Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Comparison of Zoomable User Interfaces and Folders for Grouping Visual Objects

Abstract : Making sense of information on computers is notoriously difficult because of limited size displays. Two interface techniques used to cope with these limitations are zooming and overview+detail. To evaluate these techniques, we ran a user study comparing a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) and a folder-based overview+detail interface. The task used in the study required subjects to organize shapes into groups based on common visual properties. The study results showed 30% faster completion times with the ZUI than with folders. The ZUI's advantage most likely arose from its support for fast visual comparisons. Ultimately, we expect that these results can be extended to a range of problem solving tasks involving a variety of visual objects.
Sense-based clustering of Polish nouns in the extraction of semantic relatedness

The construction of a wordnet from scratch requires intelligent software support. An accurate measure of semantic relatedness can be used to extract groups of semantically close words from a corpus. Such groups help a lexicographer make decisions about synset membership and synset placement in the network. We have adapted to Polish the well-known algorithm of Clustering by Committee, and tested it on the largest Polish corpus available. The evaluation by way of a plWordNet-based synonymy test used Polish WordNet, a resource still under development. The results are consistent with a few benchmarks, but not encouraging enough yet to make a wordnet writer's support tool immediately useful.
Cryptographic error correction

It has been said that “cryptography is about concealing information, and coding theory is about revealing it. ” Despite these apparently conflicting goals, the two fields have common origins and many interesting relationships. In this thesis, we establish new connections between cryptography and coding theory in two ways: first, by applying cryptographic tools to solve classical problems from the theory of error correction; and second, by studying special kinds of codes that are motivated by cryptographic applications. In the first part of this thesis, we consider a model of error correction in which the source of errors is adversarial, but limited to feasible computation. In this model, we construct appealingly simple, general, and efficient cryptographic coding schemes which can recover from much larger error rates than schemes for classical models of adversarial noise. In the second part, we study collusion-secure fingerprinting codes, which are of fundamental importance in cryptographic applications like data watermarking and traitor tracing. We demonstrate tight lower bounds on the lengths of such codes by devising and analyzing a general collusive attack that works for any code. Thesis Supervisor: Silvio Micali Title: Professor of Computer Science
The Importance of Human FcγRI in Mediating Protection to Malaria

The success of passive immunization suggests that antibody-based therapies will be effective at controlling malaria. We describe the development of fully human antibodies specific for Plasmodium falciparum by antibody repertoire cloning from phage display libraries generated from immune Gambian adults. Although these novel reagents bind with strong affinity to malaria parasites, it remains unclear if in vitro assays are predictive of functional immunity in humans, due to the lack of suitable animal models permissive for P. falciparum. A potentially useful solution described herein allows the antimalarial efficacy of human antibodies to be determined using rodent malaria parasites transgenic for P. falciparum antigens in mice also transgenic for human Fc-receptors. These human IgG1s cured animals of an otherwise lethal malaria infection, and protection was crucially dependent on human FcγRI. This important finding documents the capacity of FcγRI to mediate potent antimalaria immunity and supports the development of FcγRI-directed therapy for human malaria.
Effective Integration by Inter-Attribute Dependency graphs of schema matching

119 Abstract—Schema-matching problem is the most basic level refers to the problem of mapping schema elements in one information repository to corresponding elements in a second repository. Schema matching is one of the key challenges in information integration. In fact, significant improvements will be observed. The technique that is in the existing paper is an instance-based technique. I emphasize that our claims is that this technique, is not the best of techniques to apply as a useful addition to a suite of automated schema mapping tools. I propose a new usage-based schema matching technique. The proposed technique exploits the usage information of the attributes in the query logs to find matches, in contrast to relying on the schema information or the data instances. The existing methods for weighted graph matching Algorithms for schema matching is compared with the new proposed methods of 1) Direct Tree Search 2) Ullman 3) Clique 4) Hash coding. The performance and accuracy of the schema matching of the various techniques are compared and analyzed.
Prioritization of Test Cases Using Software Agents and Fuzzy Logic

Limited test time and restricted number of test resources confront test managers with big challenges, especially in the system test. Consequently, the test manager has to prioritize test cases before each test cycle. There is much information available for determining a reasonable prioritization order in software projects. However, due to the complexity of current software systems and the high number of existing test cases, the abundance of information relevant for prioritization is not manageable for the test manager, even with high effort. In this paper we present a concept for an automated prioritization of test cases using software agents and fuzzy logic. Our prioritization system determines the prioritization order which increases the test effectiveness and the fault detection rate.
What is Teacher Development ? 125

Teacher development has emerged over the last decade as an identi able area of study and much has been written on the subject. The teacher development literature has served to disseminate information on and ideas for improving teachers’ and, by extension, schools’ performance. It has provided the forum for discussion about the future of the teaching profession and the nature of teaching as a job. Yet, as an area of study, teacher development tends for the most part to be dominated by issues, while the concept itself and the methods that may effect teacher development remain comparatively neglected. In the teacher development literature, for example, very few de nitions of teacher development may be found. This article examines the concept of teacher development and presents the author’s own interpretation and de nition, as well as her views on how the development of this area of study ought to proceed.
Understanding the Behaviour of CDMA-based Cellular Networks with a User-friendly Simulation Software

The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) has been developed in order to create a unified telecommunications system with multimedia capabilities. UMTS uses the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technique. In this type of system, all users share the same frequency at the same time. Interference then plays a major role in the behaviour of a CDMA network and causes the coverage to vary according to the load. Furthermore many parameters have an impact on the coverage (spreading factor, user rate, transmission power etc.). So motivating students to learn CDMA concepts is often difficult because they find it very difficult to understand the physical phenomena. To overcome this problem, students need to practise several laboratory exercises. Then they need a suitable simulation tool. In this paper a simple cellular model is introduced and a CDMA software based on that model is described. Its effectiveness as a teaching method is explained. This simulator can help students to understand the CDMA network behaviour more accurately.
Forearm menu: using forearm as menu widget on tabletop system

In this study, we propose a menu interaction technique that utilizes the forearm (the part of the arm between the elbow and the hand) on direct input surfaces such as tabletop systems. On such systems, users commonly operate various types of data, such as images, video, audio, and documents, using menus for each type of data. In this study, we focus on the space on user's forearms as a very easy-to-access area for displaying a menu to control the data in operation. In addition, since the tabletop surface and the forearm can be used as different layers, they can be divided into a "working area" and an "area for menu operation. " Thus, a menu can be displayed without being hidden by the hand or forearm.
Open Information Extraction Based on Lexical-Syntactic Patterns

Open Information Extraction (Open IE) is an unsupervised strategy to draw out relations from text without predefining these relations, regardless the domain. This paper describes a novel Open IE approach that performs unsupervised extraction of triples by applying a few lexical-syntactic patterns to POS-tagged texts. In order to validate this strategy we developed a prototype and compared its performance with two Open IE systems. The proposed approach achieved promising results, overcoming those from the state-of-the-art systems. The paper concludes with an analysis of errors and directions for future work.
Validation of the Translated Dutch Personality Questionnaire in Papiamento Speaking Prisoners

Background: Personality disorders have a high prevalence among prisoners worldwide. Yet, in prisoners with an Antillean Caribbean background, personality disorder rates are low probably due to a lack of standardized personality tests in the Caribbean language of Papiamento which to render objective diagnoses. This also has a great potential to result in inappropriate treatment and negative interaction. Therefore, in hopes of proving better diagnostics and treatment and fill this absence, the purpose of this article is to describe a study of the effectiveness and relevance of a standard personality disorder diagnostic interview translated into Papiamento. Methods: The Dutch Personality Questionnaire was translated to Papiamento by two independent experts and retranslated into Dutch by two other independent experts. Prisoners having both parents born in Bonaire, who had been detained for at least 18 days by the Judicial Detention Centre of the Caribbean Netherlands in Bonaire, during the period from January 1, 2013 to July 1, 2014 were examined using this questionnaire. Results: There were 23 Papiamento speaking prisoners assessed using the translated Dutch Personality Questionnaire during the study period. There was a sufficient internal reliability and a validity of the personality test. Preliminary norms for use of the NPV in Papiamento were also included. Conclusion: The use of the NPV in Papiamento may lead to more valid results about the rates of personality disorders among Carib prisoners, and well as improved treatment. Future research should include larger numbers of participants.
Efficient Monte Carlo device modeling

A single-particle approach to full-band Monte Carlo device simulation is presented which allows an efficient computation of drain, substrate and gate currents in deep submicron MOSFETs. In this approach, phase-space elements are visited according to the distribution of real electrons. This scheme is well adapted to a test-function evaluation of the drain current, which emphasizes regions with large drift velocities (i.e., in the inversion channel), a substrate current evaluation via the impact ionization generation rate (i.e., in the LDD region with relatively high electron temperature and density) and a computation of the gate current in the dominant direct-tunneling regime caused by relatively cold electrons (i.e., directly under the gate at the source well of the inversion channel). Other important features are an efficient treatment of impurity scattering, a phase-space steplike propagation of the electron allowing to minimize self-scattering, just-before-scattering gathering of statistics, and the use of a frozen electric field obtained from a drift-diffusion simulation. As an example an 0.1-/spl mu/m n-MOSFET is simulated where typically 30 minutes of CPU time are necessary per bias point for practically sufficient accuracy.
A computationally optimized hemagglutinin virus-like particle vaccine elicits broadly reactive antibodies that protect nonhuman primates from H5N1 infection.

BACKGROUND Highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza viruses continue to spread via waterfowl, causing lethal infections in humans. Vaccines can prevent the morbidity and mortality associated with pandemic influenza isolates. Predicting the specific isolate that may emerge from the 10 different H5N1 clades is a tremendous challenge for vaccine design. METHODS In this study, we generated a synthetic hemagglutinin (HA) on the basis of a new method, computationally optimized broadly reactive antigen (COBRA), which uses worldwide sequencing and surveillance efforts that are specifically focused on sequences from H5N1 clade 2 human isolates. RESULTS Cynomolgus macaques vaccinated with COBRA clade 2 HA H5N1 virus-like particles (VLPs) had hemagglutination-inhibition antibody titers that recognized a broader number of representative isolates from divergent clades as compared to nonhuman primates vaccinated with clade 2.2 HA VLPs. Furthermore, all vaccinated animals were protected from A/Whooper Swan/Mongolia/244/2005 (WS/05) clade 2.2 challenge, with no virus detected in the nasal or tracheal washes. However, COBRA VLP-vaccinated nonhuman primates had reduced lung inflammation and pathologic effects as compared to those that received WS/05 VLP vaccines. CONCLUSIONS The COBRA clade 2 HA H5N1 VLP elicits broad humoral immunity against multiple H5N1 isolates from different clades. In addition, the COBRA VLP vaccine is more effective than a homologous vaccine against a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus challenge.
Cultural Priming as a Tool to Understand Multiculturalism and Culture

What is multiculturalism, and how is it typically studied? The current paper provides answers to these questions by introducing approaches to the study of multiculturalism and their implications. We first present the view of multiculturalism as a static and dispositional phenomenon (i.e., demographic, as well as most uni- and bidimensional conceptualizations of acculturation) and then focus on more dynamic approaches to multiculturalism, that view culture as emerging from domain-specificity, situated cognition, or as a dynamic constructivist process. As part of a dynamic approach to culture, two prominent techniques of priming cultural orientations (i.e., priming Individualism - Collectivism versus Cultural Frame Switching) are introduced and compared, and implications are outlined. We propose that it is necessary to perceive culture as more than a categorical variable that is stable over situations, and highlight future research avenues that might help to further advance our understanding of multiculturalism and culture as dynamic constructs.
A Simple and Flexible DCF Valuation Formula

The growth-opportunities version of the Modigliani-Miller free cash flow model is used to develop a simple discounted cash flow formula for equity valuation that accommodates gradually diminishing NPVs of future growth opportunities at a constant rate. The model includes some fundamental drivers of a firm's expected future earnings stream, including the planned investment outlay for the next period, the projected growth rate of future investment outlays, and the rate of gradual convergence of the ROEs of future investment outlays to the cost of equity. The formula may be useful when firms expect declining expected earnings growth, negative near-term free cash flows, or negative near-term earnings.
Data-Race-Freedom of Concurrent Programs

Reasoning about access isolation in a program that uses locks, transactions or both to coordinate accesses to shared memory is complex and error-prone. The programmer must understand when accesses issued to the same memory by distinct threads, under possibly different coordination semantics, are isolated, otherwise, data races are introduced. We present a program analysis that guarantees a program is data-race-free irrespective of whether locks, transactions or both are used to coordinate accesses to memory. Our framework entails two main steps: (i) a program is statically executed to determine its memory space and the types of accesses it issues to that memory, then (ii) our isolation algorithm checks that the accesses issued by the program do not result in a data race. To the best of our knowledge our work is the first to guarantee the data-race-freedom of concurrent programs that use locks, transactions or both to coordinate accesses to mutable memory.
Estimating Air Particulate Matter Using MODIS Data and Analyzing Its Spatial and Temporal Pattern over the Yangtze Delta Region

The deteriorating air quality in the Yangtze delta region is attracting growing public concern. In this paper, seasonal estimation models of the surface particulate matter (PM) were established by using aerosol optical thickness (AOT) retrievals from the moderate resolution imaging spectro-radiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite. The change of the regional distribution of the atmospheric mixed layer, relative humidity and meteorological elements have been taken into account in these models. We also used PM mass concentrations of ground measurements to evaluate the estimation accuracy of those models. The results show that model estimation of PM 2.5 and PM 10 mass concentrations were in good agreement with the ground-based observation of PM mass concentrations ( p < 0.01, the R 2 value of the PM 2.5 concentrations experimental model for four seasons are 0.48, 0.62, 0.61 and 0.52 respectively. The R 2 value of PM 10 concentrations experimental model for four seasons are 0.57, 0.56, 0.64 and 0.68 respectively). At the same time, spatial and temporal variations of PM 2.5 and PM 10 mass concentrations were analysed over the Yangtze delta region from 2000 to 2013. The results show that PM 2.5 and PM 10 show a trend of increase in the Yangtze delta region from 2000 to 2013 and change periodically. The maximum mass concentration of PM 2.5 and PM 10 was in January–February, and the minimum was in July–August. The highest values of PM 2.5 and PM 10 mass concentration are in the region of urban agglomeration which is grouped to a delta-shaped region by Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing, while the low values are in the forest far away from the city. PM mass concentration over main cities and rural areas increased gradually year by year, and were increasing more quickly in urban areas than in rural areas.
Molecular Evolutionary Consequences of Niche Restriction in Francisella tularensis, a Facultative Intracellular Pathogen

Francisella tularensis is a potent mammalian pathogen well adapted to intracellular habitats, whereas F. novicida and F. philomiragia are less virulent in mammals and appear to have less specialized lifecycles. We explored adaptations within the genus that may be linked to increased host association, as follows. First, we determined the genome sequence of F. tularensis subsp. mediasiatica, the only subspecies that had not been previously sequenced. This genome, and those of 12 other F. tularensis isolates, were then compared to the genomes of F. novicida (three isolates) and F. philomiragia (one isolate). Signs of homologous recombination were found in ∼19.2% of F. novicida and F. philomiragia genes, but none among F. tularensis genomes. In addition, random insertions of insertion sequence elements appear to have provided raw materials for secondary adaptive mutations in F. tularensis, e.g. for duplication of the Francisella Pathogenicity Island and multiplication of a putative glycosyl transferase gene. Further, the five major genetic branches of F. tularensis seem to have converged along independent routes towards a common gene set via independent losses of gene functions. Our observations suggest that despite an average nucleotide identity of >97%, F. tularensis and F. novicida have evolved as two distinct population lineages, the former characterized by clonal structure with weak purifying selection, the latter by more frequent recombination and strong purifying selection. F. tularensis and F. novicida could be considered the same bacterial species, given their high similarity, but based on the evolutionary analyses described in this work we propose retaining separate species names.
Irish travellers and Roma shadow report: A response to Ireland's Third and Fourth Report on the International Convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (CERD)

This report has been prepared by Pavee Point Travellers Centre in response to Ireland’s Combined Third and Fourth Reports to the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Pavee Point Travellers Centre (“Pavee Point”) was established in 1985. It is a voluntary, or non-governmental, organisation committed to the attainment of human rights for Irish Travellers. Pavee Point has also had a Roma Support Group since 2000.
Evaluation of Satellite Precipitation Products with Rain Gauge Data at Different Scales: Implications for Hydrological Applications

Rain gauge and satellite-retrieved data have been widely used in basin-scale hydrological applications. While rain gauges provide accurate measurements that are generally unevenly distributed in space, satellites offer spatially regular observations and common error prone retrieval. Comparative evaluation of gauge-based and satellite-based data is necessary in hydrological studies, as precipitation is the most important input in basin-scale water balance. This study uses quality-controlled rain gauge data and prevailing satellite products (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B43, 3B42 and 3B42RT) to examine the consistency and discrepancies between them at different scales. Rain gauges and TRMM products were available in the Poyang Lake Basin, China, from 1998 to 2007 (3B42RT: 2000–2007). Our results show that the performance of TRMM products generally increases with increasing spatial scale. At both the monthly and annual scales, the accuracy is highest for TRMM 3B43, with 3B42 second and 3B42RT third. TRMM products generally overestimate precipitation because of a high frequency and degree of overestimation in light and moderate rain cases. At the daily scale, the accuracy is relatively low between TRMM 3B42 and 3B42RT. Meanwhile, the performances of TRMM 3B42 and 3B42RT are highly variable in different seasons. At both the basin and pixel scales, TRMM 3B43 and 3B42 exhibit significant discrepancies from July to September, performing worst in September. For TRMM 3B42RT, all statistical indices fluctuate and are low throughout the year, performing worst in July at the pixel scale and January at the basin scale. Furthermore, the spatial distributions of the statistical indices of TRMM 3B43 and 3B42 performed well, while TRMM 3B42RT displayed a poor performance.