Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is the relative fundamental frequency an acoustic correlate of laryngeal tension in Portugese speakers?

In this study the relative fundamental frequency (RFF) of healthy speakers (N=24) and speakers with voice disorders (vocal nodules N=9; Reinke’s edema N=15) and its relation with laryngeal tension, were analysed. Ten VCV sequences from a phonetically balanced text were selected to calculate RFF values, and vowel [a] was used to estimate the mean fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, and mean harmonics-noise-ratio. Strain was also perceptually assessed with the GRBAS scale. Analysis-ofvariance was used to compare the RFF values from the three different groups but no statistically significant differences were found. There were, however statistically significant differences between the cycles. The RFF values within each group were widely dispersed. Contrary to what has been previously claimed in the literature it was not possible to establish a correlation between RFF and laryngeal tension, and it is hard to see the applicability of the RFF measure in a clinical context.
Lithium silicate pellets for CO2 capture at high temperature

In this study, lithium orthosilicate-based pellets were developed and characterized as potential regenarable high-temperature CO2 sorbents. A mechanical method was used for pelletization of the powdered materials, namely K2CO3-doped lithium silicate (Li4SiO4) with cellulose fibres. Different amounts of cellulose fibres (20, 30 and 40 wt%) were added to powered doped-sorbent in order to identify the optimal amount to ensure an adequate porosity to the produced pellets. The CO2 sorption properties of the produced pellets were investigated at high temperature (500 600 °C) by using a thermal gravimetric analyzer (TGA) at low CO2 partial pressure with repeated calcination/carbonation cycles. Compared to the pure K2CO3-doped lithium silicate pellets, the sorbents prepared using cellulose fibres showed greater CO2 capture capabilities, which were ascribed to the higher porosity developed as a result of thermal degradation of cellulose. At 580 °C and a CO2 partial pressure of 0.04 atm, the uptake of CO2 in pellets prepared with 20 % of cellulose fibres reached about 20 wt% within 120 min corresponding to a Li4SiO4-conversion of 57 %. During multiple sorption/desorption cycles, a decay of the sorption capacity of the pellets was observed due to a partial sintering of the materials. This suggested that an appropriate binder should be added in order to improve the cyclic stability and the strength of the produced pellets.
THE INFLUENCE OF BRAND IMAGE AND PROMOTIONAL MIX ON CONSUMER BUYING DECISION-A STUDY OF BEVERAGE CONSUMERS IN LAGOS STATE , NIGERIA ONIGBINDE

The objective of the study was to evaluate the influence of brand image and promotional mix on consumer buying decision. Descriptive survey research design was adopted as the study guide. Judgemental and purposive sampling techniques were used in which four hundred (400) copies of the research instrument were administered to beverage consumers in Lagos State, Nigeria, out of which three hundred and eighty four (384) copies of the questionnaire were filled and returned. Pearson Product Moment correlation was used to analyse the data generated from the respondents. The findings revealed that brand image, advertising, sales promotion and personal selling have significant influence on consumer buying decision at . 01 level (2-tailed). The study concluded that the way a product is promoted coupled with the brand integrity of such product encourages consumers to purchase it and make repeat purchase of it, and as well enhances the referral of such product to other prospects. The study therefore recommended to the organizations, especially those that engage in the marketing of the fast-moving consumer goods, to focus on distinct promotional mix, as the study empirically proved that perception of brand image is capable of influencing consumer buying decision on sustainable basis. It is also recommended that each marketing company should adopt a combination of promotional mix that can bring about distinct outcomes in terms of turnover, improved market share, customer retention, profitability, and productivity among others.
The role of the hippocampus in representations of emotional memory

Although the hippocampus has long been implicated in contextual fear learning, the exact function of this brain structure is unclear. It is generally thought to encode a spatial context with which a fear memory can be associated, but how it may accomplish this and whether it plays a role in emotional memory is largely unknown. It is also unclear whether the hippocampus acts as a single unitary structure, or whether the dorsal and ventral poles, which exhibit differential connectivity to other brain regions, function independently. This dissertation examines the involvement of the hippocampus in emotional learning. A contextual fear conditioning paradigm using a predator odor as an ethologically relevant fearful stimulus was developed and lesions and immunohistochemistry were used to examine differential involvement of the dorsal and ventral hippocampus in response to fear learning. Long-term physiological recordings of dorsal place cells were then conducted to determine the effects of fear conditioning and also fear extinction on contextual representations in the hippocampus. Additionally, cells in the ventral hippocampus were assessed for responses to visuospatial manipulations and changing odor cues of varying emotional valence. It was found that the dorsal and ventral hippocampal regions are both independently required for contextual fear conditioning, and neurons in each region are differentially activated in response to fear learning. Furthermore, place cells in the dorsal hippocampus remapped in response to fear conditioning and stabilized those new fields in the long term. Extinction training caused many place cells to remap once again, suggesting that the dorsal hippocampus encodes varying representations of `fearful' and `safe' contexts. Finally, cells in the ventral hippocampus exhibited stronger responses to anxiogenic contextual cues compared to dorsal cells. In conclusion, these data suggest that the hippocampus is involved in emotional learning and that its function may vary along its longitudinal axis. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Neuroscience First Advisor Isabel A. Muzzio Second Advisor Minghong Ma
Filtering of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar images: A sequential approach

This paper introduces a novel method for filtering polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POLSAR) imagery data. Unlike most existing filters, the proposed one is freed from using searching windows but implements the filtering in a sequential fashion. Specifically, we propose to use the inverse Wishart distribution as the conjugate prior model for the coherency matrix (CM) data and show that the maximum a posteriori (MAP) solution leads to a very simple linear recursive formula for estimate update, through which issues such as feature preservation and bias correction can be also taken into account. In the experiment, the proposed method is tested on the POLSAR dataset acquired by the DLR (Germany Aerospace Center) F-SAR system. Results demonstrate that the filter shows inspiring performances in terms of both noise reduction and feature preservation.
Organizational justice and perceived organizational support: The moderating role of conscientiousness in China

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to deepen the understanding of the relationship between perceived organizational support (POS) and organizational justice (distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactive justice), and to test the moderating effect of conscientiousness. Design/methodology/approach - A survey was conducted to measure study variables. Data were obtained utilizing a field survey from a sample of 520 professional managers working in two industries (manufacturing industry and service industry) in China. Confirmatory factor analysis and moderated hierarchical analysis were used to test hitherto untested hypotheses. Findings - As the result showed, controlling the effect of control variables (age, tenure, education and position), organizational justice (distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactive justice) had a positive effect on POS in the service sample; meanwhile, the interaction effect between distributive justice and conscientiousness has been shown to be significant in both the manufacturing and service samples. Research limitations/implications - The results have obvious implications for organizational justice and POS in organizations. However, the results are to be viewed in the light of common method variance and same source bias. Practical implications - The paper sheds light on the potential effects of conscientiousness, which strengthens the positive relationship between organizational justice and POS. Given the importance of conscientiousness, it may be worthwhile for leaders to stimulate managers' conscientiousness. Originality/value - The paper examines how conscientiousness moderates the relationship between organizational justice and POS in both the manufacturing and service samples. It should be useful to academics and managers who want to understand the importance of conscientiousness.
Frequent subgraph discovery

As data mining techniques are being increasingly applied to non-traditional domains, existing approaches for finding frequent itemsets cannot be used as they cannot model the requirement of these domains. An alternate way of modeling the objects in these data sets is to use graphs. Within that model, the problem of finding frequent patterns becomes that of discovering subgraphs that occur frequently over the entire set of graphs.The authors present a computationally efficient algorithm for finding all frequent subgraphs in large graph databases. We evaluated the performance of the algorithm by experiments with synthetic datasets as well as a chemical compound dataset. The empirical results show that our algorithm scales linearly with the number of input transactions and it is able to discover frequent subgraphs from a set of graph transactions reasonably fast, even though we have to deal with computationally hard problems such as canonical labeling of graphs and subgraph isomorphism which are not necessary for traditional frequent itemset discovery.
The development, treatment, and prevention of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders

Mood and anxiety disorders are common during pregnancy and the postpartum period. The goal of this dissertation was to investigate factors specific to the perinatal period related to the development, treatment, and prevention of depression and anxiety. In Chapter 1, we investigated the role of a risk factor specific to the perinatal period: maternal attitudes. We developed a measure of this construct and used this measure to assess the relationship between these attitudes and symptoms of depression and anxiety among first-time pregnant and postpartum mothers. Dysfunctional maternal attitudes predicted symptoms of depression and anxiety, and these attitudes had incremental predictive validity over general cognitive biases and interpersonal risk factors. In Chapters 2 and 3, we conducted meta-analyses assessing the efficacy of interventions for depression among perinatal populations and investigated whether characteristics of study design and interventions were associated with systematic differences in effect sizes. In Chapter 2, we included 27 studies assessing the efficacy of treatments for depression during pregnancy and the first year postpartum. We found that interventions resulted in significant reductions in depressive symptoms from pre-treatment to post-treatment, and symptom levels at post-treatment were below cutoff levels indicative of clinically significant symptoms. At post-treatment, intervention groups demonstrated significantly greater reductions in depressive symptoms compared to control groups. In Chapter 3, we included 37 studies assessing the efficacy of preventive interventions for postpartum depression. We found that depressive symptoms at six months postpartum were significantly lower in intervention conditions as compared to control conditions, and there was a significant reduction in the prevalence of depressive episodes in treatment conditions compared to control conditions. These studies further our understanding of the processes that place women at risk for emotional distress in the context of pregnancy and the postpartum period and suggest that a wide range of interventions are effective for treating and preventing depression in this population. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Psychology First Advisor Jacques P. Barber
Uncovering Temporal and Spatial Localities in Individuals' Mobility

Various Markov models have been proposed to model individuals' mobility, i.e., the transitions between locations. Although these studies are able to show high predicting accuracy of individuals' next move, two basic assumptions of these studies, namely the stationarity of individuals' mobility sequence and the dependency of visiting the locations, have never been validated. Moreover, a famous recent research suggests that individuals prefer to revisit the locations merely according to the visitation frequency. In this paper, we study these two presumed properties of individuals' mobility sequence. Specifically, stationarity is validated by analyzing the autocorrelation of the mobility sequences that are encoded under three popular schemes. With appropriate choice of spatial and temporal scale, two types of periodicity, e.g., daily and weekly, are observed. The visiting dependency between the locations is validated by comparing the entropy of the mobility sequence to the entropies generated from either i.i. d. or Markov sources. Based on these two statistical properties, we then construct two Markov models with three revisiting rules to model individuals' mobility. The average log-loss values show that the best revisiting rule for the Markov model is a combination of the visitation frequency and the distance of the next location to the current locations. This finding suggests that individuals' mobility is influenced by both temporal and spatial localities, rather than by either form of locality alone as suggested in the previous study.
The Impact of Long-Term Psychological Maltreatment by One's Maternal Figure

ABSTRACT In this study, a phenomenological method was used to investigate the impact of long-term psychological child maltreatment by one's maternal figure. The objective of the present study was to explicate victims' perspectives on their psychological maltreatment as a coherent whole. Five adults (ages 18–25) reporting a history of childhood psychological maltreatment provided descriptions of their maltreatment in written and verbal form. The descriptions were analyzed in such a way as to elucidate the quality and significance of having been psychologically abused as experienced by these victims. Themes revolving around feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy, self-dissatisfaction, and disempowerment were found to determine the ways in which low self-esteem, aggression, self-directed anger, and pessimism about one's future arose within the victims' perceptions of abuse.
Permissive environment in postnatal wounds induced by adenoviral‐mediated overexpression of the anti‐inflammatory cytokine interleukin‐10 prevents scar formation

Wound healing in the mid‐gestation fetus is scarless with minimal inflammation and a unique extracellular matrix. We have previously documented the relative lack of inflammatory cytokines in this environment. We demonstrate that interleukin (IL)‐10 is highly expressed in mid‐gestation human fetal skin but is absent in postnatal human skin. We hypothesize that overexpression of IL‐10 in postnatal skin may replicate a permissive environment for scarless healing. To study the mechanism underlying this process we performed immunohistochemistry for IL‐10 in human mid‐gestation fetal and postnatal skin. We also determined if adenoviral‐mediated overexpression of IL‐10 could allow for scarless wound healing in a murine incisional wound model. Wounds were analyzed at 1–90 days postwounding for effects on scar formation, inflammatory response, and biomechanical properties. Ad‐IL‐10 reconstitutes a permissive environment for scarless healing as shown by reconstitution of a normal dermal reticular collagen pattern and distribution of dermal elements. Compared with controls, Ad‐IL‐10 treated wounds showed reduced inflammatory response and no difference in biomechanical parameters. Therefore, overexpression of IL‐10 in postnatal wounds results in a permissive environment for scarless wound repair, possibly by replicating a fetal wound environment.
Gradient-based image fusion for HDR creation in dynamic scenes

In this paper we will tackle the problem of HDR image generation for dynamic scenes. The current techniques assume the scene to be static in order to create the radiance map. Otherwise, strong artifacts appear. Some attempts have been made to extend these methods directly to dynamic scenes, but, as we will explain, an intensity fusion approach leads to spatial inconsistencies in the radiance values. We propose a gradient-based approach that avoids bleeding and ghosting, two common artifacts. Moreover the method improves the detail rendition of the original images. To support the validity of our method, results and comparisons with the state of the art will be presented.
DEXTER: Large-Scale Discovery and Extraction of Product Specifications on the Web

The web is a rich resource of structured data. There has been an increasing interest in using web structured data for many applications such as data integration, web search and question answering. In this paper, we present Dexter, a system to find product sites on the web, and detect and extract product specifications from them. Since product specifications exist in multiple product sites, our focused crawler relies on search queries and backlinks to discover product sites. To perform the detection, and handle the high diversity of specifications in terms of content, size and format, our system uses supervised learning to classify HTML fragments (e.g., tables and lists) present in web pages as specifications or not. To perform large-scale extraction of the attribute-value pairs from the HTML fragments identified by the specification detector, Dexter adopts two lightweight strategies: a domain-independent and unsupervised wrapper method, which relies on the observation that these HTML fragments have very similar structure; and a combination of this strategy with a previous approach, which infers extraction patterns by annotations generated by automatic but noisy annotators. The results show that our crawler strategy to locate product specification pages is effective: (1) it discovered 1:46AM product specification pages from 3; 005 sites and 9 different categories; (2) the specification detector obtains high values of F-measure (close to 0:9) over a heterogeneous set of product specifications; and (3) our efficient wrapper methods for attribute-value extraction get very high values of precision (0.92) and recall (0.95) and obtain better results than a state-of-the-art, supervised rule-based wrapper.
Initiation of eukaryotic DNA replication: conservative or liberal?

The mechanism for initiation of eukaryotic DNA replication is highly conserved: the proteins required to initiate replication, the sequence of events leading to initiation, and the regulation of initiation are remarkably similar throughout the eukaryotic kingdom. Nevertheless, there is a liberal attitude when it comes to selecting initiation sites. Differences appear to exist in the composition of replication origins and in the way proteins recognize these origins. In fact, some multicellular eukaryotes (the metazoans) can change the number and locations of initiation sites during animal development, revealing that selection of initiation sites depends on epigenetic as well as genetic parameters. Here we have attempted to summarize our understanding of this process, to identify the similarities and differences between single cell and multicellular eukaryotes, and to examine the extent to which origin recognition proteins and replication origins have been conserved among eukaryotes. J. Cell. Physiol. 184:139–150, 2000. Published 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Evaluating Candidate Principal Surrogate Endpoints

Summary Frangakis and Rubin (2002, Biometrics 58, 21–29) proposed a new definition of a surrogate endpoint (a “principal” surrogate) based on causal effects. We introduce an estimand for evaluating a principal surrogate, the causal effect predictiveness (CEP) surface, which quantifies how well causal treatment effects on the biomarker predict causal treatment effects on the clinical endpoint. Although the CEP surface is not identifiable due to missing potential outcomes, it can be identified by incorporating a baseline covariate(s) that predicts the biomarker. Given case–cohort sampling of such a baseline predictor and the biomarker in a large blinded randomized clinical trial, we develop an estimated likelihood method for estimating the CEP surface. This estimation assesses the “surrogate value” of the biomarker for reliably predicting clinical treatment effects for the same or similar setting as the trial. A CEP surface plot provides a way to compare the surrogate value of multiple biomarkers. The approach is illustrated by the problem of assessing an immune response to a vaccine as a surrogate endpoint for infection.
Developing a Comparative Docking Protocol for the Prediction of Peptide Selectivity Proﬁles: Investigation of Potassium Channel Toxins

During the development of selective peptides against highly homologous targets, a reliable tool is sought that can predict information on both mechanisms of binding and relative afﬁnities. These tools must ﬁrst be tested on known proﬁles before application on novel therapeutic candidates. We therefore present a comparative docking protocol in HADDOCK using critical motifs, and use it to “predict” the various selectivity proﬁles of several major αKTX scorpion toxin families versus Kv1.1, Kv1.2 and Kv1.3. By correlating results across toxins of similar proﬁles, a comprehensive set of functional residues can be identiﬁed. Reasonable models of channel-toxin interactions can be then drawn that are consistent with known afﬁnity and mutagenesis. Without biological information on the interaction, HADDOCK reproduces mechanisms underlying the universal binding of αKTX-2 toxins, and Kv1.3 selectivity of αKTX-3 toxins. The addition of constraints encouraging the critical lysine insertion conﬁrms these ﬁndings, and gives analogous explanations for other families, including models of partial pore-block in αKTX-6. While qualitatively informative, the HADDOCK scoring function is not yet sufﬁcient for accurate afﬁnity-ranking. False minima in low-afﬁnity complexes often resemble true binding in high-afﬁnity complexes, despite steric/conformational penalties apparent from visual inspection. This contamination signiﬁcantly complicates energetic analysis, although it is usually possible to obtain correct ranking via careful interpretation of binding-well characteristics and elimination of false positives. Aside from adaptations to the broader potassium channel family, we suggest that this strategy of comparative docking can be extended to other channels of interest with known structure, especially in cases where a critical motif exists to improve docking effectiveness.