Genetic algorithms have been used in science and engineering as adaptive algorithms for solving practical problems and as computational models of natural evolutionary systems. They are considered as a search-based technique based on the principles of Genetics and Natural Selection used in computing to find an exact or approximate solution for optimization and search problems. Genetic algorithms are also termed as heuristic search algorithms that belong to the larger part of evolutionary algorithms. They are inspired by evolutionary biology such as selection, cross over, and inheritance mutation. These algorithms provide a technique for the program to automatically improve the class of their parameters and generate high-quality solutions for optimization problems and search problems. This paper is an introduction of the Genetic algorithm approach and briefly describes some of the most interesting research or applications which are used in real-world projects that enable readers to implement and experiment with Genetic Algorithm on their own.

The article presents biometric systems from three different standpoints. Technological standpoint, where the focus is laid on biometric system usage by the general public. Explaining basic terms and difficulties using various biometric characteristics. It also shortly describes how recognition works in several biometric characteristics (fingerprint, face, iris, and signature). After that is the legal standpoint, which is focused mainly on European Union law, where the often-mentioned GDPR is discussed, this basic legal regulation places a significantly higher standard than the previous legislation on the processing of biometric data as a particular category of personal data. Lastly, the article shows a sociological standpoint. In that part, different attitudes towards biometric technologies are discussed within the world population and different groups of the Czech Republic population. In the latest survey done by the authors in 2020 was found that age, and education play a vital role in the knowledge about biometric systems.

By analyzing the relation between time and speed, the relation between time and gravitational field, the gravitational redshift of photon and the black-body radiation theorem, the conclusion that time on an object is proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature of the object is obtained. Applying the above conclusion about the nature of time, the author analyzes the Mpemba effect and the inverse Mpemba effect, and reaches the following conclusion: the Mpemba effect is the time effect produced when heat flows from objects into space, and the “inverse” Mpemba effect is the time effect produced when heat flows from space into objects.

In a widely cited and widely talked about study, MacNell et al. (2015) [1] examined SET ratings of one female and one male instructor, each teaching two sections of the same online course, one section under their true gender and the other section under false/opposite gender. MacNell et al. concluded that students rated perceived female instructors more harshly than perceived male instructors, demonstrating gender bias against perceived female instructors. Boring, Ottoboni, and Stark (2016) [2] re-analyzed MacNell et al.’s data and confirmed their conclusions. However, the design of MacNell et al. study is fundamentally flawed. First, MacNell et al.’ section sample sizes were extremely small, ranging from 8 to 12 students. Second, MacNell et al. included only one female and one male instructor. Third, MacNell et al.’s findings depend on three outliers – three unhappy students (all in perceived female conditions) who gave their instructors the lowest possible ratings on all or nearly all SET items. We re-analyzed MacNell et al.’s data with and without the three outliers. Our analyses showed that the gender bias against perceived female instructors disappeared. Instead, students rated the actual female vs. male instructor higher, regardless of perceived gender. MacNell et al.’s study is a real-life demonstration that conclusions based on extremely small sample-sized studies are unwarranted and uninterpretable.

Abstract The northern part of the East Java Basin has become a focus of research by earth scientists, among others, because of the existence of hominid fossils and remains of other vertebrate taxa within the Quaternary sedimentary sequence. Fossil-bearing layers are found in the Kendeng Zone, mostly within the well-known Pucangan and Kabuh Formations, which are distributed from Central to East Java. However, not all formations contain vertebrate fossils as well as hominid elements. It is important to consider what factors may have influenced the concentration of vertebrate fossils in those formations. In this study, we describe sedimentary facies at three key field locations: Sangiran, Ngawi, and Mojokerto. Our study indicates that vertebrate remains and hominid fossils mainly accumulated in continental sediments associated with lacustrine and fluvial systems. In this regard, Sangiran and Ngawi B offer the greatest prospect for yielding hominid remains, owing to their unique paleoenvironmental and paleogeographical settings as a highland during the Early–Middle Pleistocene period. Certain parts of the Kabuh Formation in the Mojokerto region also hold high potential, especially those displaying evidence of continental deposition.

Abstract Real-world time-continuous stimuli such as video promise greater naturalism for studies of brain function. However, modeling the stimulus variation is challenging and introduces a bias in favor of particular descriptive dimensions. Alternatively, we can look for brain regions whose signal is correlated between subjects, essentially using one subject to model another. Intersubject correlation mapping (ICM) allows us to find brain regions driven in a canonical manner across subjects by a complex natural stimulus. However, it requires a direct voxel-to-voxel match between the spatiotemporal activity patterns and is thus only sensitive to common activations sufficiently extended to match up in Talairach space (or in an alternative, e.g. cortical-surface-based, common brain space). Here we introduce the more general approach of intersubject information mapping (IIM). For each brain region, IIM determines how much information is shared between the subjects' local spatiotemporal activity patterns. We estimate the intersubject mutual information using canonical correlation analysis applied to voxels within a spherical searchlight centered on each voxel in turn. The intersubject information estimate is invariant to linear transforms including spatial rearrangement of the voxels within the searchlight. This invariance to local encoding will be crucial in exploring fine-grained brain representations, which cannot be matched up in a common space and, more fundamentally, might be unique to each individual – like fingerprints. IIM yields a continuous brain map, which reflects intersubject information in fine-grained patterns. Performed on data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of subjects viewing the same television show, IIM and ICM both highlighted sensory representations, including primary visual and auditory cortices. However, IIM revealed additional regions in higher association cortices, namely temporal pole and orbitofrontal cortex. These regions appear to encode the same information across subjects in their fine-grained patterns, although their spatial-average activation was not significantly correlated between subjects.

Abstract For the modeling and numerical approximation of problems with time-dependent Dirichlet boundary conditions, one can call on several consistent and inconsistent approaches. We show that spatially discretized boundary control problems can be brought into a standard state space form accessible for standard optimization and model reduction techniques. We discuss several methods that base on standard finite element discretizations, propose a newly developed problem formulation, and investigate their performance in numerical examples. We illustrate that penalty schemes require a wise choice of the penalization parameters in particular for iterative solves of the algebraic equations. Incidentally, we confirm that standard finite element discretizations of higher order may not achieve the optimal order of convergence in the treatment of boundary forcing problems and that convergence estimates by the common method ofmanufactured solutionscan be misleading.

Access to the work of others is something that is too often taken for granted, yet problematic and difficult to be obtained unless someone pays for it. Green and gold open access are claimed to be a solution to this problem. While open access is gaining momentum in some fields, there is a limited and seasoned knowledge about self-archiving in computer science. In particular, there is an inadequate understanding of author-based self-archiving awareness, practice, and inhibitors. This article reports an exploratory study of the awareness of self-archiving, the practice of self-archiving, and the inhibitors of self-archiving among authors in an Italian computer science faculty. Forty-nine individuals among interns, PhD students, researchers, and professors were recruited in a questionnaire (response rate of 72.8%). The quantitative and qualitative responses suggested that there is still work needed in terms of advocating green open access to computer science authors who seldom self-archive and when they do, they often infringe the copyright transfer agreements of the publishers. In addition, tools from the open-source community are needed to facilitate author-based self-archiving, which should comprise of an automatic check of the copyright transfer agreements. The study identified nine factors inhibiting the act of self-archiving among computer scientists. As a first step, this study proposes several propositions regarding author-based self-archiving in computer science that can be further investigated. Recommendations to foster self-archiving in computer science, based on the results, are provided.