Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
(Re)orienting White Spaces Through Compañerismo: Latino Graduate Students Creating Homeplaces at a PWI

Abstract:This study employed homeplace and compañerismo as conceptual frameworks to examine the role of space among Latino men in graduate school. While research has highlighted the importance of space for marginalized students on college campuses, this literature has primarily focused on the undergraduate level. Such is valuable work, yet it is critical to examine spatial dynamics among graduate students. Here, we highlight spaces important to this group of students while centralizing close-knit relationships as an added layer. Analysis of the data revealed the continuous importance of the participants’ compañerismo across university spaces, making both compañerismo and space central components across themes, which included reciprocity of space and compañerismo, bending space through compañerismo, and compañerismo as empowerment. We conclude with implications for practice and research.
How to Design a State Education Aid Formula Using a Regression-based Estimate of the Cost-capacity Gap: The Case of Connecticut, USA

abstract:After being sued for inequity and inadequacy in school funding, many states in the US have reformed their education aid formulas but have still faced many criticisms. Using Connecticut as an example, this paper shows how to design a more equitable and adequate aid formula with tools to win broad support from communities and lawmakers. It develops a measure of the gap between education cost and revenue capacity as an indicator for each district’s need for state aid. Both education cost and revenue capacity are estimated using school district characteristics that are outside the direct control of local officials at any given point in time. This paper shows that Connecticut school districts have a wide range of cost-capacity gaps, due to disparities in cost factors and property tax base, and therefore have different needs for state aid. While larger-gap districts, on average, received more state aid per pupil than smaller-gap districts, many districts—especially the largest-gap ones—received less aid than they needed to close their cost-capacity gaps. Further analysis suggests that inadequate school funding could have a negative impact on student test performance. As a potential solution, this paper proposes a gap-based formula to allocate state aid and includes tools to make the formula more attractive to a wide range of school districts. The policy simulations show that the gap-based formulas can align aid with the gaps better than the existing formula does. However, applying tools to increase the formula’s attractiveness to small-gap districts would compromise the ability of state aid to eliminate inequity and inadequacy and would often require a larger state aid pool. This paper expands the academic community’s knowledge about the US education equity and adequacy by examining Connecticut’s school funding for the first time under the regression-based cost-capacity gap approach. This analysis can be relevant and useful for other states facing similar issues, as it provides a practical, step-by-step roadmap how to apply the sufficiently general research method and formula design to an individual state.
Explicando as diferenças na produtividade agrícola no Brasil

This paper uses the agricultural census micro data of 1995-1996 to calculate, for each of the five Brazilian macro regions, the difference in total factor productivity (TFP), with two cleavages: family farmers and input-intensive farmers. This difference in TFP is explained regarding to variables of size, supply of public goods and access to institutions, and local variables measured directly or through a municipality fixed effect. The results point out to: a) the inverse relationship between land productivity and size, a stylized fact in the literature, is verified in all regions, but the inverse relationship regarding TFP and size is verified only to North, Northeast and Southeast and for the non-intensive in other regions; b) the family farmer has higher land productivity in seven of ten cases but lower TFP in eight of ten cases. Most of this difference is due to non-observable variables; and c) the intensive-type farmer is more productive in regions and non-observable variables explain part of the difference in productivity against their counterparts.
An LSM Tree Augmented with B+ Tree on Nonvolatile Memory

Modern log-structured merge (LSM) tree-based key-value stores are widely used to process update-heavy workloads effectively as the LSM tree sequentializes write requests to a storage device to maximize storage performance. However, this append-only approach leaves many outdated copies of frequently updated key-value pairs, which need to be routinely cleaned up through the operation called compaction. When the system load is modest, compaction happens in background. However, at a high system load it can quickly become the major performance bottleneck. To address this compaction bottleneck and further improve the write throughput of LSM tree-based key-value stores, we propose LAB-DB, which augments the existing LSM tree with a pair of B+ trees on byte-addressable nonvolatile memory (NVM). The auxiliary B+ trees on NVM reduce both compaction frequency and compaction time, hence leading to lower compaction overhead for writes and fewer storage accesses for reads. According to our evaluation of LAB-DB on RocksDB with YCSB benchmarks, LAB-DB achieves 94% and 67% speedups on two write-intensive workloads (Workload A and F), and also a 43% geomean speedup on read-intensive YCSB Workload B, C, D, and E. This performance gain comes with a low cost of NVM whose size is just 0.6% of the entire dataset to demonstrate the scalability of LAB-DB with an ever increasing volume of future datasets.
Augmenting People, Places & Media: The Societal Harms Posed by Everyday Augmented Reality, and the Case for Perceptual Human Rights

Everyday Augmented Reality (AR) displays, with wearable, fashionable, all-day form factors, may one day supplant our reliance on physical displays, heralding new capabilities in augmented intelligence and perception, communication, productivity, and more. Such technology has the potential to become as fundamental to our daily lives as smartphones are today, empowering users, communities, business, governments, and others to alter, augment, diminish or otherwise mediate our perception of reality. For social good, this technology can enable augmenting expression of social identity to better represent our ‘authentic’ self, and virtually enhancing real-world social spaces to encourage greater community ownership and social cohesion. For social harm however, everyday AR could facilitate and amplify manipulation, information disorder (e.g. dis-information), censorship and coercion in our day-to-day experience of reality. In this essay, we consider some of the key societal changes (and ethical challenges) posed by the adoption of everyday AR, and argue that everyday AR will provoke the need for new human rights to be considered alongside proposed neurorights and existing and envisaged digital human rights, around: who can mediate reality (perceptual autonomy); what elements of reality are permissible to alter/augment (perceptual agency); and governing permissible intent regarding why we augment the user’s perception of reality, in particular considering tensions in cognitive autonomy (e.g. manipulation) and perceptual integrity (e.g. information disorder).
Explainability in Automated Parking: The Effect of Augmented Reality Visualizations on User Experience and Situation Awareness

Although automated driving is becoming a more widespread technology, there is still a lack of understanding about how to best communicate information to drivers in the specific situation of automated parking. This mixed-method user study aimed to address this gap by evaluating the preferences of users for information about the vehicle’s behavior in automated parking and the impact on user experience and situation awareness. An explainable concept displayed as augmented visualizations in the vehicle’s windshield was prototyped and evaluated in a driving simulation study and a qualitative interview. N = 25 participants provided insights into the development of more effective and user-centered interface designs for automated parking. As a result, the explainable concept was preferred by the participants and led to a higher user experience and explainability. This work contributes to the design and evaluation of future automated parking systems and provides a step towards more user-friendly automated driving experiences.
Second Skin : Motion Capture with Actuated Feedback for Motor Learning

Second Skin aims to combine three-dimensional (3D) motion tracking with tactile feedback for the purpose of improving users' motor-learning ability. Such a system would track a user's body and limb movements as he or she performs an action, and then give the user automatic, real-time tactile feedback to aid in the correction of movement and position errors. This thesis details the development of a robust and low-cost optical 3D motion capture system along with versatile and flexible tactile feedback hardware. The vision is that these technologies will facilitate further research and the future development of motor-learning platforms that fully integrate 3D motion tracking and tactile feedback. Thesis Supervisor: Ramesh Raskar Title: Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab
Towards Improving Spatial Orientation using Electrical Muscle Stimulation as Tactile and Force Feedback

Navigating the environment can be challenging, especially when faced with vision or hearing limitations, such as darkness and visual impairments. To address this issue, we propose using electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) to convey spatial information and assist users in avoiding obstacles. We map direction to EMS channels and distance to current intensity, with force-feedback for closer proximity and tactile EMS feedback for greater proximity. An experimental study (n=12) was conducted to evaluate the concept and gain insights into the qualitative perception of EMS. Participants were able to accurately estimate encoded distance (85.7% accuracy) and direction (99.5% accuracy). Our findings demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of using tactile and force feedback EMS to convey spatial information comprehensibly.
Eye and Face Tracking in VR: Avatar Embodiment and Enfacement with Realistic and Cartoon Avatars

Previous studies have explored the perception of various types of embodied avatars in immersive environments. However, the impact of eye and face tracking with personalized avatars is yet to be explored. In this paper, we investigate the impact of eye and face tracking on embodiment, enfacement, and the uncanny valley with four types of avatars using a VR-based mirroring task. We conducted a study (N=12) and created self-avatars with two rendering styles: a cartoon avatar (created in an avatar generator using a picture of the user’s face) and a photorealistic scanned avatar (created using a 3D scanner), each with and without eye and face tracking and respective adaptation of the mirror image. Our results indicate that adding eye and face tracking can be beneficial for certain enfacement scales (belonged), and we confirm that compared to a cartoon avatar, a scanned realistic avatar results in higher body ownership and increased enfacement (own face, belonging, mirror) — regardless of eye and face tracking. We critically discuss our experiences and outline the limitations of the applied hardware and software with respect to the provided level of control and the applicability for complex tasks such as displaying emotions. We synthesize these findings into a discussion about potential improvements for facial animation in VR and highlight the need for a better level of control, the integration of additional sensing and processing technologies, and an objective metric for comparing facial animation systems.
Communicating Software Agreement Content Using Narrative Pictograms

Introduction End users must often agree to lengthy terms of use prior to installing software or using software services. These terms of use may take the form of End User License Agreements (EULAs), privacy policies, or, in the case of computer-based human subjects research, consent agreements. While these various agreements each serve slightly different purposes, we collectively refer to them as software agreements.
New taxa and new records for Argentina of fungi from Iguazú National Park, Misiones

Fil: Lechner, Bernardo Ernesto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Oficina de Coordinacion Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Micologia y Botanica. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Micologia y Botanica; Argentina
CHARACTERISATION OF THE UPPER TELEAJEN RIVER BASIN USING MODEL-BASED INDICATORS TO IMPROVE WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

Hydrological modeling of watershed represents a too l widely used to manage, assess and simulate water resources. The paper presents the use of model-based indicator s as a pre-assessment tool for the characterization of the upper side of Teleajen River Basin, starting from Maneciu Dam to the confluence with Crasna River near Homoriciu village. The main purpose of this scientific work, was to predic t the effect of land utilization and watershed cond itions on the water quality, sediments, and nutrient loads with suffici ent accuracy on this ungauged section of the river basin. The Geographic Information System (GIS) interface creat ed for SWAT, called ArcSWAT was used to develop the watershed model. The software package was used to delineate t he basin and its sub-components, The data layers we re combined to obtain the model database. The model parameters were analyzed, ranked and adjusted for hydrologic m odeling purposes. ArcSWAT model was chosen due to its versa tility in tracking the movement and transformation of several forms of nitrogen and phosphorous. This model embed ded within the ArcGIS system was evaluated by stati stically analyzing the predicted sediments, nutrient loading s and organic load from and within the Teleajen Riv er upper section, a watershed that is significantly impacted by agricultural, animal breeding and forestry oper ations. Predicted sediments loading in the selected watershed indicat ed a significant sediment transport from the waters hed. Nitrates tend to reach higher loads in the second part of th e year in contrast with nitrites, which showed the maximum values in the February-April period.
Explaining Cointegration Analysis: Part 1

'Classical' econometric theory assumes that observed data come from a stationary process, where means and variances are constant over time. Graphs of economic time series, and the historical record of economic forecasting, reveal the invalidity of such an assumption. Consequently, we discuss the importance of stationarity for empirical modeling and inference; describe the effects of incorrectly assuming stationarity; explain the basic concepts ofnon -stationarity; note some sources of non-stationarity; formulate a class of non -stationary processes (autoregressions with unit roots) that seem empirically relevant for analyzing economic time series; and show when an analysis can be transformed by means of differencing and cointegrating combinations so stationarity becomes a reasonable assumption. We then describe how to test for unit roots and cointegration. Monte Carlo simulations and empirical examples illustrate the analysis.
Combining low level features and visual attributes for VHR remote sensing image classification

Semantic classification of very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images is of great importance for land use or land cover investigation. A large number of approaches exploiting different kinds of low level feature have been proposed in the literature. Engineers are often frustrated by their conclusions and a systematic assessment of various low level features for VHR remote sensing image classification is needed. In this work, we firstly perform an extensive evaluation of eight features including HOG, dense SIFT, SSIM, GIST, Geo color, LBP, Texton and Tiny images for classification of three public available datasets. Secondly, we propose to transfer ground level scene attributes to remote sensing images. Thirdly, we combine both low-level features and mid-level visual attributes to further improve the classification performance. Experimental results demonstrate that i) Dene SIFT and HOG features are more robust than other features for VHR scene image description. ii) Visual attribute competes with a combination of low level features. iii) Multiple feature combination achieves the best performance under different settings.
Unravelling Behavioural Biases in Individual and Institutional Investors Investment Decision- making: Intersection of Bibliometric and Systematic Literature Review

Over the past two decades, there has been a remarkable increase in research endeavours in exploring behavioural biases within the context of investment decision-making. This growth can be attributed to the growing interest and publication efforts of academic scholars. The objective of this study is to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) of the existing academic literature on the influence of behavioural biases on investment decisions (ID), utilizing bibliometric tools. Initially, a corpus of approximately 124 research papers was gathered by conducting a keyword search in the Scopus database. These papers were then subjected to inclusion and exclusion criteria, resulting in a final selection of 82 papers for in-depth analysis. Bibliometric analysis was conducted using VOS-viewer software, which identified the most prolific articles, authors and journals in the field. Moreover, a thematic analysis was performed to identify six clusters of author keywords, which were further grouped into three broader themes. This process shed light on the connections and patterns prevalent in the study of behavioural biases in investment decision-making. Crucially, keywords with the lowest link strength and co-occurrences played a vital role in identifying potential areas for future research. Additionally, the study identified approximately 50 research articles published from 30 top journals with the highest citations and h-index for further investigation. By following this systematic process, the study not only highlights gaps in the existing literature but also provides valuable insights for future endeavours. Ultimately, this study serves as a roadmap for guiding further investigations in the field of behavioural biases and their influence on ID. By delving into the relationships and themes surrounding these biases, the research aims to contribute significantly to the advancement of knowledge in this domain.
Seroprevalence of Bovine Herpes Virus Type 1 in the Industrial Dairy Cattle Herds in Suburb of Shiraz-iran

A cross-sectional study was made to investigate the prevalence of infectious bovine rhinotracheitis (IBR) virus using an indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) test in a large number of industrial dairy cattle in suburb of Shiraz (Iran). Blood samples were collected from 952 dairy cows of different parities in 43 herds. None of the herds were vaccinated against IBR. The cows were divided into different groups according to herd geographical location (North, West, East and South of Shiraz city), herd size (small, medium and large), parity and production level (low, average and high yielding cows). Two hundred and thirty seven (27.68%) of cows were ELISA seropositive. However, the true BHV-1 seroprevalence was 27.93%. All of the herds were antibody positive against BHV-1. The prevalence ranged from 16.66 to 86.19% within the herds. No relationship was observed between the presence of antibodies to IBRV and the herd size. The proportion of seropositive cows increased with their parity (P<0.05), but there were no differences among the seroprevalences of BHV-1 in cows of different production groups and four geographical regions. According to the results obtained, it was concluded that the presence of latent infection in animals within the herds in suburb of Shiraz-Iran, is responsible for the presence antibody.
Update Perioperative Antibiotikaprophylaxe in der Neonatologie

In dieser Übersicht werden Grundprinzipien der perioperativen Antibiotikaprophylaxe (PAP) bei Früh- und Reifgeborenen diskutiert und es wird auf einige Besonderheiten bei den Indikationen und der Dosierung der PAP eingegangen. Auch wenn intensivmedizinisch behandelte Neugeborene eine vulnerable Patientengruppe darstellen, soll die PAP in ihrem Wirkspektrum gezielt und in der Regel nicht länger als 24 Stunden verabreicht werden.
China in Transnational Extractives Governance: A Mapping Exercise

Abstract:China became one of the biggest players in the global extractive resource supply chain, along with increasing extractive resource demand for green industries. Interestingly, over the last two decades, Chinese actors started participating in transnational extractive governance initiatives (TEGI) supporting transparency, a norm for governance-by-disclosure. This article aims to answer the question of what types of Chinese actors engage in what TEGIs regarding transparency. Based on mapping forty-eight TEGIs, this article shows a nuanced pattern of China's involvement in extractives governance beyond a dualistic approach to China in global governance—whether China is a threat or nonthreat. Importantly, China does not act as a unified monolithic actor; rather, different types of actors engage TEGIs distinctively. Chinese corporations are most actively engaging in thin transparency TEGIs lacking stringent verification rules and featuring limited multistakeholder participation. It could potentially accelerate the risk of green washing of those companies and disempower weaker actors.
Screening versus routine practice in detection of atrial fibrillation in patients aged 65 or over: cluster randomised controlled trial

Objectives To assess whether screening improves the detection of atrial fibrillation (cluster randomisation) and to compare systematic and opportunistic screening. Design Multicentred cluster randomised controlled trial, with subsidiary trial embedded within the intervention arm. Setting 50 primary care centres in England, with further individual randomisation of patients in the intervention practices. Participants 14 802 patients aged 65 or over in 25 intervention and 25 control practices. Interventions Patients in intervention practices were randomly allocated to systematic screening (invitation for electrocardiography) or opportunistic screening (pulse taking and invitation for electrocardiography if the pulse was irregular). Screening took place over 12 months in each practice from October 2001 to February 2003. No active screening took place in control practices. Main outcome measure Newly identified atrial fibrillation. Results The detection rate of new cases of atrial fibrillation was 1.63% a year in the intervention practices and 1.04% in control practices (difference 0.59%, 95% confidence interval 0.20% to 0.98%). Systematic and opportunistic screening detected similar numbers of new cases (1.62% v 1.64%, difference 0.02%, −0.5% to 0.5%). Conclusion Active screening for atrial fibrillation detects additional cases over current practice. The preferred method of screening in patients aged 65 or over in primary care is opportunistic pulse taking with follow-up electrocardiography. Trial registration Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN19633732.