Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An articulatory examination of word-final flapping at phrase edges and interiors

Formulations of flapping as a symbolic phonological rule suggest clear articulatory differences between flaps and stops, and often offer no overt explanation for why phrase boundaries should block the alternation. The present study explores the articulatory foundation of the distinction between flaps and non-flaps in word-final position. We examine kinematic and acoustic data for these articulations in phrase-final and phrase-medial positions and in falling- and level-stress contours. It is shown that a discrepancy exists between acoustic and articulatory durational patterning – while acoustic durations of flaps are shorter than those of non-flaps overall, their articulatory durations are not uniformly so. It is important to consider multiple potential articulatory sources – both spatial and temporal – for the acoustic shortness that characterizes flaps, including spatial reduction, temporal articulatory shortening, and changes in intergestural coordination. The kinematic data indicate that different sources of word-final flap shortness exist for different speakers and different prosodic conditions, suggesting that gradient variability in the spatiotemporal patterning of tongue-tip constrictions yields acoustic shortening in word-final flaps.
Ultrafast photochemistry of methyl hydroperoxide on ice particles

Simulations show that photodissociation of methyl hydroperoxide, CH3OOH, on water clusters produces a surprisingly wide range of products on a subpicosecond time scale, pointing to the possibility of complex photodegradation pathways for organic peroxides on aerosols and water droplets. Dynamics are computed at several excitation energies at 50 K using a semiempirical PM3 potential surface. CH3OOH is found to prefer the exterior of the cluster, with the CH3O group sticking out and the OH group immersed within the cluster. At atmospherically relevant photodissociation wavelengths the OH and CH3O photofragments remain at the surface of the cluster or embedded within it. However, none of the 25 completed trajectories carried out at the atmospherically relevant photodissociation energies led to recombination of OH and CH3O to form CH3OOH. Within the limited statistics of the available trajectories the predicted yield for the recombination is zero. Instead, various reactions involving the initial fragments and water promptly form a wide range of stable molecular products such as CH2O, H2O, H2, CO, CH3OH, and H2O2.
Serum C-peptide, insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-I, IGF-binding proteins, and colorectal cancer risk in women.

BACKGROUND Leading a Western lifestyle, being overweight, and being sedentary are associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer. Recent theories propose that the effects of these risk factors may be mediated by increases in circulating insulin levels and in the bioactivity of insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-I. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a case-control study nested within a cohort of 14 275 women in New York. METHODS We used blood samples that had been obtained from these women from March 1985 through June 1991 and stored in a biorepository. C-peptide (a marker for insulin secretion), IGF-I, and IGF-binding proteins (IGFBPs)-1, -2, and -3 were assayed in the serum of 102 women who subsequently developed colorectal cancer and 200 matched control subjects. Logistic regression was used to relate cancer risk to these peptide levels, by adjustment for other risk factors. All statistical tests used are two-sided. RESULTS Colorectal cancer risk increased with increasing levels of C-peptide (P:(trend) =. 001), up to an odds ratio (OR) of 2. 92 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.26-6.75) for the highest versus the lowest quintiles, after adjustment for smoking. For colon cancer alone (75 case subjects and 146 control subjects), ORs increased up to 3.96 (95% CI = 1.49-10.50; P:(trend) <. 001) for the highest versus the lowest quintiles. A statistically significant decrease in colorectal cancer risk was observed for increasing levels of IGFBP-1 (P:(trend) =. 02; OR in the upper quintile = 0.48 [95% CI = 0.23-1. 00]), as well as for the highest quintile of IGFBP-2 levels (P:(trend) =. 06; OR = 0.38 [95% CI = 0.15-0.94]). Colorectal cancer risk showed a modest but statistically nonsignificant positive association with levels of IGF-I and was statistically significantly increased for the highest quintile of IGFBP-3 (OR = 2.46 [95% CI = 1. 09-5.57]). CONCLUSIONS Chronically high levels of circulating insulin and IGFs associated with a Western lifestyle may increase colorectal cancer risk, possibly by decreasing IGFBP-1 and increasing the bioactivity of IGF-I.
Catabolic and regulatory systems in Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 involved in electricity generation in microbial fuel cells

Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 is a facultative anaerobe that respires using a variety of inorganic and organic compounds. MR-1 is also capable of utilizing extracellular solid materials, including anodes in microbial fuel cells (MFCs), as electron acceptors, thereby enabling electricity generation. As MFCs have the potential to generate electricity from biomass waste and wastewater, MR-1 has been extensively studied to identify the molecular systems that are involved in electricity generation in MFCs. These studies have demonstrated the importance of extracellular electron-transfer (EET) pathways that electrically connect the quinone pool in the cytoplasmic membrane to extracellular electron acceptors. Electricity generation is also dependent on intracellular catabolic pathways that oxidize electron donors, such as lactate, and regulatory systems that control the expression of genes encoding the components of catabolic and electron-transfer pathways. In addition, recent findings suggest that cell-surface polymers, e.g., exopolysaccharides, and secreted chemicals, which function as electron shuttles, are also involved in electricity generation. Despite these advances in our knowledge on the EET processes in MR-1, further efforts are necessary to fully understand the underlying intra- and extracellular molecular systems for electricity generation in MFCs. We suggest that investigating how MR-1 coordinates these systems to efficiently transfer electrons to electrodes and conserve electrochemical energy for cell proliferation is important for establishing the biological basis for MFCs.
Flexible Flow Converging: A Systematic Case Study on Forwarding Plane Programmability of Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF)

It is known that software-defined networking (SDN) can support effective traffic engineering (TE) with the global view of networks. Hence, OpenFlow was used to realize flow-based TE. However, there is a tradeoff between the volume of installed flow entries and the granularity of TE. Moreover, the protocol-dependent nature of OpenFlow might limit the flexibility and adaptivity of TE. In this paper, we leverage the protocol-oblivious forwarding technology that can make each switch work as a protocol-independent white box and utilize its forwarding plane programmability to design a novel flexible flow converging (F-FC) scheme for realizing SDN-based fine-grained TE. Specifically, we design both the network system and the F-FC algorithms running on it and conduct experiments to demonstrate that our proposed scheme can not only reduce the volume of installed flow entries in switches but also realize fine-grained TE to achieve better utilization on network bandwidth.
Raised plasma insulin level and homeostasis model assessment (HOMA) score in cerebral malaria: evidence for insulin resistance and marker of virulence.

OBJECTIVE To study the glycaemic profile of patients with severe malaria (SM). METHODS For this purpose, 110 SM patients were recruited. Pre-treatment random blood glucose and plasma insulin were measured in a subset of donors. An ex-vivo experiment was developed for estimation of glucose consumption by parasitized erythrocytes. RESULTS Hyperglycaemia was frequent in SM but more commonly associated with cerebral malaria (CM), while hyperinsulinaemia was recognized in severe-malarial-hypotension (median, 25 %-75 %, 188.2, 93.8-336.8 pmol/L). The plasma insulin level was positively correlated with age (CC = 0.457, p < 0.001) and negatively with parasitaemia (CC = -0.368, p = 0.045). Importantly, fatal-CM was associated with hyperglycaemia (12.22, 6.5-14.6 mmol/L), hyperinsulinaemia (141.0, 54.0-186.8 pmol/L) and elevated homeostasis model assessment (HOMA) values. However, there was a trend of higher glucose consumption by parasites in CM compared with that in uncomplicated malaria (UM). CONCLUSION Hyperglycaemia, hyperinsulinaemia and elevated HOMA are evidence for insulin resistance and possibly pancreatic B-cell dysfunction in fatal-CM.
Carbonyl[4-(2,3-dimethylphenylamino)pent-3-en-2-onato-κ2 N,O](triphenylphosphine-κP)rhodium(I)

In the title compound, [Rh(C13H16NO)(C18H15P)(CO)], the coordination geometry of the RhI atom is square-planar, formed by the coordinating N and O atoms of the bidentate enaminoketonate ligand, one C atom from the carbonyl group and a P atom from triphenylphosphine. The complex displays a 0.591 (3):0.409 (3) ratio disorder of the phenyl unit of the monoanionic N,O-bidentate ligand. Intramolecular hydrogen bonding is observed between a C—H group of the triphenylphosphine unit and the O atom of the enaminoketonate ligand.
A Decade of Voluntary Paternity Acknowledgment in Wisconsin : 1997 – 2007

OVERVIEW Starting in the mid-1990s, Wisconsin implemented policies to encourage the use of voluntary paternity acknowledgment (VPA) in cases of nonmarital births. These policies encourage the fathers of nonmarital children to acknowledge their paternity by signing and filing a form, instead of going through a judicial hearing. The motivation for these policies was the hope that reducing obstacles to establishing paternity would encourage fathers to increase financial and nonfinancial participation in their children's lives. Our earlier report on the results of these policies (Brown, Cook, and Wimer, 2004) found that this method of paternity establishment was heavily used: 48 percent of nonmarital IV-D children born in 2001 had their paternity determined through the VPA process within 6 months after birth. We also found that, although fathers established by VPA were less likely than fathers established through adjudication to have a child support order for their children, they were more likely to pay child support when they did have an order. In addition, VPA fathers were more likely to have a shared physical placement order for their children than were adjudicated fathers. These differences persisted even after controlling for other observable dissimilarities between VPA and adjudicated fathers. This report expands upon the previous report in several ways: 1. The previous report was limited to cases that had reached the child support enforcement system, but not all voluntary paternity acknowledgment cases are subject to such enforcement. Data received for this report from the Wisconsin Bureau of Vital Records on all nonmarital births in the state allow us to determine the proportion of VPA cases that enter the child support system and assess how those cases are different from VPA cases that do not. 2 2. The previous report considered only births that occurred in 2001. This report considers children from three different birth cohorts (1997, 2000, and 2005) to enable us to determine how the use of voluntary paternity acknowledgment and the associated child support outcomes have changed over time. 3. The earlier report tracked child support outcomes for a period of about two years after birth. This report tracks outcomes over a longer timeframe, providing the opportunity for additional children to have paternity established through either the VPA or adjudication process, and for child support outcomes to be observed for a longer period of time. BACKGROUND Through the 1980s and 1990s the federal government passed legislation that imposed increasing requirements on …
Small ensembles of kriging models for optimization

The Efficient Global Optimization (EGO) algorithm uses a conditional Gaus-sian Process (GP) to approximate an objective function known at a finite number of observation points and sequentially adds new points which maximize the Expected Improvement criterion according to the GP. The important factor that controls the efficiency of EGO is the GP covariance function (or kernel) which should be chosen according to the objective function. Traditionally, a pa-rameterized family of covariance functions is considered whose parameters are learned through statistical procedures such as maximum likelihood or cross-validation. However, it may be questioned whether statistical procedures for learning covariance functions are the most efficient for optimization as they target a global agreement between the GP and the observations which is not the ultimate goal of optimization. Furthermore, statistical learning procedures are computationally expensive. The main alternative to the statistical learning of the GP is self-adaptation, where the algorithm tunes the kernel parameters based on their contribution to objective function improvement. After questioning the possibility of self-adaptation for kriging based optimizers, this paper proposes a novel approach for tuning the length-scale of the GP in EGO: At each iteration, a small ensemble of kriging models structured by their length-scales is created. All of the models contribute to an iterate in an EGO-like fashion. Then, the set of models is densified around the model whose length-scale yielded the best iterate and further points are produced. Numerical experiments are provided which motivate the use of many length-scales. The tested implementation does not perform better than the classical EGO algorithm in a sequential context but show the potential of the approach for parallel implementations.
Cannabis Users Identifying Themselves as Non-Cigarette Smokers: Who Are They?

Introduction and Aims. About 20% of cannabis consumers report not smoking cigarettes. Studies that have compared cannabis and cigarette smokers, cigarette smokers, and cannabis users who do not smoke cigarettes (CNSs) have shown that CNSs have better outcomes across a range of indicators compared to the others. Therefore, we conducted a qualitative study to determine why CNSs did not smoke cigarettes and how they managed to resist cigarette smoking in order to better inform prevention efforts. Design and Methods. We conducted five focus groups (FG) with a total of 19 CNSs between ages 16 and 25. A narrative analysis of FGs was conducted using qualitative analysis software. Results. CNSs’ non-smoking choice was rooted in a negative opinion of cigarettes and a harm-reduction strategy. They were unique cases within their peer groups, but there were no CNSs groups. All participants were confronted to the mulling paradox. Discussion and Conclusions. While tobacco-use prevention seems to have been successful, CNSs need to be informed of harmful consequences of chronic cannabis use. Given their habit of adding tobacco to cannabis, CNSs need to be alerted that they may be nicotine dependent even though they do not smoke tobacco on its own. This exploratory study brings essential insight concerning this specific population of cannabis consumers which future research should continue to develop.
Physical health and depression as predictors of fatigue in women with breast cancer undergoing chemotherapy.

8591 Background: Fatigue is common in breast cancer patients undergoing systemic chemotherapy and is also linked with depression. We evaluated the importance of physical health and depression in the fatigue reported by women with early-stage breast cancer undergoing adjuvant chemotherapy. METHODOLOGY 75 women treated for Stage I-II breast cancer were assessed within 1mo after initiating chemotherapy ('baseline') and at 2, 6 and 12mo. Scales included the Profile of Mood States (POMS) & SF36 quality of life (QOL) survey. The POMS contains fatigue and depression subscales (higher scores, worse mood symptoms). The SF36 is comprised of 4 physical and 4 mental health subscales (higher scores, better QOL). RESULTS 26 Stage I (46.4%) and 30 (53.6%) Stage II breast cancer patients provided baseline data (median age 53yrs; range 28-82 yrs). Fatigue decreased significantly from baseline to 12mo (p<0.01). Using Pearson correlations, worse physical health summary scores (r= -0.55, p<0.01) and higher depression scores (r=0.55, p<0.01) were independently linked with fatigue at baseline. In partial correlations controlling for depression, the relationship between physical health and fatigue remained significant (p<0.01), but was reduced in strength by 27%, although, the influence of depression on fatigue diminished over time. Similar patterns were observed for 3 of the SF36 physical health subscales. However, the relationship between fatigue and bodily pain was unchanged when controlling for depression (p<0.01), suggesting a strong independent relationship. In linear regression models, depression predicted fatigue at all time points and was the strongest predictor at baseline and 2mo; however physical health subscales assumed increasing importance in accounting for fatigue at 6 and 12mo. CONCLUSION Depression is the strongest predictor of fatigue during chemotherapy, however, over time physical health variables become increasingly important at predicting fatigue in women with early stage breast cancer. Conducted at Washington University, supported by NIH CA72554-02 No significant financial relationships to disclose.
Performance Comparison of Algorithms for Blind Reverberation Time Estimation from Speech

The reverberation time, T60, is one of the key parameters used to quantify room acoustics. It can provide information about the quality and intelligibility of speech recorded in a reverberant environment, and it can be used to increase robustness to reverberation of speech processing algorithms. T60 can be determined directly from a measurement of the acoustic impulse response, but in situations where this is unavailable it must be estimated blindly from reverberant speech. In this contribution, we provide a study of three stateof-the-art methods for blind T60 estimation. Experimental results with a large number of talkers, simulated and measured acoustic impulse responses, and various levels of additive white Gaussian noise are presented. The relative merits of the three methods in terms of computational time, estimation accuracy, noise sensitivity and intertalker variance are discussed. In general, all three methods are able to estimate the reverberation time to within 0:2 s forT60 0:8 s and SNR 30 dB, while increasing the noise level causes overestimation. The relative computational speed of the three methods is also assessed.
Towards automatic fine-grained semantic classification of verb-noun collocations

Plain lists of collocations as provided to date by most approaches to automatic acquisition of collocations from corpora are useful as a resource for dictionary construction. However, their use is rather limited in the case of NLP-applications such as Text Generation, Machine Translation and Text Summarization if not enriched by information on the grammatical function of the collocation elements and by information on the semantics of the collocations as multiword units. In this article, we describe an approach to a fine-grained classification of verb-noun bigrams according to a semantically motivated typology of collocations and illustrate this with Spanish material. The typology of collocations that underlies our classification is based on verb-noun Lexical Functions (LFs) from the Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology. In the first stage of the approach, the program learns the semantic features of each LF from training data. In the second stage, it examines the semantic features of verb-noun candidate bigrams and compares them with the features of all the LFs taken into account. A candidate whose features are sufficiently similar to those of a specific LF is considered to be an instance of this LF. The semantic features of both the training material and the candidate bigrams are derived from the hyperonymy hierarchies provided by the EuroWordNet. In the experiments carried out to validate the approach, we achieved an average $f$-score of about 70%.
A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing wireless body area networks

Wireless body area networks have recently gained attention, mainly after the IEEE 802.15. 6 standard had been proposed. Reviewing the literature, we easily recognize that several authors use different terminologies for a single concept or a single terminology for different concepts. This generates confusion and blocks fair comparisons between systems. In this paper, we present an overview of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) with focus on the applications. Moreover, we propose a detailed taxonomy that could help to disambiguate the confusion regarding current WBAN terminology.
Statistical Learning for OCR Text Correction

The accuracy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is crucial to the success of subsequent applications used in text analyzing pipeline. Recent models of OCR post-processing significantly improve the quality of OCR-generated text, but are still prone to suggest correction candidates from limited observations while insufficiently accounting for the characteristics of OCR errors. In this paper, we show how to enlarge candidate suggestion space by using external corpus and integrating OCR-specific features in a regression approach to correct OCR-generated errors. The evaluation results show that our model can correct 61.5% of the OCR-errors (considering the top 1 suggestion) and 71.5% of the OCR-errors (considering the top 3 suggestions), for cases where the theoretical correction upper-bound is 78%.
Intra-Individual Variability Among Children with ADHD on a Working Memory Task: An Ex-Gaussian Approach

Intra-individual variability on a computer-based working memory task was examined among 25 children/adolescents with ADHD and 24 typically developing peers. Participants completed the Visual Serial Addition Task (VSAT) and reaction time data were fit to an ex-Gaussian distribution. ADHD participants demonstrated significantly more variable performance than controls, and effects of working memory load were observed. Event rate, however, had no influence on group differences in performance. Follow-up correlations revealed associations between VSAT performance and ADHD symptomatology. This study supports intra-individual variability as a hallmark feature of ADHD beyond the domain of response inhibition and reinforces the need to consider variability in ADHD more broadly.
Immunopathologic Investigations with an Attenuated Chicken Anemia Virus in Day-Old Chickens

Abstract SUMMARY. The immunopathologic effects induced by two attenuated chicken anemia virus (CAV) isolates, known as cloned isolate 34 (CI 34) and cloned revertant isolate 18 (CRI 18), that were derived from highly passaged pools of Cux-1 CAV isolate, were compared with those induced by a pathogenic, molecularly cloned, low-passage Cux-1 isolate (CI Cux). This comparison involved the intramuscular inoculation of 1-day-old specific-pathogen-free chicks with each of the viruses and investigation of birds at selected days postinoculation for gross pathology and depletions in the thymic T-cell populations as determined by flow cytometry. Whereas infection with the pathogenic CI Cux produced severe anemia and pronounced bone marrow and thymus lesions, infections with the attenuated CRI 18 and CI 34 isolates produced no anemia, no or mild lesions, respectively, and moderate T-cell depletion. The results suggest that, with CAV, reduced pathogenicity for 1-day-old chicks correlates with reduced depletion of T-cell populations in the thymus and with reduced severity of lesions in the thymus and bone marrow.