Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reference Resolution within the Framework of Cognitive Grammar

Following the principles of Cognitive Grammar, we concentrate on a model for reference resolution that attempts to overcome the difficulties previous approaches, based on the fundamental assumption that all reference (independent on the type of the referring expression) is accomplished via access to and restructuring of domains of reference rather than by direct linkage to the entities themselves. The model accounts for entities not explicitly mentioned but understood in a discourse, and enables exploitation of discursive and perceptual context to limit the set of potential referents for a given referring expression. As the most important feature, we note that a single mechanism is required to handle what are typically treated as diverse phenomena. Our approach, then, provides a fresh perspective on the relations between Cognitive Grammar and the problem of reference.
Testing the Connectivity Paradox: Linking Teleworkers' Communication Media Use to Social Presence, Stress from Interruptions, and Organizational Identification

Scholars emphasize the importance of rich communication media for the development of Teleworkers' organizational identification, but tests of these relationships have produced inconsistent results. The connectivity paradox helps explain these findings. The paradox suggests that Teleworkers' connectivity to others through communication media facilitates remote work by affording greater social presence, while also negating the benefits of telework by enabling stressful interruptions. These outcomes of connectivity may benefit and detract from identification. We propose a model linking the core features of the connectivity paradox to organizational identification. Teleworkers and office workers were surveyed, and a multigroup path analysis was utilized. Results indicate that connectivity increases stress from interruptions and indirectly diminishes Teleworkers' identification.
Towards temporal access control in cloud computing

Access control is one of the most important security mechanisms in cloud computing. Attribute-based access control provides a flexible approach that allows data owners to integrate data access policies within the encrypted data. However, little work has been done to explore temporal attributes in specifying and enforcing the data owner's policy and the data user's privileges in cloud-based environments. In this paper, we present an efficient temporal access control encryption scheme for cloud services with the help of cryptographic integer comparisons and a proxy-based re-encryption mechanism on the current time. We also provide a dual comparative expression of integer ranges to extend the power of attribute expression for implementing various temporal constraints. We prove the security strength of the proposed scheme and our experimental results not only validate the effectiveness of our scheme, but also show that the proposed integer comparison scheme performs significantly better than previous bitwise comparison scheme.
Cultural Festival As A Salient Tool For Strategic, Holistic And Sustainable Rural Development In Africa: The Case Of The Opemso) Festival Of The Asantes Of Ghana

The Opemso) cultural festival is one of the iconic cultural festivals among the Asante ethnic society in Ghana. It is historically and culturally charged, glued to the beginnings of the most vibrant Asante kingdom because of its affiliation to the birth of the founder, Otumfuo Osei Tutu I. Using qualitative approaches, the researcher accentuates the immense contributions of the festival to the cultural, historical, social and economic development of the people of Anyinam and Kokofu in the Ashanti region of Ghana. Semi-structured interviews as well as direct observations were the main instruments for the collection of rich data on the great significance of the festival in the lives of residents and visitors from respondents who were purposively and randomly sampled. The data were qualitatively analyzed using the Data analysis spiral method to interpret the archetypal roles that the Opemso) cultural festival plays in the everyday life of the people. The study contends that if cultural festivals are strategically planned and well tailored in line with developmental policies and ideologies of a society or nation at large, they can be salient tools for the development of rural areas especially in festival-prone nations in Sub-Sahara Africa.
Reasoning about Hybrid States

In this paper, we present a new semantics for the well-known normal system of modal logic K based on the notion of convergence spaces. The purpose is to use convergence spaces to model and reason about systems with both discrete and continuous states, so-called hybrid state spaces. K is sound and complete with respect to the class of convergence space models, and we show that Kripke frames and McKinsey and Tarski’s topological frames are special cases of our convergence space models.
Chronic Stimulation of the Tone of Endogenous Anandamide Reduces Cue- and Stress-Induced Relapse in Rats

Background: The endogenous cannabinoid system plays an important role in motivation, stress, and drug abuse. Pharmacologically, the endocannabinoid system can be stimulated by either agonists of CB1 receptors or inhibition of metabolic degradation of endogenous cannabinoids and consequent increases in their brain levels. Methods: Here, we investigated whether chronic administration during a period of withdrawal of the fatty acid amide hydrolase inhibitor URB597, which increases anandamide levels, would decrease the risks of relapse to cocaine seeking. Rats were allowed to self-administer cocaine and then they underwent forced withdrawal for 28 days, during which they were treated with URB597 or vehicle. One day after the last injection, we investigated cocaine seeking in one 6 h extinction session and relapse triggered by re-exposure to drug-associated cues or a pharmacological stressor. Results: We found that administration of URB597 significantly decreases cocaine-seeking behavior and cue- and stressinduced relapse. Conclusion: These results suggest that stimulation of the endocannabinoid system could be helpful to prevent relapse to cocaine addiction.
A DRAM-flash index for native flash file systems

Index structures are widely used in file systems and database applications for efficient data management. This paper exploits the respective characteristics of DRAM and flash memory for tree index designs, for which a native file system is taken as an example target in the research. Different from DRAM caching or buffering of flash-memory access in the past work, a hybrid index design that resides over DRAM and flash memory simulaneously is proposed to improve system performance and space management. Tree nodes migrate between DRAM and flash memory, as needed, in response to user access pattern so as to optimize the performance and to reduce managing overhead. The capability of the proposed design is evaluated by a series of experiments, for which we have very encouraging results.
Slices of the Kerr ergosurface

The intrinsic geometry of the Kerr ergosurface on constant Boyer–Lindquist (BL), Kerr and Doran time slices is characterized. Unlike the BL slice, which had been previously studied, the other slices (i) do not have conical singularities at the poles (except the Doran slice in the extremal limit), (ii) have finite polar circumference in the extremal limit and (iii) for sufficiently large spin parameter fail to be isometrically embeddable as a surface of revolution above some latitude. The Doran slice develops an embeddable polar cap for spin parameters greater than about 0.96.
Comparative study on proximity indices for cluster analysis of gene expression time series

In the computational analysis of gene expression time series, the main aspect in finding co-expressed genes is the proximity (similarity or dissimilarity) index used in the clustering method. In this context, the proximity indices should find genes that have similar patterns of expression change through time. There are a number of proximity indices used for such a task. However, the majority of these works has given emphasis on the biological results, with no critical evaluation of the suitability of the proximity index used. As a consequence, so far, there is no validity study on which proximity indices are more suitable for the analysis of gene expression time series. Based on this, a comparative study of proximity indices broadly used in the literature is accomplished in this work. More specifically, versions of three distinct proximity indices are compared: Euclidean distance, Pearson correlation and angular separation. In order to evaluate the results, an adaptation of the k-fold cross-validation procedure suitable for unsupervised methods is used. The accuracies of the proximity indices are assessed with the use of an external index, which measures the agreement between the clustering results and gene annotation data.
Single template object detector based on histogram of oriented gradients

Most of the current image object detection algorithms use very large data sets for their training and these methods are also optimized for those big data sets. Unfortunately, in many cases it is very costly or even impossible to collect large data sets for training (e.g. in medicine, astronomy, and other fields). In this paper a new approach based on Dalal's Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) [3] is introduced. It is devoted for training from a single training template and is optimized to achieve reasonable accuracy with this limited training set. The accuracy is validated on 100 images, where half of them contains positive and the other half negative images. The accuracy achieved is 98% accuracy.
Evidence for Neuronal Desynchrony in the Aged Suprachiasmatic Nucleus Clock

Aging is associated with a deterioration of daily (circadian) rhythms in physiology and behavior. Deficits in the function of the central circadian pacemaker in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) have been implicated, but the responsible mechanisms have not been clearly delineated. In this report, we characterize the progression of rhythm deterioration in mice to 900 d of age. Longitudinal behavioral and sleep–wake recordings in up to 30-month-old mice showed strong fragmentation of rhythms, starting at the age of 700 d. Patch-clamp recordings in this age group revealed deficits in membrane properties and GABAergic postsynaptic current amplitude. A selective loss of circadian modulation of fast delayed-rectifier and A-type K+ currents was observed. At the tissue level, phase synchrony of SCN neurons was grossly disturbed, with some subpopulations peaking in anti-phase and a reduction in amplitude of the overall multiunit activity rhythm. We propose that aberrant SCN rhythmicity in old animals—with electrophysiological arrhythmia at the single-cell level and phase desynchronization at the network level—can account for defective circadian function with aging.
Efficient Extrapolation of the View with a Dynamic and Predictive Stimulus

In the real-world, the retinal projection of an object changes as we move, or as a moving object passes in front of us. We have to recognise objects, despite such retinal-projection changes. Many studies have shown that the time required to identify objects after a change in the retinal projection is longer than when there is no retinal-projection change. This recognition cost is referred to as the view-dependent effect. Previous researchers have studied the view-dependent effect while disregarding the predictability of retinal-projection changes. Here, we demonstrate that there is no view-dependent effect when the predictability is introduced, in the case where participants track moving objects by head-turning or eye-movement in a virtual environment. Violation of the predictability, such as an unpredictable retinal-projection change or a movement of the first stimulus that was inconsistent with a subsequent retinal-projection change, caused a view-dependent effect. Moreover, we found that extraretinal information such as head-turning or eye-movement was unnecessary for view-independent recognition. These results indicate that humans can extrapolate to the tested view from the studied view in a view-independent way when retinal-projection change is predictable from the visual stimulus.
Scalable SimRank join algorithm

Similarity join finds all pairs of objects (i, j) with similarity score s(i, j) greater than some specified threshold θ. This is a fundamental query problem in the database research community, and is used in many practical applications, such as duplicate detection, merge/purge, record linkage, object matching, and reference conciliation. In this paper, we propose a scalable approximation algorithm with an arbitrary accuracy for the similarity join problem with the SimRank similarity measure. The algorithm consists of two phases: filter and verification. The filter phase enumerates similar pair candidates, and the similarity of each candidate is then assessed in the verification phase. The scalability of the proposed algorithm is experimentally verified for large real networks. The complexity depends only on the number of similar pairs, but does not depend on all pairs O(n2). The proposed algorithm scales up to the network of 5M vertices and 70M edges. By comparing the state-of-the-art algorithms, it is about 10 times faster and it requires about 10 times smaller memory.
Fig wasp dispersal and the stability of a keystone plant resource in Borneo

The stability of interactions in remaining rainforest fragments is an issue of considerable concern for conservation. Figs are a pre-eminent tropical keystone resource because of their importance for wildlife, but are dependent on tiny (1-2 mm) species-specific wasps for pollination. To investigate fig wasp dispersal I trapped insects at various heights (5-75 m) in an isolated fragment (ca. 4500 ha) of Bornean rain forest. Fig wasps constituted the majority of captures above the canopy (pollinators 47%, non-pollinators 5%). However, genera were not evenly represented. There were 50% more species of monoecious fig pollinator than there were host species in the fragment, indicating some must have arrived from forests with different assemblages of figs at least 30 km away. Dioecious fig pollinators were poorly represented suggesting more limited dispersal, which could account for higher endemism and vulnerability to catastrophic disturbance in these figs. Diurnal activity and flight height also varied among genera. Most non-pollinating fig wasps were very rare.
The Spread of Scientific Information: Insights from the Web Usage Statistics in PLoS Article-Level Metrics

The presence of web-based communities is a distinctive signature of Web 2.0. The web-based feature means that information propagation within each community is highly facilitated, promoting complex collective dynamics in view of information exchange. In this work, we focus on a community of scientists and study, in particular, how the awareness of a scientific paper is spread. Our work is based on the web usage statistics obtained from the PLoS Article Level Metrics dataset compiled by PLoS. The cumulative number of HTML views was found to follow a long tail distribution which is reasonably well-fitted by a lognormal one. We modeled the diffusion of information by a random multiplicative process, and thus extracted the rates of information spread at different stages after the publication of a paper. We found that the spread of information displays two distinct decay regimes: a rapid downfall in the first month after publication, and a gradual power law decay afterwards. We identified these two regimes with two distinct driving processes: a short-term behavior driven by the fame of a paper, and a long-term behavior consistent with citation statistics. The patterns of information spread were found to be remarkably similar in data from different journals, but there are intrinsic differences for different types of web usage (HTML views and PDF downloads versus XML). These similarities and differences shed light on the theoretical understanding of different complex systems, as well as a better design of the corresponding web applications that is of high potential marketing impact.
Curriculum-Based Measurement of Reading: Accuracy of Recommendations From Three-Point Decision Rules

Abstract. Despite their widespread use, there is little research to support the accuracy of curriculum-based measurement of reading progress monitoring decision rules. The purpose of this study was to investigate the accuracy of a common data point decision rule. This study used a three-point rule with a goal line of 1.50 words read correctly per minute (WRCM) across six levels of true growth (range = 0–3 WRCM), two levels of dataset quality or residual (5 and 10 WRCM), and 13 levels of data collection (range = 3–15 weeks). We estimated the probability of a correct decision as well as the probability of each outcome (change instruction, increase the goal, maintain instruction) across each condition with probability theory and a spreadsheet program. In general, results indicate that recommendations are often inaccurate. Further, the probability of a correct recommendation is below chance in most situations. Results of multiple regression analyses indicate that residual, duration, and true growth interacted to influence decision accuracy. Results are discussed along with implications for future research and practice.
Heading direction computation of golf-ball collecting robot using vanishing points

Heading direction of robots is proposed using vanishing points of parallel lines contained in the facility buildings. In robot navigation, the straight navigation is often needed, which requires computation of the heading angle of the robot. In this study, we found that the relative heading direction of the robot to the surrounding facility buildings can be computed using the vanishing points of parallel lines of the buildings. The inter-stair parallel lines of facility buildings are extracted and the vanishing points are computed. As the vanishing points are computed in far away, the heading direction of the robot is close to normal angle to the facility building. The proposed vanishing point method is a novel robot orientation computing method and is proved to be time efficient and accurate via experiments. The experimental results of the proposed method are included in this paper.
Construyendo un Índice de Legitimidad del Estado en los Países Bálticos y Nórdicos

espanolEl objetivo de esta investigacion es construir un indice de legitimidad del Estado adaptado a las particularidades de los Estados Balticos y Nordicos que permita comparar paises y comprobar las variaciones de este indice a lo largo del tiempo. Un indice que puede adelantar situaciones de crisis de confianza en el sistema politico y anticipar aspectos relacionados con la estabilidad economica, social y politica de los paises. Para la construccion del indice nos basamos en las tres dimensiones de la legitimidad (legalidad, justificacion y consentimiento). Los datos los obtenemos de la Encuesta Social Europea (EES) para el periodo 2002 a 2012. Los resultados, que son dispares en los paises analizados, evidencian una perdida de legitimidad del Estado. En general, los ciudadanos balticos y nordicos confian en su justicia y las leyes, pero no estan satisfechos con la relacion con sus instituciones. Ademas, los resultados muestran una tendencia estable en los paises nordicos, pero una tendencia a la baja en los paises balticos. Todo esto sugiere que es necesario un esfuerzo de las instituciones del Estado para detener tendencias a la baja que indican una distancia cada vez mayor entre las instituciones y los ciudadanos. EnglishThe objective of this research is to build a state legitimacy index in the Baltic and Nordic countries. This index allows longitudinal comparisons between these States. It permits to identify changes over time that reflect varying levels of confidence in the political system and serve as leading indicators for differences in the economic, social, and political stability of states. The state legitimacy index is built around three dimensions (legality, justification and consent). Source data for the metric are taken the European Social Survey (ESS), between 2002 and 2012. Results, which change among countries, show a tendency toward diminishing state legitimacy. In general, Baltic and Nordic citizens trust their justice and laws, but are dissatisfied in their relationship with institutions. Moreover, results show an up-trend in Nordic Countries but a down-trend in Baltic countries. All this suggests that an effort of state institutions is necessary to improve outcomes and halt downward.
Programmieren durch Vormachen für Assistenzsysteme – Schweiß- und Klebebahnen intuitiv programmieren (Programming by Demonstration for Assistive Systems – Intuitive Programming of Welding and Gluing Trajectories)

Zusammenfassung Assistenzsysteme, seien sie mobil oder stationär, unterstützen den Werker im Produktionsprozess, beispielsweise bei Schweißarbeiten in kleinen Losgrößen. Für die Programmierung dieser Prozesse existiert keine etablierte Lösung, da die Vorgehensweisen der Industrierobotik nicht übertragbar sind. Das Konzept des Programmierens durch Vormachen ist ein Lösungsansatz, der mit der Programmierumgebung InTeach verfolgt wird. Die Komponenten des Systems und die damit mögliche schnelle und intuitive Programmierung werden am Beispiel von zwei Assistenzsystemen vorgestellt. Summary Assistant systems, both mobile or stationary, support the worker in his production process, e. g. , when welding in small lot sizes. For programming these tasks no viable solution exists, the methods of industrial robotics cannot be transferred. The concept of programming by demonstration is an approach that is followed with the programming environment InTeach. The fast and intuitive programming possible with this environment is presented with respect to two assistant systems.