Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
1 Exploring Change in Test-Taking Motivation

In this study, we expanded upon the work of Brown et al., (2009) by exploring the existence of types of test-takers characterized by qualitatively different patterns of test-taking effort across the course of a three-hour low-stakes testing session. Mixture modeling results did not indicate there were types of test-takers for this sample of upperclass examinees. Latent growth modeling results indicated that change in effort across the testing session was well-explained by a quadratic growth form. There was significant variability in effort for each of tests as well as in rates of change. The inclusion of external variables indicated that whether an examinee attended the regular testing session versus a makeup session, conscientiousness, and agreeableness explained variability in effort for the various tests, whereas only agreeableness was related to rates of change in effort. Implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.
Impacts of Climate Change and Land-Use Change on Hydrological Extremes in the Jinsha River Basin

Hydrological extremes are closely related to extreme hydrological events, which have been and continue to be one of the most important natural hazards causing great damage to lives and properties. As two of the main factors affecting the hydrological cycle, land-use change and climate change have attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years. However, there are few studies that comprehensively consider the impacts of land-use change and climate change on hydrological extremes, and few researchers have made a quantitative distinction between them. Regarding this problem, this study aims to quantitatively distinguish the effects of land-use change and climate change on hydrological extremes during the past half century using the method of scenarios simulation with the soil and water assessment tool (SWAT). Furthermore, the variations of hydrological extremes are forecast under future scenarios by incorporating the downscaled climate simulations from several representative general circulation models (GCMs). Results show that: (1) respectively rising and declining risks of floods and droughts are detected during 1960–2017. The land use changed little during 1980–2015, except for the water body and building land. (2) The SWAT model possesses better simulation effects on high flows compared with low flows. Besides, the downscaled GCM data can simulate the mean values of runoff well, and acceptable simulation effects are achieved for the extreme runoff indicators, with the exception of frequency and durations of floods and extreme low flows. (3) During the period 1970–2017, the land-use change exerts little impact on runoff extremes, while climate change is one of the main factors leading to changes in extreme hydrological situation. (4) In the context of global climate change, the indicators of 3-day max and 3-day min runoff will probably increase in the near future (2021–2050) compared with the historical period (1970–2005). This research helps us to better meet the challenge of probably increased flood risks by providing references to the decision making of prevention and mitigation measures, and thus possesses significant social and economic value.
GRITO: Sistema de medições para suporte à preservação digital num ambiente heterogéneo

The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of digital content over time. To do this it is necessary, among other things, to be able to store digital information reliably, that is, without data losses. This cannot be achieved without using redundancy. The GRITO project aims to develop a distributed storage system which allows the harnessing of spare resources of grids both dedicated to preservation or with other main purposes. Due to the usage of different grids, it is likely that the storage system’s nodes will be very heterogeneous and have different characteristics. This means that many of the failures of the system’s components will be correlated. The goal of this work is to study redundancy strategies suitable for such an heterogeneous environment and to implement them in a GRITO. To achieve this, a system was developed which allows the analysis of a redundancy strategy’s performance using simulation, its implementation in the real system and monitorization of that system to adapt the strategy to its real behaviour. We also propose strategies which take correlated failures into account and models that can be parametrized to represent the failures of a real system. Both the simulation system and strategies support different failure models, allowing the most suitable one to be used for each specific system. Experimental results show that the performance of strategies which take correlated failures into account is much superior and that their automatic adaptation can improve their performance.
Book of ICETSR , 2014 , Malaysia Handbook on the Emerging Trends in Scientific Research

The aim of this study is to look at the unique services provided by the Automated Teller Machine in terms of quality and customer satisfactions in banks. However, there are pros and cons of consuming these services. Furthermore, the study also examines the perceived usefulness, ease to use, perceived risk and awareness that is faced by the individual consumers. The results were analyzed using statistical tools. The study confirms that a huge potential market exist for commercial banks to open their branches in limited locations and to connect these to all other ATMs networks and to could reap the benefits of their businesses to improve commercial bank performances.
Characteristic Analysis on Double Side Spiral Resonator ’ s Thickness E ff ect on Transmission E ffi ciency for Wireless Power Transmission

Wireless power transmission using magnetic resonant coupling through the utilization of helical and spiral inductors offers the capability to potentially eliminate the “last wire” in power supply applications. In this paper, we will focus on double-side spiral resonators and especially on how their spacing affects the transfer efficiency between the two resonators. We fabricated double-side spiral resonators with different thicknesses and conducted measurement of the transmission efficiency-distance feature with two resonators connected to different ports of vector network analyzer, located in coaxial positions. We observed the measurement results that the thickness of double side spiral resonators affects the over coupled peak transmission efficiency, critical coupled transmission efficiency as well as the critical coupled distance between two resonators. We also conducted equivalent circuit analysis on the explanation of the thickness effect of double side resonator’s transmission efficiency at different distance ranges.
Network Pharmacology-Based Prediction of the Active Compounds, Potential Targets, and Signaling Pathways Involved in Danshiliuhao Granule for Treatment of Liver Fibrosis

This study aims to predict the active ingredients, potential targets, signaling pathways and investigate the “ingredient-target-pathway” mechanisms involved in the pharmacological action of Danshiliuhao Granule (DSLHG) on liver fibrosis. Pharmacodynamics studies on rats with liver fibrosis showed that DSLHG generated an obvious anti-liver fibrosis action. On this basis, we explored the possible mechanisms underlying its antifibrosis effect using network pharmacology approach. Information about compounds of herbs in DSLHG was collected from TCMSP public database and literature. Furthermore, the oral bioavailability (OB) and drug-likeness (DL) were screened according to ADME features. Compounds with OB≥30% and DL≥0.18 were selected as active ingredients. Then, the potential targets of the active compounds were predicted by pharmacophore mapping approach and mapped with the target genes of the specific disease. The compound-target network and Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) network were built by Cytoscape software. The core targets were selected by degree values. Furthermore, GO biological process analysis and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis were carried out to investigate the possible mechanisms involved in the anti-hepatic fibrosis effect of DSLHG. The predicted results showed that there were 108 main active components in the DSLHG formula. Moreover, there were 192 potential targets regulated by DSLHG, of which 86 were related to liver fibrosis, including AKT1, EGFR, and IGF1R. Mechanistically, the anti-liver fibrosis effect of DSLHG was exerted by interfering with 47 signaling pathways, such as PI3K-Akt, FoxO signaling pathway, and Ras signaling pathway. Network analysis showed that DSLHG could generate the antifibrosis action by affecting multiple targets and multiple pathways, which reflects the multicomponent, multitarget, and multichannel characteristics of traditional Chinese medicine and provides novel basis to clarify the mechanisms of anti-liver fibrosis of DSLHG.
Significance of Knowledge-based Representation of Speech for Spoken Term Detection

Speech communication is the most natural way for human-to-human communication. It is likely that during the process of communication, we use knowledge of production for perception. The process of decoding word sequence from acoustic signal, referred to as lexical access, is a major component of speech perception. One of the objective of speech processing is to obtain a machine representation that behaves functionally in the same manner as lexical access. A major challenge in machine representation is to account for the acoustic variability corresponding to abstract symbols of spoken language. The problem of representation of speech may be formulated as the process of decoding speech signal into a sequence of symbols such that only the phonetic information in the speech signal is extracted while unwanted information arising from sources of variability is suppressed. Approaches for machine representation of speech can be classified as either data-driven or knowledgebased. Data-driven approaches have been growing in terms of performance, but they are not comparable to human speech communication. On the other hand, knowledge-based approaches for representation of speech aim to explicitly incorporate knowledge about speech. This can be interpreted as an attempt to imitate human representation with the aim of achieving performance equivalent to human speech communication system. In this thesis, we present approaches towards obtaining knowledge-rich representation of speech in the context of spoken term detection (STD). The task of STD consists of searching for a spoken query term within a spoken search database. The need for exploring large audio corpora, like audio books, has arisen due to explosion in the use of smart and connected devices. It is now impractical to manually browse through the sea of audio data. Thus, there is need for automation of the search process. The web search engines of future may take spoken queries as input to search and browse any spoken database like classroom lectures, broadcast news, audio books, and so on. Template-based approaches have been recently proposed for STD. The STD carried out using templates is commonly referred to as query-by-example (QbE) STD. In this, the query terms and search database are represented as templates, and search is carried out by comparing query template with test templates in the database using a template matching algorithm. For the task of STD, posteriorgram based template representation have been explored in literature. Posteriorgram templates are a class versus time matrix representation, where each element denotes the likelihood of classes to acoustic observations. A novel weighted mean feature representation based
Upgrading the Performance of Speech Emotion Recognition at the Segmental Level

This paper presents an efficient approach for maximizing the accuracy of automatic speech emotion recognition in English, using minimal inputs, minimal features, lesser algorithmic complexity and reduced processing time. Whereas the findings reported here are based on the exclusive use of vowel formants, most of the related previous works used tens or even hundreds of other features. In spite of using a greater level of signal processing, the recognition accuracy reported earlier was often lesser than that obtained by our approach. This method is based on vowel utterances and the first step comprises statistical pre-processing of the vowel formants. This is followed by the identification of the best formants using the KMeans, K-nearest neighbor and Naive Bayes classifiers. The Artificial neural network that was used for the final classification gave an accuracy of 95.6% on elicited emotional speech. Nearly 1500 speech files from ten female speakers in the neutral and six basic emotions were used to prove the efficiency of the proposed approach. Such a result has not been reported earlier for English and is of significance to researchers, sociologists and others interested in speech.
Incremental processing of negation : Evidence from Korean * 1

Lee, Miseon. 2017. Incremental processing of negation: Evidence from Korean. Linguistic Research 34(2), 205-224. The present study seeks to investigate whether negation is incrementally comprehended in Korean. Many of previous behavioral and neurological studies have found delays and errors in the comprehension of English negation. However, more recent studies have reported that negative sentences are incrementally processed as fast and accurately as affirmative sentences, given a pragmatically felicitous context. This discrepancy suggests that the poor comprehension of negation is mainly due to the absence of a felicitous context. In line with this, our hypothesis was that pragmatic felicity could help negation processing by establishing expectancies for using negation. In an eye-tracking task, we found that twenty-four Korean-speaking participants were equally fast and accurate in comprehending both affirmatives and negatives within a discourse context. Fixation analyses further showed that shortly after hearing the verb in a scrambled sentence, participants distinguished between negative and affirmative interpretations. These findings support the hypothesis that given a felicitous context, negation is incrementally processed by rapidly using the polarity information of the verb. (Hanyang University)
SALINITY RESPONSE OF SOME AMPHIDIPLOIDS SPECIES OF BRASSICA (BRASSICACEAE) AT SEEDLING AND MATURITY STAGES

Studies were conducted to evaluate salt tolerance in some amphidiploids species of Brassica (Family: Brassicaceae) at seedling stage (under gravel culture) and at maturity (under saline field conditions). Ten locally adopted genotypes of Brassica (five genotypes of Brassica napus and five of Brassica juncea) were collected from NIA, Tandojam, NIFA Peshawer and ARI Tandojam. Three treatments were imposed (i.e. control, 6.0 and 9.0 dS/m NaCl). It was observed that at early seedling stage the genotypes Early raya & Toria selection of Brassica juncea species and Waster & Dunckled of Brassica napus species had better response to NaCl stress. The better performance of these genotypes under salinity stress might be due to their better osmotic adjustment. The genotype NIFA raya and Durr-e-NIFA of Brassica juncea and Brassica napus species were found more sensitive to NaCl stress, respectively. The physiological studies with respect to osmotic adjustment showed that almost all the genotypes had enhanced proline accumulation however in tolerant genotypes the relative increase (%) was higher. It was also observed that the tolerant genotypes had high K/Na ratio as compared to sensitive ones. The genotypes were also evaluated under natural saline field conditions, where salinity ranged from medium to very high (i.e. 8-16 dS/m). In the field no growth was observed above15 dSm. Observation recorded in terms of plant height, number of branches plant, number of slique plant, slique length, grain wt plant, grain yield plot and 100 grain wt. , showed that among Brassica juncea genotypes, Early raya had < 50% decrease under saline condition in all the growth parameters followed by Sultan raya having < 50% reduction in 7 growth parameters. Whereas, among the Brassica napus genotypes Waster and Abaseen-95 performed better, showing < 50% decrease in all the growth parameters under saline field conditions. Based on these studies it is concluded that Early raya and Waster are the suitable genotypes to perform better under saline field conditions.
On the Margins of Conflict : An Introduction

The violent conflicts that accompanied the fall of New Order rule tended, with the notable and still tragically unfolding exception of Aceh, to gravitate towards the eastern parts of Indonesia. By now a growing body of academic analyses in both Indonesian and in English has begun to disentangle the complex set of political, social, and discursive aspects of the conflicts in East Timor, Maluku, North Maluku, Poso, Kalimantan and Papua.1 These studies have initiated a break with many of the simplistic and often biased accounts that emerged in the immediate wake of the conflicts. Instead they have begun to paint a fuller and more complicated picture of the ethnographic context, in which the ‘east Indonesian wars’ unfolded. Political provocation, economic tensions, discursive provocation, as well as local adaptations to religious and ethnic forms of identification are shown to have fused in various ways to provide different kinds of impetus and motive for participation in each of the many individual riots that flared up throughout eastern Indonesia after 1999. While each clash (even within one conflict region like Maluku or Poso) frequently has turned out to be politically and experientially unique, they also fed into one another, each riot adding to a growing sense of national paranoia, elaborated and disseminated in the media. And in the process each violent clash sowed the seeds for the outbreak of violence elsewhere. Much work still needs to be done to more fully understand the complex interplay of global, national, and local contexts in these riots. Although some headway has been made, too many academic studies (both foreign and Indonesian) of the post-Suharto violence are still content to employ a too simplistic theoretical framework. One version of this simplistic approach was culturalist, seeing the conflicts as being either the result of a cultural essence or its attenuation by New Order politics. The problem of essentialising culture has for many years been rehearsed in anthropology, but essentialist explanations tend nevertheless to appear in concrete analyses time and again. Another—less criticised but nonetheless pernicious—form of simplification has occurred by adopting a simple political theory akin to that used in popular journalism. The tendency has here been to see the conflicts as being between a set of easily identifiable protagonists.2 The political motives of these protagonists are portrayed as unambiguous their tactics as
Effects of Cooling on Repeated Muscle Contractions and Tendon Structures in Human

Purpose: This study compared the effects of non-cold and cold conditions on the viscoelastic properties of tendon structures in vivo. Methods: Seven male subjects perfomed plantar flesion exercise with maximal isokinetic voluntary contraction, which consisted of muscle contraction for 6 sec and relaxation for 60 secs, 10 times for 1 set, Totally 10 sets were repeated. Before and after each task, the elongation of the tendon and aponeurosis of the medial gastrocnemius muscle (MG) was directly measured by ultrasonography. (The relationship between the estimated tendon force and tendon elongation.) Tendon cross-sectional area and ankle joint moment arm were obtained from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The tendon force was calculated from the joint moments and the tendon moment arm and stress was obtained by dividing force by cross-sectional areas (CSA). The strain was measured from the displacements normalized to tendon length. Results: After cooling, the tendon force was larger in cold than non-cold. The value of the tendon stiffness of MVC were significantly higher under the cold condition than under the non-cold condition. The maximal strain and stress of 7.4±0.7% and 36.4±1.8 MPa in non-cold and 7.8±8.5%, 31.8±1.1 MPa in cold (P<0.05). Conclusion: This study shows for the first time that the muscle endurance in cooling increases the stiffness and Young’s modulus of human tendons. The improvement in muscle endurance with cooling was directly related to muscle and tendon. (J Kor Soc Phys Ther 2006;18(6):1-11)
Hand Gesture Recognition of Indian Sign Language to aid Physically impaired People

Sign language is the language of communication for deaf and dumb people. Most of these physically impaired communities are dependent on sign language translators to express their thoughts to rest of the world. This causes isolation of these people in society. Hence, Sign Language Recognition is one of the most growing fields of research today. A sign language is composed of various gestures formed by physical movement of body parts i.e. hand, arms or facial expressions. In this paper, a method is proposed that makes the use of hand gestures for recognition of Indian Sign Language. Hand Gesture recognition system provides us an innovative, natural, user friendly way of interaction with the computer which is more familiar to the human beings. The proposed method is able to identify the images of the signer which are captured dynamically during testing phase. To implement this approach we have utilized a simple web camera to capture hand gesture images. Artificial neural network is used for recognizing different signs and translate them into text and voice format.
Performance Evaluation of Wimedia UWB MAC Protocols

Broadband Internet access technologies and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) have enabled service providers to deliver high-definition video streams to the doorsteps of IPTV subscribers. On the other hand, how to distribute the high data rate, delay sensitive video traffic to almost all rooms in a typical household environment becomes a new challenge. There are several approaches proposed for IPTV in-home distribution, among which the wireless ones are very attractive due to their flexibility and affordability, but the physical and media access control (MAC) layer limitations in most existing wireless technologies still impend the success of video streaming over wireless networks. Recently, WiMedia Alliance has finalized its MB-OFDM based Ultra Wide Band (UWB) standards for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN). WiMedia UWB supports two MAC protocols: Distributed Reservation Protocol (DRP) and Prioritized Channel Access (PCA), which are very suitable for high-quality video streaming. Based on our experimentation experience, the focus of our work is to develop an analytical model for WiMedia UWB MAC protocols using the renewal reward theorem framework and quantify the video streaming performance consideriv ing all practical features (PCA, Hard DRP, Soft DRP, TXOP) of WiMedia MAC protocols. We have done extensive simulation in NS-2 to validate the model and further evaluate the performance of WiMedia UWB MAC protocols.
INTRODUCTION TO HOMOLOGICAL INVARIANTS IN LOW-DIMENSIONAL TOPOLOGY

There is a common main idea in various constructions of low-dimensional topological invariants. One takes a topological object, associates a geometric construction to it, which involves some choices, and then gets an algebraic object out of it. The choices one makes in the geometric construction translate into chain homotopy in the algebraic world. Thus the chain homotopy type of the algebraic object becomes a topological invariant (in case of chain complexes their chain homotopy type is captured by homology). Those auxiliary geometric constructions usually come from either symplectic geometry, or gauge theory. We focus on those which come from symplectic geometry.