Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
THE PROJECT ACTIVITIES AS AN EFFECTIVE FORM OF INDEPENDENT WORK OF STUDENTS AT THE STAGE OF PRE-UNIVERSITY TRAINING

The article is devoted to the organization of independent educational activities of students learning Russian as a foreign language at the stage of pre-university training.It considers the process of organizing independent work in the framework of traditional communicative approaches to learning a foreign language, in the framework of a personalized approach and using multimedia tools.Within the framework of the personal-active approach, special attention is paid to this form of independent work, where the student's personality and cognitive activity are at the center of attention.The question of the insufficiency and limitations of the existing forms of independent work offered to students with communicative approaches to learning at the stage of pre-university training is raised.Particular attention is paid to the presentation of the project method in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language as a modern and effective form of organizing independent activities of students.The novelty of the research is seen in the consideration and justification of the possibility of using project activities in independent work of students even at the basic level of proficiency in Russian (A2).The article presents the author's methodological development of the use of project activities in the classes of the Russian language as a foreign language (level A2-B1) at the preparatory faculty.The authors propose a step-bystep process for carrying out project activities in the context of the Linguodidactic program of mastering the Russian language, designed for two academic semesters.At the end, the paper justifies the necessity of using project activities as an appropriate form of independent work in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language at the stage of pre-university training.The benefits of using the project method for gaining research experience in Russian under the teacher's guidance at the preparatory stage are noted.
Origins

This chapter discusses the history of human capital theory. Before the mid-twentieth century the idea of human capital had a checkered history. Ideas linking the role of human labor to wealth creation can be traced to the works of Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, and Thomas Aquinas. The chapter examines the ideas posed by notable economic theorists and thinkers such as Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, Theodore Schultz, and Gary Becker. It shows how the ideas developed by these thinkers extended to a wide range of issues concerning the relationship between education and the labor market. In turn, they were able to influence policy in such powerful ways that their legacy remains. Above all, their influence shaped the way education is viewed in many countries: as an investment in the economic fortunes of the individual and the nation. This view gradually emerged as the dominant one, but was triumphantly sealed by the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s.
FIDO puts biometrics at heart of web payments security

The FIDO Alliance – whose global mission is to replace passwords with biometric and related security – has joined forces with the payment card industry body EMVCo and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to create a single interoperable system for making digital payments.
Probability Model: Malaysian Consumer Online Shopping Behavior towards Online Shopping Scam

With the rapid development of technology, it has been assisting and connecting people through various platforms such as social networking, data sharing, information storing, online transactions and automated processes.Few years ago, people have been connecting with each other and updating news through social media.Social media has become essentials for their daily lives.Now, apart from functioning as communication platform, people started to use social media as a marketing platform to advertise their business product and services.Social media environment which is functions and navigation that allows online sellers communicate directly with their consumers has successfully made it a great channel for business marketing.However, with the success come its challenges.Consumers are potentially threatened by online shopping scam.Apparently, there are third parties that take advantages on the convenience.They would create a fake account with a fake identity and set up a fake business that looks almost like real to attract consumers to purchase with them.However, once payment has been made, no products or services will be delivered.Some fake sellers would trap consumers to pay some amount of money for a product but in the end, the products received is either different from advertised or lower quality from as per described.The purpose of this study is to explain the definition of online scam and to identify what contribute towards online shopping scam based on consumer online shopping behavior.This study was conducted in Malaysia with total 201 respondents.The data collected were analyzed using Statistical Package for Science Social (SPSS).This study was expected to find the significant factors that contributed towards the probabilities of online shopping scam based on consumer online shopping behavior.
The Effects of Tourism Websites' Attributes on e-Satisfaction and e-Loyalty: A case of American Travelers to Jordan

The paper aims to examine the effects of websites attributes (user friendliness, information quality, entertainment, and security and privacy) on tourists' e-satisfaction, and to examine the effects of tourists' e-satisfaction on attitudinal e-loyalty and the effects of e-attitudinal loyalty on e-behavioural loyalty. Based on a sample of 258 US tourists visiting Jordan, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed to assess the validity and composite reliability of the research constructs. Structural equation modelling was used to test the proposed model and hypothesised relationships. The findings show that user friendliness, information quality, and security and privacy have positive effects on tourists' e-satisfaction. Tourists' e-satisfaction exerts a strong positive effect on e-attitudinal loyalty, which in turn affects e-behavioural loyalty positively. Website user friendliness and information quality are the strongest drivers of e-satisfaction, which determines tourists' e-attitudinal and e-behavioural loyalty. Results discussion, implications, limitations and future research were outlined.
Investigation into the influence of the R&#233;union plume on the Central Indian Ridge

&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Plume-ridge interaction is an important thermal and geological process, which results in various physical and chemical anomalies along a significant length of the global mid-ocean ridge system. Despite numerous studies, some remaining questions to be solved are the origin and mechanisms of geochemical variations and their possible correlation with the morphology of mid-ocean ridges.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;The Central Indian Ridge, with a slow to intermediate spreading rate, provides an ideal opportunity to explore the long-distance plume-ridge interactions. Presently, the ridge is moving away from the R&amp;amp;#233;union hotspot which is located 1000 km away from the Central Indian Ridge at R&amp;amp;#233;union Island. Paleogeographic reconstruction suggests that the hotspot crossed the middle part of the Central Indian Ridge (MCIR) between 8&amp;amp;#176;S and 17&amp;amp;#176;S at ~34 Ma. Previous studies argue that the plume material currently flows into the Central Indian Ridge at around 19&amp;amp;#176;S, south of Marie Celeste Fracture Zone (MCFZ) and geochemical enrichments of the mid-ocean ridge basalts (MORB) from the MCIR 14&amp;amp;#176;S and 19&amp;amp;#176;S segments can be attributed to a fossil R&amp;amp;#233;union plume component. However, a recent geophysical study has suggested that the geochemical anomalies along the Rodrigues segment (18-21&amp;amp;#176;S) can be ascribed to the asthenospheric flow from the R&amp;amp;#233;union plume, reopening the debate about the origin of the enriched anomalies along the MCIR (14-19&amp;amp;#176;S).&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;In this study, we revisited the MCIR from 14&amp;amp;#176;S to 17&amp;amp;#176;S with new geochemical data obtained based on high-resolution sampling and ship-board high-resolution bathymetry data to constrain the influence of the R&amp;amp;#233;union plume on geochemistry and bathymetry of the MCIR. The results show that trace element ratios and isotopic compositions of on-axis MORB vary in association with ridge discontinuities such as transform faults and non-transform fault discontinuities. The MORB from the northern parts of segments display substantially enriched geochemical features and the enrichments correspond to a shallower axial bathymetry. We attribute the chemical and morphological anomalies along the ridge to the influence of a R&amp;amp;#233;union plume component focussed by a hotspot leading edge effect. The hotspot leading segments are offset in the direction of the plume and are more efficiently affected by the enriched plume materials. These findings suggest that lithospheric discontinuities such as transform faults and fracture zones may control the flow of mantle plume material into the ridge and the geometry of the ridge coupled to its hotspot proximity may play an important role, particularly in the long-distance plume-ridge interaction.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;
Theory-based Taxonomy of Feedback Application Design for Electricity Conservation: A User-centric Approach

Many consider electricity-consumption feedback applications a critical technology in alleviating energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.In this paper, following the design science paradigm, I examine a design taxonomy of electricity-consumption feedback applications.I relied on an integrative theoretical framework and literature review to propose a comprehensive taxonomy for salient design elements of electricity-consumption feedback applications.Using a survey method, I collected data from general public to evaluate preferences for and relative importance of the design elements.I found a preferred set of design elements for the feedback applications.The results could serve as a basis to evaluate the design of existing electricity-consumption feedback applications and to help in studying the influence that design elements have on beliefs and behaviors related to individuals' electricity conservation.
Generating Game Narratives with Focalization and Flashbacks

In this paper we describe a system for generating textual narrations of what happened in a simulation-based serious game, focusing on the use of focalization (telling the story from the perspective of one of the characters) and flashbacks to give the player insights into the internal state of non-player characters.
A Testbed for Learning by Demonstration from Natural Language and RGB-Depth Video

We are developing a testbed for learning by demonstration combining spoken language and sensor data in a natural real-world environment. Microsoft Kinect RGB-Depth cameras allow us to infer high-level visual features, such as the relative position of objects in space, with greater precision and less training than required by traditional systems. Speech is recognized and parsed using a “deep” parsing system, so that language features are available at the word, syntactic, and semantic levels. We collected an initial data set of 10 episodes of 7 individuals demonstrating how to “make tea”, and created a “gold standard” hand annotation of the actions performed in each. Finally, we are constructing “baseline” HMM-based activity recognition models using the visual and language features, in order to be ready to evaluate the performance of our future work on deeper and more structured models.
A Goal-Based Architecture for Opposing Player AI

This paper describes a goal-based architecture which provides a single source for all high level decisions made by AI players in real-time strategy games. The architecture is easily extensible, flexible enough to be rapidly adapted to multiple different games, and powerful enough to provide a good challenge on a random, unexplored map without unfair advantages or visible cheating. This framework was applied successfully in the development of two games at TimeGate Studios — Kohan2: Kings of War and Axis and Allies.
Learning to Search More Efficiently from Experience: A Multi-heuristic Approach

Learning from experience can significantly improve the performance of search based planners, especially for challenging problems like high-dimensional planning. Experience Graph (E-Graph) is a recently developed framework that encodes experiences, obtained from solving instances in the past, into a single bounded-admissible heuristic, and uses it to guide the search. While the E-Graph approach was shown to be very useful for repetitive problems, it suffers from two issues. First, computing the E-Graph heuristic is time consuming as it maintains the bounded admissibility constraints. Second, a single heuristic can get stuck in a local minimum, and thereby, degrade the performance. In this work, we present an alternative approach to improving the runtime of search from experience, based on a recently developed search algorithm Multi-heuristic A* (MHA*). This framework provides an improvement over the E-Graph planner for two reasons: a) MHA* uses multiple heuristics simultaneously to explore the search space, which reduces the probability of getting stuck in a local minimum, and b) the heuristics in MHA* can be arbitrarily inadmissible, which makes it very easy to compute them. The paper describes the framework, explains how to compute these (inadmissible) heuristics through offline and online processing and presents experimental analysis on two domains, motion planning for a 6D planar arm and large sliding tile puzzles.
From Linear Story Generation to Branching Story Graphs

Narrative is an important part of the way we interact with and make sense of the world. Interactive narrative systems tell stories in a virtual world in which the user is an interactive participant. Since the behaviors the user performs in the virtual world can affect the way in which a storyline unfolds, interactive narrative systems often use a branching story structure where non-interactive story presentations are interleaved with user decision points. An alternative approach — narrative mediation — represents story as a linear progression of events with anticipated user actions and system-controlled agent actions together in a partially-ordered plan. For every possible way the user can violate the story plan, an alternative story plan is generated. If narrative mediation is powerful enough to express the same interactive stories as systems that use branching story structures, then linear narrative generation techniques can be applied to interactive narrative generation with the use of narrative mediation. This paper sketches out a proof that narrative mediation is at least as powerful as acyclic branching story structures.
Evaluating Play Trace (Dis)similarity Metrics

Play trace dissimilarity metrics compare two plays of a game and describe how different they are from each other. But how can we evaluate these metrics? Are some more accurate than others for a particular game, or in general? If so, why? Is the appropriate metric for a given game determined by certain characteristics of the game's design? This work provides an experimental methodology for validating play trace dissimilarity metrics for conformance to game designers' perception of play trace difference. We apply this method to a game-independent metric called Gamalyzer and compare it against three baselines which are representative of commonly used techniques in game analytics. We find that Gamalyzer---with an appropriate input encoding---is more accurate than the baseline metrics for the specific game under consideration, but simpler metrics based on event counting perform nearly as well for this game.
Punch and Judy AI Playset: A Generative Farce Manifesto, Or, The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Predicate Calculus

Building complete interactive narrative systems is hard. Building systems that are satisfying for naïve users is especially hard since small deficiencies in component technologies can easily destroy the experience for a user. In this paper I argue that we can ameliorate some of these technical limitations through careful choice of genre and style, and discuss a number of properties of farce that make it a particularly attractive choice. Then I will describe work in progress on Punch and Judy AI Playset, a system that allows users to explore possible narratives in the Punch and Judy story world.
Searching for Optimal Off-Line Exploration Paths in Grid Environments for a Robot with Limited Visibility

Robotic exploration is an on-line problem in which autonomous mobile robots incrementally discover and map the physical structure of initially unknown environments. Usually, the performance of exploration strategies used to decide where to go next is not compared against the optimal performance obtainable in the test environments, because the latter is generally unknown. In this paper, we present a method to calculate an approximation of the optimal (shortest) exploration path in an arbitrary environment. We consider a mobile robot with limited visibility, discretize a two-dimensional environment with a regular grid, and formulate a search problem for finding the optimal exploration path in the grid, which is solved using A*. Experimental results show the viability of our approach for realistically large environments and its potential for better assessing the performance of on-line exploration strategies.
Program extraction applied to monadic parsing

Abstract This article outlines a proof-theoretic approach to developing correct and terminating monadic parsers. Using modified realizability, we extract formally verified and terminating programs from formal proofs. By extracting both primitive parsers and parser combinators, it is ensured that all complex parsers built from these are also correct, complete and terminating for any input. We demonstrate the viability of our approach by means of two case studies: we extract (i) a small arithmetic calculator and (ii) a non-deterministic natural language parser. The work is being carried out in the interactive proof system Minlog.
A New Educational Approach towards Preparing Skilled Chemical Engineers for Special Assignments in the Energy Field

TAMUQ) and the Manger its Fuel Characterization Lab.He has over sixteen years of research and teaching experience.His research activities are mainly focused on design of advanced reactors and processes for the XTL technology (coalto-liquid, gas-to-liquid and biomass-to liquid
Effectiveness Of A Multimedia General Education Course

The current paper describes the design, development, and evaluation of self-paced multimedia modules that are used in an advanced General Education course at San Jose State University.The design and development cycle of these modules began in 1994 and continues to this date.The General Education course, Technology and Civilization (TECH 198), is designed to introduce students to the realm of history and usage of technology in society and to increase their awareness of both the uncertainties as well as the promises of the utilization of technology as a creative human enterprise.During the summer session 1999, the completed modules were field-tested in one section of the class with fourteen students.The students were randomly assigned to two groups: group 1 completed the multimedia module on Unit 1 (The Nature of Science and Technology) and group 2 completed the multimedia module on Unit 2 (Technology and Work).When comparing performance on pre-test and post-test measures, this study produced inconsistent results.For Unit 1, there was no difference in student performance when comparing the multimedia-based instruction with the traditional classroom instruction.In fact, the students taking the multimedia-based instruction for Unit 1 did significantly worse on the posttest (t = 2.457, p = 0.022) than those students in the traditional classroom.The results from Unit 2 differ from those of Unit 1.For Unit 2, both groups had significantly higher scores on the posttest than on the pretest.Also, Group 2 performed better overall on the posttest than did Group 1 although the difference was much less than the difference for Unit 1 (Group 1 Mean = 7.7 and Group 2 Mean = 8.4).This result would indicate that, for Unit 2 at least, the instruction by self-paced multimedia was as good as the "traditional" classroom instruction.I.
Adoption of the Tablet PC by the Engineering Education Department at Virginia Tech

As Director of CGEP, Dr. Scales manages a state-wide distance learning program that has a long history over 25 years providing working scientists and engineers with access to exceptional graduate degree programs.Dr. Scales also provides leadership for international programs, research computing and academic computing within the College of
Planning in Domains with Cost Function Dependent Actions

In a number of graph search-based planning problems, the value of the cost function that is being minimized also affects the set of possible actions at some or all the states in the graph. In such planning problems, the cost function typically becomes one of the state variables thereby increasing the dimensionality of the planning problem, and consequently the size of the graph that represents the problem. In this paper, we show how to avoid this increase in the dimensionality for weighted search (with bounded suboptimality) whenever the availability of the actions is monotonically non-increasing with the increase in the cost function.
Thermal effects on the resonance fluorescence of doubly dressed artificial atoms

In this work, robustness of controlled density of optical states in doubly driven artificial atoms is studied under phonon dissipation. By using both perturbative and polaron approaches, we investigate the influence of carrier-phonon interactions on the emission properties of a two-level solid-state emitter, simultaneously coupled to two intense distinguishable lasers. Phonon decoherence effects on the main features of the emission spectra are found to be modest up to neon boiling temperatures ($\ensuremath{\sim}30$ K), as compared with photon generation at the Fourier transform limit obtained in the absence of lattice vibrations (zero temperature). These results show that optical switching and photonic modulation by means of double dressing do not require ultralow temperatures for implementation, thus boosting their potential technological applications.
13. Semantic research in computational linguistics

Computational semantics is the branch of computational linguistics that is concerned with the development of methods for processing meaning information. Because a computer system that analyzes natural language must be able to deal with arbitrary real-world sentences, computational semantics faces a number of specific challenges related to the coverage of semantic construction procedures, the efficient resolution of ambiguities, and the ability to compute inferences. After initial successes with logic-based methods, the mainstream paradigm in computational semantics today is to let the computer automatically learn from corpora. In this article, we present both approaches, compare them, and discuss some recent initiatives for combining the two.