Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An alternative method to study star cluster disruption

Many embedded star clusters do not evolve into long-lived bound clusters. The most popular explanation for this "infant mortality" of young clusters is the expulsion of natal gas by stellar winds and supernovae, which leaves up to 90% of them unbound. A cluster disruption model has recently been proposed in which this mass- independent disruption of clusters proceeds for another Gyr after gas expulsion. In this scenario, the survival chances of massive clusters are much smaller than in the traditional mass-dependent disruption models. The most common way to study cluster disruption is to use the cluster age distribution, which, however, can be heavily affected by incompleteness. To avoid this, we introduce a new method, based on size-of-sample effects, namely the relation between the most massive cluster, M_max, and the age range sampled. Assuming that clusters are sampled from a power-law initial mass function, with index -2 and that the cluster formation rate is constant, M_max scales with the age range sampled, such that the slope in a log(M_max) vs. log(age) plot is equal to unity. This slope decreases if mass-independent disruption is included. For 90% mass-independent cluster disruption per age dex, the predicted slope is zero. For the solar neighbourhood, SMC, LMC, M33, and M83, based on ages and masses taken from the literature, we find slopes consistent with the expected size-of-sample correlations for the first 100 Myr, hence ruling out the 90% mass-independent cluster disruption scenario. For M51, however, the increase of log(M_max) with log(age) is slightly shallower and for the Antennae galaxies it is flat. This simple method shows that the formation and/or disruption of clusters in the Antennae must have been very different from that of the other galaxies studied here, so it should not be taken as a representative case.
CNS tuberculosis

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Monte Carlo semantics : robust inference and logical pattern processing with natural language text

This thesis develops several pieces of theory and computational techniques which can be deployed for the purpose of allowing a computer to analyze short pieces of text (e.g. ‘Socrates is a man and every man is mortal.’) and, on the basis of such an analysis, to decide yes/no questions about the text (‘Is Socrates mortal? ’). More particularly, the problem is seen as a logical inferencing task. The computer must decide whether or not a logical consequence relation ‘therefore’ holds between the two pieces of text. (‘Socrates is a man and every man is mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal.’) This problem is a pervasive theme in logic and semantics but has also been subject over the last five years to a wave of renewed attention in computational linguistics sparked by the Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) challenge. A critical reevaluation of this line of work is presented here which demonstrate several problems concerning the empirical methodology used at RTE and the results derived from it. This thesis is thus more theorydriven, but nevertheless inspired by RTE in that it addresses problems raised by RTE which have not previously received sufficient attention from a theoretical viewpoint, such as the problem of robustness. With this goal in mind, two of the results on Natural Language Reasoning (NLR) established here become particularly important: (1) Assuming the syllogism as a benchmark fragment of NLR, the model theory which underlies NLR is not necessarily a two-valued logic, but it can be the many-valued Łukasiewicz logic. (2) Despite the fact that the syllogism is a logical language of less expressive power than natural language as a whole, a good approximation to NLR can still be obtained by using the method outlined here for rewriting natural language text into syllogistic premises. These two properties of NLR enable the approach to robust inference and logical pattern processing called Monte Carlo semantics, which, in turn, demonstrates that a single logically based theory can account for the semantic informativity of deep techniques using theorem proving and for the robustness of bag-of-words shallow inference.
Challenges in Total Ankle Arthroplasty

In the past, total ankle arthroplasty was largely abandoned due to poor survivorship most often caused by loss of bone support. High complication rates were also reported. Despite this, there is renewed interest in ankle arthroplasty and encouraging results are seen in survivorship with midterm follow-up. The procedure, however, remains more challenging than total hip or total knee arthroplasty. With the limited soft tissue envelope, wound problems are not uncommon. Forces at the ankle are very large and yet the surface area for prosthetic support is small. Therefore, fixation can be more difficult. The strongest bone can be eccentric at the distal tibia. The tibial prosthesis can, therefore, tend to settle into the softer bone often laterally. Polyethylene needs to be sufficiently thick to maintain its integrity but that requires a larger bone resection, which weakens bone support. Polyethylene failure or wear leads to the majority of failures in hip and knee arthroplasty. There is a need for further basic science research in total ankle arthroplasty. The lessons learned from other arthroplasty should be considered in ankle arthroplasty design.
The Neurocognition of Dance

I. Wachsmuth, Preface. B. Blasing, M. Puttke, T. Schacke, Preface: Towards a Neurocognitive Science of Dance - Two Worlds Approaching or Two Approaches to the Same World of Movement? Part 1. The Scientist's Perspective. T. Schack, "Do Your Senses Tingle? " Building Blocks and Architecture of Dance. D. Rosenbaum, Shall We Dance? Action Researchers and Dancers Can Move Together. H. Cruse, M. Schilling, Getting Cognitive. B. Blasing, The Dancer's Memory: Expertise and Cognitive Structures in Dance. Part 2. The Dance Perspective. M. Puttke, Learning to Dance Means Learning to Think! G. Zoellig, Searching for That Other Land of Dance: The Phases in Developing a Choreography. G. BenZion, Overcoming the Dyslexia Barrier: The Role of Kinesthetic Stimuli in the Teaching of Spelling. Part 3. Neurocognitive Studies of Dance. B. Calvo-Merino, Neural Mechansims for Seeing Dance. E. Cross, Building a Dance in the Human Brain: Insights from Expert and Novice Dancers. C. Jola, Research and Choreography: Merging Dance and Cognitive Neuroscience.
The statistical recommendations of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual: Effect sizes, confidence intervals, and meta‐analysis

Abstract Estimation based on effect sizes, confidence intervals, and meta‐analysis usually provides a more informative analysis of empirical results than does statistical significance testing, which has long been the conventional choice in psychology. The sixth edition of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual now recommends that psychologists should, wherever possible, use estimation and base their interpretation of research results on point and interval estimates. We outline the Manual's recommendations and suggest how they can be put into practice: adopt an estimation framework, starting with the formulation of research aims as ‘How much? ’ or ‘To what extent? ’ questions. Calculate from your data effect size estimates and confidence intervals to answer those questions, then interpret. Wherever appropriate, use meta‐analysis to integrate evidence over studies. The Manual's recommendations can assist psychologists improve they way they do their statistics and help build a more quantitative and cumulative discipline.
Discipline as a Factor in Academic Performance in Kenya

Discipline is a vital ingredient for the success of students’ academic performance. The Government of Kenya through the Ministry of Education (MOE) has always set up commissions of enquiries anytime the secondary schools unrests become a great concern, especially when it leads to massive destruction of property and death of students. The MOE has always wanted to get to the bottom of the matter and establish ways in which discipline can be enhanced. However, discipline in public day secondary schools has deteriorated in the past few years, especially since the ban of the cane jeopardizing the national goals of economic and industrial development (MOE 2008). In spite of efforts by the schools, indiscipline is the order of the day and it may be assumed that it hampers good academic performance. The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has further ensured that each school has a teacher-counselor to strengthen discipline yet many schools particularly in Ruiru District have continued to find it difficult to establish a strong culture of good discipline. The academic performance in Ruiru District has continued to deteriorate. The schools have also been experiencing students’ indiscipline. Although there are many factors that affect the academic performance, the factor of indiscipline has not been conclusively looked in to. It was therefore important and urgent to have an in-depth assessment of the role of discipline on academic performance in order to solve the problem. In view of the above, the task of this paper is to assess the causes of indiscipline, ascertain the relationship between students’ discipline and academic performance, find out challenges faced by teachers in dealing with students’ indiscipline and develop strategies for improving discipline in public day secondary schools in Ruiru district, Kiambu County in Kenya. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014. v4n1p289
From query to question in one click: suggesting synthetic questions to searchers

In Web search, users may remain unsatisfied for several reasons: the search engine may not be effective enough or the query might not reflect their intent. Years of research focused on providing the best user experience for the data available to the search engine. However, little has been done to address the cases in which relevant content for the specific user need has not been posted on the Web yet. One obvious solution is to directly ask other users to generate the missing content using Community Question Answering services such as Yahoo! Answers or Baidu Zhidao. However, formulating a full-fledged question after having issued a query requires some effort. Some previous work proposed to automatically generate natural language questions from a given query, but not for scenarios in which a searcher is presented with a list of questions to choose from. We propose here to generate synthetic questions that can actually be clicked by the searcher so as to be directly posted as questions on a Community Question Answering service. This imposes new constraints, as questions will be actually shown to searchers, who will not appreciate an awkward style or redundancy. To this end, we introduce a learning-based approach that improves not only the relevance of the suggested questions to the original query, but also their grammatical correctness. In addition, since queries are often underspecified and ambiguous, we put a special emphasis on increasing the diversity of suggestions via a novel diversification mechanism. We conducted several experiments to evaluate our approach by comparing it to prior work. The experiments show that our algorithm improves question quality by 14% over prior work and that adding diversification reduced redundancy by 55%.
Stationary Light in Atomic Media

When ensembles of atoms interact with coherent light fields, a great many interesting and useful effects can be observed. In particular, the group velocity of the coherent fields can be modified dramatically. Electromagnetically induced transparency is perhaps the best known example, giving rise to very slow light. Careful tuning of the optical fields can also produce stored light where a light field is mapped completely into a coherence of the atomic ensemble. In contrast to stored light, in which the optical field is extinguished, stationary light is a bright field of light with a group velocity of zero. Stationary light has applications in situations where it is important to maintain an optical field, such as attempts to engineer large nonlinear interactions. In this paper, the stationary light demonstrations published to date are reviewed and a unified theoretical framework that describes the experimental observations is provided. Possible applications of stationary light are also discussed, with a particular focus on all‐optical phase gates for quantum information technology.
Spherical disharmonies in the Earth sciences and the spatial solution: Ridges, hotspots, slabs, geochemistry and tomography correlations

There is increasing use of statistical correlations between geophysical fields and between geochemical and geophysical fields in attempts to understand how the Earth works. Typically, such correlations have been based on spherical harmonic expansions. The expression of functions on the sphere as spherical harmonic series has many pitfalls, especially if the data are nonuniformly and/or sparsely sampled. Many of the difficulties involved in the use of spherical harmonic expansion techniques can be avoided through the use of spatial domain correlations, but this introduces other complications, such as the choice of a sampling lattice. Additionally, many geophysical and geochemical fields fail to satisfy the assumptions of standard statistical significance tests. This is especially problematic when the data values to be correlated with a geophysical field were collected at sample locations which themselves correlate with that field. This paper examines many correlations which have been claimed in the past between geochemistry and mantle tomography and between hotspot, ridge, and slab locations and tomography using both spherical harmonic coefficient correlations and spatial domain correlations. No conclusively significant correlations are found between isotopic geochemistry and mantle tomography. The Crough and Jurdy (short) hotspot location list shows statistically significant correlation with lowermost mantle tomography for degree 2 of the spherical harmonic expansion, but there are no statistically significant correlations in the spatial case. The Vogt (long) hotspot location list does not correlate with tomography anywhere in the mantle using either technique. Both hotspot lists show a strong correlation between hotspot locations and geoid highs when spatially correlated, but no correlations are revealed by spherical harmonic techniques. Ridge locations do not show any statistically significant correlations with tomography, slab locations, or the geoid; the strongest correlation is with lowermost mantle tomography, which is probably spurious. The most striking correlations are between mantle tomography and post-Pangean subducted slabs. The integrated locations of slabs correlate strongly with fast areas near the transition zone and the core-mantle boundary and with slow regions from 1022–1284 km depth. This seems to be consistent with the “avalanching” downwellings which have been indicated by models of the mantle which include an endothermic phase transition at the 670-km discontinuity, although this is not a unique interpretation. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that slabs and associated cold downwellings are the dominant feature of mantle convection. Hotspot locations are no better correlated with lower mantle tomography than are ridge locations.
Economic Premise POVERTY REDUCTION AND ECONOMIC MANAGEMENT NETWORK ( PREM ) THE WORLD BANK Trade and the Competitiveness Agenda

The dramatic expansion in global trade over recent decades has contributed significantly to diversification, growth, and poverty reduction in many developing countries. This period of rapid export growth has been enabled by two critical structural changes in global trade: (1) the vertical and spatial fragmentation of manufacturing into highly integrated “global production networks,” and (2) the rise of services trade and the growth of “offshoring. ” Both of these, in turn, were made possible by major technological revolutions; and they were supported by multilateral trade policy reforms and broad liberalizations in domestic trade and investment environments worldwide. The global economic crisis came crashing into the middle of this long-running export-led growth party during 2008 and 2009. Between the last quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2009, global trade contracted by 36 percent. But as the recovery started to strengthen in 2010 (at least until the clouds began to form over Europe), the longer-term impacts of the crisis on the policy environment regarding trade and growth were becoming more apparent. Indeed, in addition to raising concerns over the global commitment to trade liberalization, the crisis has also led to some serious rethinking of some of the conventional wisdom regarding the growth agenda—the most important result of which is the likelihood that governments will play a much more activist role in the coming years. There are three principal reasons why governments are likely to be more actively involved in industrial and trade policy in the coming years. First, the crisis has undone faith in markets and discredited laissez-faire approaches that rely simply on trade policy liberalization. Instead, governments and local markets have been “rediscovered. ” In this sense, the demand for activist government is likely to go well beyond financial markets and regulation, and it will affect the policy environment in which trade and industrial strategies are designed. Second, the crisis has highlighted the critical importance of diversification (of sectors, products, and trading partners) in reducing the risks of growth volatility. The recent era of globalization contributed to substantial specialization of The global economic crisis has forced a major rethinking of the respective roles of governments and markets in the processes of trade and growth. Indeed, industrial policy seems to be back in fashion—or, at least, talking about it is. But a renewed “activism” by government in the trade and growth agenda need not mean a return to old-style policies of import substitution and “picking winners. ” Instead, it may mean a stronger focus on competitiveness by unlocking the constraints to private sector–led growth. This note discusses the renewed role of government in trade and growth policy from the competitiveness angle, and it suggests some priorities for the new competitiveness agenda. Conflict and Development—Lessons from South Asia
The elusive reality of efficacy–performance cycles in basketball shooting: An analysis of players’ performance under invariant conditions

The current work questions the putative tendency for success to be self-promoting in a non-competitive practice setting. Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky's [(1985). The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295–314. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(85)90010-6] classic controlled shooting experiment in basketball is replicated and extended to include players' efficacy judgments before taking the shots, according to the conditions outlined by Bandura [(1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York, NY: Freeman]. Fifty-eight basketball players participated in three experimental sessions. The results show that players' competency expectations reflected a consistent belief in the existence of past performance–performance cycles. However, even when asked directly about their subjective perceptions of success, the players' sense of efficacy did not predict hits or misses. It was also demonstrated that even under invariant conditions, where such correlations should be even higher according to Bandura's line of reasoning, the outcomes of successive shots were statistically independent, for both expert players and for novices. These findings provide additional support for Gilovich et al.'s seminal results and are rather challenging to Bandura's theory of self-efficacy.
Prestimulus influences on auditory perception from sensory representations and decision processes

Significance The likelihood of perceiving a faint stimulus depends not only on the stimulus itself but also on the state of rhythmic brain activity preceding the stimulus. Previous neuroimaging results did not confirm this state dependency as arising from early sensory representations or later decision-related computations. We show that state affects perception via two mechanisms: one where the amplitude of slow-wave activity influences the scaling of early sensory evidence, and another where the time profile of the activity influences sensory decisions in areas governing cognitive processes. These findings reconcile the plethora of previous findings and delineate two relevant mechanisms. The qualities of perception depend not only on the sensory inputs but also on the brain state before stimulus presentation. Although the collective evidence from neuroimaging studies for a relation between prestimulus state and perception is strong, the interpretation in the context of sensory computations or decision processes has remained difficult. In the auditory system, for example, previous studies have reported a wide range of effects in terms of the perceptually relevant frequency bands and state parameters (phase/power). To dissociate influences of state on earlier sensory representations and higher-level decision processes, we collected behavioral and EEG data in human participants performing two auditory discrimination tasks relying on distinct acoustic features. Using single-trial decoding, we quantified the relation between prestimulus activity, relevant sensory evidence, and choice in different task-relevant EEG components. Within auditory networks, we found that phase had no direct influence on choice, whereas power in task-specific frequency bands affected the encoding of sensory evidence. Within later-activated frontoparietal regions, theta and alpha phase had a direct influence on choice, without involving sensory evidence. These results delineate two consistent mechanisms by which prestimulus activity shapes perception. However, the timescales of the relevant neural activity depend on the specific brain regions engaged by the respective task.
Building a Dynamic Reputation System for DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is an essential protocol used by both legitimate Internet applications and cyber attacks. For example, botnets rely on DNS to support agile command and control infrastructures. An effective way to disrupt these attacks is to place malicious domains on a "blocklist" (or "blacklist") or to add a filtering rule in a firewall or network intrusion detection system. To evade such security countermeasures, attackers have used DNS agility, e.g., by using new domains daily to evade static blacklists and firewalls. In this paper we propose Notos, a dynamic reputation system for DNS. The premise of this system is that malicious, agile use of DNS has unique characteristics and can be distinguished from legitimate, professionally provisioned DNS services. Notos uses passive DNS query data and analyzes the network and zone features of domains. It builds models of known legitimate domains and malicious domains, and uses these models to compute a reputation score for a new domain indicative of whether the domain is malicious or legitimate. We have evaluated Notos in a large ISP's network with DNS traffic from 1.4 million users. Our results show that Notos can identify malicious domains with high accuracy (true positive rate of 96.8%) and low false positive rate (0.38%), and can identify these domains weeks or even months before they appear in public blacklists.