Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bidirectional perception of lexical prominence in Spanish and Japanese as second languages

Perception of novel phonetic contrasts in a second language has been studied extensively, but suprasegmentals have seen relatively little attention even though difficulties at this level can strongly impact comprehension. Available studies suggest that the perception of segmental and suprasegmental categories are subject to similar factors, but evidence is not entirely conclusive. Additionally, studies focusing on the perception of lexical prominence have suggested that perception across languages with different accent types might be particularly problematic, meaning that these effects in particular would be independent of the direction of language learning. This dissertation explores both of these questions by studying the perception of lexical prominence by second-language learners in Spanish (a stress-accent language) and Japanese (a pitch-accent language). Following a bidirectional approach, it examines whether the perception of phonologically different types of lexical prominence is subject to similar effects as those traditionally identified for cross-linguistic segmental perception, and how these relate to the direction of learning. A first set of studies provides a comparative acoustic description of prominence in both languages, and presents the results of an identification task with natural words in different positions within a sentence. Using multiple speakers, these tests showed that the difficulties seen by both groups are different and related to features in their L1, and that despite phonological differences, contexts existed in which high performance was possible. A second set of studies explored the sensitivity of non-native listeners to secondary acoustic cues and the development of new accentual categories, and showed effects of learning for both groups and a strong sensitivity to duration for learners of Spanish. Learners of Japanese showed extremely poor category development for unaccented words in particular. Overall results show that existing research on SLA is applicable to suprasegmental perception, and that the transfer effects affecting both groups have different domains and scope. The implications for language teaching and theories of L2 perception are discussed.
FERMENTASI HASIL SAMPING INDUSTRI DAN PERKEBUNAN KELAPA SAWIT DENGAN PROBIOTIK LOKAL TERHADAP PERFORMANS DOMBA

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui pengaruh pemanfaatan fermentasi hasil samping industi kelapa sawit dengan probiotik lokal terhadap performans domba. Penelitian dilaksanakan di Laboratorium Biologi Ternak Program Studi Peternakan, Fakultas Pertanian, Universitas Sumatera Utara, dimulai bulan Juni 2014 - September 2014. Penelitian ini menggunakan 15 ekor domba dengan bobot awal 15.13±0.64 kg dan rancangan yang digunakan adalah rancangan acak lengkap (RAL) yang terdiri atas 3 perlakuan dan 5 ulangan. Perlakuan terdiri atas ransum P0=(tanpa fermentasi), P1= (fermentasi dengan isolat hasil limbah sawit), P2= (fermentasi dengan isolat asal cairan rumen kerbau). Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa pemberian pakan hasil samping industri kelapa sawit fermentasi dengan probiotik lokal memberikan pengaruh yang sangat nyata terhadap konsumsi pakan g/ekor/hari (702.95±59.576; 866.37±52.062; 698.46±119.52), memberikan pengaruh yang nyata terhadap pertambahan bobot badan g/ekor/hari (78.50±20.91; 112.71±14.12; 78.23±29.96) dan memberikan pengaruh yang tidak nyata terhadap konversi pakan. Kesimpulan dari hasil penelitian ini adalah fermentasi hasil samping indutri dan perkebunan kelapa sawit menggunakan isolat bakteri asal limbah sawit berpengaruh positif terhadap konsumsi pakan, pertambahan bobot badan dan konversi pakan pada domba hair sheep .
Harmonic Scalpel versus Electrocautery Dissection in Modified Radical Mastectomy for Breast Cancer: A Meta-Analysis

Background Despite the common use of conventional electrocautery in modified radical mastectomy for breast cancer, the harmonic scalpel is recently emerging as a dominant surgical instrument for dissection and haemostasis, which is thought to reduce the morbidity, such as seroma and blood loss. But the results of published trials are inconsistent. So we made the meta-analysis to assess the intraoperative and postoperative endpoints among women undergoing modified radical mastectomy with harmonic scalpel or electrocautery. Methods A comprehensive literature search of case-control studies from PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE and Cochrane Library databases involving modified radical mastectomy with harmonic scalpel or electrocautery was performed. We carried out a meta-analysis of primary endpoints including postoperative drainage, seroma development, intraoperative blood loss and secondly endpoints including operative time and wound complications. We used odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) to evaluate the effect size for categorical outcomes and standardised mean differences (SMDs) for continuous outcomes. Results A total of 11 studies with 702 patients were included for this meta-analysis. There was significant difference in total postoperative drainage (SMD: -0.74 [95%CI: -1.31, -0.16]; P< 0.01), seroma development[OR: 0.49 (0.34, 0.70); P < 0.01], intraoperative blood loss(SMD: -1.14 [95%CI: -1.81,-0.47]; P < 0.01) and wound complications [OR: 0.38 (0.24, 0.59); P < 0.01] between harmonic scalpel dissection and standard electrocautery in modified radical mastectomy for breast cancer. No difference was found as for operative time between harmonic scalpel dissection and standard electrocautery (SMD: 0.04 [95%CI: -0.41, 0.50]; P = 0.85). Conclusion Compared to standard electrocautery, harmonic scalpel dissection presents significant advantages in decreasing postoperative drainage, seroma development, intraoperative blood loss and wound complications in modified radical mastectomy for breast cancer, without increasing operative time. Harmonic scalpel can be recommended as a preferential surgical instrument in modified radical mastectomy.
Status and Future Ex O Ffi Ci O Nasa National Aeronautics and Space Administration Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data Geophysics Program, for Conceiving the Idea of This Working Group and for Providing Logistical Support. Helpful Suggestions and Encouragement Were Provided

The Status and future of lunar geoscience. What good is the Moon? Does this question sounds familiar? It should. It has been asked for centuries, ever since humans realized that the Earth's nearest planetary neighbor was not a deity but another world. Until a generation ago, the Moon was a distant, inaccessible world, lacking air, water, and life. It was hard to imagine that the Moon could be of much value even if it were possible to reach it. Things have changed. Humans have travelled to the Moon, walked on it, set up instruments on it, and brought pieces of it back. We have learned more about the Moon in the last generation than in all of recorded history. In the process, the Moon may have become the unintended victim of our own success, for now we hear that the Moon is too close, it's too easy to get to, we've been there, we already know too much about it, there's nothing left to discover, and it's an uninteresting place compared to, for example, the nucleus of a comet or the moons of Uranus. The result has been to leave the Moon deserted for more than a decade. No mission, manned or un-manned, has been launched to the Moon by any nation for more than 10 years. In such an atmosphere of general neglect, this report is both important and long overdue. It describes clearly what we have learned about the Moon, so that any technically minded reader unfamiliar with the past generation of lunar research can learn, quickly and easily, how much we have learned and how far we have come. More important, the report also points out what we haven't learned about the Moon, what we still need to learn, and how we can go about learning it. It is impossible to read this report and still believe that to study the Moon is to neglect the rest of the solar system. The Moon is a special world that preserves the early history of the solar system, and it is the key to understanding how all the terrestrial planets formed. There is a special local interest as well: the origin of the Moon is inseparable from the origin of Earth, and that bright familiar world in our own sky has a special importance for what it can reveal about the origin of our own planet and ourselves. But …
Muffled Price Signals: Household Water Demand Under Increasing-Block Prices

In many areas of the world, including large parts of the United States, scarce water supplies are a serious resource and environmental concern. The possibility exists that water is being used at rates that exceed what would be dictated by efficiency criteria, particularly when externalities are taken into account. Because of this, much attention has been paid by policy makers and others to the use of demand management techniques, including requirements for the adoption of specific technologies and restrictions on particular uses. A natural question for economists to ask is whether price would be a more cost-effective instrument to facilitate water demand management. As a first step in such an investigation, this paper draws upon a newly-available set of detailed data to estimate econometrically the demand function for household use of urban water supplies. We analyze cross-sectional time-series data that track 1,082 single-family households served by 16 water utilities in 11 urban areas in the United States and Canada. Because of the diverse multiple-block pricing structures that abound, estimating the effects of price and price structure on residential water demand poses some challenging and interesting problems. We find that the sensitivity of residential water demand to price is quite low, and that the effect of price structure may be more influential than the magnitude of marginal price itself. The household-level data we use allow us to assess the influences on residential water demand of climate, sociodemographic factors, and characteristics of housing stock, including home vintage. Our results indicate substantial heterogeneity in likely household responses to utility demand-management policies.
Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Sphere of Prosumerism

The term prosumer, first introduced by Toffler in the 1980s, has been developed by sociologists in response to Web 2.0 (the set of technologies that has transformed a predominantly static web into the collaborative medium initially envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee). The phenomena is now understood as a process involving the creation of meanings on the part of the consumer, who re-appropriates spaces that were dominated by institutionalized production, and this extends to the exploitation of consumer creativity on the production side. Recent consumption literature can be re-interpreted through the prosumer lens in order to understand whether prosumers are more creative or alienated in their activities. The peculiar typology of prosumption introduced by Web 2.0 leads us to analyze social capital as a key element in value creation, and to investigate its different online and offline forms. Our analysis then discusses the digital divide and critical consumerism as forms of empowerment impairment.
Multi-class Generalized Binary Search for Active Inverse Reinforcement Learning

This paper addresses the problem of learning a task from demonstration. We adopt the framework of inverse reinforcement learning, where tasks are represented in the form of a reward function. Our contribution is a novel active learning algorithm that enables the learning agent to query the expert for more informative demonstrations, thus leading to more sample-efficient learning. For this novel algorithm (Generalized Binary Search for Inverse Reinforcement Learning, or GBS-IRL), we provide a theoretical bound on sample complexity and illustrate its applicability on several different tasks. To our knowledge, GBS-IRL is the first active IRL algorithm with provable sample complexity bounds. We also discuss our method in light of other existing methods in the literature and its general applicability in multi-class classification problems. Finally, motivated by recent work on learning from demonstration in robots, we also discuss how different forms of human feedback can be integrated in a transparent manner in our learning framework.
First Chikungunya Outbreak in Suriname; Clinical and Epidemiological Features

Background In June 2014, Suriname faced the first Chikungunya outbreak. Since international reports mostly focus on hospitalized patients, the least affected group, a study was conducted to describe clinical characteristics of mainly outpatients including children. In addition, the cumulative incidence of this first epidemic was investigated. Methodology During August and September 2014, clinically suspected Chikungunya cases were included in a prospective follow-up study. Blood specimens were collected and tested for viral RNA presence. Detailed clinical information was gathered through multiple telephone surveys until day 180. In addition, a three stage household-based cluster with a cross-sectional design was conducted in October, December 2014 and March 2015 to assess the cumulative incidence. Principal Findings Sixty-eight percent of symptomatic patients tested positive for Chikungunya virus (CHIKV). Arthralgia and pain in the fingers were distinctive for viremic CHIKV infected patients. Viremic CHIKV infected children (≤12 years) characteristically displayed headache and vomiting, while arthralgia was less common at onset. The disease was cleared within seven days by 20% of the patients, while 22% of the viremic CHIKV infected patients, mostly women and elderly reported persistent arthralgia at day 180. The extrapolated cumulative CHIKV incidence in Paramaribo was 249 cases per 1000 persons, based on CHIKV self-reported cases in 53.1% of the households and 90.4% IgG detected in a subset of self-reported CHIKV+ persons. CHIKV peaked in the dry season and a drastic decrease in CHIKV patients coincided with a governmental campaign to reduce mosquito breeding sites. Conclusions/Significance This study revealed that persistent arthralgia was a concern, but occurred less frequently in an outpatient setting. The data support a less severe pathological outcome for Caribbean CHIKV infections. This study augments incidence data available for first outbreaks in the region and showed that actions undertaken at the national level to mount responses may have positively impacted containment of this CHIKV outbreak.
Cooperative diversity based on code superposition

This paper proposes a new approach to cooperative diversity based on the algebraic superposition of channel codes over a finite field. The scenario under consideration is one in which two "partners" - Node A and Node B cooperate in transmitting information to a single destination; each partner transmits both locally-generated information and relayed information that originated at the other partner. A key observation is that Node B already knows Node A's relayed information (previously sent from Node B) and can exploit that knowledge when decoding Node A's local information. This leads to an encoding scheme in which each partner transmits the algebraic superposition of its local and relayed information, and the superimposed codeword is interpreted differently at the two receivers - i.e., at the other partner and at the destination node - based on their different a priori knowledge. It is shown via simulation that the proposed scheme provides substantial coding gain over other cooperative diversity techniques, including those based on time sharing and signal (Euclidean space) superposition
Classification of Faces in Man and Machine

We attempt to shed light on the algorithms humans use to classify images of human faces according to their gender. For this, a novel methodology combining human psychophysics and machine learning is introduced. We proceed as follows. First, we apply principal component analysis (PCA) on the pixel information of the face stimuli. We then obtain a data set composed of these PCA eigenvectors combined with the subjects' gender estimates of the corresponding stimuli. Second, we model the gender classification process on this data set using a separating hyperplane (SH) between both classes. This SH is computed using algorithms from machine learning: the support vector machine (SVM), the relevance vector machine, the prototype classifier, and the K-means classifier. The classification behavior of humans and machines is then analyzed in three steps. First, the classification errors of humans and machines are compared for the various classifiers, and we also assess how well machines can recreate the subjects' internal decision boundary by studying the training errors of the machines. Second, we study the correlations between the rank-order of the subjects' responses to each stimulusthe gender estimate with its reaction time and confidence ratingand the rank-order of the distance of these stimuli to the SH. Finally, we attempt to compare the metric of the representations used by humans and machines for classification by relating the subjects' gender estimate of each stimulus and the distance of this stimulus to the SH. While we show that the classification error alone is not a sufficient selection criterion between the different algorithms humans might use to classify face stimuli, the distance of these stimuli to the SH is shown to capture essentials of the internal decision space of humans.Furthermore, algorithms such as the prototype classifier using stimuli in the center of the classes are shown to be less adapted to model human classification behavior than algorithms such as the SVM based on stimuli close to the boundary between the classes.
Exploring the influence of age, gender, education and computer experience on robot acceptance by older adults

It is generally recognized that non perceptual factors like age, gender, education and computer experience can have a moderating effect on how perception of a technology leads to acceptance of it. In our present research we are exploring the influence of these factors on the acceptance of assistive social robots by older adults. In this short paper we discuss the results of a user study in which a movie of an elderly person using a social assistive robot was shown to older adults. The analysis of the responses give a first indication on if and how these factors relate to the perceptual processes that lead to acceptance.
Attachment Styles as Predictors of Stigma Tendency in Adults

The purpose of this study was to examine the association between attachment styles and stigma in adults. Participants were 361 adults (186 females and 175 males) aged between 18 and 69 (M=31.77, SD=9.45). Participants completed the measurement instruments for determining their stigmatizing tendencies and attachment styles. Study results showed that, stigma tendencies of people with the secure attachment style are lower for the discrimination and exclusion, prejudgment and psychological health dimensions, and are higher for people with the fearful attachment style for the discrimination and exclusion, labeling and psychological health dimensions. Preoccupied and dismissive attachment styles are also positively associated with prejudgment tendency. Finally, stigma tendencies of males are more likely to be higher than females for the discrimination and exclusion, labeling and psychological health dimensions. Because different attachment styles are related variously to the subscales of stigma in this study, interventions to decrease stigma of individuals can verge to enhancing the quality of mother-child interactions.
Discovery of narrow X-ray absorption features from the low-mass X-ray binary X 1254 690 with XMM-Newton

We report on two XMM-Newton observations of the low-mass X-ray binary X 1254 690. During an XMM-Newton observation of the low-mass X-ray binary in 2001 January a deep X-ray dip was seen while in a second observation one year later no dips were evident. The 0.5-10 keV EPIC spectra from both non-dipping intervals are very similar being modeled by a disk-blackbody and a power-law continuum with additional structure around 1 keV and narrow absorption features at 7.0 keV and 8.2 keV which are identified with the K and K absorption lines of Fexxvi. The low-energy structure may be modeled as a 175 eV () wide emission line at0.95 keV. This feature is probably the same structure that was modeled as an absorption edge in an earlier BeppoSAX observation. The absorption line properties show no obvious dependence on orbital phase and are simi- lar in both observations suggesting that the occurrence of such features is not directly related to the presence of dipping activity. Narrow Fe absorption features have been observed from the two superluminal jet sources GRO J1655 40 and GRS 1915+105, and the four low-mass X-ray binaries GX 13+1, MXB 1658 298, X 1624 490 and X 1254 690. Since the latter 3 sources are dipping sources, which are systems viewed close to the accretion disk plane, and the two microquasars are thought to be viewed at an inclination of70, this suggests that these features are more prominent when viewed at high-inclination angles. This, together with the lack of any orbital dependence, implies a cylindrical geometry for the absorbing material.
ATP Serves as an Endogenous Inhibitor of UDP-Glucuronosyltransferase (UGT): A New Insight into the Latency of UGT

We have suggested that adenine-related compounds are allosteric inhibitors of UGT in rat liver microsomes (RLM) treated with detergent. To clarify whether the same occurs with a pore-forming peptide, alamethicin, the effects of adenine-related compounds on 4-metylumbelliferone (4-MU) glucuronidation were examined using RLM and human liver microsomes (HLM). ATP inhibited 4-MU glucuronidation when polyoxyethylene cetyl alcohol ether (Brij-58)-treated RLM were used (IC50 = approximately 70 μM). However, alamethicin-treated RLM exhibited a lower susceptibility (IC50 = approximately 460 μM) than Brij-58-treated RLM. A similar phenomenon was observed when pooled HLM were used. Then, the endogenous ATP content of RLM was determined in the presence and absence of alamethicin or detergent, and although no ATP remained in the microsomal pellets after Brij-58 treatment, more than half of the microsomal ATP remained even after treatment with alamethicin. Furthermore, the Vmax in the absence of an adenine-related compound was approximately three times higher in Brij-58-treated than in alamethicin-treated RLM. The difference in the inhibitory potency observed was due to the difference in remaining endogenous ATP and the accessibility of exogenous ATP to the luminal side of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), where the active site of UDP-glucuronosyltransferase (UGT) is located. Gefitinib (Iressa), a protein tyrosine kinase inhibitor, markedly inhibited human UGT1A9 activity. It is interesting to note that AMP antagonized Gefitinib-provoked inhibition of UGT1A9, and ATP exhibited an additive inhibitory effect at a lower concentration. Therefore, Gefitinib inhibits UGT1A9 at the common ATP-binding site shared with ATP and AMP. Releasing adenine nucleotide from the ER is suggested to be one of the mechanisms that explain the “latency” of UGT.
Reform With Reinvestment: Values and Tensions in Gentrifying Urban Schools

As cities across the country experience an influx of White and middle- to upper-class residents, new opportunities for the integration of urban schools emerge. Yet crucial challenges persist even when equity and inclusion are a focus for new stakeholders. This article explores the story of a largely White group of parents committed to investing in and reforming their gentrifying neighborhood’s elementary school. Given the numerous tensions that ensued, fostering leadership, equity, and intercultural awareness remains vital to ensuring that the new urban diversity also produces just and inclusive schools.