Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acoustic-prosodic correlates of 'awkward' prosody in story retellings from adolescents with autism

Atypical speech prosody is a primary characteristic of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), yet it is often excluded from diagnostic instrument algorithms due to poor subjective reliability. Robust, objective prosodic cues can enhance our understanding of those aspects which are atypical in autism. In this work, we connect objective signal-derived descriptors of prosody to subjective perceptions of prosodic awkwardness. Subjectively, more awkward speech is less expressive (more monotone) and more often has perceived awkward rate/rhythm, volume, and intonation. We also find expressivity can be quantified through objective intonation variability features, and that speaking rate and rhythm cues are highly predictive of perceived awkwardness. Acoustic-prosodic features are also able to significantly differentiate subjects with ASD from typically developing (TD) subjects in a classification task, emphasizing the potential of automated methods for diagnostic efficiency and clarity.
The Cyclicality of Sales, Regular and Effective Prices: Business Cycle and Policy Implications

We address how using different censoring thresholds and imputation procedures affects the baseline results of Coibion, Gorodnichenko, and Hong (2015). Higher censoring thresholds introduce measure ment error and outliers that generate wide variability in results across weighting schemes, but methods that explicitly control for outliers confirm the results of Coibion, Gorodnichenko, and Hong (2015) for all censoring thresholds. We also illustrate how the BLS’s approach to imputing missing prices can introduce a cyclical bias into measures of posted price inflation when store-switching is present in the data. (JEL D12, E31, E32, L25, L81)
Compass: A scalable simulator for an architecture for cognitive computing

Inspired by the function, power, and volume of the organic brain, we are developing TrueNorth, a novel modular, non-von Neumann, ultra-low power, compact architecture. TrueNorth consists of a scalable network of neurosynaptic cores, with each core containing neurons, dendrites, synapses, and axons. To set sail for TrueNorth, we developed Compass, a multi-threaded, massively parallel functional simulator and a parallel compiler that maps a network of long-distance pathways in the macaque monkey brain to TrueNorth. We demonstrate near-perfect weak scaling on a 16 rack IBM® Blue Gene®/Q (262144 CPUs, 256 TB memory), achieving an unprecedented scale of 256 million neurosynaptic cores containing 65 billion neurons and 16 trillion synapses running only 388x slower than real time with an average spiking rate of 8.1 Hz. By using emerging PGAS communication primitives, we also demonstrate 2x better real-time performance over MPI primitives on a 4 rack Blue Gene/P (16384 CPUs, 16 TB memory).
Avicins, a family of triterpenoid saponins from Acacia victoriae (Bentham), inhibit activation of nuclear factor-κB by inhibiting both its nuclear localization and ability to bind DNA

Triterpenoid saponins, which are present in leguminous plants and some marine animals, possess a broad range of biological actions. We have earlier reported the extraction of avicins, a family of triterpenoid saponins obtained from the Australian desert tree Acacia victoriae (Leguminosae: Mimosoideae) that inhibit tumor cell growth and induce apoptosis, in part, by perturbing mitochondrial function. These saponins have also been found to prevent chemical-induced carcinogenesis in mice. This study examines the effect of a triterpene mixture (F094) and a single molecular species (avicin G) isolated from the mixture on tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-induced activation of nuclear transcription factor-κB (NF-κB) in Jurkat cells (human T cell leukemia). Both F094 and avicin G were found to be potent inhibitors of TNF-induced NF-κB. Treatment of Jurkat cells with avicin G resulted in a much slower accumulation of the p65 subunit of NF-κB into the nucleus whereas the degradation of IκBα was unaffected. Avicin G also impaired the binding of NF-κB to DNA in in vitro binding assays. Treatment of cells with DTT totally reversed the avicin G-induced inhibition of NF-κB activity, suggesting that sulfhydryl groups critical for NF-κB activation were being affected. Avicin G treatment resulted in decreased expression of NF-κB-regulated proteins such as inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) and cyclooxygenase (COX-2). Thus, the avicins may prove important for reducing both oxidative and nitrosative cellular stress and thereby suppressing the development of malignancies and related diseases.
Handwritten digit recognition by neural networks with single-layer training

It is shown that neural network classifiers with single-layer training can be applied efficiently to complex real-world classification problems such as the recognition of handwritten digits. The STEPNET procedure, which decomposes the problem into simpler subproblems which can be solved by linear separators, is introduced. Provided appropriate data representations and learning rules are used, performance comparable to that obtained by more complex networks can be achieved. Results from two different databases are presented: an European database comprising 8700 isolated digits and a zip code database from the US Postal Service comprising 9000 segmented digits. A hardware implementation of the classifier is briefly described.
Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology Prevalence of Latent Tuberculosis Infection among Health Care Workers in a Hospital for Pulmonary Diseases

Background: Little is known about the prevalence of latent tuberculosis infections (LTBI) in health care workers (HCW) in low-incidence countries especially in hospitals for pulmonary diseases. With Interferon-gamma release assays (IGRA), a new method for diagnosis of LTBI is available which is more specific than the tuberculin skin test (TST).
Women and Democracy: Cultural Obstacles to Equal Representation

A fundamental problem facing the worldwide process of democratization is the continued lack of gender equality in political leadership. The basic facts are not in dispute: Today women represent only one in seven parliamentarians, one in ten cabinet ministers, and, at the apex of power, one in 20 heads of state or government. Multiple factors have contributed to this situation, including structural and institutional barriers. But what is the influence of political culture? Are attitudes toward women as political leaders a significant barrier to their empowerment? In particular, how important is culture as compared with structural and institutional factors? These are the questions that our study seeks to address. Despite moves toward gender equality in many spheres, barriers to the entry of women into elected office persist. In June 2000, the UN General Assembly held a special session entitled “Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace,” the latest in a long series of international conferences calling for the empowerment of women. The session focused on the need for full recognition of women’s rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as demands for progress toward gender equality in education, health care, work, the family, and the public sphere. Women have mobilized at the grassroots, national, and global levels to Pippa Norris is associate director of research at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She has published more than two dozen books, including A Virtuous Circle (2000) and Digital Divide (2001). Ronald Inglehart is professor of political science and program director at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He helped to found the Eurobarometer surveys and directs the World Values Surveys. His recent books include Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies (1997).
Heterogeneous Transfer Learning for Image Classification

Transfer learning as a new machine learning paradigm has gained increasing attention lately. In situations where the training data in a target domain are not sufficient to learn predictive models effectively, transfer learning leverages auxiliary source data from other related source domains for learning. While most of the existing works in this area only focused on using the source data with the same structure as the target data, in this paper, we push this boundary further by proposing a heterogeneous transfer learning framework for knowledge transfer between text and images. We observe that for a target-domain classification problem, some annotated images can be found on many social Web sites, which can serve as a bridge to transfer knowledge from the abundant text documents available over the Web. A key question is how to effectively transfer the knowledge in the source data even though the text can be arbitrarily found. Our solution is to enrich the representation of the target images with semantic concepts extracted from the auxiliary source data through a novel matrix factorization method. By using the latent semantic features generated by the auxiliary data, we are able to build a better integrated image classifier. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on the Caltech-256 image dataset.
GIGABIT ETHERNET : From 100 to 1 , 000 Mbps

the family of high-speed Ethernet technologies. It extends the operating speed of the world's most deployed LAN to 1 billion bits per second while maintaining compatibility with the installed base of 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps Ethernet equipment. T he installed base for Ethernet ranges from PCs and servers to printers , test equipment, telephone switches, cable TV set-top boxes, process control systems, and even high-end theatrical lighting systems. In short, Ethernet is ubiquitous—which is to say, consumers can't get enough of it. The great value of Ethernet is not that one size fits all, but that common protocols and models are available at a wide range of price/performance points. Originally standardized and deployed at 10 megabits per second, Ethernet has always been considered a high-speed network. The newest standard, Gigabit Ethernet, 1 scales up two orders of magnitude to 1,000 Mbps, while maintaining compatibility with systems deployed in the early 1980s. The Ethernet supplier community has consistently led the technical developments underlying ever-faster operating speeds on the installed base of network cabling—whether it was coaxial cable, Unshielded Twisted Pair, multimode fiber, or single-mode fiber. Each media type presents unique challenges. In this tutorial, we describe the operation of Gigabit Ethernet over fiber-optic cabling and the emerging IEEE standards project known as 1000Base-T, which addresses operation over Category-5 UTP cabling. Any tutorial concerning a network interface and access protocol standard must refer first to the ISO seven-layer reference model. Like most specifications produced by the IEEE 802 LAN/MAN standards committee, Giga-bit Ethernet (IEEE802.3z) addresses the two lowest layers of the model: s Layer 2, the Data-link layer, which describes how data are organized into frames and sent over the network, and s Layer 1, the Physical layer, which describes the network medium and signaling specifications.
Iteration complexity of feasible descent methods for convex optimization

In many machine learning problems such as the dual form of SVM, the objective function to be minimized is convex but not strongly convex. This fact causes difficulties in obtaining the complexity of some commonly used optimization algorithms. In this paper, we proved the global linear convergence on a wide range of algorithms when they are applied to some non-strongly convex problems. In particular, we are the first to prove O(log(1/e)) time complexity of cyclic coordinate descent methods on dual problems of support vector classification and regression.
Sensorless Robot Collision Detection and Hybrid Force/Motion Control

We consider the problem of real-time detection of collisions between a robot manipulator and obstacles of unknown geometry and location in the environment without the use of extra sensors. The idea is to handle a collision at a generic point along the robot as a fault of its actuating system. A previously developed dynamic FDI (fault detection and isolation) technique is used, which does not require acceleration or force measurements. The actual robot link that has collided can also be identified. Once contact has been detected, it is possible to switch to a suitably defined hybrid force/motion controller that enables to keep the contact, while sliding on the obstacle, and to regulate the interaction force. Simulation results are shown for a two-link planar robot.
Rigid-Motion Scattering for Texture Classification

A rigid-motion scattering computes adaptive invariants along translations and rotations, with a deep convolutional network. Convolutions are calculated on the rigid-motion group, with wavelets defined on the translation and rotation variables. It preserves joint rotation and translation information, while providing global invariants at any desired scale. Texture classification is studied, through the characterization of stationary processes from a single realization. State-of-the-art results are obtained on multiple texture data bases, with important rotation and scaling variabilities.
Exploring a New Pathophysiological Association in Acne Vulgaris and Metabolic Syndrome: The Role of Biogenic Amines and Glutathione Peroxidase

Background and Objectives: Metabolic disorders cause many skin issues, including acne vulgaris. This research investigated the function of glutathione peroxidase (GTPx) and biogenic amines as a potential novel pathophysiological link between metabolic syndrome (MetS) and acne vulgaris. Materials and Methods: The patients were distributed into two groups: metabolic precondition (MPG, n = 78) and control (CG, n = 81). To determine the extent of acne and metabolic preconditioning, patients were subjected to extensive clinical/paraclinical investigations. Additionally, catecholamine levels in urine and GTPx levels in blood were measured. Results: Mild acne was more common in the CG (32.1 vs. 6.4, p < 0.001), and severe acne was more common in the MPG (61.54 vs. 25.9, p < 0.001), with the average age being substantially higher in the MPG (23.81 vs. 21.05, p = 0.002). Significant variations were observed in the paraclinical levels for catecholamines (p < 0.05). In the MPG, most severe acne patients were overweight (52.1%), insulin-resistant (48.8%), or obese (47.9%). Moderate acne was most often linked to obesity (56%), overweight (44%), and insulin resistance (20%). Patients with severe acne (48.83%) had a considerably greater incidence of insulin resistance syndrome (p = 0.039) than those with moderate or severe acne (20%). The presence of two or three metabolic disorders considerably raised the risk of severe acne. Significant differences between groups were observed only in the subgroup of patients with severe acne, with lower values in the MPG (p = 0.015). Significant differences between groups were observed regarding the subgroup of patients with severe acne, with lower DTPx values in the MPG. At the group level, only CG patients with severe acne had reduced GTPx levels. Significant differences in catecholamine values were seen between groups (p < 0.05), independent of acne severity, except for adrenaline in mild acne patients (p = 0.059). Conclusions: The complex connection between GTPx and catecholamines in MetS suggests a significant role of these factors in the pathogenesis of acne associated with this condition, opening new perspectives in the research and treatment of acne in the context of MetS.
Types of `reticulin' antibodies detected in human sera by immunofluorescence

Reticulin antibodies have been classified by immunofluorescence into five types reacting with distinct antigens of intra- and extracellular components in mesenchyme. Two types of fibrillar antigens can be distinguished on the basis of the staining patterns, anatomical distribution, and species specificity. A third antibody reacts with either small fibres, amorphous proteins, or mucopolysaccharides lining the hepatic sinusoids (ground substance antigens). In addition, at least two kinds of intrasinusoidal cells show cytoplasmic fluorescence, ie, Kupffer cells and glass-adherent, blood-borne cells antigenically related to peritoneal macrophages. Some sera may contain antibodies reacting with sinusoidal endothelial cells though this has not yet been proven. It has been confirmed that all these distinct antibodies related to reticulin antigens are most frequent in dermatitis herpetiformis and coeliac disease, but they are also found with increased frequency in chronic heroin addicts and in rheumatoid and Sjögren's syndromes. About 5% of normal individuals had such antibodies and no significant increase could be demonstrated in autoimmune disorders or in liver cirrhosis. The antibodies appear to be stimulated by bacterial or nutritional antigens and are likely to represent anamnestic responses rather than direct cross reactions with a multiplicity of foreign antigens.
Dimethylarginine Dimethylaminohydrolase Regulates Nitric Oxide Synthesis: Genetic and Physiological Evidence

Background—NO is a major regulator of cardiovascular physiology that reduces vascular and cardiac contractility. Accumulating evidence indicates that endogenous inhibitors may regulate NOS. The NOS inhibitors asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) and N-monomethylarginine are metabolized by the enzyme dimethylarginine dimethylaminohydrolase (DDAH). This study was designed to determine if increased expression of DDAH could reduce tissue and plasma levels of the NOS inhibitors and thereby increase NO synthesis. Methods and Results—We used gene transfer and transgenic approaches to overexpress human DDAH I in vitro and in vivo. The overexpression of DDAH in cultured endothelial cells in vitro induced a 2-fold increase in NOS activity and NO production. In the hDDAH-1 transgenic mice, we observed ≈2-fold increases in tissue NOS activity and urinary nitrogen oxides, associated with a 2-fold reduction in plasma ADMA. The systolic blood pressure of transgenic mice was 13 mm Hg lower than that of wild-type controls (P <0.05). The systemic vascular resistance and cardiac contractility were decreased in response to the increase in NO production. Conclusions—DDAH I overexpression increases NOS activity in vitro and in vivo. The hDDAH-1 transgenic animal exhibits a reduced systolic blood pressure, systemic vascular resistance, and cardiac stroke volume. This study provides compelling evidence that the elaboration and metabolism of endogenous ADMA plays an important role in regulation of NOS activity.
Stomach ghrelin-secreting cells as food-entrainable circadian clocks

Increases in arousal and activity in anticipation of a meal, termed “food anticipatory activity” (FAA), depend on circadian food-entrainable oscillators (FEOs), whose locations and output signals have long been sought. It is known that ghrelin is secreted in anticipation of a regularly scheduled mealtime. We show here that ghrelin administration increases locomotor activity in nondeprived animals in the absence of food. In mice lacking ghrelin receptors, FAA is significantly reduced. Impressively, the cumulative rise of activity before food presentation closely approximates a Gaussian function (r = 0.99) for both wild-type and ghrelin receptor knockout animals, with the latter having a smaller amplitude. For both groups, once an animal begins its daily anticipatory bout, it keeps running until the usual time of food availability, indicating that ghrelin affects response threshold. Oxyntic cells coexpress ghrelin and the circadian clock proteins PER1 and PER2. The expression of PER1, PER2, and ghrelin is rhythmic in light–dark cycles and in constant darkness with ad libitum food and after 48 h of food deprivation. In behaviorally arrhythmic-clock mutant mice, unlike control animals, there is no evidence of a premeal decrease in oxyntic cell ghrelin. Rhythmic ghrelin and PER expression are synchronized to prior feeding, and not to photic schedules. We conclude that oxyntic gland cells of the stomach contain FEOs, which produce a timed ghrelin output signal that acts widely at both brain and peripheral sites. It is likely that other FEOs also produce humoral signals that modulate FAA.
Accurate Two Dimension Finite Element Time Domain for Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducer

In this paper an accurate finite element time domain analysis of electromagnetic wave propagation in Electromagnetic Acoustics Transducer (EMAT) is presented. The suggested approach considers the solution "complete" source current density. This model is shown to give more accurate results. A detailed investigation has been performed varying model parameters such as lift off and coil dimension.
Fractional Flow Reserve–Guided Versus Angiography-Guided Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery

Background— Fractional flow reserve (FFR) is well established for patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention, yet little is known about candidates for coronary artery bypass graft surgery. Methods and Results— From 2006 to 2010, we retrospectively included in this registry 627 consecutive patients treated by coronary artery bypass graft surgery having at least 1 angiographically intermediate stenosis. In 429 patients, coronary artery bypass graft surgery was based solely on angiography (angiography-guided group). In 198 patients, at least 1 intermediate stenosis was grafted with an FFR ⩽0.80 or deferred with an FFR >0.80 (FFR-guided group). The end point was major adverse cardiovascular events at 3 years, defined as the composite of overall death, myocardial infarction, and target vessel revascularization. The rate of angiographic multivessel disease was similar in the angiography-guided and FFR-guided groups (404 [94.2%] versus 186 [93.9%]; P=0.722). In the FFR-guided group, this was significantly downgraded after FFR measurements to 86.4% (P<0.001 versus before FFR) and was associated with a smaller number of anastomoses (3 [2–3] versus 3 [2–4]; P<0.001) and rate of on-pump surgery (49% versus 69%; P<0.001). At 3 years, major adverse cardiovascular events were not different between the angiography-guided and FFR-guided groups (12% versus 11%; hazard ratio, 1.030; 95% confidence interval, 0.627–1.692; P=0.908). However, the FFR-guided group compared with the angiography-guided group presented a significantly lower rate of angina (Canadian Cardiovascular Society class II–IV, 31% versus 47%; P<0.001). Conclusions— FFR-guided coronary artery bypass graft surgery was associated with a lower number of graft anastomoses and a lower rate of on-pump surgery compared with angiography-guided coronary artery bypass graft surgery. This did not result in a higher event rate during up to 36 months of follow-up and was associated with a lower rate of angina.
More than beliefs: Subject areas and teachers' integration of laptops in secondary teaching

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship of subject areas to teachers’ technology integration. Educational technology research has often identified “culture clashes” to explain differences in technology use between subject areas. These clashes are frequently attributed to core features, values and beliefs held in the subject area cultures, but there has been little research analyzing the relationship between subject areas and integration. Using a validated path model as a conceptual framework, this paper presents an analysis of the relationship between three subject areas (English, Mathematics, Science) and known factors of teacher beliefs and readiness to use technology in teaching, which directly impact on secondary-level teachers’ technology integration, over three years. Findings show that time and subject areas are both associated with teachers’ readiness, but only subject areas are associated with teachers’ beliefs. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.