Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spoken content retrieval beyond pipeline integration of automatic speech recognition and information retrieval

The dramatic increase in the creation of multimedia content is leading to the development of large archives in which a substantial amount of the information is in spoken form. Efficient access to this information requires effective spoken content retrieval (SCR) methods. Traditionally, SCR systems have focused on a pipeline integration of two fundamental technologies: transcription using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and search supported using text-based information retrieval (IR). Existing SCR approaches estimate the relevance of a spoken retrieval item based on the lexical overlap between a user’s query and the textual transcriptions of the items. However, the speech signal contains other potentially valuable non-lexical information that remains largely unexploited by SCR approaches. Particularly, acoustic correlates of speech prosody, that have been shown useful to identify salient words and determine topic changes, have not been exploited by existing SCR approaches. In addition, the temporal nature of multimedia content means that accessing content is a user intensive, time consuming process. In order to minimise user effort in locating relevant content, SCR systems could suggest playback points in retrieved content indicating the locations where the system believes relevant information may be found. This typically requires adopting a segmentation mechanism for splitting documents into smaller “elements” to be ranked and from which suitable playback points could be selected. Existing segmentation approaches do not generalise well to every possible information need or provide robustness to ASR errors. This thesis extends SCR beyond the standard ASR and IR pipeline approach by: (i) exploring the utilisation of prosodic information as complementary evidence of topical relevance to enhance current SCR approaches; (ii) determining elements of content that, when retrieved, minimise user search effort and provide increased robustness to ASR errors; and (iii) developing enhanced evaluation measures that could better capture the factors that affect user satisfaction in SCR.
The nature and preliminary outcomes of a Four-dimensional Accounting Student Support (FASS) programme

A traditional student-support approach to Accounting, which involved tutoring and case-study-based independent learning, was redesigned to create a Four-dimensional Accounting Student Support (FASS) programme. The redesign was necessitated by continued poor module success rates, low graduation rates and limited engagement in teaching environments by postgraduate Accounting students, in spite of various support strategies. The FASS programme creatively considered the four dimensions of student-support programmes, namely, Operations, Academic assistance, Content, and Feedback. The redesigned programme was implemented for “at-risk” postgraduate students near graduation, with a specific focus on enhancing their academic performance and refining their personal attributes and skills for success. This article explains the design of the FASS programme and the results from the first implementation cycle. Improvements in academic success were noted, as were promising signs of the development of personal attributes and skills such as self-confidence, emotional resilience and how to move beyond content learning to understanding. Significant, and almost unexpected, was the obvious change in participants’ attitudes after being given the opportunity to take ownership of their learning. This evaluation study provides insight into one initiative to redesign student-support in the complex field of Accounting, though further research and debate are needed to refine such initiatives.
Big 5 ASEAN capital markets forecasting using WEMA method

ASEAN through ASEAN Economics Community (AEC) 2020 treaty has proposed financial integration via capital markets integration in order to aim comprehensive ASEAN economic integration. Therefore, the need to have a proper prediction of ASEAN capital market becomes a major issue. In this study, we took big 5 ASEAN capital markets, i.e. Straits Times Index (STI), Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE), Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET), Jakarta Stock Exchange (JKSE), and Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) to be forecasted using WEMA method. Weighted Exponential Moving Average (WEMA) is a new hybrid moving average method which combines the weighting factor calculation in Weighted Moving Average (WMA) with the procedure of Exponential Moving Average (EMA). WEMA has successfully been implemented and used to forecaste discrete time series data, but never being used to forecast ASEAN capital markets. In this study, we took further action by implementing the WEMA method with brute force approach for scaling factor tuning on big 5 ASEAN capital markets. From the experimental results, we found that WEMA has successfully forecasted all those exchanges. By looking at the forecast error measurement, it gives the best performance on PSE and worst performance on SET dataset among all datasets being considered in this study.
Fertilit6 apr s cancer du testicule

Fertility after testicular cancer E. HUYGHE, P.F. THONNEAU , P. PLANTE OBJECTIVES: To study the fertility of patients treated for testicular cancer and to identify predictive factors of infertility after treatment. MATERIAL AND METHODS: 314 men with germ cell tumor, followed by the CECOS Midi-Pyrdn(~es center between 1978 and 1998, were included in the study. They were evaluated retrospectively and interviewed by a mailed questionnaire concerning their reproductive history. If they failed to respond to the questionnaire, they were contacted twice by mail, and once by telephone. The response rate was 92%. RESULTS: The reproductive history of 277 men was known: 138 men had tried to have a child. 91 (66%) succeeded and 47 (34%) failed to achieve a "spontaneous" pregnancy. Age greater than 25 (p<0.004), a history of undescended testis, and a sperm count lower than 10 million per ml were inversely correlated with fertility (p<0.004, p<0.01, p<0.0001, respectively). However, no relationship was found between radiotherapy or chemotherapy and fertility after treatment. CONCLUSION: Men treated for testicular cancer are at high risk of infertility. We identified various prognostic factors for fertility after treatment for testicular cancer: radiotherapy and chemotherapy had no significant effect on fertility.
Children’s Signaling of Their Uncertain Knowledge State: Prosody, Face, and Body Cues Come First

ABSTRACT Children achieve their first language milestones initially in gesture and prosody before they do so in speech. However, little is known about the potential precursor role of those features later in development when children start using more complex linguistic skills. In this study, we explore how children’s ability to reflect on their degree of uncertainty develops. A total of 40 Catalan preschool children (and 10 adults) took part in a game in which they had to guess the identity of ten objects which they could touch but not see and then state how certain they were about each guess. An analysis of the children’s reflections on their own uncertainty showed that (a) when preschoolers take a stance, they start to use multimodal uncertainty signals accurately before they are able to self-report their own level of (un)certainty; (b) they use epistemic prosodic and gestural markers before they start using lexical cues; and (c) multimodal cues signaling knowledge state become increasingly more complex over time. These findings suggest that preschoolers’ expression of knowledge states through gestures and prosody reflects an early epistemic sensitivity which develops as they get older.
Officers’ memory and stress in virtual lethal force scenarios: Implications for policy and training

ABSTRACT Sworn law enforcement officers (N = 151) were exposed to two different simulated lethal force encounters, a motorcycle-traffic-stop (MTS) and a workplace violence incident. Workplace violence incidents (WPV) consisted of two versions: an original version (WVO) and an enhanced version (WVE) with additional tactile and auditory stimuli within the simulation environment. Officers’ recognition memory (immediate and 48 h later), perceived stress, and physiological stress responses were examined. Delayed reporting led to impaired memory for event information in the MTS and perpetrator information in the WVE simulation. Moreover, perpetrator information was remembered more accurately than event information. Two physiological stress markers – alpha amylase and immunoglobulin-a – were correlated with memory for the simulated experiences; however, cortisol and interleukin-6 were not. These findings support current theory related to arousal and memory suggesting that officers should be interviewed as soon as reasonably possible after a lethal force incident. Implications for legal parameters in defining a ‘reasonable officer’ exerting lethal force are considered.
Details on AMP-B-SBL: An Algorithm for Recovery of Clustered Sparse Signals Using Approximate Message Passing [1-3]

Solving the inverse problem of compressive sensing in the context of single measurement vector (SMV) problem with an unknown block-sparsity structure is considered. For this purpose, we propose a sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) algorithm simplified via the approximate message passing (AMP) framework. In order to encourage the block-sparsity structure, we incorporate the concept of total variation, called Sigma-Delta, as a measure of blocksparsity on the support set of the solution. The AMP framework reduces the computational load of the proposed SBL algorithm and as a result makes it faster compared to the message passing framework. Furthermore, in terms of the mean-squared error between the true and the reconstructed solution, the algorithm demonstrates an encouraging improvement compared to the other algorithms. Keywords— Compressed sensing (CS), sparse Bayesian learning (SBL), approximate message passing (AMP), clustered sparsity, single measurement vector (SMV).
The Impact of Breakups on Social Media Use Among Digital Natives

The Impact of Breakups on Social Media Use Among Digital Natives Hyejin Kim School of Communications, BYU Master of Arts Digital natives, who are born and raised with digital technologies, have a deep affinity with social media. Social media has a great influence over an individual’s daily life, even on his/her intimate and romantic relationship. As a breakup of romantic relationships can commonly happen to digital natives, and as it is likely to cause distress and psychological symptoms afterwards, this study attempted to find out the impact of breakups on social media use among digital natives. The quantitate survey was conducted with 175 valid participants between the ages of 18-30. These participants were those who currently live in the United States, who use social media at least once a month, who experienced a romantic breakup in the last six months. The results show that negative self-esteem plays a key role between breakup-associated factors and a strong attachment to social media use in their daily lives. Negative self-esteem mediates social media use with a breakup initiation status or depression prompted by breakup. Negative selfesteem also arises when a person’s perceived responsibility towards the breakup or the cause of the breakup is high when they are rejected by their partner.
Recognition of the Purchasing Intentions of WeChat Users Based on Forgetting Curve

Received: 23 December 2018 Accepted: 5 February 2019 The chat data of WeChat are particularly important in the era of big data. The recognition of the purchasing intentions of WeChat users can enable sellers to make accurate recommendations. However, the users’ interests in items are every-changing, making it hard to accurately identify their purchasing intentions. To solve the problem, this paper puts forward a purchasing intention recognition model based on the forgetting curve, a key tool in the experimental psychology of memory. The model predicts the current purchasing intentions of a user based on his/her historical information, and judges the strength of the intentions according to the time of the historical information. If a user is interested in an item, he/she tends to mention the item repeatedly and has a deep impression of the item. This tendency is similar to the laws of forgetting and repeated learning. The similarity ensures the accuracy of the proposed model in recognition of users’ purchasing intentions. The model was proved experimentally to have high recognition accuracy. The research findings deepen the understanding of users’ historical information.
Art Therapy With Puppet Making to Promote Emotional Empathy for an Adolescent With Autism

Abstract There is a growing interest in understanding how individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience empathy to explore their social-emotional and communication impairments. Although there has been considerable research into autism and cognitive empathy, research into emotional empathy is scarce, and there is less on the impact of teaching social skills. This study explores the use of art therapy with puppet making and puppetry using the Expressive Therapies Continuum (Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978) to promote emotional empathy in individuals with ASD within the larger goal of addressing socialization.
Placebo Economics: A Systematic Review About the Economic Potential of Utilizing the Placebo Effect

Background: Recent research shows that placebo mechanisms can be utilized in ethical and legal ways such as in open-label conditions, when patients know that they receive placebos, and through psychological interventions aiming to optimize patients’ expectations. Showing that placebo interventions are also cost-efficient could improve their acceptability. Objective: To review studies that performed health economic evaluations (HEEs) of intentional placebo interventions and to review studies that intentionally applied placebo interventions and reported outcomes eligible for HEEs. Methods: Two systematic reviews of the literature were performed. For the first review, we searched MEDLINE using “placebo” and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms associated with HEEs such as “costs,” “cost–benefit analyses,” and “economics. ” Studies were eligible if they employed patients, applied placebo interventions, included an appropriate control group, and reported results of cost analyses. For the second review, we searched the Journal of Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies (JIPS) database and MEDLINE using search terms for outcomes eligible for cost–utility analyses, such as “quality of life” or “quality-adjusted life years” (“QALYs”). Risk of bias of all studies found was assessed according to the Cochrane Handbook, and a narrative synthesis of the results is provided. Results: The first search resulted in 1,853 articles, which were screened for eligibility. Two studies were found only in which costs or cost-effectiveness analysis were reported, but with medium to high risks of biases. The second search yielded 164 articles particularly from the JIPS database of which 11 studies met our search criteria: in six studies, patients received placebo pills in open-label conditions; three studies investigated effects of patient–physician relationships; and two studies used psychological interventions to optimize treatment expectations, in patients with various diseases and disorders. These studies report outcomes potentially eligible for HEEs when costs of interventions were known. Risks of biases were low to medium, but patients were not blinded to the conditions in most studies. Conclusions: The state of knowledge about HEEs of placebo interventions is scarce. To gain more visibility and acceptability for placebo interventions, future studies should measure outcomes usable for HEEs and costs of interventions, and HEEs should be performed for existing studies if data are available.
STUDY ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MINDFULNESS AND WORK-LIFE BALANCE LEVELS IN THE ROMANIAN YOUNG POPULATION

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationship between the levels of mindfulness and work-life balance at the Romanian young population. In the process of enhancing our levels of work-life balance, satisfaction or well-being, mindfulness plays an essential role, proved by its practice and its applications. The quality of our professional life is a significant contributor to our quality of life as a STUDII EMPIRICE Revista de Pedagogie Journal of Pedagogy, 2019 (1), 7 – 19 https://doi.org/10.26755/RevPed/2019.1/7 * Professor PhD. , University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Bucharest, Romania. ** Associate Professor, PhD. , University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Bucharest, Romania. *** Lecturer, PhD. , University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Bucharest, Romania. ****Lecturer, PhD. , University of Bucharest, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Bucharest, Romania. whole. When society provides a qualitative professional life to its citizens, it also proves itself worthy of attracting and retaining employees. Mindfulness is not an independent concept, but one which positively influences multiple areas or dimensions of an individual’s life. These dimensions include: perspective, connection, choice, and self-knowledge. The subjects of this study were 60 young people, aged between 20-35. All of them were either students or graduates of higher education institutions. The methods used for this study were two questionnaires: the first one was a questionnaire for identifying the level of mindfulness, based on four dimensions – observe, describe, act with awareness and accept without judgement – and the second one – a scale for measuring the level of work-life balance. The results were processed in SPSS Statistics using the T-test for independent samples and Pearson’s correlation coefficient. The results showed a strong relationship between the levels of mindfulness and work-life balance of the Romanian young population.
Understanding connection with nature at an Amazonian deforestation frontier

Despite a widespread conviction that conservation’s success depends on people genuinely caring about saving nature, there is very little scientific research examining how “caring for nature” influences conservation decision-making – particularly in poorer tropical countries. Instead, mainstream conservation tends to focus on economic motives to incentivise pro-conservation behaviour. To better understand the role of intrinsic motivations in nature protection in the tropics, this thesis draws upon the psychological concept of connection with nature (CWN), which describes people’s self-identification with nature and emotional attachment for the natural world. This concept is applied to understand intrinsic motivation for conservation among non-indigenous colonist farmers living at the Transamazon Highway deforestation frontier in the Brazilian Amazon. The thesis tests the applicability of the CWN framework to the context of rural populations in the Global South and scrutinises conventional wisdoms regarding “caring for nature”, including that poor people do not care about the natural environment, and that caring for nature is strongly linked to ecological knowledge. First, a new tool for measuring affective CWN in rural areas is developed and validated. This measure is then applied together with an existing cognitive CWN scale to form the first assessment for CWN among farmers in the tropics. Next, the influence of CWN on the farmers’ conservation attitudes is compared to that of other economic, sociodemographic, geographic and psychological factors. Contrary to widely-held assumptions, CWN is shown to be widespread and more important in shaping farmers’ conservation attitudes than economic factors. Lastly, the relationship between caring for nature and ecological knowledge is tested. The results suggest that CWN is unconnected to ecological knowledge and associated with different predictors. Collectively, the results highlight the need for greater attention to intrinsic motivations for conservation and suggest CWN as a useful framework for understanding and improving people’s relationship with nature.
Do government schools improve learning for poor students? Evidence from rural Pakistan

ABSTRACT Pakistan’s Punjab province has witnessed numerous education reforms in recent years. Many of these reforms have been aimed at improving the well-documented low levels of learning by focusing on improving teaching quality. The rhetoric suggests that government schools, particularly those in rural areas with a more disadvantaged pupil base, are especially ineffective at imparting learning. This paper seeks to investigate whether children in rural Punjab are learning literacy and numeracy over the course of a year, and if so, are some pupils progressing more than others. Using recently collected data, it finds that children in our sample are making progress. Variation in progress is found to be greater within schools rather than across them. The competence and qualifications of a teacher also makes a significant difference to a child’s academic progress. The paper further finds differential progress for rich and poor students within schools, suggesting an important role for education policy to put in place targeted support towards those from disadvantaged backgrounds to ensure improvements in their learning keep pace with their peers.
Secure Cooperative Network With Multi-Antenna Full-Duplex Receiver

In this paper, the physical-layer security of a cooperative wireless system with multi-antenna full-duplex (FD) destination is examined. More specifically, we consider a cooperative transmission scenario in which a source communicates with a destination through a relay in the presence of an eavesdropper. In order to degrade the wiretap channel, the FD destination simultaneously transmits an interference signal towards the eavesdropper, while receiving information from the relay. A joint transmit and receive beamformer design is proposed to maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the destination, while guaranteeing that the SINR at the eavesdropper is below a certain threshold. We reformulate the optimization problem as a semidefinite relaxation problem in terms of a transmit beamforming matrix. To balance the performance and system complexity, we investigate suboptimum beamforming designs based on zero-forcing criterion. We derive exact closed-form expressions for the average secrecy rates of the proposed suboptimum designs. Our results reveal that optimum and suboptimum beamforming schemes along with friendly jamming significantly improve the secrecy performance. Moreover, simulation results demonstrate that the optimum scheme outperforms suboptimum schemes, especially in high transmit power regimes.