Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Teaching and Learning in their Disciplinary Contexts: A conceptual analysis

The growing literature on undergraduate teaching and learning currently lacks an organising framework. This article sets out to provide one, distinguishing between hard pure, soft pure, hard applied and soft applied fields of study, and hence making it possible to highlight generally unremarked similarities and differences between the various research findings. In doing so, it draws extensively on the relevant literature, offering separate analyses of knowledge-related and socially related studies. The former embody curriculum, assessment and cognitive purpose, while the latter encompass group characteristics of teachers, types of teaching method and student learning requirements. The concluding section draws out the main implications for policy and practice related to staff development, computer-based learning, assessment of student learning and quality measures.
A Predictive Energy Management System Using Pre-Emptive Load Shedding for Islanded Photovoltaic Microgrids

This paper presents an energy management system (EMS) for an islanded microgrid with photovoltaic generation and battery storage. The system uses a predictive approach to set operational schedules in order to minimize system-wide outages in the microgrid, specifically through pre-emptive load shedding. Four-times daily updated online weather forecasts are combined with the photovoltaic system model to predict energy production over a 48 h period. These predictions are used, along with load forecasts and a model of the energy storage system, to predict the state-of-charge and characterize potential upcoming outages. Outage mitigation actions using pre-emptive load shedding are then planned and executed to avoid outages or minimize the duration of unavoidable outages. The approach also features bounds on the battery state-of-charge to account for uncertainties in the estimate of the stored energy. The EMS has been implemented using an event-driven framework with TCP/IP communication, which is modular and extensible to more complex system configurations. The approach has been validated through simulations and experiments, which demonstrate its feasibility and potential, for the chosen test scenario, to reduce the outage duration by 87% to 100%.
Brain adaptation and alternative developmental trajectories

Abstract Resilience and adaptation in the face of early genetic or environmental risk has become a major interest in child psychiatry over recent years. However, we still remain far from an understanding of how developing human brains as a whole adapt to the diffuse and widespread atypical synaptic function that may be characteristic of some common developmental disorders. The first part of this paper discusses four types of whole-brain adaptation in the face of early risk: redundancy, reorganization, niche construction, and adjustment of developmental rate. The second part of the paper applies these adaptation processes specifically to autism. We speculate that key features of autism may be the end result of processes of early brain adaptation, rather than the direct consequences of ongoing neural pathology.
Does the Vocational Focus of Community Colleges Hinder Students' Educational Attainment?

This study examines the effects of vocational focus of community colleges on students' educational attainment. By examining different aspects of vocational education and three distinct student outcomes, the results demonstrate variation in the extent to which institutional focus on vocational training influences students' progress through higher education. Controlling for individual and state characteristics, this study found that the vocational focus of associate degree programs has no negative effects on students' educational attainment. However, when institutions move away from degree-granting programs and focus on awarding short-term certificates, students' likelihood of earning associate degrees is adversely affected.
Efficient GPU implementation of convolutional neural networks for speech recognition

Deep learning has enjoyed tremendous success in speech recognition in recent years. Despite their widespread use, training large and complex architectures remains very time consuming. A prime example of this are convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have provided state-of-the-art results, but are also among the most computationally intensive networks to train. In this paper, we study four different methods for GPU acceleration of CNNs: a native implementation us-ing cuBLAS, two implementations based on NVIDIA’s recently released deep-learning cuDNN library, and an implementation based on cuFFT. We analyze the performance of each of these approaches on the forward operation, the gradient computation, and the backward propagation. The overall best performance is obtained using the custom native implementation, which was found to be up to 6.9 times faster than cuDNN. The paper concludes with results on the end-to-end training speed of our CNN network on an LVCSR task.
The mirror system hypothesis stands but the framework is much enriched

Challenges for extending the mirror system hypothesis include mechanisms supporting planning, conversation, motivation, theory of mind, and prosody. Modeling remains relevant. Co-speech gestures show how manual gesture and speech intertwine, but more attention is needed to the auditory system and phonology. The holophrastic view of protolanguage is debated, along with semantics and the cultural basis of grammars. Anatomically separated regions may share an evolutionary history.
The time-order error and its relatives: Mirrors of cognitive processes in comparing.

A number of studies on the time-order error (TOE) and related perceptual and judgmental phenomena are reviewed. It is concluded that the TOE should be classified as a perceptual phenomenon that can be understood and predicted with adaptation-level theory and the notion of sensation weighting. It is also concluded that sensation weighting underlies assimilation and contrast phenomena and that it is a manifestation of a general cognitive principle: the utilization of generic information to supplement specific stimulus information.
An effective tooth isolation method for bitewing dental X-ray images

Tooth isolation is a very important pre-processing step for both computer-aided dental diagnosis and automatic dental identification systems. The accuracy of tooth isolation will directly affect the accuracy of feature extraction and thereby the final results of both types of systems. This paper presents a very effective and fully automatic tooth isolation method for bitewing dental X-ray images. Our upper-lower jaw separation mechanism is based on gray-scale integral projection to avoid possible information loss and incorporates with angle adjustment to handle skewed images. In single tooth isolation, we propose an adaptive windowing scheme for locating gap valleys to improve the accuracy. Furthermore, excessive isolation-curves can be removed and separating lines can be added to indicate the locations of missing teeth. Experimental results show that our method achieves higher tooth isolation accuracy rates for both upper- and lower-jaw images, when compared to Nomir and Abdel-Mottaleb's method.
Occupational Skin Diseases in Korea

Skin disease is the most common occupational disease, but the reported number is small in Korea due to a difficulty of detection and diagnosis in time. We described various official statistics and data from occupational skin disease surveillance system, epidemiological surveys and cases published in scientific journals. Until 1981, 2,222 cases of occupational skin disease were reported by Korean employee's regular medical check-up, accounting for 4.9% of the total occupational diseases. There was no subsequent official statistics to figure out occupational skin diseases till 1998. From 1999, the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (KOSHA) published the number of occupational skin diseases through the statistics of Cause Investigation for Industrial Accidents. A total of 301 cases were reported from 1999 to 2007. Recent one study showed the figures of compensated occupational skin diseases. Many of them belonged to daily-paid workers in the public service, especially forestry workers. Also, it described the interesting cases such as vitiligo and trichloroethylene-induced Stevens-Johnson Syndrome. Skin diseases are still important though the number of cases has decreased, and therefore it is recommended to grasp the status of occupational skin diseases through continuous surveillance system and to make policy protecting high-risk group.
Simplification and analysis of transitive trust networks

When transacting and interacting through open computer networks, traditional methods used in the physical world for establishing trust can no longer be used. Creating virtual network substitutes with which people, organisations and software agents can derive trust in other parties requires computerised analysis of the underlying trust networks. This article describes an approach to trust network analysis using subjective logic (TNA-SL), that consists of the three following elements. Firstly it uses a concise notation with which trust transitivity and parallel combination of trust paths can be expressed. Secondly it defines a method for simplifying complex trust networks so that they can be expressed in this concise form. Finally it allows trust measures to be expressed as beliefs, so that derived trust can be automatically and securely computed with subjective logic. We compare our approach with trust derivation algorithms that are based on normalisation such as PageRank and EigenTrust. We also provide a numerical example to illustrates how TNA-SL can be applied.
Demyelination affects temporal aspects of perception: An optic neuritis study

Visual Evoked Potentials (VEPs) following optic neuritis (ON) remain chronically prolonged, although standard visual tests indicate full recovery. We hypothesized that dynamic visual processes, such as motion perception, may be more vulnerable to slowed conduction in the optic nerve, and consequently be better associated with projection rates.
Sentences as categories: Is there a basic-level sentence?

This study reports a psycholinguistic experiment investigating people's knowledge of sentences äs linguistic categories belonging to taxonomic hierarchies. Sentences äs categories are compared to natural object categories, where previous work hadfound that the most common type of object attribute at the basic level of the taxonomic hierarchy is a pari (e.g., a tau is pari of a dog), while at the subordinate level, characteristics of parts distinguish among categories (e.g., color offur distinguishes types ofdogs). In the current study, lists of attributes for different sentence types and patterns were given to 20 students who were asked to rate the goodness of the characteristic on a scale from l to 7 and were asked to judge whether or not the characteristic was a pari or a non-part. Ratings were used to determine whether parts and non-parts could be used to distinguish among categories of sentences. For all categories, including the hypothesized superOrdinate "sentence", parts were rated äs better characteristics than nonparts; for declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory sentences, the non-parts distinguished among categories. The study concludes that College students treat sentences äs a global, diffuse category with few fine distinctions, much äs children treat some basic-level categories. Results are discussed in terms of implications for the relationship between language and other forms of cognition. Linguistic categories are among the kinds of abstract categories that any adequate theory of the human conceptual System must be able t o account for. Human lan~ guage is therefore an important source of evidence for the nature of cognitive categories. Conversely, general results concerning the nature of cognitive Cognitive Linguistics 2-4 (1991), 339-356 0936-5907/91/0002-0339 $2.00 © Walter de Gruyter
Issues and agency: postgraduate student and tutor experiences with written feedback

This paper examines the issues which postgraduate students and tutors experienced as they engaged in receiving, providing and requesting feedback, as well as the strategies which they adopted as they sought resolution of these issues. The study employed a case study approach, using data obtained from semi-structured and stimulated recall interviews with students and staff from three discipline areas at one university in the UK. The findings reinforce the conclusions that have been drawn in a number of previous studies in terms of the sources of dissatisfaction emerging from individual interactions and institutional practices. Additionally, however, the results expand on our current understanding of feedback and agency in higher education by illustrating how participants sought out imaginative solutions to the challenges they experienced, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the feedback process. The diversity of the strategies used provides evidence of student and tutor agency, and has implications for current feedback practices and future research in this area.
Using ontology to build news network

One of the main activities in the knowledge sharing is to search and retrieve textual document.Traditional searching methods use user-specified keywords to search for documents.The common problem with this method is that the retrieved documents are not the ones that they are actually looking for even the searching is based on user-defined keywords The proposal in the research work is to build a well-defined domain where semantic relationship can be defined among the text documents in the repository to enhance the searching and retrieval performance.Reuters news is chosen as the domain where the ontology that defined the relationship is established to address the synonymy and polysemy problems.The ontology uses keywords to quantify the relationship strengths and labels the qualitative semantics.The ontology structure is a network of documents that is arranged based on hierarchy.This paper discusses the implementation of the document ontology which is applied to Reuters news corpus where the retrieval performance is measured based on the recall and precision.
Perceived Sexual Benefits of Alcohol Use among Recent High School Graduates: Longitudinal Associations with Drinking Behavior and Consequences

In this research study of 153 college-bound students, perceived sexual benefits of alcohol use were associated with greater drinking and related consequences during the senior year of high school and freshman year of college. Perceived benefits predicted drinking outcomes during fall after adjustment for gender, sensation seeking, parental education, and the corresponding outcome in high school. Inadequately addressed concerns about sexual pleasure may lead to high-risk drinking among subsets of youth. Sexuality education programs delivered in high school should address concerns about sexual pleasure and highlight advantages of refraining from alcohol use with respect to developing healthy and satisfying relationships.
Suppressive Mechanisms in Monkey V1 Help to Solve the Stereo Correspondence Problem

Neurons encode the depth in stereoscopic images by combining the signals from the receptive fields in the two eyes. Local variations in single images can activate neurons that do not signal the correct disparity (false matches), giving rise to the stereo correspondence problem. We used binocular white-noise stimuli to decompose the responses of monkey primary visual cortex V1 neurons into the elements of a linear–nonlinear model (via spike-triggered covariance analysis). In our population of disparity-selective neurons, we find both excitatory and suppressive elements in many of the neurons. Their binocular receptive fields were aligned in a specific push–pull manner for disparity. We demonstrate that this arrangement reduces the responses to false matches but preserves the responses to true matches. The responses of the cells to the noise stimuli were well explained by a linear summation of the elements, followed by a nonlinearity. This model also explained the shape of independently measured disparity-tuning curves, although it overestimated the response magnitude. This study constitutes the first direct physiological evidence for the contribution of suppressive mechanisms to disparity selectivity. This new mechanism contributes to solving the stereo correspondence problem.
Selective factors in memory. Part 1: age, sex and personality attributes

Synopsis Material with pleasurable affective connotations has been found to be better recalled to a significant extent than material with unpleasant connotations in healthy volunteer subjects. Age, neuroticism and extraversion, but not sex, have proved to be associated with the variability which different subjects show in this regard. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to various theoretical constructs which seek to explain the interaction between personality variables and cognitive performance.
Bilingual Deaf Students’ Phonological Awareness in ASL and Reading Skills in English

The sources of knowledge that individuals use to make similarity judgments about words are thought to tap underlying phonological representations. This study addresses the issue of segmental representation by investigating bilingual deaf students’ (a) awareness of American Sign Language (ASL) phonological structure; (b) the relationships between ASL phonological awareness (ASL-PA) and written English word recognition and reading comprehension skill, and (c) the question of whether age and/or reading ability would differentially affect performance on an ASL-PA task in fifty bilingual deaf children (ages 7–18) attending schools for deaf children in Western Canada. In the ASL-PA task, minimal contrasts between ASL parameters (handshape, movement, and location; H, M, and L, respectively) were systematically manipulated. The results show significant differences in deaf students’ ASL phonological awareness, with discrimination accuracy improving with age and reading ability. Significant relationships between children’s second language (L2) reading skills and first language (L1) phonological awareness skills were found. Evidence of rich metalinguistic knowledge that children with developing L1 phonological skills bring to the acquisition of L2 reading skills may have practical implications for the education of bilingual deaf children.
Yoshimitsu, Benedict, End l : guilt, shame and the post-war idea of Japan

The idea that Japan is a 'shame culture' and that the Japanese have a weak sense of sin has been an influential one, both in Japan and abroad. It has also often influenced attitudes towards Japan's behaviour in World War II. This idea, however, has its roots in the Japanese critique of pre-war ideology after World War II and in the Japanese reception of Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword . In various forms, the idea also became an important element of Nihonbunkaron , those theories of Japanese culture which have been so popular in post-war Japan. The same idea was also given a powerful and influential expression in the novels of End l Sh saku (1923-96). Earlier Christian theologians in Japan, such as Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko (1904-45), had often seen traditional Japanese culture as closer to Christianity than modern European culture. To such thinkers, Japan's war with Britain and America was in part a war on modernity itself. By contrast, End l accepted the post-war belief that Japan was a shame culture, distant from European Christianity. As his career proceeded, however, he came to take a more positive view of the 'weak' Japanese self. In this sense, his work closely parallels the development of Nihonbunkaron itself. Paradoxically, however, End l 's 'Japanese' reinterpretation of Christianity proved highly popular not only in Japan but also abroad, raising the possibility that it was less exclusively Japanese than his work suggested.
Designing the Model Human Cochlea: An Ambient Crossmodal Audio-Tactile Display

We present a model human cochlea (MHC), a sensory substitution technique and system that translates auditory information into vibrotactile stimuli using an ambient, tactile display. The model is used in the current study to translate music into discrete vibration signals displayed along the back of the body using a chair form factor. Voice coils facilitate the direct translation of auditory information onto the multiple discrete vibrotactile channels, which increases the potential to identify sections of the music that would otherwise be masked by the combined signal. One of the central goals of this work has been to improve accessibility to the emotional information expressed in music for users who are deaf or hard of hearing. To this end, we present our prototype of the MHC, two models of sensory substitution to support the translation of existing and new music, and some of the design challenges encountered throughout the development process. Results of a series of experiments conducted to assess the effectiveness of the MHC are discussed, followed by an overview of future directions for this research.
Leadership and leadership development in highly effective further education providers. Is there a relationship?

There has been a strong increase in interest in leadership development in recent years, not least in the learning and skills sector. However, little research exists on the relationship between leadership development and actual leadership behaviours in the sector. This study is an attempt to help fill this gap by looking at leadership, leadership development and the relationship between them in 10 case study organizations selected to be amongst the most effective in terms of leadership, but representative of the breadth of the sector. A mixed methods approach was used combining a survey of all staff, focus groups and individual interviews. Findings show that transformational leadership was deemed most effective and that leadership development was relatively uncommon among staff. There was a significant relationship between preferred mode of leadership development and leadership style of respondents.
Contour trees of uncertain terrains

We study contour trees of terrains, which encode the topological changes of the level set of the height value ℓ as we raise ℓ from -∞ to +∞ on the terrains, in the presence of uncertainty in data. We assume that the terrain is represented by a piecewise-linear height function over a planar triangulation M, by specifying the height of each vertex. We study the case when M is fixed and the uncertainty lies in the height of each vertex in the triangulation, which is described by a probability distribution. We present efficient sampling-based Monte Carlo methods for estimating, with high probability, (i) the probability that two points lie on the same edge of the contour tree, within additive error; (ii) the expected distance of two points p, q and the probability that the distance of p, q is at least ℓ on the contour tree, within additive error, where the distance of p, q on a contour tree is defined to be the difference between the maximum height and the minimum height on the unique path from p to q on the contour tree. The main technical contribution of the paper is to prove that a small number of samples are sufficient to estimate these quantities. We present two applications of these algorithms, and also some experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Facial image clustering in single channel and stereo video content

In this paper spectral clustering techniques are implemented and evaluated on image clustering for single channel and 3D video analysis. The main idea is to use mutual information to create a similarity matrix for image pairs and then apply spectral clustering. Then, spectral clustering techniques can be used for image clustering. Such clustering techniques are then extended to stereo video. The application at hand includes facial image clustering on single view and stereo videos facial images.