Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Social Interactions, Mechanisms, and Equilibrium: Evidence from a Model of Study Time and Academic Achievement

We develop and estimate a model of study time choices of students on a social network. The model is designed to exploit unique data collected in the Berea Panel Study. Study time data allow us to quantify an intuitive mechanism for academic social interactions: own study time may depend on friend study time. Social network data allow study time choices and resulting academic achievement to be embedded in an estimable equilibrium framework. New data on study propensities allow us to directly address potential sorting into friendships based on typically unobserved determinants of study time. We develop a specifi cation test that exploits the equilibrium nature of social interactions and use it to show that our study propensity measures substantially address endogeneity concerns. We find friend study time strongly affects own study time, and, therefore, student achievement. We examine how network structure interacts with student characteristics to affect academic achievement. Sorting on friend characteristics appears important in explaining variation across students in study time and achievement, and determines the aggregate achievement level.
Image segmentation based on fuzzy clustering with neighborhood information

In this paper, an improved fuzzy c-means (IFCM) clustering algorithm for image segmentation is presented. The originality of this algorithm is based on the fact that the conventional FCM-based algorithm considers no spatial context information, which makes it sensitive to noise. The new algorithm is formulated by incorporating the spatial neighborhood information into the original FCM algorithm by a priori probability and initialized by a histogram based FCM algorithm. The probability in the algorithm that indicates the spatial influence of the neighboring pixels on the centre pixel plays a key role in this algorithm and can be automatically decided in the implementation of the algorithm by the fuzzy membership. To quantitatively evaluate and prove the performance of the proposed method, series of experiments and comparisons with many derivates of FCM algorithms are given in the paper. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective and robust to noise.
Scalable Self-Deployment of Mobile Sensor Networks: A Fluid Dynamics Approach

We propose a novel approach inspired by compressible fluids as a distributed and scalable solution to the deployment problem of mobile sensor networks in unknown environments. Our approach is based on fluid dynamics through which we model the sensor network as a fluid body and each sensor node as a fluid element. Originating from local neighborhood interactions, the principles of fluid flow are adapted to the deployment of the sensor network. Mimicking the diffusive and self-spreading behavior of compressible fluids in a mobile sensor network, we achieve the desirable properties of effective coverage, scalability, and distributed self-deployment. An adaptive deployment scheme is also devised for urban disaster environments where the number of nodes to be deployed may not be determined a priori. Simulation results show that our approach can guarantee a desired level coverability
Impact of Breakfast Skipping and Breakfast Choice on the Nutrient Intake and Body Mass Index of Australian Children

Recent data on breakfast consumption among Australian children are limited. This study examined the impact of breakfast skipping and breakfast type (cereal or non-cereal) on nutrient intakes, likelihood of meeting nutrient targets and anthropometric measures. A secondary analysis of two 24-h recall data from the 2007 Australian National Children’s Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey was conducted (2–16 years; n = 4487) to identify (a) breakfast skippers and (b) breakfast consumers, with breakfast consumers further sub-divided into (i) non-cereal and (ii) cereal consumers. Only 4% skipped breakfast and 59% of skippers were 14–16 years. Breakfast consumers had significantly higher intakes of calcium and folate, and significantly lower intakes of total fat than breakfast skippers. Cereal consumers were more likely to meet targets and consume significantly higher fibre, calcium, iron, had significantly higher intakes of folate, total sugars and carbohydrate, and significantly lower intakes of total fat and sodium than non-cereal consumers. The prevalence of overweight was lower among breakfast consumers compared to skippers, and among cereal consumers compared to-cereal consumers (p < 0.001), while no significant differences were observed for mean body mass index (BMI), BMI z-score, waist circumference and physical activity level across the categories. Breakfast and particularly breakfast cereal consumption contributes important nutrients to children’s diets.
A Novel Approach for Software Implementation of Graphical Authentication Methodology

--The conventional method of authentication requires the user to remember a text based password which he enters in order to prove his legitimacy. Since security cannot be compromised, such passwords are usually lengthy and complicated else they would be cracked easily with various password hacking techniques. The user thus finds it difficult to remember such passwords and often tends to forget them. Therefore, a more secure and attractive method can be created using graphical authentication. In this paper we propose a system where the user can define one region per image over a sequence of images and the access is given if he clicks in the correct region for the given image. We have also introduced several user friendly functions which aim to provide additional security as well as ease of access to its users.
Reliable hardware/software architecture

Deals with the problem of reliability in a hardware/software system. More specifically it deals with the strategy used to achieve reliability in a particular hardware/software system built by the author and his colleagues. Rather than dealing with the myriad details of the reliability aspects of this system, the paper focuses on the design philosophy which aims at keeping the system operational even though the underlying hardware may be malfunctioning. This philosophy is essentially an extension of the `modular' programming methodology to include dynamic error detection and recovery.
Satisfaction of the students in a preparatory course of mathematics in e-modalities

El objetivo de la investigación de la cual procede este trabajo fue analizar la satisfacción de los estudiantes con el curso propedéutico de matemáticas avanzadas, en modalidades e y b-learning, de una maestría en electrónica en una institución de posgrado del Tecnológico Nacional de México. El análisis de la satisfacción se realizó con base en la teoría de la desconfirmación de expectativas, y las categorías para el análisis se retomaron de la teoría de la idoneidad didáctica. La investigación se diseñó como un estudio de caso, con alcance exploratorio y descriptivo. Para la valoración de la satisfacción de los estudiantes, utilizamos dos cuestionarios en línea, uno antes de iniciar el curso para conocer sus expectativas y otro al final para valorar la satisfacción. Aplicamos entrevistas semiestructuradas a los estudiantes y al docente que impartió el curso y observación no participante durante la modalidad e-learning para la triangulación de datos. Aunque el estudio se realizó con un solo grupo, los resultados preliminares muestran que los estudiantes, a pesar de las limitaciones materiales y afectivas durante el curso, presentan un alto grado de satisfacción con este. Las categorías de análisis son adecuadas para la evaluación de cursos de matemáticas en estas modalidades. Abstract
The Origins of Industrial Scientific Discoveries

This paper estimates science production functions for RD this is especially true when papers are weighted by citations received, a measure of their importance. Consistent with the role assigned to knowledge spillovers in growth theory, the importance of outside knowledge, especially that of universities, increases from the firm to the industry level. The findings survive the inclusion of fixed effects, interactions among the effects, variations in sample and specification, and efforts to control for endogeneity.
Lock-free protected types for real-time ada

The Ravenscar profile defined by Ada prevents deadlock and starvation of conforming Ada programs on monoprocessor systems, allowing for better reasoning about real-time behavior. While defined in terms of mutual exclusion, we show Ada's protected types are general enough to allow an enhanced compiler to automatically generate appropriate lock-free synchronization code even on multiprocessors for some basic datastructures. In the context of real-time systems this allows for a more deterministic real-time response and improves the ability to statically analyze generated code.
Dynamic and static load scheduling performance on a NUMA shared memory multiprocessor

Multiprocessor Xiaodong Zhang Division of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Texas at San Antonio San Antonio, Texas 78249 Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures make it possible to build large-scale shared memory multiprocesSOr systems in comparison with the non-scalable Uniform Memory Access (UMA) architectures. Most NUMA multiprocessor operations such as scheduling and synchronizing processes, accessing data from processors to memory models and allocating distributed memory space to different processors, are performed through interconnection networks such as a multistage switching network. The efficiency of these basic operations determines the parallel processing performance on a N UMA multiprocessor. This paper presents several analytical models to predict and evaluate dynamic and static load scheduling performance on a NUMA shared memory multiprocessor. Performance measurements to support the models and analyses through several numerical examples have been done on the BBN GP1OOO, a NUMA shared memory multiprocessor. Both analytical and experimental results give a comprehensive and clear understanding of the various effects, which are important for the effective use of a NUMA shared memory multiprocessor. The results in this paper may be used to determine optimal strategies in developing an efficient programming environment for a NUMA system.
Energy and Economic Growth: The Stylized Facts

We summarize what we know about energy and economic growth in a set of stylized facts. We combine analysis of a panel data set of 99 countries from 1971 to 2010 with analysis of some longer run historical data. Our key result is that over the last 40 years there has been a stable cross-sectional relationship between per capita energy use and income per capita with an elasticity of energy use with respect to income of less than unity. This implies that energy intensity has tended to decrease in countries that have become richer but not in others. We also find that over the last two centuries there has been convergence in energy intensity towards the current distribution, per capita energy use has tended to rise and energy quality to increase, and, though evidence is limited, the cost share of energy has declined.
A Sensitivity Analysis of fMRI Balloon Model

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows the mapping of the brain activation through measurements of the Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) contrast. The characterization of the pathway from the input stimulus to the output BOLD signal requires the selection of an adequate hemodynamic model and the satisfaction of some specific conditions while conducting the experiment and calibrating the model. This paper, focuses on the identifiability of the Balloon hemodynamic model. By identifiability, we mean the ability to estimate accurately the model parameters given the input and the output measurement. Previous studies of the Balloon model have somehow added knowledge either by choosing prior distributions for the parameters, freezing some of them, or looking for the solution as a projection on a natural basis of some vector space. In these studies, the identification was generally assessed using event-related paradigms. This paper justifies the reasons behind the need of adding knowledge, choosing certain paradigms, and completing the few existing identifiability studies through a global sensitivity analysis of the Balloon model in the case of blocked design experiment.
Real Time Tracking using Stereo Vision for Augmented Reality

Correct tracking of the user position is crucial for an Augmented Reality (AR) application. For this reason, tracking became a very important research subject in the field of real-time AR. The most common solution to implement an AR system is based on the use of an Head Mounted Display (HMD) and two cameras for the stereoscopic video see-through visualization. Almost all the systems presented in literature employ one camera to obtain a marker based video-tracking. This technique is widespread because it offers sufficient precision and accuracy. This paper describes an innovative tracking solution based on a stereo vision approach which aims to use the information coming from both cameras in order to improve tracking accuracy. The proposed solution is also able to switch itself into a standard single camera visual tracking when the stereo pair correspondence is missing. Further, a comparison of the performance of both mono and stereo tracking is reported.
A ‘cool’ load balancer for parallel applications

Meeting power requirements of huge exascale machines of the future will be a major challenge. Our focus in this paper is to minimize cooling power and we propose a technique that uses a combination of DVFS and temperature aware load balancing to constrain core temperatures as well as save cooling energy. Our scheme is specifically designed to suit parallel applications which are typically tightly coupled. The temperature control, comes at the cost of execution time and we try to minimize the timing penalty. We experiment with three applications (with different power utilization profiles), run on a 128-core (32-node) cluster with a dedicated air conditioning unit. We calibrate the efficacy of our scheme based on three metrics: ability to control average core temperatures thereby avoiding hot spot occurence, timing penalty minimization, and cooling energy savings. Our results show cooling energy savings of up to 57% with a timing penalty of 19%.
The pleasures of immersion and engagement: schemas, scripts and the fifth business

Presently, designers of interactive narratives and video games have only a slender understanding of the aesthetic experiences their audiences and users seek. Using schema theory, this study articulates the two varieties of aesthetic pleasures that users of interactive works enjoy: immersion and engagement. It uses schema theory to define the characteristics of immersion and engagement in both conventional and new media. After examining how readers' experiences of these two different aesthetics may be enhanced or diminished by interface design, options for navigation, and other features, the essay concludes by looking beyond immersion and engagement to 'flow', a state in which readers are both immersed and engaged.
An Alternative Representation for QBF

Quantified Boolean formulas are a powerful representation that have been used to capture and solve a variety of problems in Artificial Intelligence. While most research has focused on quantified Boolean formulas in prenex normal form (QBF), we explore an alternative representation of quantified Boolean formulas, called Constrained Quantified Formulas (CQF). CQF allows for a more direct representation of many applications. We present complexity results for CQF and for several subclasses of CQF. We have developed a solver, called QRSsat3, for CQF instances at the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. Computational results of QRSsat3 are compared with the results of solvers for quantified Boolean formulas in prenex normal form.
Runtime Analysis of Evolutionary Diversity Maximization for OneMinMax

Diversity mechanisms are key to the working behaviour of evolutionary multi-objective algorithms. With this paper, we contribute to the theoretical understanding of such mechanisms by means of rigorous runtime analysis. We consider the OneMinMax problem for which it has been shown in [11] that a standard benchmark algorithm called SIBEA is not able to obtain a population with optimal hypervolume distribution in expected polynomial time if the population size is relatively small. We investigate the same setting as in [11] and show that SIBEA is able to achieve a good approximation of the optimal hypervolume distribution very efficiently. Furthermore, we study OneMinMax in the context of search-based diversity optimization and examine the time until SIBEA with a search-based diversity mechanism has obtained a population of maximal diversity covering the whole Pareto front.
Collecting and Analysing Personal Information Management Data

Personal Information Management (PIM) research has investigated the information trail generated by an individual while performing some information-seeking task on their desktop, with the aim of improving PIM tool-support. Nevertheless, due to the personal nature of the data, this is rarely released for reuse. Furthermore, there exists no tool that allows a PIM researcher to investigate how PIM related data evolves over time nor one that allows for the results of applying different approaches over such data to be analysed. In this paper, we present the Personal Information Management Analytix framework (PiMx) that leverages upon a graph-analytics approach for the analysis and visualisation of evolving activity-data generated by individuals performing tasks on their desktops. We further describe a data collection methodology that opens up the data for reuse and briefly discuss how PiMx is used to analyse such a collection.
Multilevel Network Security Monitoring and Evaluation Model

Based on the correspondence between the artificial immune system antibody and pathogen invasion intensity, this paper is to establish a real-time network risk evaluation model. According to the network intrusion own characteristics and the consequence from service, assets and attack, this paper design to build a hierarchical, quantitative measurement indicator system, and an unified evaluation information base and knowledge base. The paper also combines assets evaluation system and network integration evaluation system, considering from the application layer, the host layer, network layer may be factors that affect the network risks. The experimental results show that the new model improves the ability of intrusion detection and prevention than that of the traditional passive intrusion prevention systems.
Enrichment of an Endosulfan-Degrading Mixed Bacterial Culture

ABSTRACT An endosulfan-degrading mixed bacterial culture was enriched from soil with a history of endosulfan exposure. Enrichment was obtained by using the insecticide as the sole source of sulfur. Chemical hydrolysis was minimized by using strongly buffered culture medium (pH 6.6), and the detergent Tween 80 was included to emulsify the insecticide, thereby increasing the amount of endosulfan in contact with the bacteria. No growth occurred in control cultures in the absence of endosulfan. Degradation of the insecticide occurred concomitant with bacterial growth. The compound was both oxidized and hydrolyzed. The oxidation reaction favored the alpha isomer and produced endosulfate, a terminal pathway product. Hydrolysis involved a novel intermediate, tentatively identified as endosulfan monoaldehyde on the basis of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and chemical derivatization results. The accumulation and decline of metabolites suggest that the parent compound was hydrolyzed to the putative monoaldehyde, thereby releasing the sulfite moiety required for growth. The monoaldehyde was then oxidized to endosulfan hydroxyether and further metabolized to (a) polar product(s). The cytochrome P450 inhibitor, piperonyl butoxide, did not prevent endosulfan oxidation or the formation of other metabolites. These results suggest that this mixed culture is worth investigating as a source of endosulfan-hydrolyzing enzymes for use in enzymatic bioremediation of endosulfan residues.
Detecting vibrations across the body in mobile contexts

In this paper we explore the potential and limitations of vibrotactile displays in practical wearable applications, by comparing users' detection rate and response time to stimuli applied across the body in varied conditions. We examined which body locations are more sensitive to vibrations and more affected by movement; whether visual workload, expectation of location, or gender impact performance; and if users have subjective preferences to any of these conditions. In two experiments we compared these factors using five vibration intensities on up to 13 body locations. Our contributions are comparisons of tactile detection performance under conditions typifying mobile use, an experiment design that supports further investigation in vibrotactile communication, and guidelines for optimal display location given intended use.
A SAMPLE OF ASTRONOMICAL TIME SERIESPaul

The observation of variability in astronomical systems provides astronomers with valuable information on the physical nature of the system. The types of variability which astronomers deal with can be periodic, quasi-periodic, or aperiodic. We collect and describe a number of time series data sets which exemplify the types of problems encountered by the modern astronomer and which demonstrate some of the methodological challenges they face. The Sample includes data sets with periodic, quasi-periodic and aperiodic behavior, sparse and unevenly spaced sampling, and paired time series requiring cross-correlation. The data sets in the Sample are available on diskette, over the Internet using the World Wide Web, or by electronic mail. We hope that statisticians and time series analysts will nd problems of interest and be stimulated to apply new techniques to astronomical problems.
Trends and Transitions in Language Development: Looking for the Missing Piece

In this article, we show that developmental neuropsychology can make significant inroads into the study of language acquisition. The 1st section describes new methodological developments in the field of language acquisition, including the headturn preference procedure (e.g., Fernald, 1985; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1996a). The 2nd section shows how these new methods are altering our view of the process of acquisition and placing more emphasis on the period prior to the emergence of speech. The 3rd section presents a profile of language acquisition, reviewing recent research in the areas of phonological, lexical, and syntactic development. Using Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff's (1996a) coalition model as a base, we examine major transitions in the landscape of development. Finally, we conclude that the transitions observed in the behavioral data offer ripe opportunities for the use of conve.