Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparing parameterizations of pitch register and its discontinuities at prosodic boundaries for Hungarian

We examined how well prosodic boundary strength can be captured by two declination stylization methods as well as by four different representations of pitch register. In the stylization proposed by Liebermann et al. (1985) base- and topline are fitted to peaks and valleys of the pitch contour, whereas in Reichel&Mady (2013) these lines are fitted to medians below and above certain pitch percentiles. From each of the stylizations four feature pools were induced representing different aspects of register discontinuity at word boundaries: discontinuities related to the base-, mid-, and topline, as well as to the range between base- and topline. Concerning stylization the median-based fitting approach turned out to be more robust with respect to declination line crossing errors and yielded base-, topline and range-related discontinuity characteristics with higher correlations to perceived boundary strength. Concerning register representation, for the peak/valley fitting approach the base- and topline patterns showed weaker correspondences to boundary strength than the other feature pools. We furthermore trained generalized linear regression models for boundary strength prediction on each feature pool. It turned out that neither the stylization method nor the register representation had a significant influence on the overall good prediction performance.
Quantitative Comparison of Constitutive Promoters in Human ES cells

Background Constitutive promoters that ensure sustained and high level gene expression are basic research tools that have a wide range of applications, including studies of human embryology and drug discovery in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Numerous cellular/viral promoters that ensure sustained gene expression in various cell types have been identified but systematic comparison of their activities in hESCs is still lacking. Methodology/Principal Findings We have quantitatively compared promoter activities of five commonly used constitutive promoters, including the human β-actin promoter (ACTB), cytomegalovirus (CMV), elongation factor-1α, (EF1α), phosphoglycerate kinase (PGK) and ubiquitinC (UbC) in hESCs. Lentiviral gene transfer was used to ensure stable integration of promoter-eGFP constructs into the hESCs genome. Promoter activities were quantitatively compared in long term culture of undifferentiated hESCs and in their differentiated progenies. Conclusion/Significance The ACTB, EF1α and PGK promoters showed stable activities during long term culture of undifferentiated hESCs. The ACTB promoter was superior by maintaining expression in 75–80% of the cells after 50 days in culture. During embryoid body (EB) differentiation, promoter activities of all five promoters decreased. Although the EF1α promoter was downregulated in approximately 50% of the cells, it was the most stable promoter during differentiation. Gene expression analysis of differentiated eGFP+ and eGFP- cells indicate that promoter activities might be restricted to specific cell lineages, suggesting the need to carefully select optimal promoters for constitutive gene expression in differentiated hESCs.
Urban planning, neighbourhoods and social cohesiveness : a socio-cultural study of expatriate residents in Dubai

In an era of globalisation and hyper-urbanisation, cities are rapidly emerging as drivers of social, cultural and economic change. Cities are imbibing the values of urbanism: the absence of intimate and personal relationships, and human relations which are largely anonymous, superficial and transitory. The concept of community neighbourhoods in urban living is gradually disappearing, which has led to more challenges for urban planners, designers and the architects. As architecture and urban planning are expressions of social and cultural milieus, this research focuses on contemporary urban planning approaches, with a theoretical framework that assesses the social cohesiveness and sustainability of neighbourhood communities. Academic literature in key areas of urban social sustainability, social cohesiveness and urban neighbourhood planning guides the theoretical framework. The key attributes of social cohesiveness identified by primary research are social interactions, sense of community and social ties. The aim of the study is to assess and analyse the role of the physical planning of the built forms, layout and design in creating socially cohesive neighbourhoods in the multicultural city of Dubai. The study focuses on four selected neighbourhoods in Dubai to analyse the extent of social cohesiveness evident and present and within these neighbourhoods. The study involves mixed methods: with quantitative, qualitative, spatial and observation analysis examining the physical factors of the neighbourhood and its impact on social cohesiveness. The findings of the study conclude that physical layout and built form contribute towards social cohesiveness among residents. There is a willingness of the residents to be part of a socially cohesive society; and if opportunities are provided through urban planning, this can help foster a socially cohesive multicultural society in Dubai. The study concludes that the role of urban planners, architects are important in building socially cohesive neighbourhoods in Dubai. The study seeks to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on building socially cohesive urban neighbourhoods; more specifically, in the context of Dubai’s transient multicultural expatriate population. Keywords: built environment, culture, Dubai, expatriates, housing, neighbourhood, social sustainability, social cohesiveness
Design Considerations for a Ground-Based Transit Search for Habitable Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs

By targeting nearby M dwarfs, a transit search using modest equipment is capable of discovering planets as small as 2 R⊕ in the habitable zones of their host stars. The MEarth Project, a future transit search, aims to employ a network of ground-based robotic telescopes to monitor M dwarfs in the northern hemisphere with sufficient precision and cadence to detect such planets. Here we investigate the design requirements for the MEarth Project. We evaluate the optimal bandpass, and the necessary field of view, telescope aperture, and telescope time allocation on a star-by-star basis, as is possible for the well-characterized nearby M dwarfs. Through these considerations, 1976 late M dwarfs (R < 0.33 R⊙) emerge as favorable targets for transit monitoring. Based on an observational cadence and on total telescope time allocation tailored to recover 90% of transit signals from planets in habitable zone orbits, we find that a network of 10 30 cm telescopes could survey these 1976 M dwarfs in less than three years. A null result from this survey would set an upper limit (at 99% confidence) of 17% for the rate of occurrence of planets larger than 2 R⊕ in the habitable zones of late M dwarfs, and even stronger constraints for planets lying closer than the habitable zone. If the true occurrence rate of habitable planets is 10%, the expected yield would be 2.6 planets.
Photometric Variability among the Brightest Asymptotic Giant Branch Stars near the Center of M32

Deep K′ images with 0. ″1 angular resolution, obtained with Altair+NIRI on Gemini North, are used to investigate photometric variability among the brightest asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars in the central regions of M32. On the basis of a comparison with brightnesses obtained from the K-band data discussed by Davidge et al., it is concluded that (1) at least 60% of bright AGB stars near the center of M32 are photometrically variable, and (2) the amplitudes of the light variations are similar to those of long-period variables in the Galactic bulge. We do not find evidence for a population of large-amplitude variables, such as those detected by IRAS in the Galactic bulge. The technique discussed here may prove useful for conducting an initial reconnaisance of photometric variability among AGB stars in spheroids in the Virgo Cluster and beyond, where the required long exposure times may restrict observations to only a few epochs.
The Importance of Being Useless: A Cross-Cultural Contribution to the New Materialisms from Zhuangzi

The recent ‘material turn’ focuses on materiality in two distinctive ways: one, by including nonhuman agencies, another, by mining indigenous knowledges for alternative conceptions of agency and human–thing relations. A troubling gap persists between the two endeavours. The gap insinuates an us–them dichotomy and, more importantly, curtails communication between radically different visions of thingly agency – thereby impeding the political drive of these conceptual enterprises. This article is an essay in cross-cultural transposition. Through a close reading of a story of a useless tree in an ancient proto-Daoist text, Zhuangzi (莊子), the author shows how its fabulist and oneiric form illuminates a distinctive perspective on uselessness. Conversely, the trope of uselessness lets us begin from what she calls a ‘situated affectivity’ amidst more-than-human materialities. The article concludes with a brief comparison of three modalities of uselessness from different ‘cosmologies’ of thought – a foretaste of the potentials of cross-cosmological endeavours.
Reporting clinical outcomes of breast reconstruction: a systematic review.

BACKGROUND Breast reconstruction after mastectomy for cancer requires accurate evaluation to inform evidence-based participatory decision making, but the standards of outcome reporting after breast reconstruction have not previously been considered. METHODS We used extensive searches to identify articles reporting surgical outcomes of breast reconstruction. We extracted data using published criteria for complication reporting modified to reflect reconstructive practice. Study designs included randomized controlled trials, cohort studies, and case series. The Cochrane Risk of Bias tool was used to critically appraise all study designs. Other criteria used to assess the studies were selection and funding bias, statistical power calculations, and institutional review board approval. Wilcoxon signed rank tests were used to compare the breadth and frequency of study outcomes, and χ² tests were used to compare the number of studies in each group reporting each of the published criteria. All statistical tests were two-sided. RESULTS Surgical complications following breast reconstruction in 42,146 women were evaluated in 134 studies. These included 11 (8.2%) randomized trials, 74 (55.2%) cohort studies, and 49 (36.6%) case series. Fifty-three percent of studies demonstrated a disparity between methods and results in the numbers of complications reported. Complications were defined by 87 (64.9%) studies and graded by 78 (58.2%). Details such as the duration of follow-up and risk factors for adverse outcomes were omitted from 47 (35.1%) and 58 (43.3%) studies, respectively. Overall, the studies defined fewer than 20% of the complications they reported, and the definitions were largely inconsistent. CONCLUSIONS The results of this systematic review suggest that outcome reporting in breast reconstruction is inconsistent and lacks methodological rigor. The development of a standardized core outcome set is recommended to improve outcome reporting in breast reconstruction.
Proteome-Wide Screening Reveals Immunodominance in the CD8 T Cell Response against Classical Swine Fever Virus with Antigen-Specificity Dependent on MHC Class I Haplotype Expression

Vaccination with live attenuated classical swine fever virus (CSFV) vaccines induces a rapid onset of protection which has been associated with virus-specific CD8 T cell IFN-γ responses. In this study, we assessed the specificity of this response, by screening a peptide library spanning the CSFV C-strain vaccine polyprotein to identify and characterise CD8 T cell epitopes. Synthetic peptides were pooled to represent each of the 12 CSFV proteins and used to stimulate PBMC from four pigs rendered immune to CSFV by C-strain vaccination and subsequently challenged with the virulent Brescia strain. Significant IFN-γ expression by CD8 T cells, assessed by flow cytometry, was induced by peptide pools representing the core, E2, NS2, NS3 and NS5A proteins. Dissection of these antigenic peptide pools indicated that, in each instance, a single discrete antigenic peptide or pair of overlapping peptides was responsible for the IFN-γ induction. Screening and titration of antigenic peptides or truncated derivatives identified the following antigenic regions: core241–255 PESRKKLEKALLAWA and NS31902–1912 VEYSFIFLDEY, or minimal length antigenic peptides: E2996–1003 YEPRDSYF, NS21223–1230 STVTGIFL and NS5A3070–3078 RVDNALLKF. The epitopes are highly conserved across CSFV strains and variable sequence divergence was observed with related pestiviruses. Characterisation of epitope-specific CD8 T cells revealed evidence of cytotoxicity, as determined by CD107a mobilisation, and a significant proportion expressed TNF-α in addition to IFN-γ. Finally, the variability in the antigen-specificity of these immunodominant CD8 T cell responses was confirmed to be associated with expression of distinct MHC class I haplotypes. Moreover, recognition of NS21223–1230 STVTGIFL and NS31902–1912 VEYSFIFLDEY by a larger group of C-strain vaccinated animals showed that these peptides could be restricted by additional haplotypes. Thus the antigenic regions and epitopes identified represent attractive targets for evaluation of their vaccine potential against CSFV.
The Effect of TIP on Pneumovirus-Induced Pulmonary Edema in Mice

Background Pulmonary edema plays a pivotal role in the pathophysiology of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)-induced respiratory failure. In this study we determined whether treatment with TIP (AP301), a synthetic cyclic peptide that mimics the lectin-like domain of human TNF, decreases pulmonary edema in a mouse model of severe human RSV infection. TIP is currently undergoing clinical trials as a therapy for pulmonary permeability edema and has been shown to decrease pulmonary edema in different lung injury models. Methods C57BL/6 mice were infected with pneumonia virus of mice (PVM) and received TIP or saline (control group) by intratracheal instillation on day five (early administration) or day seven (late administration) after infection. In a separate set of experiments the effect of multiple dose administration of TIP versus saline was tested. Pulmonary edema was determined by the lung wet-to-dry (W/D) weight ratio and was assessed at different time-points after the administration of TIP. Secondary outcomes included clinical scores and lung cellular response. Results TIP did not have an effect on pulmonary edema in different dose regimens at different time points during PVM infection. In addition, TIP administration did not affect clinical severity scores or lung cellular response. Conclusion In this murine model of severe RSV infection TIP did not affect pulmonary edema nor course of disease.
Measuring Learning using an Untrained Control Group: Comment on R. Reber and Perruchet

R. Reber and Perruchet (this issue) argue that use of control groups without training is unsound for establishing that learning has occurred. We show that inferring learning from a difference between a trained group and an untrained control in no way relies on their implausible additivity assumption, and that untrained control groups can be an invaluable aid to the researcher.
Does Privatisation Improve Performance of Industrial Enterprises? Empirical Evidence from Russia

This study, based on panel data from 189 industrial enterprises in 1992‐96, shows that privatisation 'on average' produces little improvement in performance of Russian enterprises. However, disaggregating the process, we reveal that methods of privatisation do influence performance but the impact is not always positive. The state seems to be a passive shareholder. At the same time, our results suggest that majority state ownership is preferable to a state minority stockholding, possibly because the absence of a monitoring shareholder in the latter case does not permit managers to achieve their own objectives at the expense of other shareholders.
Efficient Two-Stream Motion and Appearance 3D CNNs for Video Classification

The video and action classification have extremely evolved by deep neural networks specially with two stream CNN using RGB and optical flow as inputs and they present outstanding performance in terms of video analysis. One of the shortcoming of these methods is handling motion information extraction which is done out side of the CNNs and relatively time consuming also on GPUs. So proposing end-to-end methods which are exploring to learn motion representation, like 3D-CNN can achieve faster and accurate performance. We present some novel deep CNNs using 3D architecture to model actions and motion representation in an efficient way to be accurate and also as fast as real-time. Our new networks learn distinctive models to combine deep motion features into appearance model via learning optical flow features inside the network.
Signal enhancement using beamforming and nonstationarity with applications to speech

We consider a sensor array located in an enclosure, where arbitrary transfer functions (TFs) relate the source signal and the sensors. The array is used for enhancing a signal contaminated by interference. Constrained minimum power adaptive beamforming, which has been suggested by Frost (1972) and, in particular, the generalized sidelobe canceler (GSC) version, which has been developed by Griffiths and Jim (1982), are the most widely used beamforming techniques. These methods rely on the assumption that the received signals are simple delayed versions of the source signal. The good interference suppression attained under this assumption is severely impaired in complicated acoustic environments, where arbitrary TFs may be encountered. In this paper, we consider the arbitrary TF case. We propose a GSC solution, which is adapted to the general TF case. We derive a suboptimal algorithm that can be implemented by estimating the TFs ratios, instead of estimating the TFs. The TF ratios are estimated by exploiting the nonstationarity characteristics of the desired signal. The algorithm is applied to the problem of speech enhancement in a reverberating room. The discussion is supported by an experimental study using speech and noise signals recorded in an actual room acoustics environment.
Individual heterogeneity and costly punishment: a volunteer's dilemma

Social control and the enforcement of social norms glue a society together. It has been shown theoretically and empirically that informal punishment of wrongdoers fosters cooperation in human groups. Most of this research has focused on voluntary and uncoordinated punishment carried out by individual group members. However, as punishment is costly, it is an open question as to why humans engage in the punishment of wrongdoers even in one-time-only encounters. While evolved punitive preferences have been advocated as proximate explanations for such behaviour, the strategic nature of the punishment situation has remained underexplored. It has been suggested to conceive of the punishment situation as a volunteer's dilemma (VOD), where only one individual's action is necessary and sufficient to punish the wrongdoer. Here, we show experimentally that implementing the punishment situation as a VOD sustains cooperation in an environment where punishers and non-punishers coexist. Moreover, we show that punishment-cost heterogeneity allows individuals to tacitly agree on only the strongest group member carrying out the punishment, thereby increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of social norm enforcement. Our results corroborate that costly peer punishment can be explained without assuming punitive preferences and show that centralized sanctioning institutions can emerge from arbitrary individual differences.
Finding recurrent patterns from continuous sign language sentences for automated extraction of signs

We present a probabilistic framework to automatically learn models of recurring signs from multiple sign language video sequences containing the vocabulary of interest. We extract the parts of the signs that are present in most occurrences of the sign in context and are robust to the variations produced by adjacent signs. Each sentence video is first transformed into a multidimensional time series representation, capturing the motion and shape aspects of the sign. Skin color blobs are extracted from frames of color video sequences, and a probabilistic relational distribution is formed for each frame using the contour and edge pixels from the skin blobs. Each sentence is represented as a trajectory in a low dimensional space called the space of relational distributions. Given these time series trajectories, we extract signemes from multiple sentences concurrently using iterated conditional modes (ICM). We show results by learning single signs from a collection of sentences with one common pervading sign, multiple signs from a collection of sentences with more than one common sign, and single signs from a mixed collection of sentences. The extracted signemes demonstrate that our approach is robust to some extent to the variations produced within a sign due to different contexts. We also show results whereby these learned sign models are used for spotting signs in test sequences.
Personality, motivation and video games

This study explored relationships between personality, video game preference and gaming experiences. Two hundred and thirty-five participants completed an online survey in which they recalled a recent gaming experience, and provided measures of personality and their gaming experience via the Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) measure. Relationships between game genre, personality and gaming experience were found. Results are interpreted with reference to the validity of the PENS, current models of video gaming motivations and enjoyment, and sub-groups of people that may be more vulnerable to possible negative effects of games.
Guided Exploration of the Architectural Solution Space in the Face of Uncertainty

A system’s early architectural decisions impact its properties (e.g., scalability, dependability) as well as stakeholder concerns (e.g., cost, time to delivery). Choices made early on are both difficult and costly to change, and thus it is paramount that the engineer gets them “right”. This leads to a paradox, as in early design, the engineer is often forced to make these decisions under uncertainty, i.e., not knowing the precise impact of those decisions on the various concerns. How could the engineer make the “right” choices in such circumstances? This is precisely the question we have tackled in this paper. We present GuideArch, a framework aimed at guiding the exploration of the architectural solution space under uncertainty. It provides techniques and tools that help the engineer to make informed decisions. The approach has been thoroughly evaluated in a project aimed at reengineering a mobile software system.
A Conceptual Framework of Knowledge Integration in Multisourcing Arrangements

As organizations are increasingly outsourcing interdependent IT and business services to multiple vendors, the issue of knowledge integration between client and multiple vendors is becoming of high relevance today. This paper explores the antecedents and mechanisms which facilitate the success of knowledge integration across multiple stakeholders in multisourcing and the outcomes of successful knowledge integration in this context. The paper develops a conceptual framework of knowledge integration in the multisourcing arrangements, based on a detailed review of current literature on knowledge integration and applying it to the multi-vendor environment. This paper concludes by calling for further empirical study to examine the integrative framework of the key antecedents, mechanisms and consequences of knowledge integration in the multisourcing arrangements.