Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Teaching Expertise Reconsidered: The Technology, Pedagogy, Content, and Spaces (TPeCS) Knowledge Framework

School-practitioners are increasingly expected to lead construction projects in their schools to create future learning spaces (FLSs) that support learning in today’s networked society. This study examined the process by which practitioners of one school developed their readiness to incorporate an FLS into the school via a long-lasting research-practice-partnership that focused on co-designing learning materials for contemporary teaching. To conceptualize this process, we introduce the Technology, Pedagogy, Content and Space (TPeCS) knowledge framework, which expands current conceptualizations of teaching expertise by tying them into the emerging field of FLSs. We interpret practitioners’ learning within a series of action-reaction progressive developments along a two-year timeline of the partnership. Visits to an FLS, where researchers modeled, coached, then faded their guidance along this timeline played a key role in practitioners’ development of readiness to incorporate an FLS into their school. The pedagogical domain was most challenging among all the dimension of TPeCS. We conclude that school-practitioners’ involvement leading FLS endeavors within their schools can serve as an unprecedented opportunity for practitioners to develop contemporary teaching skills, with FLSs serving as ideal spaces that make pedagogy visible.
Markov Decision Processes

5. r : S×A×S → R is the reward function. The value r(s, a, s′) gives the amount of “reward” associated transitioning into state s′ when taking action a from state s. 6. γ ∈ [0, 1] is the discount factor, which determines how much future rewards should be “discounted” when making decisions. A value of γ = 0 means that we don’t care about future rewards at all, while a value of γ = 1 indicates that rewards in the distant future should count just as much as the reward at the next time-step.
The IC 1004 Urban Hannover Scenario – 3 D Pathloss Predictions and Realistic Traffic and Mobility Patterns

The increasing complexity in today’s mobile networks enforces the need for more sophisticated and more realistic simulation scenarios. It is a pre-requisite to cope with the effects in real heterogeneous networks in order to allow the exploitation of their inherent heterogeneity. This paper describes the first version of a common “ready-to-use” simulation environment in the city of Hannover: A complete LTE network, which has been modelled for the entire city area. In addition, sophisticated modelling approaches user mobility patterns and for data traffic have been employed. Furthermore, provisioning a common scenario ensures the comparability of simulation results, which are based on this scenario. Keywords— realistic; scenario; environment; system-level; pathloss; traffic; mobility;
Speech Parameter Generation Algorithm C HMM-Based Speech

This paper describes a novel parameter generation algorithm for the HMM-based speech synthesis. The conventional algorithm generates a trajectory of static features that maximizes an output probability of a parameter sequence consisting of the static and dynamic features from HMMs under an actual constraint between the two features. The generated trajectory is often excessively smoothed due to the statistical processing. Using the over-smoothed trajectory causes the muffled sound. In order to alleviate the over-smoothing effect, we propose the generation algorithm considering not only the output probability used for the conventional method but also that of a global variance (GV) of the generated trajectory. The latter probability works as a penalty for a reduction of the variance of the generated trajectory. A result of a perceptual evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method causes large improvements of the naturalness of synthetic speech.
Design and implementation of an artificial neural network applied to finger bad-positioning detection on touchless multiview fingerprints devices

This paper presents a method based on Artificial Neural Network that evaluates the rotational bad-positioning of fingers on touchless multiview fingerprinting devices. The objective is to determine whether the finger is rotated or not, since a proper positioning of the finger is mandatory for high fingerprint matching rates. A test set of 9000 acquired images has being used to train, validate and test the proposed multilayer Artificial Neural Network classifier. To our knowledge, there is no definitive method that addressed the problem of fingerprint quality on touchless multiview scanners. The proposed finger rotation detection here presented is one of the steps that must be taken into account if a future automatic image quality assessment method is to be considered. Average results show that: (a) our classifier correctly identifies bad-positioning in approximately 94% of cases; and (b) if bad-positioning is detected, the rotation angle is correctly estimated in 90% evaluations.
A Spectral Conversion Approach to Fe Enhancemen

In this paper we demonstrate that spectral conversion can be successfully applied to the speech enhancement problem as a feature denoising method. The enhanced spectral features can be used in the context of the Kalman filter for estimating the clean speech signal. In essence, instead of estimating the clean speech features and the clean speech signal using the iterative Kalman filter, we show that is more efficient to initially estimate the clean speech features from the noisy speech features using spectral conversion (using a training speech corpus) and then apply the standard Kalman filter. Our results show an average improvement compared to the iterative Kalman filter that can reach 6 dB in the average segmental output Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), in low input SNR’s.
Request for Information (RFI) on Advancing Privacy Enhancing Technologies

PETs provide an extremely powerful and versatile toolbox for controlled processing of data, while keeping the data itself hidden. Consequently, PETs allow for a radical rethinking of the possible uses of data, proving fine-grained control over which functions of data are to be exposed (and to whom) and which are to be kept hidden. When properly and responsibly used, this power of PETs can greatly advance democracy for the benefit of all individuals and communities. However, when used carelessly and irresponsibly, PETs can also cause great harm. Therefore, the adoption and development pf PETs should be done in a careful and principled way, while making sure to adequately educate the relevant constituents in the power and dangers of using PETs, and while taking care to provide adequate checks and balances that are appropriate to each and every use case.
Journal of Economics and Business

This study explores the cointegration relationship and causal link of internet penetration and broadband subscription to economic growth from the 10 countries of ASEAN for the period 2000-2016. A pooled multiple regression model with GDP growth as a function of internet penetration and broadband subscription was developed. The Johansen-Fisher panel cointegration was applied to determine the presence of a long-run equilibrium relationship among the three variables and the direction of causality was identified by estimating the panel-based vector error correction model (VECM). Results from cointegration test indicate a long run equilibrium relationship between internet penetration, broadband subscription and economic growth. The causality test reveals there is long run causality running from internet penetration and broadband subscription to economic growth. In the short-run, broadband subscription causes economic growth in the ASEAN countries. However, internet penetration has no causal link with economic growth in the short-run during the period 2000-2016. The findings are supportive of the claim that internet penetration and broadband connections are engine of economic growth and are rapidly transforming ASEAN economies. Based on these findings, this study recommends that ASEAN governments should be supportive on policies that promotes better internet and broadband infrastructure to achieved short and long-run economic growth.
Proceedings of FAST ’03: 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies

OceanStore is an Internet-scale, persistent data store designed for incremental scalability, secure sharing, and long-term durability. Pond is the OceanStore prototype; it contains many of the features of a complete system including location-independent routing, Byzantine update commitment, push-based update of cached copies through an overlay multicast network, and continuous archiving to erasure-coded form. In the wide area, Pond outperforms NFS by up to a factor of 4.6 on read-intensive phases of the Andrew benchmark, but under-performs NFS by as much as a factor of 7.3 on write-intensive phases. Microbenchmarks show that write performance is limited by the speed of erasure coding and threshold signature generation, two important areas of future research. Further microbenchmarks show that Pond manages replica consistency in a bandwidth-efﬁcient manner and quantify the latency cost imposed by this bandwidth savings.
Agent-based Simulation for Software Project Planning

Estimates of task duration and resource requirements in software engineering are notoriously inaccurate, and as a result effective project management often must be very dynamic. In response to new information or revised estimates, it may be necessary to reassign resources, cancel optional tasks, etc. Project management tools that make projections while treating decisions about tasks and resource assignments as static will not yield realistic results. In this paper we describe some preliminary attempts to adapt a simulation-based planning algorithm developed for planning experimental activities of Mars rovers to the problem of planning for software project management. Simulation techniques offer the potential for modeling the way agents behave in project development, and the way a manager might adapt the project plan based on the project status at future points, resulting in a tool that more accurately reflects the realities of software project management.
of the proteins involved in the metabolic apparatus Signatures of nitrogen limitation in the elemental composition

References http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing. org/content/276/1667/2605.full. html#ref-list-1 This article cites 15 articles, 8 of which can be accessed free Subject collections (788 articles) evolution (683 articles) ecology (32 articles) cellular biology Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections Email alerting service here right-hand corner of the article or click Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article sign up in the box at the top
Full TCP/IP for 8-bit architectures

We describe two small and portable TCP/IP implementations fulfilling the subset of RFC1122 requirements needed for full host-to-host interoperability. Our TCP/IP implementations do not sacrifice any of TCP's mechanisms such as urgent data or congestion control. They support IP fragment reassembly and the number of multiple simultaneous connections is limited only by the available RAM. Despite being small and simple, our implementations do not require their peers to have complex, full-size stacks, but can communicate with peers running a similarly light-weight stack. The code size is on the order of 10 kilobytes and RAM usage can be configured to be as low as a few hundred bytes.
Two-way function computation

We explore the role of feedback for the problem of reliable computation over two-way multicast networks. Specifically we consider a scenario in which there are forward-message computation demands and feedback is offered through the backward network for aiding the forward-message computation. We characterize the feedback computation capacity of a four-node Avestimehr-Diggavi-Tse deterministic network in which two nodes in one side wish to compute modulo-2 sums of two independent Bernoulli sources generated from the other two nodes. As a consequence of this result, we show that the backward network can be more efficiently used for feedback, rather than if it were used for independent backward-message computation. Our achievability proof builds upon a network decomposition framework developed in our earlier work.
0 O ct 2 00 1 Deterministic walks in random networks : an application to thesaurus graphs

In a landscape composed of N randomly distributed sites in Euclidean space, a walker (“tourist”) goes to the nearest one that has not been visited in the last τ steps. This procedure leads to trajectories composed of a transient part and a final cyclic attractor of period p. The tourist walk presents universal aspects with respect to τ and can be done in a wide range of networks that can be viewed as ordinal neighborhood graphs. As an example, we show that graphs defined by thesaurus dictionaries share some of the statistical properties of low dimensional (d = 2) Euclidean graphs and are easily distinguished from random graphs. This approach furnishes complementary information to the usual clustering coefficient and mean minimum separation length.
PATH PLANNING OF MOBILE ROBOT IN UNKNOWN ENVIRONMENT

— In this paper, we study the online path planning for khepera II mobile robot in an unknown environment. The well known heuristic A* algorithm is implemented to make the mobile robot navigate through static obstacles and find the shortest path from an initial position to a target position by avoiding the obstacles. The proposed path finding strategy is designed in a grid-map form of an unknown environment with static unknown obstacles. When the mission is executed, it is necessary to plan an optimal or feasible path for itself avoiding obstructions in its way and minimizing a cost such as time, energy, and distance. In our study we have considered the distance and time metric as the cost function .
Word from the Guest Editors

1 The background This special issue presents the expanded and improved versions of selected papers from a workshop on Formal and Informal Information Exchange in Negotiations. The workshop took place on May 26-27, 2005, at the University of Ottawa. It was designed to bring together researchers who work on various aspects of interaction in negotiations and those who work in Natural Language Processing or Machine Learning, on problems that might be of interest to negotiation specialists. Such problems include sentiment analysis. Recognizing the sentiments that negotiators express in language (for example, in messages exchanged during electronic negotiations) could ooer insight into the negotiation process and a glimpse of the changes in feelings throughout the course of the negotiation. While external factors may innuence users at any time, it is likely that they will react fairly consistently to the tone of the partner's messages and ooers. Analysis of texts to recognize attitudes, sentiments and opinions has been receiving more and more attention in recent years. Hearst (1992) proposed direction-based text interpretation to complement topic analysis. Such interpretation showed where a text lies on the axis from opposed to in favour. Later work on sentiment analysis abandoned the continuous axis in favour of a binary view: recognize positive and negative (or favourable and 1
Sparse Discriminant Analysis

We consider the problem of performing interpretable classification in the high-dimensional setting, in which the number of features is very large and the number of observations is limited. This setting has been studied extensively in the chemometrics literature, and more recently has become commonplace in biological and medical applications. In this setting, a traditional approach involves performing feature selection before classification. We propose sparse discriminant analysis, a method for performing linear discriminant analysis with a sparseness criterion imposed such that classification and feature selection are performed simultaneously. Sparse discriminant analysis is based on the optimal scoring interpretation of linear discriminant analysis, and can be extended to perform sparse discrimination via mixtures of Gaussians if boundaries between classes are nonlinear or if subgroups are present within each class. Our proposal also provides low-dimensional views of the discriminative directions.
This paper

Building expressive encrypted databases that can scale to large volumes of data while enjoying formal security guarantees has been one of the holy grails of security and cryptography research. Searchable Encryption (SE) is considered to be an attractive implementation choice for this goal: It naturally supports basic database queries such as point , join , group-by and range , and is very practical at the expense of well-deﬁned leakage such as search and access pattern. Never-theless, recent attacks have exploited these leakages to recover the plaintext database or the posed queries, casting doubt to the usefulness of SE in encrypted systems. Defenses against such leakage-abuse attacks typically require the use of Obliv-ious RAM or worst-case padding—such countermeasures are however quite impractical. In order to efﬁciently defend against leakage-abuse attacks on SE-based systems, we pro-pose SEAL, a family of new SE schemes with adjustable leakage . In SEAL, the amount of privacy loss is expressed in leaked bits of search or access pattern and can be deﬁned at setup. As our experiments show, when protecting only a few bits of leakage (e.g., three to four bits of access pattern), enough for existing and even new more aggressive attacks to fail, SEAL query execution time is within the realm of practical for real-world applications (a little over one order of magnitude slowdown compared to traditional SE-based encrypted databases). Thus, SEAL could comprise a promising approach to build efﬁcient and robust encrypted databases.
Psychological.

Coproduction where citizens collaborate with public employees in producing and delivering public services is often argued to be associated with benefits for either participating citizens, their relatives, friends, or society at large. Less is known about the potential downsides associated with citizen participation in coproduction of public services. We argue that psychological costs such as experiences of stigma, stress, and loss of autonomy may arise among citizens in response to coproduction initiatives stimulated or directly imposed by public organizations. We test our propositions in two randomized vignette experiments on a representative sample of Danish citizens. First, we manipulate whether citizens are encouraged to coproduce public services yielding private or collective benefits. Second, we induce perceived self-efficacy among a subsample of citizens. We find that citizens are more likely to experience psychological costs when they are encouraged to coproduce public services resulting in private benefits for relatives or friends in contrast to collective benefits for a larger group of people. Furthermore, these psychological costs are felt to a greater extent among citizens with low self-efficacy. Fusing insights from multiple perspectives, our study pushes the theoretical frontiers of coproduction literature by illustrating how complex emotional responses is an overlooked, but integral part of a more comprehensive theory on the manifestations and effects of citizen coproduction.
Analysis of Strain Distribution in Common Clinical Designs of Posterior Implant-Supported Fixed Partial Restorations: Comparison between Six Configurations

The configuration of implant-supported prostheses is considered to influence the magnitude of stress concentrations, affecting their survival rate. The purpose of this study is to determine, through strain gauge measurements during load application, the dispersion and magnitude of strain concentrations in different implant-supported prosthesis designs. All designs matched those commonly used in posterior partially edentulous states. Three implants were inserted into an epoxy resin model (PLM-4B Vishay Measurements Group Inc., Raleigh, NC, USA), allowing for the delivery of three- and four-unit crowns in different cemented configurations. Loads were applied at vertical and oblique directions over the cast crowns in six different configurations representing various posterior partially edentulous restorations. The readings from the strain gauges adhered to the implant necks’ presented data on implant strain. Prostheses including cantilevers showed the highest strain among the three-unit prostheses within the prosthetic complex, and three single units showed the least (8133 µs vs. 201 µs, respectively). Angulated load application also had a role in amplifying the strains recorded, resulting in total strains of between 3.5 and 20 times higher than during vertical loading in all configurations. It can be concluded that the configuration of implant-fixed partial prosthesis changes the loads engaging the restoration, the implant, and, probably, the supporting bone.
Pharmacologic therapeutics in sarcopenia with chronic kidney disease.

Inflammation, metabolic acidosis, renin-angiotensin system activation, insulin resistance, and impaired perfusion to skeletal muscles, among others, are possible causes of uremic sarcopenia. These conditions induce the activation of the nuclear factor-kappa B and mitogen-activated protein kinase pathways, adenosine triphosphate ubiquitin-proteasome system, and reactive oxygen species system, resulting in protein catabolism. Strategies for the prevention and treatment of sarcopenia in chronic kidney disease (CKD) are aerobic and resistance exercises along with nutritional interventions. Anabolic hormones have shown beneficial effects. Megestrol acetate increased weight, protein catabolic rate, and albumin concentration, and it increased intracellular water component and muscle mass. Vitamin D supplementation showed improvement in physical function, muscle strength, and muscle mass. Correction of metabolic acidosis showed an increase in protein intake, serum albumin levels, body weight, and mid-arm circumference. The kidney-gut-muscle axis indicates that dysbiosis and changes in gut-derived uremic toxins and short-chain fatty acids affect muscle mass, composition, strength, and functional capacity. Biotic supplements, AST-120 administration, hemodiafiltration, and preservation of residual renal function are alleged to reduce uremic toxins, including indoxyl sulfate (IS) and p-cresyl sulfate (PCS). Synbiotics reversed the microbiota change in CKD patients and decreased uremic toxins. AST-120 administration changed the overall gut microbiota composition in CKD. AST-120 prevented IS and PCA tissue accumulation, ameliorated muscle atrophy, improved exercise capacity and mitochondrial biogenesis, restored epithelial tight junction proteins, and reduced plasma endotoxin levels and markers of oxidative stress and inflammation. In a human study, the addition of AST-120 to standard treatment had modest beneficial effects on gait speed change and quality of life.