techniques presented in this dissertation aim at reducing energy consumption in such contemporary and near-future multiprocessor systems.
Human motion analysis using dynamic textures

Human motion analysis is a dynamic field of research in computer vision. Its popularity is because of wide application in surveillance, study of social interaction, robot guidance and video indexing. Human motion can be considered as dynamic texture since it has statistical variation in spatiotemporal domain. The local interest features contain efficient information of these spatiotemporal variations. The proposed method is based on dynamic texture description for analysis of human motion using visual dictionary. This method is applied to two major applications: action recognition and gait recognition. We evaluate the performance of our method on KTH dataset for both action and gait recognition.
Coordinated manipulator/spacecraft motion control for space robotic systems

The coordinated control of space manipulators and their spacecraft is investigated. The dynamics of free-flying space robotic systems are written compactly as functions of the system barycentric vectors. A control technique is developed that includes requirements on a spacecraft's position and orientation as well as on its manipulator. This control scheme has the double advantage of allowing a system's motion to be planned to avoid impacts with is environment, and of maintaining a favorable manipulator configuration during the end-effector's motion. In addition, since a system's spacecraft can be moved, the workspace of its manipulator becomes unlimited. A transposed-Jacobian type controller with inertial feedback is developed, and an example is used to demonstrate this technique. <<ETX>>
A Unified Approach for Preventing Attacks Exploiting a Range of Software Vulnerabilities ∗

Software implementation bugs are behind most security vulnerabilities reported today. Our analysis of CVE vulnerabilities in 2003 and 2004 indicate that 20% of them were classified as DOS attacks, 30% are due to design errors, and almost every thing else is due to implementation errors. Among implementation errors, 84% are due to generalized injection vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to modify the values of security-sensitive variables using carefully crafted inputs to vulnerable programs. Attacks in this category include buffer overflows, format-string attacks, SQL and shell-code injection attacks, directory traversal attacks, and cross-site scripting. In this paper, we present a unified approach that can stop exploitation of these vulnerabilities. Our approach is based on a dynamic taint analysis technique for C-programs that is capable of tracking information flow at the level of individual bytes. By leveraging the low-level features of C-language, our technique achieves soundness even in the presence of memory errors such as buffer overflows. At the same time, we exploit the higher-level features of C to optimize tainttracking to achieve low overheads of about 10% for server programs, and moderate overheads of between 25% and 60% for most CPU-intensive applications. Our experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of the approach in stopping 9 real-world attacks that span the above categories.
Data mining approaches to software fault diagnosis

Automatic identification of software faults has enormous practical significance. This requires characterizing program execution behavior and the use of appropriate data mining techniques on the chosen representation. In this paper we use the sequence of system calls to characterize program execution. The data mining tasks addressed are learning to map system call streams to fault labels and automatic identification of fault causes. Spectrum kernels and SVM are used for the former while latent semantic analysis is used for the latter The techniques are demonstrated for the intrusion dataset containing system call traces. The results show that kernel techniques are as accurate as the best available results but are faster by orders of magnitude. We also show that latent semantic indexing is capable of revealing fault-specific features.