Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gender difference in speech intelligibility using speech intelligibility tests and acoustic analyses

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to compare men with women in terms of speech intelligibility, to investigate the validity of objective acoustic parameters related with speech intelligibility, and to try to set up the standard data for the future study in various field in prosthodontics. MATERIALS AND METHODS Twenty men and women were served as subjects in the present study. After recording of sample sounds, speech intelligibility tests by three speech pathologists and acoustic analyses were performed. Comparison of the speech intelligibility test scores and acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency range, formant frequency, formant ranges, vowel working space area, and vowel dispersion were done between men and women. In addition, the correlations between the speech intelligibility values and acoustic variables were analyzed. RESULTS Women showed significantly higher speech intelligibility scores than men and there were significant difference between men and women in most of acoustic parameters used in the present study. However, the correlations between the speech intelligibility scores and acoustic parameters were low. CONCLUSION Speech intelligibility test and acoustic parameters used in the present study were effective in differentiating male voice from female voice and their values might be used in the future studies related patients involved with maxillofacial prosthodontics. However, further studies are needed on the correlation between speech intelligibility tests and objective acoustic parameters.
Romanian WordNet : Current State , New Applications and Prospects

The development of the Romanian WordNet began in 2001 within the framework of the European project BalkaNet which aimed at building core WordNets for 5 new Balkan languages: Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, Serbian and Turkish. The philosophy of the BalkaNet architecture was similar to EuroWordNet [1, 2]. As in EuroWordNet, in BalkaNet the concepts considered highly relevant for the Balkan languages (and not only) were identified and called BalkaNet Base Concepts. These are classified in three increasing size sets (BCS1, BCS2 and BCS3). Altogether BCS1, BCS2 and BCS3 contain 8516 concepts that were lexicalized in each of the BalkaNet WordNets. The monolingual WordNets had to have their synsets aligned to the translation equivalent synsets of the Princeton WordNet (PWN). The BCS1, BCS2 and BCS3 were adopted as core WordNets for several other WordNet projects such as Hungarian [3], Slovene [4], Arabic [5, 6], and many others. At the end of the BalkaNet project (August 2004) the Romanian WordNet, contained almost 18,000 synsets, conceptually aligned to Princeton WordNet 2.0 and through it to the synsets of all the BalkaNet WordNets. In [7], a detailed account on the status of the core Ro-WordNet is given as well as on the tools we used for its development. After the BalkaNet project ended, as many other project partners did, we continued to update the Romanian WordNet and here we describe its latest developments and a few of the projects in which Ro-WordNet, Princeton WordNet or some of its BalkaNet companions were of crucial importance.
Teacher Emotions in Primary and Secondary Education: Effects of Self-Efficacy and Collective-Efficacy, and Problem-Solving Appraisal as a Moderating Mechanism

This study aimed to examine: 1) teachers’ self-reported emotions experienced at school, problem-solving appraisal, self-efficacy and school collective-efficacy; 2) the effects of self-efficacy on the formulation of collective-efficacy and problem-solving appraisal, and on the impact of problem-solving appraisal on collective-efficacy; 3) the influential role of efficacy beliefs, problem-solving appraisal and their inter-effects in the emotions; and 4) the effect of teaching level (primary/secondary school) in the examined concepts. The sample consists of 256 primary and secondary school teachers, 92 men and 164 women, who came from various Greek state schools. Data were collected at the middle of a school year, and they were analyzed between and within groups across all constructs. The results revealed: 1) teachers experienced positive emotions from moderate to high intensity, and negative emotions from low to high intensity, particularly context-, task- and self-related; 2) a moderate to high sense of both efficacy beliefs and problem-solving appraisal (except for personal control that was low); 3) while problem-solving appraisal influenced collective-efficacy, its effect was to a significant extent mediated by self-efficacy; 4) self-efficacy, problem-solving appraisal and collective-efficacy had complimentary impact on the emotions, with self-efficacy being the most powerful formulator of most of them; and 5) the primary school teachers, compared to secondary school teachers, felt more intense positive emotions, had a stronger sense of school collective-efficacy and reported lower impulsive and personal control in problem-solving. The findings are discussed with respect to their practical applications and future research.
The role of microtubules in neutrophil polarity and migration in live zebrafish

Summary Microtubules control cell motility by positively regulating polarization in many cell types. However, how microtubules regulate leukocyte migration is not well understood, particularly in living organisms. Here we exploited the zebrafish system to study the role of microtubules in neutrophil migration in vivo. The localization of microtubules was visualized in motile neutrophils using various bioprobes, revealing that, in contrast to what has been seen in studies in vitro, the microtubule organizing center is positioned in front of the nucleus (relative to the direction of migration) in motile neutrophils. Microtubule disassembly impaired attraction of neutrophils to wounds but enhanced the polarity of F-actin dynamics as measured by the distribution of stable and dynamic F-actin. Microtubule depolymerization inhibited polarized phosphoinositol 3-kinase (PI(3)K) activation at the leading edge and induced rapid PI(3)K independent motility. Finally, we show that microtubules exert their effects on neutrophil polarity and motility at least in part by the negative regulation of both Rho and Rac activity. These results provide new insight into the role of microtubules in neutrophil migration in a living vertebrate and show that the motility of these professional migratory cells are subject to distinctly different rules from those established for other cell types.
Duration and life-stage of antibiotic use and risk of cardiovascular events in women.

AIMS Growing data suggest that antibiotic exposure is associated with a long-lasting alteration in gut microbiota, and may be related to subsequent cardiovascular disease (CVD). We investigated associations of life-stage and duration of antibiotic exposure during adulthood with subsequent CVD events. METHODS AND RESULTS This study included 36 429 women initially free of CVD and cancer from the Nurses' Health Study. We estimated hazard ratios (HRs) for CVD (a composite endpoint of coronary heart disease or stroke) according to duration of antibiotic use in young (age 20-39), middle (age 40-59), and late (age 60 and older) adulthood. During an average of 7.6 years of follow-up, 1056 participants developed CVD. Women with long-term use of antibiotics (for ≥2 months) in late adulthood had a significantly increased risk of CVD (HR 1.32, 95% confidence interval 1.03-1.70) after adjustment for covariates (such as demographic factors, diet and lifestyle, reasons for antibiotic use, overweight or obesity, disease status, and other medication use), as compared to women who did not use antibiotics in this life-stage. Longer duration of antibiotic use in middle adulthood was also related to higher risk of CVD (P trend = 0.003) after controlling for these covariates. There was no significant relationship between the use in young adulthood and the risk of CVD. CONCLUSION In this study which examined the antibiotic use in different life-stages, longer duration of exposure to antibiotics in the middle and older adulthood was related to an increased risk of future CVD events among elderly women at usual risk.
The Time-Course of the Use of Background Knowledge in Perceptual Categorization

We examined the time-course of the utilization of background knowledge in perceptual categorization by manipulating the meaningfulness of labels associated with categories and by manipulating the amount of time given to subjects to make a categorization decision. Extending a paradigm originally reported by Wisniewski and Medin (1994), subjects learned two categories of children's drawings that either were given standard labels (drawing by children from group 1 or group 2) or were given theory-based labels (drawings by creative or noncreative children); meaningfulness of the label had a profound effect on how new drawings were categorized. Half of the subjects were given unlimited time to respond, the other half of the subjects were given a quick response deadline; speeded response conditions had a relatively large effect on categorization decisions by subjects given the standard labels but had a relatively small effect on categorization decisions by subjects given the theory-based labels. These results suggest that background knowledge may have its influence at relatively early stages in the time-course of a categorization decision.
A Dependency-Based Neural Reordering Model for Statistical Machine Translation

In machine translation (MT) that involves translating between two languages with significant differences in word order, determining the correct word order of translated words is a major challenge. The dependency parse tree of a source sentence can help to determine the correct word order of the translated words. In this paper, we present a novel reordering approach utilizing a neural network and dependency-based embeddings to predict whether the translations of two source words linked by a dependency relation should remain in the same order or should be swapped in the translated sentence. Experiments on Chinese-to-English translation show that our approach yields a statistically significant improvement of 0.57 BLEU point on benchmark NIST test sets, compared to our prior state-of-the-art statistical MT system that uses sparse dependency-based reordering features.
How Does a Metalinguistic Phonological Intervention Impact the Reading Achievement and Language of African American Boys?

Abstract Researchers consistently find a correlation between low literacy levels and high school dropout rates, expulsion, reading achievement, and failing grades for African American males. Low literacy achievement in African American males may result from multiple factors, including dialectic linguistic differences and/or phonological awareness abilities. Phonological deficits are consistently associated with dyslexia. This article documents results from a metacognitive flexibility-based phonological intervention designed to mitigate the effects of dialect differences and phonological awareness among African American boys. Based on their scaled scores on the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing–Second Edition Elision subtest, we placed participants in 2 different groups: low phonological awareness (n = 13) and average phonological awareness (n = 17). The 4-week intervention included manipulative phonemic procedures targeting final consonant patterns with an emphasis on a metacognitive understanding of phonological differences between African American English and academic English. We analyzed pre- and posttest data on resulting reading achievement, phonological awareness, and dialect variation using multivariate analysis of variance/multivariate analysis of covariance. We used hierarchical regression to analyze the prediction of reading achievement scores. The findings of this study suggest several recommendations for teachers to increase phonological awareness abilities among students who are at risk for reading difficulties. Teachers can also implement explicit instruction combining phonemic manipulation and verbal scaffolding related to a metacognitive understanding of the phonological differences between African American English and academic English.
The doughboys network: Social interactions and labor market outcomes of World War I veterans

An electrophotographic sensitive plate is formed by depositing first and second photoconductive layers on a conductive substrate in which the first photoconductive layer provides a rectifying barrier for preventing the injection of charges from the substrate and the second photoconductive layer is formed in a reticulated pattern. The second photoconductive layer may comprise a mixture of selenium with an element selected from the group consisting of Te, As and Sb. One of the photoconductive layers has a greater sensitivity than the other so as to improve the fidelity of half tone image reproduction. A transparent organic semiconductor layer is formed on the second photoconductive layer to maintain electric charges on its surface and for transporting photo-charge carriers generated within the first and second photoconductive layers. In an alternative embodiment the second photoconductive layer comprises a mixture in which the amount of the selected element is less than the amount of the selected element in the first photoconductive layer.
Current Trends in Cartilage Science

From May 12 to 15, 2012, the 10th world congress of the International Cartilage Repair Society (ICRS) was held in Montreal, Canada. This year, there were 850 participants with backgrounds in both basic scientific as well as clinical research directed at cartilage repair and regeneration. It encompassed more than 135 oral and 270 poster contributions; 7 plenary sessions and 20 special sessions were organized (three in parallel), each of which included two to three invited lectures by international leaders in the field, covering recent developments and opinions both in clinical as well as more basic scientific research on cartilage repair.
Towards Opinion Summarization from Online Forums

Summarizing opinions expressed in online forums can potentially benefit many people. However, special characteristics of this problem may require changes to standard text summarization techniques. In this work, we present our initial attempt at extractive summarization of opinionated online forum threads. Given the nature of user generated content in online discussion forums, we hypothesize that besides relevance, text quality and subjectivity also play important roles in deciding which sentences are good summary sentences. We therefore construct an annotated corpus to facilitate our study of extractive summarization of online discussion forums. We define a set of features to capture relevance, text quality and subjectivity, and empirically test their usefulness in choosing summary sentences. Using unpaired Student’s t-test, we find that sentence length and number of sentiment words have high correlations with good summary sentences. Finally we propose some simple modifications to a standard Integer Linear Programming based summarization framework to incorporate these features.
Professional development: investigating the relationships between employee motives, learning opportunities, and activities

Purpose This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings Employees are increasingly becoming facilitators of their own professional career path and development. A highly motivated employee wanting to learn and train for their own personal development will be more aware of potential learning opportunities available to them, and will be more inclined to engage in them. For improved productivity and success, organizations need both engaged and committed employees and to offer a range of learning opportunities. Practical implications The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.
Introduction to Space-Time Wireless Communications

Wireless networks are under constant pressure to provide ever-higher data rates to increasing numbers of users with greater reliability. This book is an accessible introduction to every fundamental aspect of space-time wireless communications. Space-time processing technology is a powerful tool for improving system performance that already features in the UMTS and CDMA2000 mobile standards. The ideal volume for graduate students and professionals, it features homework problems and other supporting material on a companion website.
The Search for Cosmological Black Holes: A Surface Brightness Variability Test

Recently it has been suggested that the majority of dark matter in the universe resides in the form of Jupiter-mass black holes distributed cosmologically. This population makes itself apparent by microlensing high-redshift quasars and introducing pronounced variability into their observed light curves. While several arguments dismissing this hypothesis have been presented, a conclusive observational test is, alas, sadly lacking. In this paper we investigate the effect of a cosmologically distributed population of microlensing masses on galaxies at low to intermediate redshift. The magnification of bright stars in these galaxies leads to small, but observable, fluctuations in their surface brightness. The variability timescale for Jupiter-mass lensing objects is of the order of a few months, and this population can be detected through a future space-based monitoring campaign of a field containing z ~ 0.5 galaxies. The monitoring of galactic surface brightness will provide an effective test of the nature of dark matter on cosmological scales.
Evaluation of the effectiveness of early or delayed treatment upon healing of mandibular fractures: A retrospective study

Objectives: This study was aimed to assess the impacts of delay treatment of mandibular fracture and its complications. In addition risk variables related such as time to repair, fracture types, substance abuse, causes, surgical management, muddling or complications and duration of clinic stay were also evaluated. Materials and Methods: The data of patients attending the Newcastle General Hospital, UK for the management of mandibular fractures were probed. This retrospective clinical trial conducted over 6 months, included 91 patients attending trauma operating theatre during weekdays or weekends. Data were analyzed for time to admission and treatment and its relationships to various factors using SPSS version 20 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL). Results: Time to treatment from the point of admission was 31.50 ± 3.83 h during week days that has been significantly more for patients attending the hospital at weekends or nights. Similar trend was observed for total summative time from the incident to treatment analysis. Conclusions: This investigation has demonstrated that the rate of infection and postoperative complications following surgical treatment of mandible fractures can be eased off by reducing the waiting time from presentation to the emergency and to the operating theater.
Mechanism of gating of T-type calcium channels

We have analyzed the gating kinetics of T-type Ca channels in 3T3 fibroblasts. Our results show that channel closing, inactivation, and recovery from inactivation each include a voltage-independent step which becomes rate limiting at extreme potentials. The data require a cyclic model with a minimum of two closed, one open, and two inactivated states. Such a model can produce good fits to our data even if the transitions between closed states are the only voltage-dependent steps in the activating pathway leading from closed to inactivated states. Our analysis suggests that the channel inactivation step, as well as the direct opening and closing transitions, are not intrinsically voltage sensitive. Single-channel recordings are consistent with this scheme. As expected, each channel produces a single burst per opening and then inactivates. Comparison of the kinetics of T-type Ca current in fibroblasts and neuronal cells reveals significant differences which suggest that different subtypes of T-type Ca channels are expressed differentially in a tissue specific manner.
Chandra Observations of the Bursting X-Ray Transient SAX J1747.0–2853 during Low-Level Accretion Activity

We present Chandra/ACIS observations of the bursting X-ray transient SAX J1747.0-2853 performed on 2001 July 18. We detected a bright source at the position of R.A. = 17h47m02. ˢ60 and decl. = -28°52'58. ″9 (J2000.0, with a 1 σ error of ~0.″7), consistent with the BeppoSAX and ASCA positions of SAX J1747.0-2853 and with the Ariel V position of the transient GX +0.2-0.2, which was active during the 1970s. The 0.5-10 keV luminosity of the source during our observations was ~ 3 × 1035 ergs s-1 (assuming a distance of 9 kpc), demonstrating that the source was in a low-level accretion state. We also report on the long-term light curve of the source as observed with the all-sky monitor on board the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer. After the initial 1998 outburst, two more outbursts (in 2000 and 2001) were detected with peak luminosities about 2 orders of magnitude larger than our Chandra luminosity. Our Chandra observation falls between those two outbursts, making the outburst history for SAX J1747.0-2853 complex. Those bright 2000 and 2001 outbursts, combined with the likely extended period of low-level activity between those outbursts, strongly suggest that the classification of SAX J1747.0-2853 as a faint X-ray transient was premature. It might be possible that the other faint X-ray transients can also exhibit bright, extended outbursts that would eliminate the need for a separate subclass of X-ray transients. We discuss our results also in the context of the behavior of X-ray binaries accreting at low levels with luminosities around 1035 ergs s-1, a poorly studied accretion rate regime.
An Improved Antenna Mounting for Ultra-Wideband On-Body Communications and Channel Characterization

The electromagnetic coupling of antennas with the human body is a well-known, but often neglected, problem in body area network (BAN) communications. The resulting distortion of the antenna's free-space characteristics may, in turn, demand more complex terminals to cope with the different conditions encountered as antennas are mounted on different parts of the body and/or varying separations from the skin. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a mounting method to provide a more stable response and to reduce the antenna's coupling to the body for ultra-wideband (UWB) BAN applications. The proposed mounting method is evaluated on two UWB BAN antennas, characterizing the antennas coupling with the body by analyzing variations in the antennas reflection coefficient between 4-9 GHz, when mounted at different distances from the skin and at different locations on the body. The modified mounting method was found to increase the correlation coefficient between the antenna's reflection coefficient when in free space and mounted using 5 mm of spacer, for the two antennas, from 0.22 and 0.13, to 0.66 and 0.90. The free-space characteristics of the modified antennas are also tested, showing a reduction of up to 4.7 dB of radiated power into the body.