Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficient WFST-Based One-Pass Decoding With On-The-Fly Hypothesis Rescoring in Extremely Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition

This paper proposes a novel one-pass search algorithm with on-the-fly composition of weighted finite-state transducers (WFSTs) for large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition. In the standard search method with on-the-fly composition, two or more WFSTs are composed during decoding, and a Viterbi search is performed based on the composed search space. With this new method, a Viterbi search is performed based on the first of the two WFSTs. The second WFST is only used to rescore the hypotheses generated during the search. Since this rescoring is very efficient, the total amount of computation required by the new method is almost the same as when using only the first WFST. In a 65k-word vocabulary spontaneous lecture speech transcription task, our proposed method significantly outperformed the standard search method. Furthermore, our method was faster than decoding with a single fully composed and optimized WFST, where our method used only 38% of the memory required for decoding with the single WFST. Finally, we have achieved high-accuracy one-pass real-time speech recognition with an extremely large vocabulary of 1.8 million words
Easing Political Digestion: The Effects of News Curation on Citizens’ Behavior

ABSTRACT We focus on “curated news:” a collection of links delivered to one’s inbox, phone, or RSS feed. These digests vary in the extent to which they contextualize the information they present. Some offer headlines with links to the full article, while others summarize and interpret the story for the reader. Using a survey experiment, we vary the amount of contextualization present in a set of curated links. We find that increased curation decreases the likelihood that individuals will seek out the original source of political information, but it does lead people to recall more information about the issues being discussed.
mlo‐based powdery mildew resistance in hexaploid bread wheat generated by a non‐transgenic TILLING approach

Summary Wheat is one of the most widely grown cereal crops in the world and is an important food grain source for humans. However, wheat yields can be reduced by many abiotic and biotic stress factors, including powdery mildew disease caused by Blumeria graminis f.sp. tritici (Bgt). Generating resistant varieties is thus a major effort in plant breeding. Here, we took advantage of the non‐transgenic Targeting Induced Lesions IN Genomes (TILLING) technology to select partial loss‐of‐function alleles of TaMlo, the orthologue of the barley Mlo (Mildew resistance locus o) gene. Natural and induced loss‐of‐function alleles (mlo) of barley Mlo are known to confer durable broad‐spectrum powdery mildew resistance, typically at the expense of pleiotropic phenotypes such as premature leaf senescence. We identified 16 missense mutations in the three wheat TaMlo homoeologues, TaMlo‐A1, TaMlo‐B1 and TaMlo‐D1 that each lead to single amino acid exchanges. Using transient gene expression assays in barley single cells, we functionally analysed the different missense mutants and identified the most promising candidates affecting powdery mildew susceptibility. By stacking of selected mutant alleles we generated four independent lines with non‐conservative mutations in each of the three TaMlo homoeologues. Homozygous triple mutant lines and surprisingly also some of the homozygous double mutant lines showed enhanced, yet incomplete, Bgt resistance without the occurrence of discernible pleiotropic phenotypes. These lines thus represent an important step towards the production of commercial non‐transgenic, powdery mildew‐resistant bread wheat varieties.
Ethnobotanical survey of medicinal plants used traditionally in two villages of Hamedan, Iran

A notable amount of medicinal plants grow in Iran and local communities in different parts of the country have developed a deep knowledge of various uses of plants during their old history. Several ethnobotanical studies have been conducted by the Traditional Medicine and Material Medica Research Center (TMRC) to investigate the use of medicinal plants by local people. Some of these studies have been carried out in Kohgiluye va Boyer Ahmad, Azarbayjan-e-Sharghi and Golestan provinces. These ethnobotanical data have been collected by semi-structured interviews. In the present study, two villages of Hamedan province were investigated and eleven informants were interviewed. Our results have presented 45 traditionally used plant species, belonging to 23 plant families and 39 genera. Asteraceae and Fabaceae were the dominant locally used families. The plants were used both for medicinal and non-medicinal purposes and the most treated problems were digestive disorders and infections.
Realization of Room‐Temperature Phonon‐Limited Carrier Transport in Monolayer MoS2 by Dielectric and Carrier Screening

By combining a high-κ dielectric substrate and a high density of charge carriers, Coulomb impurities in MoS2 can be effectively screened, leading to an unprecedented room-temperature mobility of ≈150 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) and room-temperature phonon-limited transport in a monolayer MoS2 transistor for the first time.
Fe b 19 99 Starburst 99 : Synthesis Models for Galaxies with Active Star Formation

Starburst99 is a comprehensive set of model predictions for spectrophotometric and related properties of galaxies with active star formation. The models are an improved and extended version of the data set previously published by Leitherer & Heckman (1995). We have upgraded our code by implementing the latest set of stellar evolution models of the Geneva group and the model atmosphere grid compiled by Lejeune et al. (1997). Several predictions which were not included in the previous publication are shown here for the first time. The models are presented in a homogeneous way for five metallicities between Z = 0.040 and 0.001 and three choices of the initial mass function. The age coverage is 10 6 to 10 9 yr. We also show the spectral energy distributions which are used to compute colors and other quantities. The full data set is available for retrieval at run specific models with non-standard parameters as well. We also make the source code available to the community.
The relationship between court surface and tactics in tennis using a computerized scorebook.

The purpose of this study was to use a newly developed computerised scorebook for tennis in order to clarify the characteristics of tennis tactics used on specific court surfaces. The authors developed a computerised scorebook for tennis that calculates the time duration of shots, points, and the time between points. Data were collected from matches played by male Japanese intercollegiate players. A total of 97 points were observed. Two observers (A, B) were recruited for recording matches using the scorebook. The mean error of observer A was 0.003±0.05 s, while the mean error of observer B was 0.02±0.10 s. The computerised scorebook for tennis was used to collect data for clarifying the characteristics of tennis tactics used on specific court surfaces. Forty-one matches from the Grand Slam tournaments held in 2003 and 2004 were analyzed. The scorebook recorded the final shot of each point, the result of each point, and the time duration of each shot. The final shots were categorised into the following 5 groups: service, return of serve, ground strokes, attacking strokes, and defending strokes. The time between the impact of the serve and the impact of the return of serve determined the duration of service. The time duration of ground strokes was calculated as the time between the impact of one player and the impact of the other player. A chi-square test was used to compare the distribution of the final shots on each surface. An ANOVA test was conducted in order to compare the time duration on each surface and a Tukey’s HSD test was used for multiple comparisons. For the last shot of each point, significant differences were observed between the court surface and the distribution of the type of stroke. The percentage of ground strokes was high on clay while the percentages for attacking and defending strokes were high on grass. Furthermore, the rate of service strokes was high on hard courts. The shot time duration of the 1st service was 0.91 s on clay, 0.71 s on grass, and 0.73 s on hard courts. The time duration of service on clay was significantly longer than the time durations observed on other surfaces. The time duration of ground strokes was 1.36 s on clay, 1.34 s on grass, and 1.35 s on hard courts. The time duration of ground strokes on clay was significantly longer than time durations observed on grass; however, the difference was only 2/100 of a second. Service and return of service strokes were important to the tactics used on grass and hard courts as players must react more quickly than on clay. Ground strokes were important on clay and hard courts, and the average time duration of ground strokes was equal on these surfaces.
Wind Shear and the Strength of Severe Convective Phenomena—Preliminary Results from Poland in 2011–2015

Severe convective phenomena cause significant loss in the economy and, primarily, casualties. Therefore, it is essential to forecast such extreme events to avoid or minimize the negative consequences. Wind shear provides an updraft-downdraft separation in the convective cell, which extends the cell lifetime. Wind shears between a few different air layers have been examined in all damaging convective cases in Poland, taken from the European Severe Weather Database between 2011 and 2015, in order to find their values and patterns according to the intensity of this phenomenon. Each severe weather report was assigned wind shear values from the nearest sounding station, and subsequently the presented summary was made. It was found that wind shear values differ between the given phenomena and their intensity. This regularity is particularly visible in shears containing 0 km wind. The highest shears occur within wind reports. Lower values are associated with hail reports. An important difference between weak and F1+ tornadoes was found in most of the wind shears. Severe phenomena probability within 0–6 km and 0–1 km shears show different patterns according to the phenomena and their intensity. This finding has its application in severe weather forecasting.
Are megaquakes clustered?

We study statistical properties of the number of large earthquakes over the past century. We analyze the cumulative distribution of the number of earthquakes with magnitude larger than threshold M in time interval T, and quantify the statistical significance of these results by simulating a large number of synthetic random catalogs. We find that in general, the earthquake record cannot be distinguished from a process that is random in time. This conclusion holds whether aftershocks are removed or not, except at magnitudes below M = 7.3. At long time intervals (T = 2–5 years), we find that statistically significant clustering is present in the catalog for lower magnitude thresholds (M = 7–7.2). However, this clustering is due to a large number of earthquakes on record in the early part of the 20th century, when magnitudes are less certain.
Pharmacological Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Cloropidol on Motor Task

Purpose : To investigate the pharmacologic modulation of motor task-dependent physiologic responses by antiplatelet agent, clopidogrel, during hand motor tasks in healthy subjects. Materials and Methods: Ten healthy, right-handed subjects underwent three functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) sessions: one before drug administration, one after high dose drug administration and one after reaching drug steady state. For the motor task fMRI, finger flexion-extension movements were performed. Blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast was collected for each subject using a 3.0 T VHi (GE Healthcare, Milwaukee, USA) scanner. T2*-weighted echo planar imaging was used for fMRI acquisition. The fMRI data processing and statistical analyses were carried out using SPM2. Results: Second-level analysis revealed significant increases in the extent of activation in the contralateral motor cortex including primary motor area (M1) after drug administration. The number of activated voxels in motor cortex was 173 without drug administration and the number increased to 1049 for high dose condition and 673 for steady-state condition respectively. However, there was no significant difference in the magnitude of BOLD signal change in terms of peak T
Topology and dynamics of active nematic vesicles

Liquid crystals on a deformable substrate The orientation of the molecules in a liquid crystalline material will change in response to either changes in the substrate or an external field. This is the basis for liquid crystalline devices. Vesicles, which are fluid pockets surrounded by lipid bilayers, will change size or shape in response to solvent conditions or pressure. Keber et al. report on the rich interactions between nematic liquid crystals placed on the surface of a vesicle. Changes to the vesicle size, for example, can “tune” the liquid crystal molecules. But conversely, the shape of the vesicles can also change in response to the activity of the nematic molecules. Science, this issue p. 1135 Dynamical shape-changing materials result from merging active liquid crystals with soft deformable vesicles. Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We studied the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematic film of microtubules and molecular motors is encapsulated within a shape-changing lipid vesicle. Unlike in equilibrium systems, where defects are largely static structures, in active nematics defects move spontaneously and can be described as self-propelled particles. The combination of activity, topological constraints, and vesicle deformability produces a myriad of dynamical states. We highlight two dynamical modes: a tunable periodic state that oscillates between two defect configurations, and shape-changing vesicles with streaming filopodia-like protrusions. These results demonstrate how biomimetic materials can be obtained when topological constraints are used to control the non-equilibrium dynamics of active matter.
Changing Policy With Words: How Persuasive Words in Election Pledges Influence Voters’ Beliefs About Policies

Parties often frame their election pledges with value-laden words such as freedom and equality, and it is well known that this can influence voters’ support for policies. However, research is not conclusive about why as of yet. This article adds to common explanations of value-framing effects by proposing a linguistic explanation to how citizens are influenced by value words in election pledges. Drawing on what linguistic theory says about persuasive words, this article hypothesizes that value-laden words elicit different beliefs about policy content, beyond what has actually been pledged. To support this assertion, a survey experiment (N = 739) shows that such words do provoke different beliefs about policies and that this, in turn, influences the extent to which individuals support the policies. The findings have implications for representative democracy, as they indicate that voters’ outspoken support for policy pledges do not necessarily reflect their true policy preferences.
Reliability-dependent contributions of visual orientation cues in parietal cortex

Significance The world is 3D, but our eyes sense 2D projections. Constructing 3D spatial representations is consequently a complex problem the brain must solve for us to interact with the environment. Robust 3D representations can theoretically be created by combining distinct visual signals according to their reliabilities, which depend on factors such as an object’s orientation and distance. Here, we show that reliability constrains the integration of texture and disparity cues for 3D orientation in macaque parietal cortex. Consistent with human perceptual studies, the contribution of texture cues is found to increase as the object’s slant (i.e., depth variation) increases. This finding suggests that the parietal cortex is capable of combining multiple visual signals to perform statistical inference about the 3D world. Creating accurate 3D representations of the world from 2D retinal images is a fundamental task for the visual system. However, the reliability of different 3D visual signals depends inherently on viewing geometry, such as how much an object is slanted in depth. Human perceptual studies have correspondingly shown that texture and binocular disparity cues for object orientation are combined according to their slant-dependent reliabilities. Where and how this cue combination occurs in the brain is currently unknown. Here, we search for neural correlates of this property in the macaque caudal intraparietal area (CIP) by measuring slant tuning curves using mixed-cue (texture + disparity) and cue-isolated (texture or disparity) planar stimuli. We find that texture cues contribute more to the mixed-cue responses of CIP neurons that prefer larger slants, consistent with theoretical and psychophysical results showing that the reliability of texture relative to disparity cues increases with slant angle. By analyzing responses to binocularly viewed texture stimuli with conflicting texture and disparity information, some cells that are sensitive to both cues when presented in isolation are found to disregard one of the cues during cue conflict. Additionally, the similarity between texture and mixed-cue responses is found to be greater when this cue conflict is eliminated by presenting the texture stimuli monocularly. The present findings demonstrate reliability-dependent contributions of visual orientation cues at the level of the CIP, thus revealing a neural correlate of this property of human visual perception.
Effects of Extended Unemployment Insurance Benefits: Evidence From The Monthly CPS

This paper attempts to quantify the effects of extended unemployment insurance benefits in recent years. Using the monthly Current Population Survey, I estimate unemployment-to-employment (UE) hazard function and unemployment-to-inactivity (UN) hazard function for male workers. The estimated hazard functions for the period of 2004-2007, during which no extended benefits were available, exhibit patterns consistent with the expiration of regular benefits at 26 weeks. These patterns largely disappear from the hazard functions for the period of 2009-2010, during which largescale extended benefits had become available. I conduct counterfactual experiments in which the estimated hazard functions for 2009-2010 are replaced by the counterfactual hazard functions whose patterns are inferred from those for the 2004-2007 period. The experiments suggest that extended benefits in recent years have raised male workers’ unemployment rate by 1.2 percentage points with a 90% confidence interval of 0.8 to 1.8 percentage points. The increases in the unemployment rate largely come from the effects on the UE hazard function rather than the UN hazard function.
The Solar Neighborhood. XVII. Parallax Results from the CTIOPI 0.9 m Program: 20 New Members of the RECONS 10 Parsec Sample

Astrometric measurements for 25 red dwarf systems are presented, including the first definitive trigonometric parallaxes for 20 systems within 10 pc of the Sun, the horizon of the RECONS sample. The three nearest systems that had no previous trigonometric parallaxes (other than perhaps rough preliminary efforts) are SO 0253+1652 (3.84 ± 0.04 pc, the 23rd nearest system), SCR 1845-6357 AB (3.85 ± 0.02 pc, 24th nearest), and LHS 1723 (5.32 ± 0.04 pc, 56th nearest). In total, seven of the systems reported here rank among the nearest 100 stellar systems. Supporting photometric and spectroscopic observations have been made to provide full characterization of the systems, including complete VRIJHKs photometry and spectral types. A study of the variability of 27 targets reveals six obvious variable stars, including GJ 1207, for which we observed a flare event in the V band that caused it to brighten by 1.7 mag. Improved parallaxes for GJ 54 AB and GJ 1061, both important members of the 10 pc sample, are also reported. Definitive parallaxes for GJ 1001 A, GJ 633, and GJ 2130 ABC, all of which have been reported to be within 10 pc, indicate that they are beyond 10 pc. From the analysis of systems with (previously) high trigonometric parallax errors, we conclude that parallaxes with errors in excess of 10 mas are insufficiently reliable for inclusion in the RECONS sample. The cumulative total of new additions to the 10 pc sample since 2000 is now 34 systems: 28 by the RECONS team and six by other groups. This total represents a net increase of 16% in the number of stellar systems reliably known to be nearer than 10 pc.
Super4PCS: Fast Global Pointcloud Registration via Smart Indexing

Data acquisition in large-scale scenes regularly involves accumulating information across multiple scans. A common approach is to locally align scan pairs using Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm (or its variants), but requires static scenes and small motion between scan pairs. This prevents accumulating data across multiple scan sessions and/or different acquisition modalities (e.g., stereo, depth scans). Alternatively, one can use a global registration algorithm allowing scans to be in arbitrary initial poses. The state-of-the-art global registration al-gorithm, 4PCS, however has a quadratic time complexity in the number of data points. This vastly limits its applicability to acquisition of large environments. We present S UPER 4PCS for global pointcloud registration that is optimal, i.e., runs in linear time (in the number of data points) and is also output sensitive in the complexity of the alignment problem based on the (unknown) overlap across scan pairs. Technically, we map the algorithm as an â ˘AŸinstance problemâ ˘A ´Z and solve it efﬁciently using a smart indexing data organization. The algorithm is simple, memory-efﬁcient, and fast. We demonstrate that S UPER 4PCS results in signiﬁcant speedup over alternative approaches and allows unstructured efﬁcient acquisition of scenes at scales previously not possible. Complete source code and datasets are available for research use at http://geometry.cs. ucl.ac. uk/projects/2014/super4PCS/.
Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans

Liberals and conservatives exhibit different cognitive styles and converging lines of evidence suggest that biology influences differences in their political attitudes and beliefs. In particular, a recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and conservatives have significantly different brain structure, with liberals showing increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, and conservatives showing increased gray matter volume in the in the amygdala. Here, we explore differences in brain function in liberals and conservatives by matching publicly-available voter records to 82 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging. Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did. Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization of party identification long thought to be one of the core findings of political science. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli.