Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Assessment of Cyc for Natural Language Processing

This is the final report on the assessment of Cyc for natural language processing applications. The work reported here was carried out by the authors at CRL, NMSU under collaboration with both the Department of Defense and Cycorp, Inc. The primary motivation of this relatively small-scale exercise was to arrive at an independent assessment of the utility of Cyc’s knowledge and inference capabilities for solving difficult problems in NLP and machine translation. Word sense disambiguation and coreference resolution were chosen as the two problems for this study. We conclude from this exercise that Cyc in fact has a large amount of knowledge that is potentially useful for solving these problems in NLP. However, the knowledge in Cyc is not directly applicable to the problems either in an exclusively Cyc-based solution or one where Cyc is used to improve the performance of other methods. In this report, we have attempted to identify the primary reasons why Cyc cannot readily solve NLP problems, to illustrate our findings with many real-world examples, and to suggest changes or enhancements to Cyc that might make its knowledge more readily applicable to NLP problems.
Vaccinia Virus Protein Complex F12/E2 Interacts with Kinesin Light Chain Isoform 2 to Engage the Kinesin-1 Motor Complex

During vaccinia virus morphogenesis, intracellular mature virus (IMV) particles are wrapped by a double lipid bilayer to form triple enveloped virions called intracellular enveloped virus (IEV). IEV are then transported to the cell surface where the outer IEV membrane fuses with the cell membrane to expose a double enveloped virion outside the cell. The F12, E2 and A36 proteins are involved in transport of IEVs to the cell surface. Deletion of the F12L or E2L genes causes a severe inhibition of IEV transport and a tiny plaque size. Deletion of the A36R gene leads to a smaller reduction in plaque size and less severe inhibition of IEV egress. The A36 protein is present in the outer membrane of IEVs, and over-expressed fragments of this protein interact with kinesin light chain (KLC). However, no interaction of F12 or E2 with the kinesin complex has been reported hitherto. Here the F12/E2 complex is shown to associate with kinesin-1 through an interaction of E2 with the C-terminal tail of KLC isoform 2, which varies considerably between different KLC isoforms. siRNA-mediated knockdown of KLC isoform 1 increased IEV transport to the cell surface and virus plaque size, suggesting interaction with KLC isoform 1 is somehow inhibitory of IEV transport. In contrast, knockdown of KLC isoform 2 did not affect IEV egress or plaque formation, indicating redundancy in virion egress pathways. Lastly, the enhancement of plaque size resulting from loss of KLC isoform 1 was abrogated by removal of KLC isoforms 1 and 2 simultaneously. These observations suggest redundancy in the mechanisms used for IEV egress, with involvement of KLC isoforms 1 and 2, and provide evidence of interaction of F12/E2 complex with the kinesin-1 complex.
Does facilitated Advance Care Planning reduce the costs of care near the end of life? Systematic review and ethical considerations

Background: While there is increasing evidence that Advance Care Planning has the potential to strengthen patient autonomy and improve quality of care near the end of life, it remains unclear whether it could also reduce net costs of care. Aim: This study aims to describe the cost implications of Advance Care Planning programmes and discusses ethical conflicts arising in this context. Design: We conducted a systematic review based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses statement. Data sources: We systematically searched the databases PubMed, NHS EED, EURONHEED, Cochrane Library and EconLit. We included empirical studies (no limitation to study type) that investigated the cost implications of Advance Care Planning programmes involving professionally facilitated end-of-life discussions. Results and discussion: Seven studies met our inclusion criteria. Four of them used a randomised controlled design, one used a before-after design and two were observational studies. Six studies found reductions in costs of care ranging from USD1041 to USD64,827 per patient, depending on the study period and the cost measurement. One study detected no differences in costs. Studies varied considerably regarding the Advance Care Planning intervention, patient selection and costs measured which may explain some of the variations in findings. Normative appraisal: Looking at the impact of Advance Care Planning on costs raises delicate ethical issues. Given the increasing pressure to reduce expenditures, there may be concerns that cost considerations could unduly influence the sensitive communication process, thus jeopardising patient autonomy. Safeguards are proposed to reduce these risks. Conclusion: The limited data indicate net cost savings may be realised with Advance Care Planning. Methodologically robust trials with clearly defined Advance Care Planning interventions are needed to make the costs and returns of Advance Care Planning transparent.
Platforms: A Systematic Review Of The Literature Using Algorithmic Historiography

The concept of a platform is in widespread use across a range of disciplines. This research explores the development of the platform concept through a systematic review of the literature using algorithmic historiography. The paper generates a time-based visualisation of relationships between the most cited articles in the domain. Key structural findings are triangulated using thematic content analysis, quantitative citation and network graph analysis. The analysis delineates two conceptions of platform: interior and exterior. These two classifications provide a historical lens that demonstrate the development of the platform concept over time. Furthermore, the methodology provides a generalizable systematic approach to examining the historical development, underlying structures and significant contributions of a specific knowledge domain.
The Listenn Project : Acoustic Ecology as a Tool for Remediating Environmental Awareness

The Listen project is an interdisciplinary media arts project, investigating the pristine acoustic ecologies of Southwest deserts of America. Establishing the largest database of ambisonic and stereo field recordings of the Southwestern landscapes of the United States, the Listen project is designed to not only archive sound, but to explore how virtual environmental engagement through media arts and sound can cultivate environmental awareness and community agency. It delivers community partnerships and capacity building with enthusiastic communities in four American Southwest desert communities: Joshua Tree, Sequoia & Kings Canyon and Organ Pipe Cactus National Parks and the Mojave Desert Trust. Aiming to empower and encourage communities to make creative contributions to and have agency in the development of the Listen project, this paper outlines the fieldwork undertaken in 2014 and 2015 and discusses the substantial online listening database, virtual reality and web based tools deployed and currently in development. It will also provide information on the project’s innovative application of ambisonic audio recording and playback to create 360-degree immersive experiences online and through the Oculus Rift VR headset (EcoRift).
Gender and Self-Employment : Evidence from Rural China

The goal of this paper is to examine how has the expansion of the economy after 2000 affected rural off-farm labor market participation. Specifically, we seek to determine whether off-farm labor increased after 2000, what forms of employment are driving trends in off-farm labor, and whether gender differences can be observed in off-farm employment trends. Using a nationally representative dataset that consist of two waves of surveys done in 2000 and 2008 in six provinces, this paper finds that off-farm labor market participation has continued to rise steadily in the early 2000s. However, there is a clear difference in the trends associated with occupational choice before and after 2000. Additionally, we find that rural off-farm employment trends were different for men and women. Our analysis also shows that the rise of wage-earning employment corresponds with an increasing unskilled wage for both men and women.
Randomized neural networks for learning stochastic dependences

We consider the problem of learning the dependence of one random variable on another, from a finite string of independently identically distributed (i.i.d.) copies of the pair. The problem is first converted to that of learning a function of the latter random variable and an independent random variable uniformly distributed on the unit interval. However, this cannot be achieved using the usual function learning techniques because the samples of the uniformly distributed random variables are not available. We propose a novel loss function, the minimizer of which results in an approximation to the needed function. Through successive approximation results (suggested by the proposed loss function), a suitable class of functions represented by combination feedforward neural networks is selected as the class to learn from. These results are also extended for countable as well as continuous state-space Markov chains. The effectiveness of the proposed method is indicated through simulation studies.
Full weighting Hough Forests for object detection

Object detection plays an important role in autonomous video surveillance systems nowadays. Models based on the Hough Forests are widely applied, which use the local patches that vote for the object centers in images. Since these patches vote independently from each other, there is no guarantee that trees built in Hough Forests can obtain optimal parameters for the entire model. This paper proposes a novel method to improve the Hough Forests by introducing weights to each offset in the positive training images to specify the importance of the patch to the training object. Also, all patches in the dataset are weighted and updated during the training process by minimizing the global loss function. The weights are used in both the training and detection phases to obtain a more accurate location of instances in detection images. The proposed method is then evaluated on TUD pedestrian and UIUC car datasets showing promising results compared to recent methods such as Hough Forests, and Alternating Decision Forests.
Exploring Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks in Sequential Labelling for Dialogue Topic Tracking

Dialogue topic tracking is a sequential labelling problem of recognizing the topic state at each time step in given dialogue sequences. This paper presents various ar-tiﬁcial neural network models for dialogue topic tracking, including convolutional neural networks to account for semantics at each individual utterance, and recurrent neural networks to account for conversational contexts along multiple turns in the dialogue history. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed models can signiﬁcantly improve the tracking performances in human-human conversations.
Numerical Modelling of the Time-dependent Behaviour of Venice Lagoon Silts

ABSTRACT: To protect the city of Venice against recurrent flooding, a huge project has been undertaken involving the design and construction of movable gates located at the lagoon inlets for controlling tidal flow. The design of the gate foundations required mineralogic and mechanical characterization of the Venice lagoon soils. An instrumented circular test embankment was constructed in the lagoon area, enabling accurate measurement of relevant ground displacements. Furthermore, in situ stress-strain-time measurements were carried out in order to better understand the viscous behaviour of the material. This paper is aimed to modell ing the creep behaviour shown by field data with finite element analysis, in which a recently developed anisotropic constitutive model was used. The constitutive parameters of the models were calibrated from in situ and laboratory tests on Venetian silty soils. The good performance of the finite element model in predicting time dependent behaviour of Venetian soils is presented.
Improving the Reading Comprehension of Middle School Students With Disabilities Through Computer-Assisted Collaborative Strategic Reading

This study investigated the effects of computer-assisted comprehension practice using a researcher-developed computer program, Computer-Assisted Collaborative Strategic Reading (CACSR), with students who had disabilities. Two reading/ language arts teachers and their 34 students with disabilities participated. Students in the intervention group received the CACSR intervention, which consisted of 50-min instructional sessions twice per week over 10 to 12 weeks. The results revealed a statistically significant difference between intervention and comparison groups’ reading comprehension ability as measured by a researcher-developed, proximal measure (i.e., finding main ideas and question generation) and a distal, standardized measure (i.e., Woodcock Reading Mastery Test, Passage Comprehension). Effect sizes for all dependent measures favored the CACSR group. Furthermore, a majority of students expressed positive overall perspectives of the CACSR intervention and believed that their reading had improved. UNDERSTANDING AND LEARNING FROM TEXT IS at the heart of reading. As students progress through the grades, they are increasingly required to draw on their reading comprehension skills to learn from text (Williams, 1998). One of the most vexing problems facing middle and secondary school teachers today is that many students come into their classrooms without the requisite knowledge, skills, and disposition to read and comprehend the materials placed before them (Rippen & Brewer, as cited in Snow, 2002, p. iii). Students who are successful at meaning-making are able to monitor their understanding and to use various strategies to resolve problems and improve their comprehension. However, many students with learning disabilities (LD) have not developed this metacognitive awareness or the ability to skillfully apply comprehension strategies (Baker & Brown, 1984; Flavell, 1977). Over the years, researchers and their collaborators have developed numerous strategies to help struggling readers interact with text in ways that improve their understanding. The effectiveness of these strategies for students with LD has been well documented (Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001; Pressley, Johnson, Symons, McGoldrick, & Kurita, 1989; Snow, 2002; Swanson, 1999; Weisberg, 1988; Wong, 1985). From such empirical evidence, we know that comprehension strategy lessons should include explicit instruction in the targeted strategies (Swanson, 1999) and incorporate careful modeling and the provision of extensive feedback to students (Gersten et al., 2001). COLLABORATIVE STRATEGIC READING Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) was designed to facilitate reading comprehension for students with reading diffi-
Do Surveys Provide Representative or Whimsical Assessments of the Economy?

We argue that survey responses to economic evaluation questions exhibit instability and can be affected by fairly trivial changes in questionnaire wording. Our analyses make three empirical contributions to this area of survey research. First, we demonstrate that within the course of the interview there is considerable instability in economic evaluations. Second, one source of this instability is cues regarding economic performance, such as those provided by the media. We find that respondents can be persuaded to change their economic evaluations if they receive contradictory cues. Finally, we demonstrate that question placement can affect economic evaluations. More specifically, we demonstrate that proximity to political questions can contaminate economic evaluations. If economic evaluations closely follow political preference questions, respondents have a tendency to give economic responses that are “consistent” with their political responses. Our empirical analysis is based on economic evaluations of respondents to the Hungarian Markets and Democracy Survey administered during December 1997.
Comparisons of Immunoassay and Mass Spectrometry Measurements of Serum Estradiol Levels and Their Influence on Clinical Association Studies in Men

Context: Immunoassay-based techniques, routinely used to measure serum estradiol (E2), are known to have reduced specificity, especially at lower concentrations, when compared with the gold standard technique of mass spectrometry (MS). Different measurement techniques may be responsible for the conflicting results of associations between serum E2 and clinical phenotypes in men. Objective: Our objective was to compare immunoassay and MS measurements of E2 levels in men and evaluate associations with clinical phenotypes. Design and Setting: Middle-aged and older male subjects participating in the population-based Osteoporotic Fractures in Men (MrOS) Sweden study (n = 2599), MrOS US (n = 688), and the European Male Aging Study (n = 2908) were included. Main Outcome Measures: Immunoassay and MS measurements of serum E2 were compared and related to bone mineral density (BMD; measured by dual energy x-ray absorptiometry) and ankle-brachial index. Results: Within each cohort, serum E2 levels obtained by immunoassay and MS correlated moderately (Spearman rank correlation coefficient rS 0.53–0.76). Serum C-reactive protein (CRP) levels associated significantly (albeit to a low extent, rS = 0.29) with immunoassay E2 but not with MS E2 levels. Similar associations of immunoassay E2 and MS E2 were seen with lumbar spine and total hip BMD, independent of serum CRP. However, immunoassay E2, but not MS E2, associated inversely with ankle-brachial index, and this correlation was lost after adjustment for CRP. Conclusions: Our findings suggest interference in the immunoassay E2 analyses, possibly by CRP or a CRP-associated factor. Although associations with BMD remain unaffected, this might imply for a reevaluation of previous association studies between immunoassay E2 levels and inflammation-related outcomes.
Role of Endothelium‐Derived Prostanoid in Angiotensin‐Induced Vasoconstriction

To test the hypothesis that prostanoids contribute to angiotensin H-induced vascular contraction, we compared the effect of angiotensin II on isometric tension development by rings of descending thoracic aorta bathed in Krebs' bicarbonate buffer with and without indomethacin (10 fiM) to inhibit cyclooxygenase, CGS13080 (10 fiM) to inhibit thromboxane A2 synthesis, or SQ29548 (1 fiM) to block thromboxane A2/prostaglandin endoperoxide receptors. The comparisons were made in rings of aorta taken from nonnotensive rats and from rats with aortic coarctation-induced hypertension at 12 days and 90-113 days after coarctation. These rings released thromboxane B2, which was found to be endothelium dependent, increased in hypertensive rats, and stimulated by angiotensin II (10~6 M) in normotensive rats and in hypertensive rats at 12 days after coarctation. The angiotensin II (10~6 to 10~5M)-induced contraction of aortic rings was increased by about 30% at 12 days after coarctation and decreased at 90-113 days after coarctation. Removal of the endothelium increased the contractile effect of angiotensin II (10"' M) in aortic rings of normotensive rats and hypertensive rats at 90-113 days after coarctation but decreased the effect in aortic rings of hypertensive rats at 12 days after coarctation. In rats at 12 days after coarctation, the angiotensin II (10~6 M)-induced contraction of aortic rings with endothelium was attenuated by indomethacin and SQ29548 but not by CGS13080. These data suggest that a prostanoidmediated and endothelium-dependent mechanism of vasoconstriction contributes to the constrictor effect of angiotensin II in aortic rings of rats in the early phase of aortic coarctation-induced hypertension.
Talking Peace: A Population-Based Survey on Attitudes about Security, Dispute Resolution, and Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Liberia

Liberia’s civil war between 1989 and 2003 left hundreds of thousands dead, and many more affected by the extreme violence that ravaged the country. Peacebuilding and reconstruction have been daunting challenges for a country that was divided and impoverished even before the war. The conflict destroyed or damaged almost all structures and institutions of the state, the economy, and everyday life. Much progress has been made since President Sirleaf’s government assumed office in 2006, but enormous challenges remain. As the second presidential election since the end of the war nears, Liberia is once again at an important juncture on the path to its peaceful reconstruction.This study was undertaken to contribute to a deeper understanding of: (1) the population's priorities for peacebuilding, (2) Liberians’ perceptions of their post-war security, and (3) existing disputes and dispute resolution mechanisms. The study is based on extensive consultations with local organizations, interviews with key informants, and a nationwide survey of 4,501 respondents randomly selected in each of the counties to represent the views of the adult population in Liberia. The survey was implemented in November and December 2010. Results are representative of the population at the county level and for the Greater Monrovia district.
SROI in smoking cessation policy in The Netherlands Social return on investments in smoking cessation policy in The Netherlands Master Thesis

Social return on investments in smoking cessation policy in The Netherlands. Introduction. Smoking is one of the most addictive behavioural risks, causing serious health problems for individuals and imposing costs to the whole society. Nearly every country has adopted more or less stringent smoking policies, leading to increased smoking cessation. The question is whether it is economically worthwhile to raise the magnitude of various anti-smoking campaigns and cessation aids. Research Question. From a viewpoint of society, does smoking cessation policy in The Netherlands pay off in the long run? Methods. A method of social return on investment was applied. Smokers of three different age groups (20 – 44, 45 – 64, 65+) were targeted and work productivity and health outcomes were analyzed as a consequence of successful smoking cessation. Results. Returns on investment appeared to be substantially positive, ranging from approximately 110% to 220%. It is an exceptionally high return if we compare it to any other regular investment. Therefore, smoking cessation could be a contributor to welfare, and every euro invested might potentially bring a € 1.1 to € 2.2 net return. Conclusions. Smoking cessation does pay off to the Dutch society in the long run, and employers, individuals, governments, health insurers, and care providers can take advantage of anti-smoking policies and get tangible returns on their investment. Yet, the interventions’ financing issue needs to be addressed with private-public partnerships as a potential mechanism to make smoking cessation pay its way to society.