Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Convolutional Neural Networks with Data Augmentation for Classifying Speakers' Native Language

We use a feedforward Convolutional Neural Network to classify speakers’ native language for the INTERSPEECH 2016 Computational Paralinguistic Challenge Native Language Sub-Challenge, using no specialized features for computational par-alinguistics tasks, but only MFCCs with their ﬁrst and second order deltas. In addition, we augment the training data by re-placing the original examples with shorter overlapping samples extracted from them, thus multiplying the number of training examples by almost 40. With the augmented training dataset and enhancements to neural network models such as Batch Nor-malization, Dropout, and Maxout activation function, we managed to improve upon the challenge baseline by a large margin, both for the development and the test set.
The signal model: a possible explanation for the conversion of DNA double-strand breaks into chromatid breaks.

PURPOSE To present and evaluate the 'signal' model for the formation of radiation-induced chromatid breaks. CONCLUSIONS Chromatid breaks in human cells represent the apparent interstitial loss of up to about 40 Mbp of DNA, difficult to account for as single lesions under the classical 'breakage-and-reunion' hypothesis. If breakage-first resulted from two interacting DNA double-strand breaks (dsb) with the loss or displacement of the intervening fragment, a dose-squared relationship would be predicted for chromatid breaks. However, the relationship between chromatid break frequency and dose for human cells is linear. The alternative 'exchange' model of Revell is based on the principle of the interaction of two initiating lesions, thus also predicting a dose-squared relationship for chromatid 'breaks'. The signal model explains the conversion of dsb into chromatid breaks on the assumption that a single dsb generates a signal which triggers the cell to initiate a recombinational exchange involving a large loop of chromatin. Incomplete exchanges would be observed as chromatid breaks. Possible candidates for the signalling molecule(s) are DNA protein kinase (DNA PK) and the ATM protein.
Heritability and Evolutionary Potential in Thermal Tolerance Traits in the Invasive Mediterranean Cryptic Species of Bemisia tabaci (Hemiptera: Aleyrodidae)

With advancing global climate change, the analysis of thermal tolerance and evolutionary potential is important in explaining the ecological adaptation and changes in the distribution of invasive species. To reveal the variation of heat resistance and evolutionary potential in the invasive Mediterranean cryptic species of Bemisia tabaci, we selected two Chinese populations—one from Harbin, N China, and one from Turpan, S China—that experience substantial heat and cold stress and conducted knockdown tests under static high- and low-temperature conditions. ANOVAs indicated significant effects of populations and sex on heat knockdown time and chill coma recovery time. The narrow-sense heritability (h 2) estimates of heat tolerance based on a parental half-sibling breeding design ranged from 0.47±0.03 to 0.51±0.06, and the estimates of cold tolerance varied from 0.33±0.07 to 0.36±0.06. Additive genetic variances were significantly different from zero for both heat and cold tolerance. These results suggest that invasive B. tabaci Mediterranean cryptic species possesses a strong ability to respond to thermal selection and develops rapid resistance to climate change.
Individualised multifactorial lifestyle intervention trial for high-risk cardiovascular patients in primary care.

BACKGROUND The multiprofessional teams in Finnish health centres are well placed to carry out interventions aimed at the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. AIM To evaluate the effectiveness of an individually tailored multifactorial lifestyle intervention in primary care for individuals at high risk for cardiovascular disease. DESIGN OF STUDY A randomised controlled trial was conducted over 24 months with interim assessments at six and 12 months. SETTING A health centre in Finland with a patient population of 11,000. METHOD One hundred and fifty adults aged 18 to 65 years old with existing cardiovascular disease or multiple risk factors were randomised to active multiprofessional risk factor intervention or to standard care. The main outcome measure was a change in cardiovascular risk-factor score. Secondary outcomes were changes in blood pressure, weight, body-mass index, serum cholesterol, blood glucose, smoking cessation, and exercise habits. RESULTS The cardiovascular risk score decreased by 28% in the intervention group (23% in the control group), body weight decreased by 3.7% (2%) and total cholesterol decreased by 10.8% (6.5%), while time engaged in exercise increased by 39% (43%). Differences were not significant. CONCLUSIONS Cardiovascular risk levels of high-risk individuals decreased in both intervention and control groups. Primary care prevention should be targeted to high-risk persons. Long-term follow-up studies are needed.
Specificity of emotion regulation deficits in social anxiety: an internet study.

OBJECTIVES There is evidence for an association between social anxiety and emotion regulation difficulties. This study investigates that emotion regulation difficulties are specific to two domains of social anxiety. DESIGN AND METHOD An explorative study was conducted to examine the associations between emotion regulation facets and social anxiety in the normal population. N= 149 healthy volunteers participated in an internet-based survey. MEASURES Emotion regulation deficits were measured by the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale which consists of six subscales. Social anxiety was measured by the Social Phobia Scale and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale. RESULTS Hierarchical regression analyses showed that anxiety of interactive social situations is associated with non-acceptance of negative emotions, impulse control difficulties, and lack of functional emotion regulation strategies over and above the impact of age and general psychopathology. In contrast, anxiety of being observed by others was not specifically associated with emotion regulation strategies. CONCLUSION The results support the hypothesis that specific emotion regulation deficits are relevant to specific aspects of social anxiety. Implications for further research and therapy are discussed.
Context-for-wireless: context-sensitive energy-efficient wireless data transfer

Ubiquitous connectivity on mobile devices will enable numerous new applications in healthcare and multimedia. We set out to check how close we are towards ubiquitous connectivity in our daily life. The findings from our recent field-collected data from an urban university population show that while network availability is decent, the energy cost of network interfaces poses a great challenge. Based on our findings, we propose to leverage the complementary strength of Wi-Fi and cellular networks by choosing wireless interfaces for data transfers based on network condition estimation. We show that an ideal selection policy can more than double the battery lifetime of a commercial mobile phone, and the improvement varies with data transfer patterns and Wi-Fi availability. We formulate the selection of wireless interfaces as a statistical decision problem. The key to attaining the potential battery improvement is to accurately estimate Wi-Fi network conditions without powering up its network interface. We explore the use of different context information, including time, history, cellular network conditions, and device motion, for this purpose. We consequently devise algorithms that can effectively learn from context information and estimate the probability distribution of Wi-Fi network conditions. Simulations based on field-collected traces show that our algorithms can improve the average battery lifetime of a commercial mobile phone for a three-channel electrocardiogram (ECG) reporting application by 39%, very close to the theoretical upper bound of 42%. Finally, our field validation of our most simple algorithm demonstrates a 35% improvement in battery lifetime.
An analysis of requirements evolution in open source projects: recommendations for issue trackers

While requirements for open source projects originate from a variety of sources like e.g. mailing lists or blogs, typically, they eventually end up as feature requests in an issue tracking system. When analyzing how these issue trackers are used for requirements evolution, we witnessed a high percentage of duplicates in a number of high-prole projects. Further investigation of six open source projects and their users led us to a number of important observations and a categorization of the root causes of these duplicates. Based on this, we propose a set of improvements for future issue tracking systems.
Stiffness and hysteresis properties of some prosthetic feet

A prosthetic foot is an important element of a prosthesis, although it is not always fully recognized that the properties of the foot, along with the prosthetic knee joint and the socket, are in part responsible for the stability and metabolic energy cost during walking. The stiffness and the hysteresis, which are the topics of this paper, are not properly prescribed, but could be adapted to improve the prosthetic walking performance. The shape is strongly related to the cosmetic appearance and so can not be altered to effect these improvements. Because detailed comparable data on foot stiffness and hysteresis, which are necessary to quantify the differences between different types of feet, are absent in literature, these properties were measured by the authors in a laboratory setup for nine different prosthetic feet, bare and with two different shoes. One test cycle consisted of measurements of load deformation curves in 66 positions, representing the range from heel strike to toe-off. The hysteresis is defined by the energy loss as a part of the total deformation energy. Without shoes significant differences in hysteresis between the feet exist, while with sport shoes the differences in hysteresis between the feet vanish for the most part. Applying a leather shoe leads to an increase of hysteresis loss for all tested feet. The stiffness turned out to be non-constant, so mean stiffness is used. Because very little is known about the optimal values of stiffness and hysteresis, and substantial differences in stiffness between different feet and shoes exist, further investigation into the importance of stiffness and hysteresis to the walking quality of a foot is necessary. Footwear counts too for this quality because it modifies the variation in stiffness among the feet.
Deformations of N = 2 superconformal algebra and supersymmetric two-component Camassa–Holm equation

This paper is concerned with a link between central extensions of N = 2 superconformal algebra and a supersymmetric two-component generalization of the Camassa–Holm equation. Deformations of superconformal algebra give rise to two compatible bracket structures. One of the bracket structures is derived from the central extension and admits a momentum operator which agrees with the Sobolev norm of a co-adjoint orbit element. The momentum operator induces, via Lenard relations, a chain of conserved Hamiltonians of the resulting supersymmetric Camassa–Holm hierarchy.
Melatonin and vitamin D3 synergistically down‐regulate Akt and MDM2 leading to TGFβ‐1‐dependent growth inhibition of breast cancer cells

Abstract: Melatonin and vitamin D3 inhibit breast cancer cell growth and induce apoptosis, but they have never been combined as a breast cancer treatment. Therefore, we investigated whether their association could lead to an enhanced anticancer activity. In MCF‐7 breast cancer cells, melatonin together with vitamin D3, induced a synergistic proliferative inhibition, with an almost complete cell growth arrest at 144 hr. Cell growth blockade is associated to an activation of the TGFβ‐1 pathway, leading to increased TGFβ‐1, Smad4 and phosphorylated‐Smad3 levels. Concomitantly, melatonin and D3, alone or in combination, caused a significant reduction in Akt phosphorylation and MDM2 values, with a consequent increase of p53/MDM2 ratio. These effects were completely suppressed by adding a monoclonal anti‐TGFβ‐1 antibody to the culture medium. Taken together, these results indicate that cytostatic effects triggered by melatonin and D3 are likely related to a complex TGFβ‐1‐dependent mechanism, involving down‐regulation of both MDM2 and Akt‐phosphorylation.
Digging for knowledge with information extraction: a case study on human gene-disease associations

We present the information extraction system Text2SemRel. The system (semi-) automatically constructs knowledge bases from textual data consisting of facts about entities using semantic relations. An integral part of the system is a graph-based interactive visualization and search layer. The second contribution in this paper is the presentation of a case study on the (semi-) automatic construction of a knowledge base consisting of gene-disease associations. The resulting knowledge base, the Literature-derived Human Gene-Disease Network (LHGDN), is now an integral part of the Linked Life Data initiative and represents currently the largest publicly available gene-disease repository. The LHGDN is compared against several curated state of the art databases. A unique feature of the LHGDN is that the semantics of the associations constitute a wide variety of biomolecular conditions.
Dietary Flaxseed Oil Prevents Western-Type Diet-Induced Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in Apolipoprotein-E Knockout Mice

The prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has dramatically increased globally during recent decades. Intake of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), mainly eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA, C20:5n-3) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, C22:6n-3), is believed to be beneficial to the development of NAFLD. However, little information is available with regard to the effect of flaxseed oil rich in α-linolenic acid (ALA, C18:3n-3), a plant-derived n-3 PUFA, in improving NAFLD. This study was to gain the effect of flaxseed oil on NAFLD and further investigate the underlying mechanisms. Apolipoprotein-E knockout (apoE-KO) mice were given a normal chow diet, a western-type high-fat and high-cholesterol diet (WTD), or a WTD diet containing 10% flaxseed oil (WTD + FO) for 12 weeks. Our data showed that consumption of flaxseed oil significantly improved WTD-induced NAFLD, as well as ameliorated impaired lipid homeostasis, attenuated oxidative stress, and inhibited inflammation. These data were associated with the modification effects on expression levels of genes involved in de novo fat synthesis (SREBP-1c, ACC), triacylglycerol catabolism (PPARα, CPT1A, and ACOX1), inflammation (NF-κB, IL-6, TNF-α, and MCP-1), and oxidative stress (ROS, MDA, GSH, and SOD).
Diaphyseal Fractures of the Forearm in Adults, Plating Or Intramedullary Nailing Is a Better Option for the Treatment?

BACKGROUND: Fractures of the radius and ulna occupy a large field of the modern traumatology. Therefore, these fractures are a major subject in modern orthopaedics and traumatology. The study of the mechanisms of the trauma, and the pathophysiological changes that occur are of great importance for the development of ever more efficient and varied ways of the treatment and prophylactics of this type of fracture. AIM: The aim of this paper was to study the pattern of the diaphyseal fractures of the forearm in adults, to decide the modalities of surgical management, to observe the period of fracture healing clinically and radiologically, as well to study the rehabilitation of the patients. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The present study included 45 cases of diaphyseal fractures of both bones forearm in adults presenting to the orthopaedic outpatient department. For all the patients a detailed history was taken. A thorough clinical examination was carried out, required X-rays were taken, and initial treatment was given and admitted as in all patients. After careful pre-operative planning and evaluation for anaesthetic fitness, patients were operated for the fractures of both bone forearms. Twenty-three cases with 46 fractures were treated by open reduction and rigid fixation with DCP & Semi-tubular plates and 22 cases with 44 fractures were treated by closed reduction and fixation with “Talwarkar” intramedullary square nails. RESULTS: United results were found in 100% of plating group vs. 86% in the nailing group. Delayed and non-union results were found in 9% of the nailing group only. Average time to union in weeks was 9.4 weeks in the plating group vs. 10.2 weeks in the nailing group. CONCLUSION: Open reduction and internal fixation with compression plates with strict adherence to surgical technique is the gold standard method of treatment in both bones forearm fractures with excellent results than closed reduction, internal fixation with “Talwarkar” square nails which is also again a simple method with better results than conservative methods.
Selenoprotein P genetic variants and mrna expression, circulating selenium, and prostate cancer risk and survival

Low levels of selenium have been associated with increased risk of prostate cancer (PCa). Selenoprotein P is the most abundant selenoprotein in serum and delivers ten selenocysteine residues to tissues. Variation in the selenoprotein P gene (SEPP1) may influence PCa development or modify the effects of selenium. We examined the association of SEPP1 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with PCa risk and survival, and tested for interactions.
Connections From Kafka

In the current studies, we tested the prediction that learning of novel patterns of association would be enhanced in response to unrelated meaning threats. This prediction derives from the meaning-maintenance model, which hypothesizes that meaning-maintenance efforts may recruit patterns of association unrelated to the original meaning threat. Compared with participants in control conditions, participants exposed to either of two unrelated meaning threats (i.e., reading an absurd short story by Franz Kafka or arguing against one's own self-unity) demonstrated both a heightened motivation to perceive the presence of patterns within letter strings and enhanced learning of a novel pattern actually embedded within letter strings (artificial-grammar learning task). These results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning patterns are enhanced by the presence of a meaning threat.
Incidence of Hypertension in an Ambulatory Elderly Population

Investigations of the natural history of blood pressure have generally evaluated mean systolic and diastolic pressure changes. While informative, this information is not directly applicable to clinical practice settings, in which patients are usually classified as normotensive or hypertensive. We measured the actual incidence of hypertension, using two different definitions, in an ambulatory elderly population of 2,584 individuals over an 8‐year period. Using the less stringent blood pressure definition (systolic blood pressure >140 mmHg and diastolic blood pressure ≥90 mmHg), 884 (34.2%) participants were normotensive and 1,700 (65.8%) were hypertensive at an initial screening. The average annual incidence of hypertension over the subsequent eight years was 13.2%, and life tables demonstrated a gradual risk of developing hypertension. The development of hypertension was not associated with gender or age; while older age groups had a greater chance of developing hypertension than younger, the difference did not reach statistical significance.
Las escalas de prejuicio manifiesto y sutil: ¿una o dos dimensiones?

This paper examines whether the blatant and subtle prejudice scales of Pettigrew and Meertens (1995) are truly independent. We consider the correlation, factor structure and predictive capacity of the type of prejudice that these scales identify. In this study, subjects were administered the questionnaire and then placed in an experimental courtroom simulation, in which they act as members of the jury. The simulation stage, which represented the main innovation of the study, provided additional information on the validity of the typology. The data obtained showed a high correlation between the two scales and a factor structure that also calls into question the idea that the blatant and subtle prejudice scales are two independent dimensions. On the other hand, the typology presents a certain predictive value. All this suggests that the two scales reflect different levels of intensity of the same construct.
Simulation results for an interference-limited multiple-input multiple-output cellular system

We describe a simulation study of a cellular system using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna techniques along with adaptive modulation and aggressive frequency reuse. We show for the case of 3 transmit and 3 receive antennas, how much MIMO systems outperform systems with receive-diversity-only when noise dominates. When co-channel interference from surrounding cells dominates, the differences shrink, as do the absolute numbers. We quantify these reductions for the specific cases studied, and discuss further areas of research.
The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

1. Introduction 2. The meme hypothesis 3. Cultural DNA 4. The replication of complex culture 5. Variation 6. Selection 7. The story so far 8. The human mind: meme-complex with a virus? 9. The meme's eye view 10. Early cultural evolution 11. Memetic DNA 12. Memes and the mind 13. Science, religion and society: what can memes tell us? 14. Conclusions.
In Vitro-Assembled Alphavirus Core-Like Particles Maintain a Structure Similar to That of Nucleocapsid Cores in Mature Virus

ABSTRACT In vitro-assembled core-like particles produced from alphavirus capsid protein and nucleic acid were studied by cryoelectron microscopy. These particles were found to have a diameter of 420 Å with 240 copies of the capsid protein arranged in a T=4 icosahedral surface lattice, similar to the nucleocapsid core in mature virions. However, when the particles were subjected to gentle purification procedures, they were damaged, preventing generation of reliable structural information. Similarly, purified nucleocapsid cores isolated from virus-infected cells or from mature virus particles were also of poor quality. This suggested that in the absence of membrane and glycoproteins, nucleocapsid core particles are fragile, lacking accurate icosahedral symmetry.