Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
1 Crowdsourcing in Speech Perception

Our understanding of human speech perception is still at a pr imitive stage, and the best theoretical or computational models lack the kind of detail required to predict listeners’ responses to spoken stimuli. It is natural, therefore, for r esearchers to seek novel methods to gain insights into one of the most complex aspects of human behaviour. Web-based experiments offer the prospect of detailed response distri butions gleaned from large listener samples, and thereby provide a means to ask new types of quest ions. Instead of instructing listeners to classify speech stimuli into one of a small numb er of categories chosen by the experimenter, large sample experiments allow the luxury of meaningful analysis of what is effectively an open set of responses. This freedom from expe rimenter bias is more likely to lead to unexpected outcomes than a traditional formal tes t which, of necessity, usually involves far fewer participants. Web-based experimentati on involving auditory and linguistic judgements for speech stimuli is in its infancy, but early ef forts over the last decade have produced some useful data. Some of these early crowdsourcin g experiences are related in section 1.2. However, the promise of web-based speech perception experi ments must be tempered by the realisation that the combination of audio, linguisti c judgement and the web is not a natural one. Notwithstanding browser and other portabili y issues covered elsewhere in this volume, it is relatively straightforward to guarantee a consistent presentation of textual elements to web-based participants, but the same cannot be s aid currently for audio stimuli, and speech signals in particular. Similarly, while it may be possible using pre-tests to assess
On representations of p-adic GL2(D)

This paper is in two parts. In the first we work out the asymptotics of functions in the Kirillov model of an irreducible admissible representation of GL 2 (D) for a p-adic division algbera D. In the second part we prove a theorem, for GL m (H) for a quaternionic p-adic division algebra H, of explicitly realizing the contragredient representation and then derive a consequence of this for distinguished representations for GL 2 (H]).
Mechanical Ventilation Drives Inflammation in Severe Viral Bronchiolitis

Introduction Respiratory insufficiency due to severe respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection is the most frequent cause of paediatric intensive care unit admission in infants during the winter season. Previous studies have shown increased levels of inflammatory mediators in airways of mechanically ventilated children compared to spontaneous breathing children with viral bronchiolitis. In this prospective observational multi-center study we aimed to investigate whether this increase was related to disease severity or caused by mechanical ventilation. Materials and Methods Nasopharyngeal aspirates were collected <1 hour before intubation and 24 hours later in RSV bronchiolitis patients with respiratory failure (n = 18) and non-ventilated RSV bronchiolitis controls (n = 18). Concentrations of the following cytokines were measured: interleukin (IL)-1α, IL-1β, IL-6, monocyte chemotactic protein (MCP)-1 and macrophage inflammatory protein (MIP)-1α. Results Baseline cytokine levels were comparable between ventilated and non-ventilated infants. After 24 hours of mechanical ventilation mean cytokine levels, except for MIP-1α, were elevated compared to non-ventilated infected controls: IL-1α (159 versus 4 pg/ml, p<0.01), IL-1β (1068 versus 99 pg/ml, p<0.01), IL-6 (2343 versus 958 pg/ml, p<0.05) and MCP-1 (174 versus 26 pg/ml, p<0.05). Conclusions Using pre- and post-intubation observations, this study suggests that endotracheal intubation and subsequent mechanical ventilation cause a robust pulmonary inflammation in infants with RSV bronchiolitis.
Promoting Youth Development in Workplaces

Working for pay is a common experience for youth in the United States. If informal jobs like baby-sitting and lawn mowing are included, 69% of youth work for pay at some time when they are age 15. During the year when they are age 18, 91% work (U.S. Department of Labor, 2003, p. 3). This may seem an unremarkable fact, but it reflects a unique convergence of forces. As formal schooling became universal through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, youth moved progressively out of the labor force and enrolled in school instead. Compulsory education and child labor laws were passed not only to protect children but to protect adult workers from competition. But in the midtwentieth century combining employment with school enrollment became increasingly common, especially as students worked after school and on weekends. In other highly developed countries this combination is much rarer. Students in most European and Asian countries are expected to devote all their time to school.
A^cbus^ ^ (ubfiasies) ^ Working Paper Alfred P. Sloan School of Management Instrument Variable Estimation of Misspecified Models Instrument Variable Estimation of Misspecified Models @bulletinstrumental Variable Estimation of Misspecified Models

This paper studies the estimation of models in which the set of instruments is not, in fact, orthogonal to the residuals. 1 first show that, in overidentified models of this type, one can generally obtain arbitrary estimates by varying the weights given to different instruments. I then weaken the assumptions of instrumental variable estimation by allowing for nondegenerate price distributions over the product of instruments and residuals. If the variance covariance matrix of this distribution is diagonal, the estimates which minimize the impact of misspecification are shown to lie inside the polyhedron of estimates from the exactly identified submodels.
Protective Efficacy of VP1-Specific Neutralizing Antibody Associated with a Reduction of Viral Load and Pro-Inflammatory Cytokines in Human SCARB2-Transgenic Mice

Hand-foot-mouth diseases (HFMD) caused by enterovirus 71 (EV71) and coxsackievirus 16 (CVA16) in children have now become a severe public health issue in the Asian-Pacific region. Recently we have successfully developed transgenic mice expressing human scavenger receptor class B member 2 (hSCARB2, a receptor of EV71 and CVA16) as an animal model for evaluating the pathogenesis of enterovirus infections. In this study, hSCARB2-transgenic mice were used to investigate the efficacy conferred by a previously described EV71 neutralizing antibody, N3. A single injection of N3 effectively inhibited the HFMD-like skin scurfs in mice pre-infected with clinical isolate of EV71 E59 (B4 genotype) or prevented severe limb paralysis and death in mice pre-inoculated with 5746 (C2 genotype). This protection was correlated with remarkable reduction of viral loads in the brain, spinal cord and limb muscles. Accumulated viral loads and the associated pro-inflammatory cytokines were all reduced. The protective efficacy of N3 was not observed in animals challenged with CVA16. This could be due to dissimilarity sequences of the neutralizing epitope found in CVA16. These results indicate N3 could be useful in treating severe EV71 infections and the hSCARB2-transgenic mouse could be used to evaluate the protective efficacy of potential anti-enterovirus agent candidates.
Program confinement in KVM/370

One aspect of producing secure operating systems involves the confinement of programs. This paper discusses the program confinement problem as addressed by the developers of a retrofitted version of the IBM VM/370 virtual machine monitor. This version of the system (called KVM/370) uses a security-kernel architecture to provide a provably secure multi-level environment for Department of Defense computer operations. To produce an efficient system, software and hardware resources must be globally shared among all processes of the security hierarchy. Since not all portions of KVM/370 can be formally proven, it is possible that untrusted software controlling global resources can be used to transmit sensitive information from a high-level to a low-level process. This paper discusses the techniques used in KVM/370 to confine programs (to prevent data leakage) so that the security of the system is preserved. A brief architectural description of the system is presented as well.
Monocarboxylate Transporter 2 and Stroke Severity in a Rodent Model of Sleep Apnea

Stroke is not only more prevalent but is also associated with more severe adverse functional outcomes among patients with sleep apnea. Monocarboxylate transporters (MCT) are important regulators of cellular bioenergetics, have been implicated in brain susceptibility to acute severe hypoxia (ASH), and could underlie the unfavorable prognosis of cerebrovascular accidents in sleep apnea patients. Rodents were exposed to either intermittent hypoxia (IH) during sleep, a characteristic feature of sleep apnea, or to sustained hypoxia (SH), and expression of MCT1 and MCT2 was assessed. In addition, the functional recovery to middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) in rats and hMCT2 transgenic mice and of hippocampal slices subjected to ASH was assessed, as well as the effects of MCT blocker and MCT2 antisense oligonucleotides and siRNAs. IH, but not SH, induced significant reductions in MCT2 expression over time at both the mRNA and protein levels and in the functional recovery of hippocampal slices subjected to ASH. Similarly, MCAO-induced infarcts were significantly greater in IH-exposed rats and mice, and overexpression of hMCT2 in mice markedly attenuated the adverse effects of IH. Exogenous pyruvate treatment reduced infarct volumes in normoxic rats but not in IH-exposed rats. Administration of the MCT2 blocker 4CN, but not the MCT1 antagonist p-chloromercuribenzene sulfonate, increased infarct size. Thus, prolonged exposures to IH mimicking sleep apnea are associated with increased CNS vulnerability to ischemia that is mediated, at least in part, by concomitant decreases in the expression and function of MCT2. Efforts to develop agonists of MCT2 should provide opportunities to ameliorate the overall outcome of stroke.
A New Forward Masking Model and its Application to Speech Enhancement

This paper presents a new forward masking model, which is applied to speech enhancement. The model develops a novel expression for forward masking, where the parameters are related to the masker level, the delay and the frequency obtained by curve-fitting the psychoacoustic data. This model is then incorporated, in a novel way, into a speech enhancement scheme. Objective measures using PESQ demonstrates that our enhancement scheme, provides significant improvements over four existing speech enhancement methods, when tested with speech signals corrupted by various noises at very low signal to noise ratios. Hence, the new forward masking model provides a greater and more accurate masking threshold calculation that leads to better PESQ scores
Circulating Angiogenic T Cells and Their Subpopulations in Patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Objective. Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is associated with accelerated atherosclerosis and increased cardiovascular risk. Angiogenic T cells (Tang), a specific T cell subset, have been identified and involved in the repair of damaged endothelium. This study aimed to analyze the Tang cell subsets in relation to disease specific features from SLE patients. Methods. Tang cell subsets were assessed in peripheral blood samples from 41 SLE patients and 22 healthy controls (HC) by flow cytometry on the basis of CD31 and CXCR4 expression on CD3+, CD4+, and CD8+ T cells. Results. The percentage of circulating CD8+CD31+CXCR4+ T cells (CD8+ Tang), but not CD3+CD31+CXCR4+ T cells (Tang) and CD4+CD31+CXCR4+ T cells (CD4+ Tang), in SLE was higher than HC. The percentages of Tang cell subsets in anti-dsDNA-positive SLE patients were significantly increased as compared to their negative counterparts and HC. Additionally, the levels of circulating Tang cell subsets were negatively correlated with age at sampling and at diagnosis, but not disease duration or disease activity. Conclusion. Anti-dsDNA-positivity may identify a group of SLE patients with increased Tang cell subsets and circulating CD8+ Tang cells may be viewed as a potentially useful biomarker of endothelial damage and cardiovascular risk in SLE.
Distributions of ground movements parallel to deep excavations in clay

An empirical procedure for fitting a complementary error function (erfc) to settlement and lateral ground movement data in a direction parallel to an excavation support wall is proposed based on extensive optical survey data obtained around a 12.8 m deep excavation in Chicago. The maximum ground movement and the height and length of an excavation wall define the erfc fitting function. The erfc fit is shown to apply to three other excavation projects where substantial ground movement data were reported.Key words: excavations, clays, ground movements, performance data.
A Comparison of Multifractal Models for Assets Returns in Economic Perspective

This paper compares multifractal models for assets returns from four aspects of economic perspective: ability of reproducing stylized facts, support of economic theory, accuracy of forecasting and explaining, mathematical elegancy and computational parsimony. All the multifractal models, according to their hypotheses and logic, can be classified into three categories, the representatives of which are MRW, MSM and SEMF respectively. Comparing with the models in classical finance, the multifractal models have better forecasting performance and more excellent ability to reproduce stylized facts. MRW has a little preponderance in reproducing stylized facts but fewer literature and empirical estimated method than MSM. MSM has more preponderance in dealing with multi-frequency asset returns than MRW. SEMF is better than MRW and MSM in four aspects of economic perspective but has the least literature and empirical estimated method than MSM or MRW. The SEMF and its extend models have extraordinary advantage and glamour for economists and are worth further research.
The Interaction between Accrual Management and Hedging: Evidence from Oil and Gas Firms

This research investigates whether oil and gas producing firms use abnormal accruals and hedging with derivatives as substitutes to manage earnings volatility. Firms engaged in oil exploration and drilling are exposed to two kinds of risks that can cause earnings volatility: oil price risk and exploration risk. Firms can use abnormal accrual choices and/or derivatives to reduce earnings volatility caused by oil price risk, but cannot directly hedge the operational risk of unsuccessful drilling. Because hedging and using abnormal accruals are costly activities, and because prior research suggests managers do not eliminate all volatility (Haushalter 2000; Barton 2001), we expect that, at the margin, managers will use these smoothing mechanisms as substitutes to manage earnings volatility. Our results suggest a sequential process whereby managers of oil and gas producing firms first determine the extent to which they will use derivatives to hedge oil price risk, and then, especially in the fourth quarter, ma.
Time Scales in Epidemiological Analysis: An Empirical Comparison

The Cox proportional hazards model is routinely used to analyze time-to-event data. To use this model requires the definition of a unique well-defined time scale. Most often, observation time is used as the time scale for both clinical and observational studies. Recently after a suggestion that it may be a more appropriate scale, chronological age has begun to appear as the time scale used in some reports. There appears to be no general consensus about which time scale is appropriate for any given analysis. It has been suggested that if the baseline hazard is exponential or if the age-at-entry is independent of covariates used in the model, then the two time scales provide similar results. In this report we provide an empirical examination of the results using the two different time scales using a large collection of data sets to examine the relationship between systolic blood pressure and coronary heart disease death (CHD death). We demonstrate, in this empirical example that the two time-scales can lead to differing results even when these two conditions appear to hold.
Finance and Growth: Time Series Evidence on Causality

This paper re-examines the empirical relationship between financial and economic development while (i) taking into account their dynamics and (ii) differentiating between stock market and banking sector development. We study the cointegration and causality between finance and growth for 22 advanced economies. Our time series analysis suggests that causality patterns depend on whether countries’ financial development stems from the stock market or the banking sector. We show that stock market development tends to cause economic development, while a reverse causality is mostly present between banking sector development and output growth. These findings indicate that the direction of causality between finance and growth is likely to be different at high levels of development.
A Comprehensive and Comparative Survey of the SIFT Algorithm - Feature Detection, Description, and Characterization

The SIFT feature extractor was introduced by Lowe in 1999. This algorithm provides invariant features and the corresponding local descriptors. The descriptors are then used in the image matching process. We propose an overview of this algorithm: the methodology and the tricky steps of its implementation, properties of the detector and descriptor. We analyze the structure of detected features. We finally compare our implementation to others, including the Lowe’s.
An inter‐regional approach to intraspecific variation in habitat association: Rock Buntings Emberiza cia as a case study

The habitat association approach has been increasingly used in ecology to resolve problems in wildlife conservation and management. One problem related to habitat association studies is that they are restricted to small geographical areas within a species’ range, and thus they are applicable to only a limited set of environmental conditions utilized by the species. In addition, very few studies address why the preference for specific habitat components may be adaptive for the species in question. The objective of this study was to examine how consideration of populations of a species from two dramatically different environments affects the results of habitat association modelling for a ground-nesting passerine, the Rock Bunting Emberiza cia . At a regional scale, a trend to defending breeding habitat patches with relatively higher stone cover was confined to birds from a temperate region in Slovakia. In contrast, in a semi-arid region in southeastern Spain, Rock Buntings preferred to use breeding habitat patches that had relatively higher grass cover. Combining data from both regions, breeding Rock Buntings showed a general pattern of using habitat patches close to hedges, with low bush cover, high ditch density and a steep slope. Whereas regional habitat association models appear to be sensitive to the particularities of the breeding environment, our study suggests that Rock Bunting breeding habitat association is constrained by the adults’ tactics to protect themselves against predators. Although the birds prefer to nest in patches of low vegetation, the better to see nearby predators, these patches are ideally close to taller vegetation that can be used to provide cover when evading predators, and they are also of a rugged profile that helps the birds to approach and leave the nest stealthily.
What Drives Matching E ¢ ciency ?

This paper presents a framework to study movements in the matching e¢ ciency of the labor market and highlights two observable factors a¤ecting matching e¢ ciency: (i) unemployment composition and (ii) dispersion in labor market conditions, the fact that tight labor markets coexist with slack ones. Using CPS micro data over 1976-2009, we nd that composition is responsible for most of the movements in matching e¢ ciency until 2006. In 2008-2009, only forty percent of an exceptionally low matching e¢ ciency can be attributed to composition. New highly disaggregated data on vacancies and unemployment show that the unexplained decline in matching e¢ ciency coincides with an increase in dispersion. JEL classi cations: J6, E24, E32
Is Structural Separation of Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers Necessary for Competition

Although competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) collectively have gained considerable market share since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, many entrants into local telecommunications have stumbled or failed. Some argue that competitive local telephony will eventuate only if the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) place their wholesale and retail operations in structurally separate subsidiaries. By mid-2001, several states began proceedings on mandatory structural separation, and influential members of Congress introduced legislation mandating structural separation. In this Article, we analyze, and reject as unpersuasive, the putative benefits of mandatory structural separation. Such regulatory intervention is unnecessary to prevent discrimination against unaffiliated retailers of telecommunications services. Nor would mandatory structural separation lower wholesale discounts or increase the CLECs' market share. Plausible hypotheses for the CLECs' problems do not require the assumption of anticompetitive behavior by the ILECs. Apart from producing no discernable benefits to consumers, mandatory structural separation would entail a substantial social cost in terms of forgone coordination of investment and production and forgone economies of scope. Moreover, mandatory structural separation would harm consumer welfare and reduce resources for investment by facilitating an anticompetitive strategy by the ILECs' largest rivals to raise the ILECs' costs of providing local telecommunications services. Policy makers should reject proposals for mandatory structural separation of the ILECs.
Omega-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids: Structural and Functional Effects on the Vascular Wall

Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFA) consumption is associated with reduced cardiovascular disease risk. Increasing evidence demonstrating a beneficial effect of n-3 PUFA on arterial wall properties is progressively emerging. We reviewed the recent available evidence for the cardiovascular effects of n-3 PUFA focusing on structural and functional properties of the vascular wall. In experimental studies and clinical trials n-3 PUFA have shown the ability to improve arterial hemodynamics by reducing arterial stiffness, thus explaining some of its cardioprotective properties. Recent studies suggest beneficial effects of n-3 PUFA on endothelial activation, which are likely to improve vascular function. Several molecular, cellular, and physiological pathways influenced by n-3 PUFA can affect arterial wall properties and therefore interfere with the atherosclerotic process. Although the relative weight of different physiological and molecular mechanisms and the dose-response on arterial wall properties have yet to be determined, n-3 PUFA have the potential to beneficially impact arterial wall remodeling and cardiovascular outcomes by targeting arterial wall stiffening and endothelial dysfunction.
Responses of trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides) phytochemistry and aspen blotch leafminer (Phyllonorycter tremuloidiella) performance to elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 and O3

1 This research was conducted at the Aspen FACE (Free Air CO2 Enrichment) site located in northern Wisconsin, U.S.A. where trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides Michaux) trees were exposed to one of four atmospheric treatments: elevated carbon dioxide (CO2; 560 µL/L), elevated ozone (O3; ambient × 1.5), elevated CO2 and O3, or ambient air. We evaluated the effects of these fumigants on aspen foliar quality and the performance of aspen blotch leafminer (Phyllonorycter tremuloidiella Braun).