Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Motivational factors and persistence in learning Japanese as a foreign language

This paper aims to discuss correlation of motivation with learning Japanese as a foreign language (JFL). It will investigate what features borne from the learning process are key factors that motivate learners to continue, and whether or not motivational features differ between continuing and discontinuing students, and at different proficiency levels. Motivation is one of the most important prerequisites for learning. It is often compared to the engine (intensity) and steering wheel (direction) of a car (Gage and Berliner, 1984). Hilgard et al. (1979) state that motivation is concerned with those factors which energise behaviour and give it direction. Motivation in education is generally understood as a trigger of students' thought of engaging in a particular subject, and maintains the intensity of acquiring the knowledge of the subject. Logan (1969: 155) says that ‘motivation affects the way you practice, what you observe and what you do. And there are what you learn. ’ Motivation is also an important factor in learning a foreign language. When learners start learning, they may already have some motives, and as they learn, they will experience various psychological stages. Because it takes a certain length of time for learners to reach a certain level of proficiency (and perhaps it takes longer, the more different the target language is from their first language), their initial motives may or may not change while learning. As they learn the language and its cultural background, they may pick up some stimulus that may become a new motive for them to continue their study. Other learners may find the same stimulus as hampering their learning, and terminate their study. Motivation has been much discussed and theorised in educational psychology. On the other hand, studies in Second Language Acquisition
Effectiveness of Feature-Driven Storytelling in 3D Time-Varying Data Visualization

Storytelling animation has a great potential to be widely adopted by domain scientists for exploring trends in scientific simulations. However, due to the dynamic nature and generation methods of animations, serious concerns have been raised regarding their effectiveness for analytical tasks. This has led to interactive techniques often being favored over animations, as they provide the user with complete control over the visualization. This trend in scientific visualization design has not yet considered newer algorithmic animation generation methods that are driven by the automatic analysis of data features and storytelling techniques. In this work, we performed an experiment which compares feature-driven storytelling animations to common interactive visualization techniques for time-varying scientific simulations. We discuss the design of the experiment, including tasks for storm-surge analysis that are representative of common scientific visualization projects. Our results illustrate the relative advantages of both feature-driven storytelling animations and interactive visualizations, which may provide useful design guidelines for future storytelling and scientific visualization techniques.
Variability of the North Atlantic subtropical high and associations with tropical sea‐surface temperature

Based on generated time series of the central pressure of the subtropical high, the behaviour of this atmospheric centre of action has been examined since 1950 with regard to the inter‐annual variations, persistence, linear trends, abrupt change, spectral analysis and interactions. The year‐to‐year variations in the central pressure of the subtropical high are considerable. The pronounced strengthening of the subtropical high during approximately the last 20 years is its most remarkable feature. Variations in the subtropical high's intensity seem to follow a cyclic pattern. Statistically significant abrupt onset events are found, with the majority occurring in winter. Increasing and decreasing episodes have occurred in the late 1960s and early 1980s. According to spectral analysis, it can be assumed that the centre of action of the subtropical high is characterized by non‐periodic behaviour. The peaks occur only at the lowest frequency. The quasi‐biennial oscillation may affect the subtropical high in the winter season, whereas the North Atlantic Ocean may affect the subtropical high in summer. There is no detectable connection between El Niño–southern oscillation and the subtropical high in either season. The subtropical high has been affected by sea‐surface temperatures of the north and south tropical Atlantic, with negative and positive signs respectively in the winter season. Interactions between the subtropical high and sea‐surface temperatures over the tropical Atlantic Ocean are absent in the summer season. Copyright © 2004 Royal Meteorological Society
Three decades of Medicare: what the numbers tell us.

The Medicare program was first implemented to meet a critical need in American society, and over its thirty-year history it has evolved into an integral part of the U.S. health care system. This DataWatch provides a broad overview of the program, outlining both historical and current trends in coverage, financing, payment mechanisms, beneficiary status, benefits, and spending.
Human melatonin and alerting response to blue-enriched light depend on a polymorphism in the clock gene PER3.

CONTEXT Light exposure, particularly at the short-wavelength range, triggers several nonvisual responses in humans. However, the extent to which the melatonin-suppressing and alerting effect of light differs among individuals remains unknown. OBJECTIVE Here we investigated whether blue-enriched polychromatic light impacts differentially on melatonin and subjective and objective alertness in healthy participants genotyped for the PERIOD3 (PER3) variable-number, tandem-repeat polymorphism. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Eighteen healthy young men homozygous for the PER3 polymorphism (PER3(5/5)and PER3(4/4)) underwent a balanced crossover design during the winter season, with light exposure to compact fluorescent lamps of 40 lux at 6500 K and at 2500 K during 2 h in the evening. RESULTS In comparison to light at 2500 K, blue-enriched light at 6500 K induced a significant suppression of the evening rise in endogenous melatonin levels in PER3(5/5) individuals but not in PER3(4/4). Likewise, PER3(5/5) individuals exhibited a more pronounced alerting response to light at 6500 K than PER3(4/4) volunteers. Waking electroencephalographic activity in the theta range (5-7 Hz), a putative correlate of sleepiness, was drastically attenuated during light exposure at 6500 K in PER3(5/5) individuals as compared with PER3(4/4). CONCLUSIONS We provide first evidence that humans homozygous for the PER3 5/5 allele are particularly sensitive to blue-enriched light, as indexed by the suppression of endogenous melatonin and waking theta activity. Light sensitivity in humans may be modulated by a clock gene polymorphism implicated in the sleep-wake regulation.
13CO (J = 1-0) Depression in Luminous Starburst Mergers

It is known that the class of luminous starburst galaxies tends to have higher R=12CO (J=1-0)/13CO (J=1-0) integrated line intensity ratios (R>20) than normal spiral galaxies (R~10). Since most previous studies investigated only R, it remains uncertain whether the luminous starburst galaxies are overabundant in 12CO or underabundant in 13CO. Here we propose a new observational test to examine this problem. Our new test is to compare far-infrared luminosities [L(FIR)] with those of 12CO and 13CO [L(12CO) and L(13CO), respectively]. It is shown that there is a very tight correlation between L(12CO) and L(FIR), as found in many previous studies. However, we find that the 13CO luminosities of the high-R galaxies are lower by a factor of 3 on average than those expected from the correlation for the remaining galaxies with ordinary R values. Therefore, we conclude that the observed high R values for the luminous starburst galaxies are attributed to their lower 13CO line intensities.
Clinical, microbiological and epidemiological aspects of Escherichia coli O157 infection

In the last decade infections caused by Escherichia coli O157:H7 and other verocytotoxigenic E. coli (VTEC) have emerged as a major public health concern in North America and in Europe, and increasingly in other areas of the world. Although absolute numbers of infections are low in comparison with other enteric pathogens such as Salmonella or Campylobacter, it is well-recognised that E. coli O157 can produce severe, potentially life-threatening, illness. As a consequence of this awareness, there has been a rapid expansion of our knowledge about these organisms and the diseases which they cause. In this article, the clinical, microbiological and epidemiological features of VTEC O157 infection are reviewed.
Harmony: Towards Automated Self-Adaptive Consistency in Cloud Storage

In just a few years cloud computing has become a very popular paradigm and a business success story, with storage being one of the key features. To achieve high data availability, cloud storage services rely on replication. In this context, one major challenge is data consistency. In contrast to traditional approaches that are mostly based on strong consistency, many cloud storage services opt for weaker consistency models in order to achieve better availability and performance. This comes at the cost of a high probability of stale data being read, as the replicas involved in the reads may not always have the most recent write. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, named Harmony, which adaptively tunes the consistency level at run-time according to the application requirements. The key idea behind Harmony is an intelligent estimation model of stale reads, allowing to elastically scale up or down the number of replicas involved in read operations to maintain a low (possibly zero) tolerable fraction of stale reads. As a result, Harmony can meet the desired consistency of the applications while achieving good performance. We have implemented Harmony and performed extensive evaluations with the Cassandra cloud storage on Grid'5000 test bed and on Amazon EC2. The results show that Harmony can achieve good performance without exceeding the tolerated number of stale reads. For instance, in contrast to the static eventual consistency used in Cassandra, Harmony reduces the stale data being read by almost 80% while adding only minimal latency. Meanwhile, it improves the throughput of the system by 45% while maintaining the desired consistency requirements of the applications when compared to the strong consistency model in Cassandra.
Kernel Based Partially Linear Models and Nonlinear Identification

In this paper we propose Partially Linear models with Least Squares Support Vector Machines (LS-SVMs) for nonlinear ARX models. We illustrate how full black-box models can be improved when prior information about model structure is available. A real-life example, based on the Silverbox benchmark data, shows significant improvements in the generalization ability of the structured model with respect to the full black-box model, reflected also by a reduction in the effective number of parameters.
REACTION TIME STUDY OF SHAPE AND TEXTURE BIAS IN PRESCHOOLERS' NAMING

The problem of young children’s processes of naming is among the crucial issues of language acquisition (see e.g. Bloom, 2002; Gleitman & Landau, 1994; Macnamara, 1982; Smith, 2001). Are there early semantic or formal constraints on naming, or are strategies of naming more or less sophisticated statistical generalizations of children’s experiences with objects and names accumulated in the first few years? One of the most prominent solutions following the statistical generalization is the hypothesis of shape bias proposed by Landau, Smith, & Jones (1988) and later developed in subsequent studies (e.g. Smith, Jones & Landau, 1996; Smith, 2001). These authors aimed originally to find a psychological solution for Quine’s question what part of the perTwo reaction time experiments were designed to test a conceptual explanation of shape and texture biases in young children’s naming processes against the Smith et al. (1996) “dumb attentional mechanism” and the Imai et al. (1994) hypotheses. We assumed that (1) if shape-biased and category-based naming are based on the same processes no substantial time differences will be expected between them, and that (2) if perceptual biases have conceptual bases, systematic differences in reaction times and bias distribution should be found between different conceptual categories. Although in both experiments reaction times for biased choices were a little quicker than for category-based choices, the difference was too small to be attributed to substantially different cognitive mechanisms (conceptual vs. perceptual processing). Texture bias for inanimate natural kinds was also found in both experiments. Texture bias has conceptual bases and reflects the importance of substance for inanimate natural kind categories. Finally, in experiment 2. , when no forced selection procedure was used, a within-category texture-different alternative was selected much more often than either cross-category (shape and texture biased), or within-category shapebiased alternatives. Shape indicates important causal properties of objects, so children rather tend to reject shape-different exemplars than extend new names onto shape-similar objects from a different category. REACTION TIME STUDY OF SHAPE AND TEXTURE BIAS
The influence of reservoirs, climate, land use and hydrologic conditions on loads and chemical quality of dissolved organic carbon in the Colorado River

Longitudinal patterns in dissolved organic carbon (DOC) loads and chemical quality were identified in the Colorado River from the headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to the United States–Mexico border from 1994 to 2011. Watershed‐ and reach‐scale climate, land use, river discharge and hydrologic modification conditions that contribute to patterns in DOC were also identified. Principal components analysis (PCA) identified site‐specific precipitation and reach‐scale discharge as being correlated with sites in the upper basin, where there were increases in DOC load from the upstream to downstream direction. In the lower basin, where DOC load decreased from upstream to downstream, sites were correlated with site‐specific temperature and reach‐scale population, urban land use and hydrologic modification. In the reaches containing Lakes Powell and Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the United States, DOC quantity decreased, terrestrially derived aromatic DOC was degraded and/or autochthonous less aromatic DOC was produced. Taken together, these results suggest that longitudinal patterns in the relatively unregulated upper basin are influenced by watershed inputs of water and DOC, whereas DOC patterns in the lower basin are reflective of a balance between watershed contribution of water and DOC to the river and loss of water and DOC due to hydrologic modification and/or biogeochemical processes. These findings suggest that alteration of constituent fluxes in rivers that are highly regulated may overshadow watershed processes that would control fluxes in comparable unregulated rivers. Further, these results provide a foundation for detailed assessments of factors controlling the transport and chemical quality of DOC in the Colorado River.
Feldspar-grain size relations in Cambrian arenites, upper Mississippi Valley

ABSTRACT The Upper Cambrian (St. Croixan Series) in the northern portion of the upper Mississippi Valley consists primarily of sandstone with minor amounts of shale and carbonate. This paper presents data on the relation of the mineralogy of the sandstones, particularly feldspar content, to grain size and depositional environments. Feldspar is far more abundant in some formations than previously recognized and consists of detrital K-feldspar grains with low-temperature K-feldspar overgrowths. The abundance of feldspar in these sandstones is nearly linearly related to the volume of very fine sand and, to a lesser extent, to the coarse silt size grains present because most of the feldspar grains are 0.177 mm. Arenites having mean sizes between 0.177 mm and 0.105 mm are usually feldspathic (10-25% feldspar), while arenites and siltstones with mean sizes between 0.105 mm and 0.053 mm are usually highly feldspathic (25-70% feldspar). Feldspar and glauconite abundance and distribution are strongly related to the energy regime of the depositional environments. The quartz arenites are characteristic of high energy regimes (littoral and nearshore environments). The feldspathic and highly feldspathic arenites are characteristic of low energy regimes (shelfal environments). Feldspathic and highly feldspathic arenites in which glauconite is abundant were formed primarily on the shoreward side of the shelf environment. A hydrodynamic model is proposed to explain the small grain size of the feldspar, the repetitive stratigraphic occurrence of feldspathic units, and the regional distribution of feldspathic and nonfeldspathic facies. Because of its excellent cleavage, the feldspar was differentially abraded during passage through extensive high energy environments then sorted and deposited in low energy environments.
Utilizing Prior Knowledge for Non-Rigid Shape Completion

In recent years, researchers have shown an increased interest in 3D human pose and shape estimation. Most studies in the ﬁeld relies solely on completion from partial shape without additional information, resulting a limited models that cannot always reconstruct the partial shape precisely. The study utilized prior based approach for shape reconstruction of human partial scans that signiﬁcantly improved the performance of existing methods. Additionally, in this study we developed and applied new technique for sampling from large datasets resulting solid increase of the performance across all tested learning models. The sampling methodology presented here has profound implications for future studies of machine-learning models that relies on learning from large datasets. Finally, we designed new visualization tools to explore the shape and the pose manifold of parametric body models and datasets.
Golgi duplication in Trypanosoma brucei

Duplication of the single Golgi apparatus in the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei has been followed by tagging a putative Golgi enzyme and a matrix protein with variants of GFP. Video microscopy shows that the new Golgi appears de novo, near to the old Golgi, about two hours into the cell cycle and grows over a two-hour period until it is the same size as the old Golgi. Duplication of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) export site follows exactly the same time course. Photobleaching experiments show that the new Golgi is not the exclusive product of the new ER export site. Rather, it is supplied, at least in part, by material directly from the old Golgi. Pharmacological experiments show that the site of the new Golgi and ER export is determined by the location of the new basal body.
A Survey On Document Image Skew Detection

This paper addresses the research area of Document Image Skew Detection and Correction. The problem is of critical importance in the automated content conversion systems domain, making libraries digitalization projects possible. The paper at hand consists in a comparison between the main types of skew detection algorithms and presents the reader with a study on their advantages and disadvantages, as well as proposed improvements.
Lógica Fuzzy e Zoneamento ambiental da Bacia do Arroio Grande

Arroio Grande Watershed is located in Rio Grande do Sul and the objective from this paper was to elaborate a proposal of environmental zonning, starting from a process of environmental variables regionalization, with techniques of Fuzzy Sets. With the establishment of the importance factors (geology, slope, soils and land use and cover), a numeric raster was generated in a continuous space, which varies among (0. 1), or, it varies from 0 to 100%. Inside of this perspective, the watershed was classified in 5 classes of environmental risk, varying from areas with low susceptibility, moderate susceptibility and areas with high susceptibility, through which it can establish down some measured of environmental protection and implement studies of water resources management in watershed, as premised by the Fundo Setorial de Recursos Hidricos. Palavras-chave: Environmental impacts, environmental zonning, Fuzzy sets; Impactos ambientais, zoneamento ambiental, inferencia Fuzzy. 1. Introducao
Massive Stars and the Energy Balance of the Interstellar Medium. II. The 35 M☉ Star and a Solution to the “Missing Wind Problem”

We continue our numerical analysis of the morphological and energetic influence of massive stars on their ambient interstellar medium for a 35 M☉ star that evolves from the main-sequence through red supergiant and Wolf-Rayet phases, until it ultimately explodes as a supernova. We find that structure formation in the circumstellar gas during the early main-sequence evolution occurs as in the 60 M☉ case but is much less pronounced because of the lower mechanical wind luminosity of the star. On the other hand, since the shell-like structure of the H II region is largely preserved, effects that rely on this symmetry become more important. At the end of the stellar lifetime 1% of the energy released as Lyman continuum radiation and stellar wind has been transferred to the circumstellar gas. From this fraction 10% is kinetic energy of bulk motion, 36% is thermal energy, and the remaining 54% is ionization energy of hydrogen. The sweeping up of the slow red supergiant wind by the fast Wolf-Rayet wind produces remarkable morphological structures and emission signatures, which are compared with existing observations of the Wolf-Rayet bubble S308, whose central star has probably evolved in a manner very similar to our model star. Our model reproduces the correct order of magnitude of observed X-ray luminosity, the temperature of the emitting plasma, and the limb brightening of the intensity profile. This is remarkable, because current analytical and numerical models of Wolf-Rayet bubbles fail to consistently explain these features. A key result is that almost the entire X-ray emission in this stage comes from the shell of red supergiant wind swept up by the shocked Wolf-Rayet wind rather than from the shocked Wolf-Rayet wind itself as hitherto assumed and modeled. This offers a possible solution to what is called the "missing wind problem" of Wolf-Rayet bubbles.
Trends in aerosol nutrient solubility along a west–east transect of the Saharan dust plume

Simple leaching protocols have been used to examine trends in the solubility of aerosol nutrients (Fe, P and Si) along a west – east transect through the Saharan dust plume (German SOLAS cruise M55) and between Saharan and southern hemisphere‐origin aerosols. Solubilities were in the range 0.5–7.9% for Fe, 2.3–67% for P and 0.02–1.1% for Si, with lower values corresponding to samples of Saharan origin. Previous laboratory studies have suggested that aerosol Fe solubility might be enhanced by acid‐ and/or photo‐chemistry during transport through the atmosphere, but only the solubility of P was observed to be higher at the western end of the transect than the eastern. This implies that if (photo)chemical processing of aerosol Fe occurs in the atmosphere, significant enhancement of Fe solubility requires longer than the 5–10 days associated with transport of Saharan dust across the tropical Atlantic Ocean.