Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
FloatX

We present FloatX (Float eXtended), a C++ framework to investigate the effect of leveraging customized floating-point formats in numerical applications. FloatX formats are based on binary IEEE 754 with smaller significand and exponent bit counts specified by the user. Among other properties, FloatX facilitates an incremental transformation of the code, relies on hardware-supported floating-point types as back-end to preserve efficiency, and incurs no storage overhead. The article discusses in detail the design principles, programming interface, and datatype casting rules behind FloatX. Furthermore, it demonstrates FloatX’s usage and benefits via several case studies from well-known numerical dense linear algebra libraries, such as BLAS and LAPACK; the Ginkgo library for sparse linear systems; and two neural network applications related with image processing and text recognition.
Towards validity for a formative assessment for language-specific program tracing skills

Formative assessments can have positive effects on learning, but few exist for computing, even for basic skills such as program tracing. Instead, teachers often rely on overly broad test questions that lack the diagnostic granularity needed to measure early learning. We followed Kane's framework for assessment validity to design a formative assessment of JavaScript program tracing, developing "an argument for effectiveness for a specific use. " This included: 1) a fine-grained scoring model to guide practice, 2) item design to test parts of our fine-grained model with low confound-caused variance, 3) a covering test design that samples from a space of items and covers the scoring model, and 4) a feasibility argument for effectiveness for formative use (can target and improve learning). We contribute a distillation of Kane's framework situated for computing education, and a novel application of Kane's framework to formative assessment of program tracing, focusing on scoring, generalization, and use. Our application also contributes a novel way of modeling possible conceptions of a programming language's semantics by modeling prevalent compositions of control flow and data flow graphs and the paths through them, a process for generating test items, and principles for minimizing item confounds.
Application of Blockchain Technology in the Sharing Economy: A Model of Trust and Intermediation

Combining blockchain technology and smart contracts has the potential to facilitate disintermediation and realize true peer-to-peer transactions provided that sufficient trust is build. An advanced research model of blockchain-mediated trust is conceptualized by incorporating extant trust building concepts. The conceptualized model helps to advance future empirical trust research in connection with blockchain technology in the sharing economy by suggesting moderating and mediating effects on trust in online settings.
Running head: EFFECTS OF STRATEGIC BSR ON FIRM PERFORMANCE 1 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, PLATTEVILLE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

This paper examines the impact that buyer-supplier relationships have on inter and intraorganizational performance and aims to connect those specific relational exchanges to increases in operational performance metrics. This paper begins by using research to identify the shift from traditional buyer-supplier relationships to a more strategic, collaborative model, and how methods such as Transaction Cost Theory and Supply Management Orientation contributed to that change. It then discusses different buyer-supplier typologies and describes the role of each partner in those exchanges. With international purchasing continuing at a high rate, cultural aspects such as power dependence and individualism are investigated for their part in strengthening relational exchanges between buyers and suppliers. Elements that increase firm competitiveness are also presented, linking resources advantages and social environments to firm performance. Special focus is on the tangible and intangible forms of resource advantages, and how organizations can exploit those capabilities for maximal gains. This paper then highlights the study results presented in the research, which are based on survey results from organization participants and statistical model findings. Various performance measures are analyzed which include relational and transactional based constructs that helped in the development of the argument concerning the performance increasing effects of strategic buyer-supplier relationships. EFFECTS OF STRATEGIC BSR ON FIRM PERFORMANCE 5
Optimal Logistics Control of an Omnichannel Supply Chain

This paper aims to find the best way to control logistics in an omnichannel supply chain (OSC). For this purpose, two steps of work were carried out around case-based reasoning (CBR). In the first step, the combined feedback which proved stability was selected to control logistics in the single node, while the variational method and the virtual siphon were combined to determine the optimal control curve. There is a linear part and a nonlinear part in the combined feedback. The new method of storing data mode is “data turning to picture”. In the second step, image features were extracted by the hybrid method of SURF-GoogLeNet and used for case matching via the grey cloud method. SURF-GoogLeNet was firstly used to update the weight proportion of the defect points in the whole image via the speeded up robust features (SURF) method and secondly to self-extract features using the GoogLeNet method. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed methods was verified through experiments. The research findings shed new light on the management of supply chains.
Molecular-Scale Studies of Phosphorus Speciation and Transformation in Manure-Amended and Microdose-Fertilized Indigenous Vegetable Production Systems of Nigeria and Benin Republic

This study investigated the speciation, transformation and availability of P during indigenous vegetable production by employing a combination of chemical and spectroscopic techniques. The study focused upon sites in two ecozones of SSA, the Dry Savanna (lna, Benin Republic) and Rainforest (Ilesha, Nigeria). Both sites were cultivated with two indigenous vegetable species; local amaranth (Amaranthus cruentus (AV)) and African eggplant (Solanum macrocarpon (SM)). The soils were treated with 5 t/ha poultry manure and urea fertilizer at the rate of 0, 20, 40, 60 and 80 kg N/ha. Soil samples were collected before planting and after harvest. Phosphorus K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy was used to determine P speciation in these soils. Quantitative analysis showed that adsorbed and organic P were the two dominant P species in the manure amended Dry Savanna (DS) soils before planting and after harvest in soils cultivated with both AV and SM, with the addition of urea (40 kg N/ha) causing an increase in the organic P form in Dry Savanna soils cultivated with AV. Soils of the Rainforest (RF) cultivated with AV initially had large amounts of apatite P in the manure amended soils prior to planting which was transformed to adsorbed and organic P after harvest. Urea addition to the Rainforest soils shifted the dominant P species from organic P to adsorbed and apatite P, which is likely to limit P availability. Soils cultivated with SM had similar proportions of both organic and adsorbed P forms, with 40 kg N/ha addition slightly increasing the proportion of adsorbed P.
Efficient Inference Amortization in Graphical Models using Structured Continuous Conditional Normalizing Flows

We introduce a more efficient neural architecture for amortized inference (Gershman, 2014; Ritchie et al., 2016), which combines continuous (Grathwohl et al., 2018) and conditional (Chen et al., 2019) normalizing flows using a principled choice of structure. Our flow derives its sparsity pattern from the minimally faithful inverse of its underlying graphical model (Webb et al., 2018). We find that this factorization reduces the necessary numbers both of parameters in the neural network and of adaptive integration steps in the ODE solver. Consequently, the throughput at training time and inference time is increased, without decreasing performance in comparison to unconstrained flows. By expressing the structural inversion and the flow construction as compilation passes of a probabilistic programming language, we demonstrate their applicability to the stochastic inversion of realistic models such as convolutional neural networks (CNN). Our automated pipeline consists of three program transformations, as illustrated in Figure 1: First, a formal specification of a generative process is translated into a graphical model, and its minimally faithful inverse structure is computed as described in Section 2. Subsequently, the latter acts as the sparsity pattern for the novel neural network architecture introduced in Section 3. Finally, the resulting flow is trained with a novel symmetrized KL loss, as summarized in Section 4.
Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

We examine the functional coupling between articulatory characteristics of prominence, such as articulator speed, and its acoustic characteristics, such as F0 and acoustic energy, for content words (nouns) and function words (e.g., articles, prepositions and conjunctions) using real-time magnetic resonance imaging data. We use Granger causality ideas to test the degree and direction of causal influence between the chosen articulatory and acoustic measures for function and content words. We further apply functional canonical correlation analysis to these measures to understand the covariant behavioral modes of the articulatory and acoustic measures. After controlling for word duration, we observe that articulatory speed generally has a significant causal influence on F0, especially for longer content words, but observe no such effect in the opposite direction. Notably, we do not observe this effect for function words in most cases. We further observe a tighter coupling of canonical weight functions of articulatory speed and acoustic prominence characteristics for the content words as compared to the function words considered. These observations provide support for the hypothesis that prominence realized during content words may result from a close coupling between articulatory and acoustic characteristics such as articulatory speed and F0, with suggestions of a directional causal relationship.
The Associations between Imageability of Positive and Negative Valence Words and Fear Reactivity

This study investigated the associations of imageability with fear reactivity. Imageability ratings of four word classes: positive and negative (i) emotional and (ii) propriosensitive, neutral and negative (iii) theoretical and (iv) neutral concrete filler, and fear reactivity scores—degree of fearfulness towards different situations (Total Fear (TF) score) and total number of extreme fears and phobias (Extreme Fear (EF) score), were obtained from 171 participants. Correlations between imageability, TF and EF scores were tested to analyze how word categories and their valence were associated with fear reactivity. Imageability ratings were submitted to recursive partitioning. Participants with high TF and EF scores had higher imageability for negative emotional and negative theoretical words. The correlations between imageability of negative emotional words and negative theoretical words for EF score were significant. Males showed stronger correlations for imageability of negative emotional words for EF and TF scores. High imageability for positive emotional words was associated with lower fear reactivity in females. These findings were discussed with regard to negative attentional bias theory of anxiety, influence on emotional systems, and gender-specific coping styles. This study provides insight into cognitive functions involved in mental imagery, semantic competence for mental imagery in relation to fear reactivity, and a potential psycholinguistic instrument assessing fear reactivity.
Challenges in Computing and Optimizing Upper Bounds of Marginal Likelihood based on Chi-Square Divergences

Abstract Variational inference based on χ divergence minimization (CHIVI) provides a way to approximate a model’s posterior while obtaining an upper bound on the marginal likelihood. However, in practice CHIVI relies on Monte Carlo (MC) estimates of an upper bound objective that at modest sample sizes are not guaranteed to be true bounds on the marginal likelihood. This paper provides an empirical study of CHIVI performance on a series of synthetic inference tasks. We show that CHIVI is far more sensitive to initialization than classic VI based on KL minimization, often needs a very large number of samples (over a million), and may not be a reliable upper bound. We also suggest possible ways to detect and alleviate some of these pathologies, including diagnostic bounds and initialization strategies.
Biodiversity of epiphytic Pseudomonas strains isolated from leaves of pepper and lettuce

Plants are complex biological systems under constant and dynamic interaction with diverse microbial communities which influence their development. The microbial communities associated to plants could possess specific functions on basis on colonized tissue. In crop plants, microbial diversity and their beneficial effects can be affected by plant genotype and farming activities. In this context, we explored biodiversity of Pseudomonas strains isolated from leaves of pepper and lettuce crops, through phylogenetic analysis and physiological profile coupled with specific biochemical tests for plant-microorganism interaction. Bacterial isolates showed genetic and phenotypic diversity despite to be isolated from domestic plant crops. The importance of biodiversity at taxonomic and functional level found in phyllosphere of plant crops and its relationship to achieving sustainability is discussed.
OVERCLAIMING AND FAKING BEHAVIOR 1 Liar! Liar! (when Stakes are Higher): Understanding how the Overclaiming Technique can be used to Detect Faking in Personnel Selection

Overclaiming questionnaires (OCQs), which capture ‘overclaiming behavior’ or exaggerating one’s knowledge about a given topic, have been proposed as potentially indicative of faking behaviors that plague self-report assessments in job application settings. The empirical evidence on the efficacy of OCQs in this respect is inconsistent, however. We draw from expectancy theory to reconcile these inconsistencies and identify the conditions under which overclaiming behavior will be most indicative of faking. We propose that the assessment context must be tied to an outcome with high valence, and that the content of the OCQ must match the perceived knowledge requirements of the target job, such that overclaiming knowledge of that content will be instrumental to receiving a job offer. We test these propositions through three studies. First, in a sample of 519 applicants to Firefighter positions, we demonstrate that overclaiming on a job-relevant OCQ is positively associated with other indicators of faking and self-presentation. Next, we demonstrate through a repeated-measures experiment (N = 252) that participants in a simulated personnel selection setting overclaim more knowledge on a job-relevant OCQ than on a job-irrelevant OCQ, compared to when they are instructed to respond honestly. Finally, in a novel repeatedmeasures personnel selection paradigm (N = 259), we observed more overclaiming during a ‘selection’ assessment compared to a ‘research’ assessment, and that this job-application overclaiming behavior predicted deviant behavior following selection. Altogether, the results show that overclaiming behavior is most indicative of faking in job application assessments when an OCQ contains job-relevant (rather than job-irrelevant) content.
Effect of a combined intervention on the control of hypertension, in patients from primary care centers in Lisbon

A Hipertensão Arterial (HTA) é um dos mais importantes fatores de risco para as doenças cardiovasculares (DVC) e apresenta uma elevada prevalência em Portugal. Apesar de, nas últimas décadas, terem sido desenvolvidos terapêuticas antihipertensoras (aHT) eficazes, 57,5% dos hipertensos medicados não têm a sua HTA controlada, reforçando a necessidade de desenvolver estratégias para melhorar o controlo da pressão arterial (PA) em Portugal.
A Controller for Changing the Yaw Direction of an Underactuated Unicycle Robot

Several researchers have developed unicycle robots and associated control systems. We have also developed a unicycle robot that consists of a body, a disk driven by a dc motor for rotation, and a wheel driven by another dc motor to move the body. Because the disk is rotated in the frontal plane, there is no direct force to change the yaw direction of the robot. Hence conventional controllers cannot change the yaw direction. The present paper proposes a control method for changing the yaw direction by using the interaction between individual motions in the yaw, pitch, and roll directions. Simulation and experimental results show that the control method can control the yaw direction of the unicycle robot while stabilizing its posture. An observer to estimate the robot posture is also developed. Index Terms – Unicycle Robot, Underactuated System, Regulator, Nonlinear Control System
Technical note: Fundamental aspects of ice nucleation via pore condensation and freezing including Laplace pressure and growth into macroscopic ice

Abstract. Pore condensation and freezing (PCF) is an ice nucleation mechanism that explains ice formation at low ice supersaturation. It assumes that liquid water condenses in pores of solid aerosol particles below water saturation, as described by the Kelvin equation, followed by homogeneous ice nucleation when temperatures are below about 235 K or immersion freezing at higher temperatures, in case the pores contain active sites that induce ice nucleation. Porewater is under tension (negative pressure) below water saturation as described by the Young–Laplace equation. This negative pressure affects the ice nucleation rates and the stability of the pore ice. Here, pressure-dependent parameterizations of classical nucleation theory are developed to quantify the increase in homogeneous ice nucleation rates as a function of tension and to assess the critical diameter of pores that is required to accommodate ice at negative pressures. Growth of ice out of the pore into a macroscopic ice crystal requires ice supersaturation. This supersaturation as a function of the pore opening width is derived, assuming that the ice phase first grows as a spherical cap on top of the pore opening before it starts to expand laterally on the particle surface into a macroscopic ice crystal.
Nichtpharmakologische Therapie bei Menschen mit kognitiven Einschränkungen Ergebnisse der randomisierten kontrollierten German-Day-Care-Studie

Hintergrund: Zur Förderung von Menschen mit kognitiven Einschränkungen im Alter gibt es verschiedene nichtmedikamentöse Maßnahmen. Häufig werden unstrukturierte und nichtevidenzbasierte Interventionen eingesetzt. Die im Pflegeheim bereits evaluierte Mehrkomponententherapie MAKS (motorisch, alltagspraktisch, kognitiv, sozial) wird in der vorliegenden Studie in Tagespflegeeinrichtungen (TPE) untersucht.
Contribution of endoscopy to early diagnosis of hypertrophic pyloric stenosis.

Summary:The diagnostic accuracy of ultrasonography and gastrointestinal endoscopy was compared in 63 infants who were operated on for infantile hypertrophic pyloric stenosis. Endoscopy was far more accurate than ultrasonography, the diagnosis being made in 97 and 81% of the cases, respectively. The
Specification and Verification of Properties of Neural Networks

With the development of machine learning and its daily applications, gaining confidence in the systems produced by such techniques has become a critical issue. A first problem consists in formalizing what is expected from the systems. Such requirements may be either generic or specific to the task to be achieved. For instance, adversarial robustness is a generic property [1]. It measures how much information is needed by an attacker to “falsify” the answer of a classifying system. On the other hand, assume the system proposes actions to be performed in the presence of an intruder, a specific property would be that there is no action to be proposed when no intruder is detected. In the internship, we will focus on neural networks since this is the most widely used and moreover it presents similar features to hybrid systems letting the possibility to adapt efficient techniques from this domain. Let us illustrate an example of specification formula:
WHO EMRO | Harnessing the power of advocacy to improve seasonal influenza vaccination coverage in the Eastern Mediterranean Region

Seasonal influenza epidemics constitute a major burden to human health in terms of morbidity and mortality. Vaccines are available and effective for preventing influenza. However, the optimal impact of these vaccines on a community can be only achieved with proper implementation and adequate coverage among risk groups. Influenza vaccination rates in the Eastern Mediterranean Region remain low and lag behind other regions. This is despite implementation of rigorous vaccination policies in many countries in the Region and can be attributed to various barriers, including lack of knowledge and misconceptions regarding influenza and vaccination. Advocacy to promote the benefits and safety of vaccination and to educate the health sector and the public about the burden of influenza is needed to enhance vaccination coverage in the Region, particularly among high-risk groups. We highlight approaches that have improved vaccination coverage to support the value of advocacy in promoting and improving vaccination rates in the Region.
News of the Society: Twenty Years of North American Psychosomatic Medicine

GAJSTOM requires me to deliver and you to endure the annual presidential address to this society. Thinking it over carefully, and taking into account my old age and long experience, I came to the conclusion that a survey of progress in North American psychosomatic medicine or, more correctly, in North American psychosomatic research, would be most appropriate for the occasion. The period to be covered extends over the last 2 decades. This period was arbitrarily chosen because it covers the existence and successful functioning of our Journal. My review encompasses the tenure of the first Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Flanders Dunbar, whose death we so profoundly regret, and that of Carl Binger, whose editorial efforts have brought the Journal to the present high level—which is a source of pride to us all. I have included in the title of my address the words "North American" because a global view shows that marked differences exist in approach and conceptualization in different parts of the world. North American psychosomatic medicine is based on the physiological conceptual models of Cannon and, to some extent on those of Selye, and
WiFi-based indoor location system on a mobile device for a university building using Bayesian filters

This work describes the implementation of an indoor location system on a mobile device for a faculty of the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieŕıa, Peru. The proposed system makes use of WiFi signals and a Bayes filter to predict the location. The main advantage of the proposed method is that it does not require special hardware. The experimental results show 92.31% for position accuracy and a real-time response.