Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fullband conversational codec: What testing methodology?

In ITU-T Study Group 12, the ITU-T lead study group on quality of service and performance, most of the activities have mainly focused until now on Narrowband and Wideband speech codec performance evaluation. As ITU-T Study Group 16 (that has a mandate for studies on media coding), is working on codecs with wider audio bandwidth, ITU-T SG12 has extended its scope to study quality assessment methodologies appropriate for wider bandwidths. After a presentation of ITU-T speech and audio codec standardization process and an overview of the audio quality testing methodologies, this paper describes the ITU-T G.722. 1 Fullband qualification exercise and the adopted testing methodology as well as the following characterization phase and its related methodology.
Rethinking Flow Classification in SDN

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) increasingly attracts more researchers as well as industry attentions. Most of current SDN packet processing approaches classify packets based on matching a set of fields on the packet against a flow table and then applying an action on the packet. We argue we can simplify this mechanism using single-field classification and reduce the overhead. We propose a tag-based packet classification architecture to reduce filtering and flow management overhead. Then, we show how to use this extra capacity to perform application layer classification for different purposes. In this work-in-progress paper we demonstrate our preliminary evaluation results to indicate the effectiveness of the proposal.
Impact of Antioxidants on Cardiolipin Oxidation in Liposomes: Why Mitochondrial Cardiolipin Serves as an Apoptotic Signal?

Molecules of mitochondrial cardiolipin (CL) get selectively oxidized upon oxidative stress, which triggers the intrinsic apoptotic pathway. In a chemical model most closely resembling the mitochondrial membrane—liposomes of pure bovine heart CL—we compared ubiquinol-10, ubiquinol-6, and alpha-tocopherol, the most widespread naturally occurring antioxidants, with man-made, quinol-based amphiphilic antioxidants. Lipid peroxidation was induced by addition of an azo initiator in the absence and presence of diverse antioxidants, respectively. The kinetics of CL oxidation was monitored via formation of conjugated dienes at 234 nm. We found that natural ubiquinols and ubiquinol-based amphiphilic antioxidants were equally efficient in protecting CL liposomes from peroxidation; the chromanol-based antioxidants, including alpha-tocopherol, were 2-3 times less efficient. Amphiphilic antioxidants, but not natural ubiquinols and alpha-tocopherol, were able, additionally, to protect the CL bilayer from oxidation by acting from the water phase. We suggest that the previously reported therapeutic efficiency of mitochondrially targeted amphiphilic antioxidants is owing to their ability to protect those CL molecules that are inaccessible to natural hydrophobic antioxidants, being trapped within respiratory supercomplexes. The high susceptibility of such occluded CL molecules to oxidation may have prompted their recruitment as apoptotic signaling molecules by nature.
Nonasymptotic bounds on the estimation error of MCMC algorithms

We address the problem of upper bounding the mean square error of MCMC estimators. Our analysis is non-asymptotic. We first establish a general result valid for essentially all ergodic Markov chains encountered in Bayesian computation and a possibly unbounded target function f: The bound is sharp in the sense that the leading term is exactly �2 as(P; f)=n, where �2 as(P; f) is the CLT asymptotic variance. Next, we proceed to specific assumptions and give explicit computable bounds for geometrically and polynomially ergodic Markov chains. As a corollary we provide results on confidence estimation.
Residents’ attitudes to tourists visiting their mosques: a case study from Istanbul, Turkey

ABSTRACT Resident perception of tourism impacts has been one of the most studied areas of tourism. However, there is an extremely limited literature on resident perceptions of religious tourism development, especially in non-Western countries. This study investigated the attitudes of local residents toward tourists visiting four important mosques in Istanbul, Turkey and their perception of religious tourism development. All residents surveyed were practicing Muslims who prayed in a mosque at least once a year. We found that, in general, local residents are supportive of tourists visiting their mosque, but the level of support may differ based on the demographic and cultural background of the residents as well as on the number of tourists visiting the mosque.
B2B Online Reverse Auctions and the Future of Information Systems as the Discipline of Reference

Studies of information systems1 have largely neglected, despite their great importance, such relevant information technologies as B2B online reverse auctions (ORAs). 2 In an attempt to make up for this neglect, we provide an empirical application of the extent to which the IS discipline has the potential to become the reference discipline. Drawing from the IT artifact concept and the emergent perspective, we provide new lenses to investigate ORAs outcomes in a novel manner to the existing non-IS literature. We believe that systematic learning from the past accomplishments of the IS discipline, coupled with a dynamic multidisciplinary perspective, is the ideal means of charting a promising future for the discipline.
Effects of financial incentives on medical practice: results from a systematic review of the literature and methodological issues.

OBJECTIVE To identify all financial incentives that had been proposed, described, or used regardless of their initial objective and, when possible, to assess the results of these incentives on costs, process or outcomes of care. MATERIAL AND METHODS Systematic review of the literature. Databases searched were: Medline, Embase, Health Planning and Administration, Pascal, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts and the Cochrane Library. Search terms were: health professionals and tape of practice, type of incentive, methodology, languages English or French, January 1993 to May 1999. RESULTS Financial incentives concerned the modalities of physician payment and financing of the health care system. Confounding factors included: age of the doctor, training, speciality, place and type of medical practice, previous sanctions for over-prescribing, type and severity of disease, type of insurance. Risks of financial incentives were: limited access to certain types of care, lack of continuity of care, conflict of interests between the physician and the patient. Any form of fund-holding or capitation decreased the total volume of prescriptions by 0-24%, and hospital days by up to 80% compared with fee-for-service. Annual cap on doctors' incomes resulted in referrals to colleagues when target income is reached. DISCUSSION Financial incentives can be used to reduce the use of health care resources, improve compliance with practice guidelines or achieve a general health target. It may be effective to use incentives in combination depending on the target set for a given health care programme.
An overview of the North Atlantic Oscillation

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is one of the most prominent and recurrent patterns of atmospheric circulation variability. It dictates climate variability from the eastern seaboard of the United States to Siberia and from the Arctic to the subtropical Atlantic, especially during boreal winter, so variations in the NAO are important to society and for the environment. Understanding the processes that govern this variability is, therefore, of high priority, especially in the context of global climate change. This review, aimed at a scientifically diverse audience, provides general background material for the other chapters in the monograph, and it synthesizes some of their central points. It begins with a description of the spatial structure of climate and climate variability, including how the NAO relates to other prominent patterns of atmospheric circulation variability. There is no unique way to define the spatial structure of the NAO, or thus its temporal evolution, but several common approaches are illustrated. The relationship between the NAO and variations in surface temperature, storms and precipitation, and thus the economy, as well as the ocean and ecosystem responses to NAO variability, are described. Although the NAO is a mode of variability internal to the atmosphere, indices of it exhibit decadal variability and trends. That not all of its variability can be attributed to intraseasonal stochastic atmospheric processes points to a role for external forcings and, perhaps, a small but useful amount of predictability. The surface, stratospheric and anthropogenic processes that may influence the phase and amplitude of the NAO are reviewed.
DR. Swap: Energy-efficient paging for smartphones

Smartphones are becoming increasingly energy-hungry to support feature-rich applications, posing a lot of pressure on battery lifetime and making energy consumption a non-negligible issue. In particular, DRAM is among the most demanding components in energy consumption. In this paper, we propose DR. Swap, an energy-efficient paging design to reduce energy consumption in smartphones. We adopt emerging energy-efficient non-volatile memory (NVM) and use it as the swap area. Utilizing NVM's byte-addressability, we propose direct read which guarantees zero-copy for read-only pages in the swap area. Experimental results based on the Google Nexus 5 smartphone show that our technique can effectively reduce energy consumption.
Model-based specification, analysis and synthesis of servo controllers for lithoscanners

ASML is the world's leading provider of complex lithography systems for the semiconductor industry. Such systems consist of numerous servo control systems. To design such control systems, a multi-disciplinary model-based development environment has been developed. It is based on a set of domain specific languages (DSLs) describing A) the transducers and control logic, i.e. the application; B) the relevant subset of the hardware, i.e. the platform; and C) the mapping of the application on the platform. Models specified with these DSLs are used for different types of analysis, for example load prediction of computing nodes and networks between them. Furthermore, the behavioral specification present in the models is transformed into efficient C code that is executed in a hard real-time setting. Finally, the models are used during startup of a twinscanner to initialize the servo controllers and their execution platforms, and to schedule the control blocks on the computing nodes.
Tracing the cosmological assembly of stars and supermassive black holes in galaxies

We examine possible phenomenological constraints for the joint evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host spheroids. We compare all the available observational data on the redshift evolution of the total stellar mass and star formation rate density in the Universe with the mass and accretion rate density evolution of SMBHs, estimated from the hard X-ray selected luminosity function of quasars and active galactic nuclei for a given radiative efficiency, ∈. We assume that the ratio of the stellar mass in spheroids to the black hole mass density evolves as (1 + z) -α , while the ratio of the stellar mass in discs + irregulars to that in spheroids evolves as ( 1 + z) -β , and we derive constraints on α, β and ∈. We find that a > 0 at more than the 4a level, implying a larger black hole mass at higher redshift for a given spheroid stellar mass. The favoured values for β are typically negative, suggesting that the fraction of stellar mass in spheroids decreases with increasing redshift. This is consistent with recent determinations that show that the mass density at high redshift is dominated by galaxies with irregular morphology. In agreement with earlier work, we constrain ∈ to be between 0.04 and 0.11, depending on the exact value of the local SMBH mass density, but almost independently of a and β.
Course of social support and relationships between social support and patients' depressive symptoms in the first 3 years post-stroke.

OBJECTIVE To describe the course of social support (everyday support, support in problem situations and esteem support) from initial inpatient rehabilitation until 3 years post-stroke and to examine the cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships of social support with depressive symptoms. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SUBJECTS A total of 249 stroke patients. METHODS Depressive symptoms were measured with the Center of Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. Perceived social support was assessed with the Social Support List-Interaction. Pearson correlations and multilevel analysis were performed. RESULTS More than one-third of participants had depressive symptoms. Social support and its 3 subtypes declined significantly over time. Divergent relationships were found between subtypes of social support and depressive symptoms. Everyday support and esteem support had negative associations with depressive symptoms, whereas support in problem situations had a positive association. Social support in problem situations was a predictor of depressive symptoms over time. No effect-modification by participants with physical or cognitive limitations was found. CONCLUSION Stroke survivors experience a decline in social support over time. Various subtypes of support show distinct relationships with depressive symptoms. Healthcare professionals should focus on the various subtypes of support when supporting patients to improve and maintain an adequate social support network.
Agile, efficient virtualization power management with low-latency server power states

One of the main driving forces of the growing adoption of virtualization is its dramatic simplification of the provisioning and dynamic management of IT resources. By decoupling running entities from the underlying physical resources, and by providing easy-to-use controls to allocate, deallocate and migrate virtual machines (VMs) across physical boundaries, virtualization opens up new opportunities for improving overall system resource use and power efficiency. While a range of techniques for dynamic, distributed resource management of virtualized systems have been proposed and have seen their widespread adoption in enterprise systems, similar techniques for dynamic power management have seen limited acceptance. The main barrier to dynamic, power-aware virtualization management stems not from the limitations of virtualization, but rather from the underlying physical systems; and in particular, the high latency and energy cost of power state change actions suited for virtualization power management. In this work, we first explore the feasibility of low-latency power states for enterprise server systems and demonstrate, with real prototypes, their quantitative energy-performance trade offs compared to traditional server power states. Then, we demonstrate an end-to-end power-aware virtualization management solution leveraging these states, and evaluate the dramatically-favorable power-performance characteristics achievable with such systems. We present, via both real system implementations and scale-out simulations, that virtualization power management with low-latency server power states can achieve comparable overheads as base distributed resource management in virtualized systems, and thus can benefit from the same level of adoption, while delivering close to energy-proportional power efficiency.
Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women

In many Asian countries the ratio of male to female population is higher than in the West: as high as 1.07 in China and India, and even higher in Pakistan. A number of authors (most notably Amartya Sen) have suggested that this imbalance reflects excess female mortality and have argued that as many as 100 million women are “missing. ” This paper proposes an explanation for some of the observed overrepresentation of men: the hepatitis B virus. I present new evidence, consistent with an existing scientific literature, that carriers of the hepatitis B virus have offspring sex ratios around 1.50 boys for each girl. This evidence includes both cross‐country analyses and a natural experiment based on recent vaccination campaigns. Hepatitis B is common in many Asian countries, especially China, where some 10–15 percent of the population is infected. Using data on prevalence of the virus by country and estimates of the effect of hepatitis on the sex ratio, I argue that hepatitis B can account for about 45 percent of the “missing women”: around 75 percent in China, between 20 and 50 percent in Egypt and western Asia, and under 20 percent in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal.
Linguistics and Philosophy:History and Sources

Linguistics and philosophy are closely connected. Different linguistic schools have their respective philosophical foundations. Taking a historical approach, this paper reviews the attention paid to linguistics in philosophy, traces the philosophical origins of major linguistic schools and identifies their respective philosophical attributes. Based on the result of the microanalysis, the paper concludes that while the scientific approach to linguistics has been fully and systematically developed, there is much room for further study in the humanistic approach.
QUASARS ARE NOT LIGHT BULBS: TESTING MODELS OF QUASAR LIFETIMES WITH THE OBSERVED EDDINGTON RATIO DISTRIBUTION

We use the observed distribution of Eddington ratios as a function of supermassive black hole (BH) mass to constrain models of quasar/active galactic nucleus (AGN) lifetimes and light curves. Given the observed (well constrained) AGN luminosity function, a particular model for AGN light curves L(t) or, equivalently, the distribution of AGN lifetimes (time above a given luminosity t(>L)) translates directly and uniquely (without further assumptions) to a predicted distribution of Eddington ratios at each BH mass. Models for self-regulated BH growth, in which feedback produces a self-regulating “decay” or “blowout” phase after the AGN reaches some peak luminosity/BH mass and begins to expel gas and shut down accretion, make specific predictions for the light curves/lifetimes, distinct from, e.g., the expected distribution if AGN simply shut down by gas starvation (without feedback) and very different from the prediction of simple phenomenological “light bulb” scenarios. We show that the present observations of the Eddington ratio distribution, spanning nearly 5 orders of magnitude in Eddington ratio, 3 orders of magnitude in BH mass, and redshifts z = 0–1, agree well with the predictions of self-regulated models, and rule out phenomenological “light bulb” or pure exponential models, as well as gas starvation models, at high significance (∼5σ). We also compare with observations of the distribution of Eddington ratios at a given AGN luminosity, and find similar good agreement (but show that these observations are much less constraining). We fit the functional form of the quasar lifetime distribution and provide these fits for use, and show how the Eddington ratio distributions place precise, tight limits on the AGN lifetimes at various luminosities, in agreement with model predictions. We compare with independent estimates of episodic lifetimes and use this to constrain the shape of the typical AGN light curve, and provide simple analytic fits to these for use in other analyses. Given these constraints, the average local BH must have gained its mass in no more than a couple of bright, near peak-luminosity episodes, in agreement with models of accretion triggering in interactions and mergers.
ommunity mean traits as additional indicators to monitor effects of land-use ntensity on grassland plant diversity

Semi-natural grasslands, biodiversity hotspots in Central-Europe, suffer from the cessation of traditional land-use. Amount and intensity of these changes challenge current monitoring frameworks typically based on classic indicators such as selected target species or diversity indices. Indicators based on plant functional traits provide an interesting extension since they reflect ecological strategies at individual and ecological processes at community levels. They typically show convergent responses to gradients of landuse intensity over scales and regions, are more directly related to environmental drivers than diversity components themselves and enable detecting directional changes in whole community dynamics. However, probably due to their laborand cost intensive assessment in the field, they have been rarely applied as indicators so far. Here we suggest overcoming these limitations by calculating indicators with plant traits derived from online accessible databases. Aiming to provide a minimal trait set to monitor effects of land-use intensification on plant diversity we investigated relationships between 12 community mean traits, 2 diversity indices and 6 predictors of land-use intensity within grassland communities of 3 different regions in Germany (part of the German ‘Biodiversity Exploratory’ research network). By standardization of traits and diversity measures, use of null models and linear mixed models we confirmed (i) strong links between functional community composition and plant diversity, (ii) that traits are closely related to land-use intensity, and (iii) that functional indicators are equally, or even more sensitive to land-use intensity than traditional diversity indices. The deduced trait set consisted of 5 traits, i.e., specific leaf area (SLA), leaf dry matter content (LDMC), seed release height, leaf distribution, and onset of flowering. These database derived traits enable the early detection of changes in community structure indicative for future diversity loss. As an addition to current monitoring measures they allow to better link environmental drivers to processes controlling community dynamics. © 2012 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
Finding hidden cliques in linear time

In the hidden clique problem, one needs to find the maximum clique in an $n$-vertex graph that has a clique of size $k$ but is otherwise random. An algorithm of Alon, Krivelevich and Sudakov that is based on spectral techniques is known to solve this problem (with high probability over the random choice of input graph) when $k \geq c \sqrt{n}$ for a sufficiently large constant $c$. In this manuscript we present a new algorithm for finding hidden cliques. It too provably works when $k > c \sqrt{n}$ for a sufficiently large constant $c$. However, our algorithm has the advantage of being much simpler (no use of spectral techniques), running faster (linear time), and experiments show that the leading constant $c$ is smaller than in the spectral approach. We also present linear time algorithms that experimentally find even smaller hidden cliques, though it remains open whether any of these algorithms finds hidden cliques of size $o(\sqrt{n})$.
Boundary triples and Weyl functions for singular perturbations of self-adjoint operators

Given the symmetric operator $A_N$ obtained by restricting the self-adjoint operator $A$ to $N$, a linear dense set, closed with respect to the graph norm, we determine a convenient boundary triple for the adjoint $A_N^*$ and the corresponding Weyl function. These objects provide us with the self-adjoint extensions of $A_N$ and their resolvents.