LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Pronomial clitics in Qu\'ebec colloquial French: A morphological analysis

PRONOMINAL CLITICS IN QUÉBEC COLLOQUIAL FRENCH: A MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS Julie Auger Supervisors: Sabine Iatridou Gillian Sankoff The grammatical status of Romance pronominal clitics has long been the object of intense debate. Are they syntactically-independent arguments or are they affixal agreement markers? This dissertation addresses this question with respect to Québec Colloquial French (QCF). It treats the morphophonological and morphosyntactic dimensions as two independent dimensions, thus allowing either for affixes to have argument status and prohibiting them from cooccurring with an overt, lexical argument, or for non-affixal elements to behave like agreement markers and not count as syntactic arguments. The analysis reveals that all the clitics of QCF are affixes at the morphological level, since they demonstrate numerous patterns which are too idiosyncratic to be handled by syntactic rules. Only subject clitics, however, function as agreement markers, since they occur in all the environments where we would expect agreement markers; object markers, conversely, are excluded from those environments. I shall present a morphological analysis following the approach taken by Roberge and his colleagues and work within the Minimalist framework of Chomsky (1993). I assume that fully-inflected lexical items are inserted in the syntax, and I adopt Cummins
Performance Optimization of Virtual Keyboards

Text entry has been a bottleneck of nontraditional computing devices. One of the promising methods is the virtual keyboard for touch screens. Correcting previous estimates on virtual keyboard efficiency in the literature, we estimated the potential performance of the existing QWERTY, FITALY, and OPTI designs of virtual keyboards to be in the neighborhood of 28, 36, and 38 words per minute (wpm), respectively. This article presents 2 quantitative design techniques to search for virtual keyboard layouts. The first technique simulated the dynamics of a keyboard with digraph springs between keys, which produced a Hooke keyboard with 41.6 wpm movement efficiency. The second technique used a Metropolis random walk algorithm guided by a “Fitts-digraph energy” objective function that quantifies the movement efficiency of a virtual keyboard. This method produced various Metropolis keyboards with different HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION, 2002, Volume 17, pp. 89–XXX Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Shumin Zhai is a human–computer interaction researcher with an interest in inventing and analyzing interaction methods and devices based on human performance insights and experimentation; he is a Research Staff Member in the User Sciences and Experience Research Department of the IBM Almaden Research Center. Michael Hunter is a graduate student of Computer Science at Brigham Young University; he is interested in designing graphical and haptic user interfaces. Barton A. Smith is an experimental scientist with an interest in machines, people, and society; he is manager of the Human Interface Research Group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. shapes and structures with approximately 42.5 wpm movement efficiency, which was 50% higher than QWERTY and 10% higher than OPTI. With a small reduction (41.16 wpm) of movement efficiency, we introduced 2 more design objectives that produced the ATOMIK layout. One was alphabetical tuning that placed the keys with a tendency from A to Z so a novice user could more easily locate the keys. The other was word connectivity enhancement so the most frequent words were easier to find, remember, and type.
Key Dimensions of E-commerce Service Quality and Its Relationships to Satisfaction and Loyalty

Evidence exists that one successful strategy to satisfy and retain customers is offering superior service quality. Motivated by the growing interest in e-commerce, we focus our research questions on identifying the key dimensions of e-commerce service quality and its relationships to customer satisfaction and loyalty. In exploring answers to our research questions a hypothesized model is proposed and empirically tested using a research survey with 370 online shoppers. Salient results include: (1) key dimensions of e-commerce service quality are website usability, information quality, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and personalization; (2) customer satisfaction is influenced mostly with the perception of reliability, while customer loyalty is affected by the perception of assurance; (3) customer retention is predicted by the customer satisfaction index. Results of the study contribute to the nascent body of research in e-service quality and offer unique insights for managers of online firms on how to manage the quality of their e-commerce e-service.
Microscopy cell counting and detection with fully convolutional regression networks

This paper concerns automated cell counting and detection in microscopy images. The approach we take is to use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to regress a cell spatial density map across the image. This is applicable to situations where traditional single-cell segmentation-based methods do not work well due to cell clumping or overlaps. We make the following contributions: (i) we develop and compare architectures for two fully convolutional regression networks (FCRNs) for this task; (ii) since the networks are fully convolutional, they can predict a density map for an input image of arbitrary size, and we exploit this to improve efficiency by end-to-end training on image patches; (iii) we show that FCRNs trained entirely on synthetic data are able to give excellent predictions on microscopy images from real biological experiments without fine-tuning, and that the performance can be further improved by fine-tuning on these real images. Finally, (iv) by inverting feature representations, we show to what extent the information from an input image has been encodedby feature responses in different layers.We set a new state-of-the-art performance for cell counting on standard synthetic image benchmarks and show that the FCRNs trained entirely with synthetic data can generalise well to real microscopy images both for cell counting and detections for the case of overlapping cells. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 15 Nov 2015 Accepted 28 Jan 2016
Contralaterally controlled neuromuscular electrical stimulation for recovery of ankle dorsiflexion: a pilot randomized controlled trial in patients with chronic post-stroke hemiplegia.

OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to compare the effects of contralaterally controlled neuromuscular electrical stimulation (CCNMES) vs. cyclic neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) on lower extremity impairment, functional ambulation, and gait characteristics.


DESIGN
Twenty-six survivors of stroke with chronic (≥6 mos) foot drop during ambulation were randomly assigned to 6 wks of CCNMES or cyclic NMES. Both groups had ten sessions per week of self-administered home application of either CCNMES or cyclic NMES plus two sessions per week of gait training with a physical therapist. Primary outcomes included lower extremity Fugl-Meyer score, modified Emory Functional Ambulation Profile, and gait velocity. Assessments were made at pretreatment and posttreatment and at 1 and 3 mos after treatment.


RESULTS
There were no significant differences between the groups in the outcome trajectories for any of the measures. With data from both groups pooled, there were significant but modest and sustained improvements in the Fugl-Meyer score and the modified Emory Functional Ambulation Profile but not in gait velocity.


CONCLUSIONS
The results support the hypothesis that gait training combined with either CCNMES or cyclic NMES reduces lower extremity impairment and functional ambulation but do not support the hypothesis that CCNMES is more effective than cyclic NMES in patients with chronic post-stroke hemiplegia.
An MRI investigation into the function of the transversus abdominis muscle during "drawing-in" of the abdominal wall.

STUDY DESIGN
An operator blinded dual modality trial of measurement of the abdominal muscles during "drawing-in" of the abdominal wall.


OBJECTIVES
1) To investigate, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the function of the transversus abdominis muscle bilaterally during a drawing-in of the abdominal wall. 2) To validate the use of real-time ultrasound imaging as a measure of the deep abdominal muscle during a drawing-in of the abdominal wall.


SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA
Previous research has implicated the deep abdominal muscle, transversus abdominis, in the support and protection of the spine and provided evidence that training this muscle is important in the rehabilitation of low back pain. One of the most important actions of the transversus abdominis is to "draw-in" the abdominal wall, and this action has been shown to stiffen the sacroiliac joints. It is hypothesized that in response to a draw in, the transversus abdominis muscle forms a deep musculofascial "corset" and that MRI could be used to view this corset and verify its mechanism of action on the lumbopelvic region.


METHODS
Thirteen healthy asymptomatic male elite cricket players aged 21.3 +/- 2.1 years were imaged using MRI and ultrasound imaging as they drew in their abdominal walls. Measurements of the thickness of the transversus abdominis and internal oblique muscles and the slide of the anterior abdominal fascia were measured using both MRI and ultrasound. Measurement of the whole abdominal cross-sectional area (CSA) was conducted using MRI.


RESULTS
Results of the MRI demonstrated that, as a result of draw-in, there was a significant increase in thickness of the transversus abdominis (P < 0.001) and the internal oblique muscles (P < 0.001). There was a significant decrease in the CSA of the trunk (P < 0.001). The mean slide (+/-SD) of the anterior abdominal fascia was 1.54 +/- 0.38 cm for the left side and 1.48 +/- 0.35 cm for the right side. Ultrasound measurements of muscle thickness of both transversus abdominis and the internal oblique, as well as fascial slide, correlated with measures obtained using MRI (interclass correlations from 0.78 to 0.95).


CONCLUSIONS
The MRI results demonstrated that during a drawing-in action, the transversus abdominis contracts bilaterally to form a musculofascial band that appears to tighten (like a corset) and most likely improves the stabilization of the lumbopelvic region. Real-time ultrasound imaging can also be used to measure changes in the transversus abdominis during the draw-in maneuver.
Personalized Key Frame Recommendation

Key frames are playing a very important role for many video applications, such as on-line movie preview and video information retrieval. Although a number of key frame selection methods have been proposed in the past, existing technologies mainly focus on how to precisely summarize the video content, but seldom take the user preferences into consideration. However, in real scenarios, people may cast diverse interests on the contents even for the same video, and thus they may be attracted by quite different key frames, which makes the selection of key frames an inherently personalized process. In this paper, we propose and investigate the problem of personalized key frame recommendation to bridge the above gap. To do so, we make use of video images and user time-synchronized comments to design a novel key frame recommender that can simultaneously model visual and textual features in a unified framework. By user personalization based on her/his previously reviewed frames and posted comments, we are able to encode different user interests in a unified multi-modal space, and can thus select key frames in a personalized manner, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first time in the research field of video content analysis. Experimental results show that our method performs better than its competitors on various measures.
Comparison of localization performance with implanted fiducial markers and cone-beam computed tomography for on-line image-guided radiotherapy of the prostate.

PURPOSE
The aim of this work was to assess the accuracy of kilovoltage (kV) cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT)-based setup corrections as compared with orthogonal megavoltage (MV) portal image-based corrections for patients undergoing external-beam radiotherapy of the prostate.


METHODS AND MATERIALS
Daily cone-beam CT volumetric images were acquired after setup for patients with three intraprostatic fiducial markers. The estimated couch shifts were compared retrospectively to patient adjustments based on two orthogonal MV portal images (the current clinical standard of care in our institution). The CBCT soft-tissue based shifts were also estimated by digitally removing the gold markers in each projection to suppress the artifacts in the reconstructed volumes. A total of 256 volumetric images for 15 patients were analyzed.


RESULTS
The Pearson coefficient of correlation for the patient position shifts using fiducial markers in MV vs. kV was (R2 = 0.95, 0.84, 0.81) in the left-right (LR), anterior-posterior (AP), and superior-inferior (SI) directions, respectively. The correlation using soft-tissue matching was as follows: R2 = 0.90, 0.49, 0.51 in the LR, AP and SI directions. A Bland-Altman analysis showed no significant trends in the data. The percentage of shifts within a +/-3-mm tolerance (the clinical action level) was 99.7%, 95.5%, 91.3% for fiducial marker matching and 99.5%, 70.3%, 78.4% for soft-tissue matching.


CONCLUSIONS
Cone-beam CT is an accurate and precise tool for image guidance. It provides an equivalent means of patient setup correction for prostate patients with implanted gold fiducial markers. Use of the additional information provided by the visualization of soft-tissue structures is an active area of research.
Cruising for parking

摘要:为寻找路内停车泊位在道 路上巡游的车辆是造成交通拥堵 的原因之一。首先指出路内停车 低价与路外停车高价共同刺激驾 驶人选择巡游而非使用路外停车 场(库)。其次针对洛杉矶的巡游 开展调查,得到车辆平均巡游时耗 和距离,并得出每年由此产生的车 辆行驶里程、时间浪费、燃油消耗 及 CO2排放。然后通过分析路内 停车价格与车辆巡游的关系,提出 城市全日泊位使用率大约为 85% 时,停车泊位处于供需平衡状态, 停车价格较合理。接着以加利福 尼亚格雷伍德城停车价格制定及 停车收益使用为例,给出停车增量 融资的收益回馈方式。最后指出, 为了减少拥堵、降低温室气体排 放、改善街区环境等,城市应制定 合理的路内停车价格并将产生的 收益用于改善公共服务。 Abstract: Cruising for on-street parking causes traffic congestion. This paper first points out that the combination of low prices for on-street parking and high prices for off-street parking increases the incentive for drivers to search for on-street parking spaces. Through a survey of cruising for parking in Los Angeles, the author obtains average cruising time and distance, as well as corresponding vehicle-miles traveled, waste of time, extra fuel consumption, and CO2 emissions. The author concludes that when the occupancy rate of on-street parking is about 85%, the demand and supply of parking are in balance and the price is just right. Taking the parking charges and revenue usage in Redwood City in California as an example, the paper discusses parking increment finance. Finally, the paper emphasizes that it is necessary to charge properly for on-street parking and spend the resulting revenue to improve local public services in order to reduce traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions, and improve neighborhoods. 关键词:停车管理;路内停车;车辆 巡游;停车价格;收益管理
Effect of neck exercise on sitting posture in patients with chronic neck pain.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
Poor sitting posture has been implicated in the development and perpetuation of neck pain symptoms. This study had 2 purposes: (1) to compare change in cervical and thoracic posture during a distracting task between subjects with chronic neck pain and control subjects and (2) to compare the effects of 2 different neck exercise regimens on the ability of people with neck pain to maintain an upright cervical and thoracic posture during this task.


SUBJECTS
Fifty-eight subjects with chronic, nonsevere neck pain and 10 control subjects participated in the study.


METHOD
Change in cervical and thoracic posture from an upright posture was measured every 2 minutes during a 10-minute computer task. Following baseline measurements, the subjects with neck pain were randomized into one of two 6-week exercise intervention groups: a group that received training of the craniocervical flexor muscles or a group that received endurance-strength training of the cervical flexor muscles. The primary outcomes following intervention were changes in the angle of cervical and thoracic posture during the computer task.


RESULTS
Subjects with neck pain demonstrated a change in cervical angle across the duration of the task (mean=4.4 degrees ; 95% confidence interval [CI]=3.3-5.4), consistent with a more forward head posture. No significant difference was observed for the change in cervical angle across the duration of the task for the control group subjects (mean=2.2 degrees ; 95% CI=1.0-3.4). Following intervention, the craniocervical flexor training group demonstrated a significant reduction in the change of cervical angle across the duration of the computer task.


DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
This study showed that people with chronic neck pain demonstrate a reduced ability to maintain an upright posture when distracted. Following intervention with an exercise program targeted at training the craniocervical flexor muscles, subjects with neck pain demonstrated an improved ability to maintain a neutral cervical posture during prolonged sitting.
Pilot induction regimen incorporating pharmacokinetically guided topotecan for treatment of newly diagnosed high-risk neuroblastoma: a Children's Oncology Group study.

PURPOSE
To assess the feasibility of adding dose-intensive topotecan and cyclophosphamide to induction therapy for newly diagnosed high-risk neuroblastoma (HRNB).


PATIENTS AND METHODS
Enrolled patients received two cycles of topotecan (approximately 1.2 mg/m(2)/d) and cyclophosphamide (400 mg/m(2)/d) for 5 days followed by four cycles of multiagent chemotherapy (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center [MSKCC] regimen). Pharmacokinetically guided topotecan dosing (target systemic exposure with area under the curve of 50 to 70 ng/mL/hr) was performed. Peripheral-blood stem cell (PBSC) harvest and surgical resection of residual primary tumor occurred after cycles 2 and 5, respectively. Patients achieving at least a partial response received myeloablative chemotherapy with PBSC rescue and radiation to the presurgical primary tumor volume. Oral 13-cis-retinoic acid maintenance therapy was administered twice daily for 14 days in six 28-day cycles.


RESULTS
Thirty-one patients were enrolled onto the study. No deaths related to toxicity or dose-limiting toxicities occurred during induction. Mucositis rarely occurred after topotecan cycles (9.7%) in contrast to 30% after MSKCC cycles. Thirty patients underwent PBSC collection with median 31.1 × 10(6) CD34+ cells/kg (range, 1.8 to 541.8 × 10(6) CD34+ cells/kg), all negative for tumor contamination by immunocytochemical analysis. Targeted topotecan systemic exposure was achieved in 26 (84%) of 31 patients. At the end of induction, 26 patients (84%) had tumor response and one patient had progressive disease. In the overall cohort, 3-year event-free and overall survival were 37.8% ± 9.4% and 57.1% ± 9.4%, respectively.


CONCLUSION
This pilot induction regimen was well tolerated with expected and reversible toxicities. These data support investigation of efficacy in a phase III clinical trial for newly diagnosed HRNB.
Accelerating Bitcoin's Transaction Processing. Fast Money Grows on Trees, Not Chains

Bitcoin is a potentially disruptive new crypto-currency based on a decentralized opensource protocol which is gradually gaining popularity. Perhaps the most important question that will affect Bitcoin’s success, is whether or not it will be able to scale to support the high volume of transactions required from a global currency system. We investigate the restrictions on the rate of transaction processing in Bitcoin as a function of both the bandwidth available to nodes and the network delay, both of which lower the efficiency of Bitcoin’s transaction processing. The security analysis done by Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto [12] assumes that block propagation delays are negligible compared to the time between blocks—an assumption that does not hold when the protocol is required to process transactions at high rates. We improve upon the original analysis and remove this assumption. Using our results, we are able to give bounds on the number of transactions per second the protocol can handle securely. Building on previously published measurements by Decker and Wattenhofer [5], we show these bounds are currently more restrictive by an order of magnitude than the bandwidth needed to stream all transactions. We additionally show how currently planned improvements to the protocol, namely the use of transaction hashes in blocks (instead of complete transaction records), will dramatically alleviate these restrictions. Finally, we present an easily implementable modification to the way Bitcoin constructs its main data structure, the blockchain, that immensely improves security from attackers, especially when the network operates at high rates. This improvement allows for further increases in the number of transactions processed per second. We show that with our proposed modification, significant speedups can be gained in confirmation time of transactions as well. The block generation rate can be securely increased to more than one block per second – a 600 fold speedup compared to today’s rate, while still allowing the network to processes many transactions per second.
Early virological response may predict treatment response in sofosbuvir-based combination therapy of chronic hepatitis c in a multi-center “real-life” cohort

BACKGROUND
The combination of sofosbuvir (SOF), ribavirin (RBV) and peg-interferon-alfa-2a (peg-IFN-alfa-2a) as well as the combination of SOF and RBV for the treatment of patients infected with hepatitis c virus (HCV) has improved rates of sustained virological response (SVR) considerably in recent trials. However, there is only limited data concerning the efficacy and safety in a "real-life" cohort.


METHODS
We analyzed a cohort of 119 patients with chronic HCV infection treated at four investigational sites in Germany. All patients received either a combination treatment of SOF, RBV and peg-IFN-alfa-2a or SOF and RBV.


RESULTS
The rates of SVR at 12 weeks after end of treatment (SVR 12) were as follows: Among 76 patients with genotype 1 infection the SVR 12 rate was 74% (n = 56), among 14 patients with genotype 2 infection the SVR 12 rate was 79% (n = 11), among 24 patients with genotype 3 infection the SVR 12 rate was 92% (n = 22) and among 5 patients with genotype 4 infection the SVR 12 rate was 80% (n = 4). Of all 26 patients with a relapse in our cohort, 69% (n = 18) of these patients presented with liver cirrhosis and 58% (n = 15) were treatment experienced. Notably, the level of HCV-RNA after 4 weeks of treatment was a significant predictor of treatment response in genotype 1 patients. Patients with HCV-RNA levels ≥ 12 IU ml-1 after 4 weeks of treatment achieved SVR 12 only in 30% (n = 17/56, p < 0.0001) of cases and treatment response was even lower with SVR 12 of 25% (n = 5/20, p = 0.0016) in the subgroup of patients with cirrhosis.


CONCLUSION
We observed a high rate of SVR 12 with SOF-based treatment regimes, however probably due to the high number of patients with liver cirrhosis and prior treatment experience, treatment response rates were lower than in previously published trials. In genotype 1 patients the analysis of early virological response may predict treatment response in SOF-based combination therapies.