Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electrophysiological Measures of Language Processing in Bilinguals

The aim of the present study was to investigate how multiple languages are represented in the human brain. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from right-handed polyglots and monolinguals during a task involving silent reading. The participants in the experiment were nine Italian monolinguals and nine Italian/Slovenian bilinguals of a Slovenian minority in Trieste; the bilinguals, highly fluent in both languages, had spoken both languages since birth. The stimuli were terminal words that would correctly complete a short, meaningful, previously shown sentence, or else were semantically or syntactically incorrect. The task consisted in deciding whether the sentences were well formed or not, giving the response by pressing a button. Both groups read the same set of 200 Italian sentences to compare the linguistic processing, while the bilinguals also received a set of 200 Slovenian sentences, comparable in complexity and length, to compare the processing of the two languages within the group. For the bilinguals, the ERP results revealed a strong, left-sided activation, reflected by the N1 component, of the occipito-temporal regions dedicated to orthographic processing, with a latency of about 150 msec for Slovenian words, but bilateral activation of the same areas for Italian words, which was also displayed by topographical mapping. In monolinguals, semantic error produced a long-lasting negative response (N2 and N4) that was greater over the right hemisphere, whereas syntactic error activated mostly the left hemisphere. Conversely, in the bilinguals, semantic incongruence resulted in greater response over the left hemisphere than over the right. In this group, the P615 syntactical error responses were of equal amplitude on both hemispheres for Italian words and greater on the right side for Slovenian words. The present findings support the view that there are inter- and intrahemispheric brain activation asymmetries when monolingual and bilingual speakers comprehend written language. The fact that the bilingual speakers in the present study were highly fluent and had acquired both languages in early infancy suggests that the brain activation patterns do not depend on the age of acquisition or the fluency level, as in the case of late, not-so-proficient L2 language learners, but on the functional organization of the bilinguals' brain due to polyglotism and based on brain plasticity.
Compression of weighted graphs

We propose to compress weighted graphs (networks), motivated by the observation that large networks of social, biological, or other relations can be complex to handle and visualize. In the process also known as graph simplification, nodes and (unweighted) edges are grouped to supernodes and superedges, respectively, to obtain a smaller graph. We propose models and algorithms for weighted graphs. The interpretation (i.e. decompression) of a compressed, weighted graph is that a pair of original nodes is connected by an edge if their supernodes are connected by one, and that the weight of an edge is approximated to be the weight of the superedge. The compression problem now consists of choosing supernodes, superedges, and superedge weights so that the approximation error is minimized while the amount of compression is maximized. In this paper, we formulate this task as the 'simple weighted graph compression problem'. We then propose a much wider class of tasks under the name of 'generalized weighted graph compression problem'. The generalized task extends the optimization to preserve longer-range connectivities between nodes, not just individual edge weights. We study the properties of these problems and propose a range of algorithms to solve them, with different balances between complexity and quality of the result. We evaluate the problems and algorithms experimentally on real networks. The results indicate that weighted graphs can be compressed efficiently with relatively little compression error.
Nonequilibrium spin noise spectroscopy on single quantum dots

All optical spin noise spectroscopy is typically used to extract the virtually undisturbed spin dynamics from measurements of spin fluctuations in thermal equilibrium. In this thesis, the method is applied to study spin fluctuations in single positively charged InGaAs quantum dots beyond thermal equilibrium conditions, in view of the spin-photon interface provided by the optical transition. Spin noise spectroscopy with a resonantly driven optical transition additionally reveals the spin dynamics in the optically excited state, enables the characterization of the optical transition, and unveils a charge occupation noise which is naturally inherent in optically driven semiconductor quantum dots. The spin noise measurements in combination with a theoretical model show that the average spin relaxation rate of the optically driven spin is a mixture of hole-spin relaxation in the ground state and electron-spin relaxation in the excited state. The electron-spin relaxation is found to be on the order of a few 10 MHz, and dominates the average spin relaxation rate under quasi-resonant excitation. The dependence of spin dynamics and noise power on the laser detuning is used to determine saturation intensity, line width, and inhomogeneous broadening of the optical transition. It is shown that the unfavorable inhomogeneous broadening due to charge fluctuations in the quantum dot environment becomes very small and can even be absent in high-quality samples with a very low quantum dot density. Beyond the spin relaxation, the spin noise under quasiresonant driving furthermore contains an additional contribution which is assigned to the temporary escape of the resident hole in the quantum dot. The detailed analysis of this occupation noise shows that the hole escape is initiated by non-radiative Auger recombination. The subsequent reoccupation of the quantum dot depends
EXPECTED SUB-MM EMISSION AND DUST PROPERTIES OF LYMAN BREAK GALAXIES AT HIGH REDSHIFT

We investigate expected sub-mm emission and dust properties of the Lyman Break Galaxies (LBGs) in the Hubble Deep Field (HDF). The SCUBA Deep Survey (Hughes et al., 1998) provides an upper limit of the 850μm flux densities of the LBGs. With this constraint, we argue that a typical ultra-violet to far-infrared spectral shape of the high-redshift LBGs is rather close to a template spectrum of lowreddening starburst galaxies in the local universe but different from that of heavily dust-enshrouded ultra-luminous far-infrared galaxies like Arp220. We also evaluate the lower-limit temperature of dust in LBGs assuming singleand two-component modified black-body spectrum. To estimate the total amount of energy re-emitted in FIR wavelength, we take two different approaches; model fitting of the UV spectra of LBGs and an empirical method using the relationship between UV spectral shape and UV/FIR flux ratio observed for local starburst galaxies. Both methods give lower-limit temperature of the LBGs as ∼ 40K, which is higher than the typical dust temperature of local opticaland infraredselected galaxies. This result is also supported by the comparison of the expected sub-mm flux of the LBGs with the cosmic FIR background radiation. The high dust temperature may indicate the effective massive-star formation or different dust properties in the high-redshift LBGs. Subject headings: galaxies: starburst — galaxies: ISM — galaxies: formation
Numerical Simulations of Interactions between Gravity Waves and Deep Moist Convection

Abstract This study uses a numerical model to simulate deep convection both in the Tropics over the ocean and the midlatitudes over land. The vertical grid that was used extends into the stratosphere, allowing for the simultaneous examination of the convection and the vertically propagating gravity waves that it generates. A large number of trajectories are used to evaluate the behavior of tracers in the troposphere, and it is found that the tracers can be segregated into different types based upon their position in a diagram of normalized vertical velocity versus displacement. Conditional sampling is also used to identify updrafts in the troposphere and calculate their contribution to the kinetic energy budget of the troposphere. In addition, Fourier analysis is used to characterize the waves in the stratosphere; it was found that the waves simulated in this study have similarities to those observed and simulated by other researchers. Finally, this study examines the wave energy flux as a means to provid.
Time trends of neonatal mortality by causes of death in Shenyang, 1997–2014

To investigate the rate and time trends of neonatal mortality from 1997 to 2014 in Shenyang, which were previously rarely reported upon by developing countries, data on 4719 neonatal deaths (0–28 days) and 970,583 live births from the Shenyang Women and Children Health Care Centre were analyzed. Neonatal mortality rates (per 1000 live births), percent change, and annual percent change (APC) were calculated. During the observation period, neonatal mortality in Shenyang significantly decreased by 7.04%, 8.33%, and 5.35% per year overall, in urban and rural areas, respectively. When grouped by category of neonatal death, the time trends of three categories showed statistically significant decreases: congenital malformations (APC = −9.97%), diseases of the perinatal period (APC = −6.04%), and diseases of the respiratory system (APC = −8.52%). Congenital malformations, diseases of the respiratory system, and diseases of the nervous system and sense organs were the three major contributors to the aforementioned decreasing trend, which accounted for 58.71% in overall areas. Among selective causes of neonatal death, the neonatal mortality rates of pneumonia, congenital heart disease, preterm birth and low birth weight, birth asphyxia, and intracranial hemorrhage of the newborn significantly decreased 7.87%, 7.32%, 2.47%, 11.04%, and 10.68% per year, respectively. In summary, neonatal mortality rates decreased in Shenyang during the 17-year study period. Future studies are warranted to further investigate the factors contributing to the neonatal mortality trends in China.
Elucidating the Role of AII Amacrine Cells in Glutamatergic Retinal Waves

Spontaneous retinal activity mediated by glutamatergic neurotransmission—so-called “Stage 3” retinal waves—drives anti-correlated spiking in ON and OFF RGCs during the second week of postnatal development of the mouse. In the mature retina, the activity of a retinal interneuron called the AII amacrine cell is responsible for anti-correlated spiking in ON and OFF α-RGCs. In mature AIIs, membrane hyperpolarization elicits bursting behavior. Here, we postulated that bursting in AIIs underlies the initiation of glutamatergic retinal waves. We tested this hypothesis by using two-photon calcium imaging of spontaneous activity in populations of retinal neurons and by making whole-cell recordings from individual AIIs and α-RGCs in in vitro preparations of mouse retina. We found that AIIs participated in retinal waves, and that their activity was correlated with that of ON α-RGCs and anti-correlated with that of OFF α-RGCs. Though immature AIIs lacked the complement of membrane conductances necessary to generate bursting, pharmacological activation of the M-current, a conductance that modulates bursting in mature AIIs, blocked retinal wave generation. Interestingly, blockade of the pacemaker conductance Ih, a conductance absent in AIIs but present in both ON and OFF cone bipolar cells, caused a dramatic loss of spatial coherence of spontaneous activity. We conclude that during glutamatergic waves, AIIs act to coordinate and propagate activity generated by BCs rather than to initiate spontaneous activity.
Using semantic similarity measures across Gene Ontology to predict protein-protein interactions

Living cells are controlled by proteins and genes that interact through complex molecular pathways to achieve a specific function. Therefore, determination of protein-protein interaction is fundamental for the understanding of the cell’s lifecycle and functions. The function of a protein is also largely determined by its interactions with other proteins. The amount of protein-protein interaction data available has multiplied by the emergence of large-scale technologies for detecting them, but the drawback of such measures is the relatively high amount of noise present in the data. It is time consuming to experimentally determine protein-protein interactions and therefore the aim of this project is to create a computational method that predicts interactions with high sensitivity and specificity. Semantic similarity measures were applied across the Gene Ontology terms assigned to proteins in S. cerevisiae to predict protein-protein interactions. Three semantic similarity measures were tested to see which one performs best in predicting such interactions. Based on the results, a method that predicts function of proteins in connection with connectivity was devised. The results show that semantic similarity is a useful measure for predicting protein-protein interactions.
Bit Loading Algorithms for Cooperative OFDM Systems

We investigate the resource allocation problem for an OFDM cooperative network with a single source-destination pair and multiple relays. Assuming knowledge of the instantaneous channel gains for all links in the entire network, we propose several bit and power allocation schemes aiming at minimizing the total transmission power under a target rate constraint. First, an optimal and efficient bit loading algorithm is proposed when the relay node uses the same subchannel to relay the information transmitted by the source node. To further improve the performance gain, subchannel permutation, in which the subchannels are reallocated at relay nodes, is considered. An optimal subchannel permutation algorithm is first proposed and then an efficient suboptimal algorithm is considered to achieve a better complexity-performance tradeoff. A distributed bit loading algorithm is also proposed for ad hoc networks. Simulation results show that significant performance gains can be achieved by the proposed bit loading algorithms, especially when subchannel permutation is employed.
Counting massive sets and dimensions of harmonic functions

In a previous article of the authors [L-W1], they introduced the notion of dmassive sets. Using this, they proved a structural theorem for polynomial growth harmonic maps into a Cartan-Hadamard manifold with strongly negative sectional curvature. When d = 0, the maximum number of disjoint 0-massive sets m0(M) admissible on a complete manifold M is known [G] to be the same as the dimension h0(M) of bounded harmonic functions on the manifold. This relationship is not established and it is unclear if it is at all true for d > 0. However, the theory of estimating md(M) has an analogous counterpart in the theory of estimating hd(M). This was first indicated in [L-W1]. The purpose of this article is to give sharp estimates on both of these quantities in various situations. Before we outline the main results in this article, let us recall some definitions and set up the appropriate notations. Throughout this article, M is assumed to be an n-dimensional, complete, noncompact manifold without boundary. The operator ∆ denotes the Laplacian with respect to the given Riemannian metric. Let p ∈ M be a fixed point in M and rp(x) the geodesic distance function from x ∈ M to the point p.
Tracking in Low Frame Rate Video: A Cascade Particle Filter with Discriminative Observers of Different Lifespans

Tracking object in low frame rate video or with abrupt motion poses two main difficulties which conventional tracking methods can barely handle: 1) poor motion continuity and increased search space; 2) fast appearance variation of target and more background clutter due to increased search space. In this paper, we address the problem from a view which integrates conventional tracking and detection, and present a temporal probabilistic combination of discriminative observers of different lifespans. Each observer is learned from different ranges of samples, with different subsets of features, to achieve varying level of discriminative power at varying cost. An efficient fusion and temporal inference is then done by a cascade particle filter which consists of multiple stages of importance sampling. Experiments show significantly improved accuracy of the proposed approach in comparison with existing tracking methods, under the condition of low frame rate data and abrupt motion of both target and camera.
The Sensitivity of Topic Coherence Evaluation to Topic Cardinality

©2016 Association for Computational Linguistics. When evaluating the quality of topics generated by a topic model, the convention is to score topic coherence - either manually or automatically - using the top-N topic words. This hyper-parameter N, or the cardinality of the topic, is often overlooked and selected arbitrarily. In this paper, we investigate the impact of this cardinality hyper-parameter on topic coherence evaluation. For two automatic topic coherence methodologies, we observe that the correlation with human ratings decreases systematically as the cardinality increases. More interestingly, we find that performance can be improved if the system scores and human ratings are aggregated over several topic cardinalities before computing the correlation. In contrast to the standard practice of using a fixed value of N (e.g. N = 5 or N = 10), our results suggest that calculating topic coherence over several different cardinalities and averaging results in a substantially more stable and robust evaluation. We release the code and the datasets used in this research, for reproducibility.1
Hereditary pancreatitis: clinical features and inheritance characteristics of the R122C mutation in the cationic trypsinogen gene (PRSS1) in six Spanish families.

CONTEXT Hereditary pancreatitis is an autosomal dominant disease which is caused by mutations in the PRSS1 gene. OBJECTIVE The aim of our study was to describe the penetrance and phenotype-genotype correlations of the c.346C>T (p.R122C) mutation. DESIGN Case series descriptive study. PATIENTS Forty-one members of six families from whom DNA samples were analyzed. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES In subjects with R122C mutation symptoms, pancreatic calcifications, main pancreatic duct changes, diabetes, steatorrhea, pancreatic cancer and surgery were recorded. RESULTS The R122C mutation was detected in 22 of the 41 family members studied, and 7 men and 2 women developed pancreatic disease, resulting in a penetrance of 40.9%. One out of the 9 patients was excluded because she died before the mutation was detected. The mean age at symptom onset was 23.5 years (range: 4-51 years). Abdominal pain was present in 6 (75.0%) of the 8 patients with the R122C mutation who developed pancreatic disease. Calcifications had developed in 5 (62.5%) at a mean age of 35.8 years (range: 14-56 years). Five (62.5%) developed changes in the pancreatic ducts at a mean age of 44.2 years (range: 19-65 years). Two patients (25.0%) developed steatorrhea during the follow-up at 26 and 35 years of disease progression. Diabetes developed in five patients (62.5%) at a mean age of 41.4 years old (range: 22-53 years). Three of the patients analyzed (37.5%) developed pancreatic cancer at 59 years of age, 63 years of age and 70 years of age. CONCLUSIONS Penetrance of the R122C mutation is lower than that described for the R122H and N29I mutations, and there is a tendency toward a predominance of males with the R122C mutation who developed the phenotype of pancreatitis.
A Voted Regularized Dual Averaging Method for Large-Scale Discriminative Training in Natural Language Processing

We propose a new algorithm based on the dual averaging method for large-scale discriminative training in natural language processing (NLP), as an alternative to the perceptron algorithms or stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The new algorithm estimates parameters of linear models by minimizing L1 regularized objectives and are effective in obtaining sparse solutions, which is particularly desirable for large scale NLP tasks. We then give the mistake bound of the algorithm, and show how the bound is affected by the additional L1 regularization term. Evaluations on the tasks of parse reranking and statistical machine translation attest the success of the new algorithm.
Implied trees in illiquid markets: A Choquet pricing approach

Implied trees are necessary to implement the risk neutral valuation approach, and standard methodologies for their derivation are based on the validity of the put call parity. However, in illiquid markets the put call parity fails to hold, and the uniqueness of the artificial probabilities leaves room for an interval. The contribution of this article is twofold. First we propose a methodology for the derivation of implied trees in illiquid markets. Such a methodology, by contrast with standard ones, takes into account the information stemming both from call and put prices. Second, we set up a framework for pricing derivatives written on an underlying asset traded on an illiquid market. To this end we have extended the Choquet integral definition to account for interval payoffs of the underlying asset. The price interval we obtain may be interpreted as a bid‐ask price quoted by the intermediary issuing the derivative security. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Should I've stayed or should I've gone? What residents of continuing care retirement communities and former candidates think and feel one year after their decision: a quantitative longitudinal comparison

Abstract The aim of this study was to compare satisfaction with residence, wellbeing and physical health of continuing care retirement community (CCRC) residents with people who considered enrolling in the same CCRCs but elected not to move. A total of 101 participants were recruited from 13 CCRCs located in multiple cities in the United States of America. A phone interview was conducted with participants three months or less from enrolment and one year later. Compared with those who chose not to move, CCRC residents reported lower satisfaction at baseline, but higher satisfaction at one year. Wellbeing declined from baseline to follow-up for both groups, but was higher in CCRC residents both at baseline and at one year. CCRCs might consider giving new residents a longer cancellation period in order to allow sufficient time for the adjustment process. This, in turn, might both prevent an early departure and affect the decision of potential CCRC residents to move into the community.
10-Year Survival of Acetabular Reinforcement Rings/Cages for Complex Hip Arthroplasty

Introduction : Acetabular reinforcement rings/ cages (AR) are commonly used for reconstruction of bone defects in complex hip arthroplasty. The aim of this study was to retrospectively investigate the 10-year survival rate of Ganz reinforcement rings and Burch-Schneider cages used in a single institution. Material and Methods : Between September 1999 and June 2002 all ARs, implanted in one institution, were identified. All patients had regular clinical and radiographic follow-up and were included in this study. Their prospectively collected clinical and radiographic data was retrospectively analyzed. In case of death before the 10-year follow-up examination, patient’s families or their general practitioner was contacted by telephone. The main outcome measures were survival of the ARs and kind of revision surgery. Results : The 10-year survival rate was 77.7%. At 10-year follow-up, 5/60 (8,3%) patients could not be located and had to be excluded therefore. 27/55 (49,1%) were dead, whereof 22 had no revision of the ARs before death (after a mean of 66 months; range: 0 - 123). Of the remaining 28/55 (50,9%) patients, 23 patients (24 ARs) had no revision of the ARs. Conclusion : Despite the high mortality rate of this study’s collective, ARs for complex primary or revision total hip arthroplasty provided predictable long term results. Level of Evidence : Clinical investigation.