Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Are functional motor and sensory symptoms really more frequent on the left? A systematic review

Objectives: To test the hypothesis that unilateral motor and sensory symptoms unexplained by identifiable disease are more common on the left side of the body than the right. Methods: Systematic review of the literature published since 1965. Results: 121 eligible studies, involving 1139 patients, were analysed. The pooled proportion of functional left sided weakness and sensory symptoms in adults was 58% (95% confidence interval (CI) 55 to 61%). A much higher proportion of left sided symptoms (66%, 95% CI 61 to 71%) was found in studies where laterality featured in the title of the paper. However, when laterality was not mentioned in the title, no significant difference between left and right was observed (53% on the left, 95% CI 48 to 57%). This difference could not be explained on the basis of sex differences between the groups or the date of the study. Functional or “psychogenic” movement disorder was right sided in 68% (95% CI 61 to 75%). Handedness did not influence symptom lateralisation. Conclusions: The findings of this systematic review question whether functional weakness and sensory symptoms do in fact occur more commonly on the left side of the body. A type of outcome variable reporting bias in combination with non-blinding of investigators may be responsible for this long held but erroneous belief.
ACQUISITION OF L2 VOCABULARY FOR EFFECTIVE READING: TESTING TEACHERS' CLASSROOM PRACTICE

Four practical approaches taken by teachers in their attempts to help students acquire the minimum sight vocabulary necessary for reading English for Science and Technology (EST) texts are described. Over a period of 12 weeks, subjects (native Spanish speakers at university level) were divided into 4 intact groups and worked under different conditions. Initial measurement showed that the groups were not significantly different and that all subjects featured low levels of vocabulary knowledge. Comparison of means obtained in a final test revealed that all groups improved their vocabulary significantly, and that the different approaches seemed to have helped to different degrees. The approach that produced the most improvement was that which trained subjects in the use of a specific vocabulary-memorizing technique. Due to the use of intact, numerically varying groups, results should be viewed with caution. However, they are consistent with previous research findings showing that Hispanic students with strategy training improved their vocabulary (O’Malley and Chamot, 1990). In addition, our results also conform to research showing that students, especially those at lower levels of proficiency, are accustomed to and favor the use of mechanical strategies for learning vocabulary (Schmitt, 1997; Riazi and Alvari, 2004).
Ethics, morality and the case for realist political theory

Abstract A common trait of all realistic political theories is the rejection of a conception of political theory as applied moral philosophy and an attempt to preserve some form of distinctively political thinking. Yet the reasons for favouring such an account of political theory can vary, a point that has often been overlooked in recent discussions by realism’s friends and critics alike. While a picture of realism as first-and-foremost an attempt to develop a more practical political theory which does not reduce morality to politics is often cited, in this paper we present an alternative understanding in which the motivation to embrace realism is grounded in a set of critiques of or attitudes towards moral philosophy which then feed into a series of political positions. Political realism, on this account, is driven by a set of philosophical concerns about the nature of ethics and the place of ethical thinking in our lives. This impulse is precisely what motivated Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss to their versions of distinctively realist political thought and is important to emphasise because it demonstrates that realism does not set politics against ethics (a misunderstanding typically endorsed by realism’s critics) but is rather an attempt to philosophise about politics without relying on understandings of morality which we have little reason to endorse.
An Exploration of Document Impact on Graph-Based Multi-Document Summarization

The graph-based ranking algorithm has been recently exploited for multi-document summarization by making only use of the sentence-to-sentence relationships in the documents, under the assumption that all the sentences are indistinguishable. However, given a document set to be summarized, different documents are usually not equally important, and moreover, different sentences in a specific document are usually differently important. This paper aims to explore document impact on summarization performance. We propose a document-based graph model to incorporate the document-level information and the sentence-to-document relationship into the graph-based ranking process. Various methods are employed to evaluate the two factors. Experimental results on the DUC2001 and DUC2002 datasets demonstrate that the good effectiveness of the proposed model. Moreover, the results show the robustness of the proposed model.
Observed influence of riming, temperature, and turbulence on the fallspeed of solid precipitation

Forecasts of the amount and geographic distribution of snow are highly sensitive to a model's parameterization of hydrometeor fallspeed. Riming is generally thought to lead to particles with a higher mass and terminal velocity. Yet models commonly assume that heavily rimed particles such as graupel have a fixed density and that their settling speed is unaffected by turbulence in storms. Here we show automated measurements of photographed hydrometeor shape and fallspeed using a new instrument placed in Utah's Wasatch Mountain Range. The data show that graupel in low‐turbulence conditions has a size‐dependent fallspeed distribution with a mode near 1 m s−1, a result that is generally consistent with prior observations. However, the distributions are broadened by turbulence and there is a correspondence between particle density and air temperature. In high turbulence and at low temperatures, any sensitivity of fallspeed to particle size disappears.
Sentiment Analysis in the News

Recent years have brought a significant growth in the volume of research in sentiment analysis, mostly on highly subjective text types (movie or product reviews). The main difference these texts have with news articles is that their target is clearly defined and unique across the text. Following different annotation efforts and the analysis of the issues encountered, we realised that news opinion mining is different from that of other text types. We identified three subtasks that need to be addressed: definition of the target; separation of the good and bad news content from the good and bad sentiment expressed on the target; and analysis of clearly marked opinion that is expressed explicitly, not needing interpretation or the use of world knowledge. Furthermore, we distinguish three different possible views on newspaper articles ― author, reader and text, which have to be addressed differently at the time of analysing sentiment. Given these definitions, we present work on mining opinions about entities in English language news, in which we apply these concepts. Results showed that this idea is more appropriate in the context of news opinion mining and that the approaches taking this into consideration produce a better performance.
The DAN-AERO MW Experiments Final report

max. 2000 char. ): This report describes the DAN-AERO MW experiments carried out within a collaborative, three years research project between Riso DTU and the industrial partners LM Glasfiber, Siemens Wind Power, Vestas Wind Systems A/S and the utility company DONG Energy. The main objective of the project was to establish an experimental data base which can provide new insight into a number of fundamental aerodynamic and aero-acoustic issues, important for the design and operation of MW size turbines. The most important issue is the difference between airfoil characteristics measured under 2D, steady conditions in a wind tunnel and the unsteady 3D flow conditions on a rotor. The different transition characteristics might explain some of the differences between the 2D and 3D airfoil data and the experiments have been set up to provide data on this subject. The overall experimental approach has been to carry out a number of coordinated, innovative measurements on full scale MW size rotors as well as on airfoils for MW size turbines in wind tunnels. Shear and turbulence inflow characteristics were measured on a Siemens 3.6 MW turbine with a five hole pitot tube. Pressure and turbulent inflow characteristics were measured on a 2MW NM80 turbine with an 80 m rotor. One of the LM38.8 m blades on the rotor was replaced with a new LM38.8 m blade where instruments for surface pressure measurements at four radial sections were build into the blade during the blade production process. Additionally, the outmost section on the blade was further instrumented with around 50 microphones for high frequency surface pressure measurements. The surface pressure measurements have been correlated with inflow measurements from four five hole pitot tubes and two sensors for measuring the high frequency (50 Hz to10 kHz) contents of the inflow turbulence. In parallel, 2D wind tunnel measurements on common airfoils for wind turbine applications have been conducted in three different wind tunnels at Delft University (NL), at LM Glasfiber (DK) and at VELUX (DK). Initial results from the different measurement set-ups are presented in order to show the application areas for the total data set. ISSN 0106-2840 ISBN 978-87-550-3809-7 Contract no.: ENS no. 33033-0074 Group's own reg. no.: 1110059-01,-02,-03,-04,-05 Sponsorship: The Danish Energy Agency EFP2007, Vestas Wind Systems A/S, Siemens Wind Power A/S, LM Glasfiber, DONG Energy, Riso DTU Cover : The lift at the NM80 turbine at Tjaereborg bringing down the technicians after having covered all the pressure taps with tape. Photo: Helge Aagaard Madsen, Riso DTU Pages: 41 Figures: 43 References: 14 Information Service Department Riso National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy Technical University of Denmark P.O. Box 49 DK-4000 Roskilde Denmark Telephone +45 46774005 bibl@risoe.dtu.dk Fax +45 46774013 www.risoe.dtu.dk
Nonopioid Actions of Intrathecal Dynorphin Evoke Spinal Excitatory Amino Acid and Prostaglandin E2 Release Mediated by Cyclooxygenase-1 and -2

Spinal dynorphin is hypothesized to contribute to the hyperalgesia that follows tissue and nerve injury or sustained morphine exposure. We considered that these dynorphin actions are mediated by a cascade involving the spinal release of excitatory amino acids and prostaglandins. Unanesthetized rats with lumbar intrathecal injection and loop dialysis probes received intrathecal NMDA, dynorphin A(1-17), or dynorphin A(2-17). These agents elicited an acute release of glutamate, aspartate, and taurine but not serine. The dynorphin peptides and NMDA also elicited a long-lasting spinal release of prostaglandin E2. Prostaglandin release evoked by dynorphin A(2-17) or NMDA was blocked by the NMDA antagonist amino-5-phosphonovalerate as well the cyclooxygenase (COX) inhibitor ibuprofen. To identify the COX isozyme contributing to this release, SC 58236, a COX-2 inhibitor, was given and found to reduce prostaglandin E2 release evoked by either agent. Unexpectedly, the COX-1 inhibitor SC 58560 also reduced dynorphin A(2-17)-induced, but not NMDA-induced, release of prostaglandin E2. These findings reveal a novel mechanism by which elevated levels of spinal dynorphin seen in pathological conditions may produce hyperalgesia through the release of excitatory amino acids and in part by the activation of a constitutive spinal COX-1 and -2 cascade.
A Redistributed Proximal Bundle Method for Nonconvex Optimization

Proximal bundle methods have been shown to be highly successful optimization methods for unconstrained convex problems with discontinuous first derivatives. This naturally leads to the question of whether proximal variants of bundle methods can be extended to a nonconvex setting. This work proposes an approach based on generating cutting-planes models, not of the objective function as most bundle methods do but of a local convexification of the objective function. The corresponding convexification parameter is calculated “on the fly” in such a way that the algorithm can inform the user as to what proximal parameters are sufficiently large that the objective function is likely to have well-defined proximal points. This novel approach, shown to be sound from both the objective function and subdifferential modelling perspectives, opens the way to create workable nonconvex algorithms based on nonconvex $\mathcal{VU}$ theory. Both theoretical convergence analysis and some encouraging preliminary numerical experience are provided.
SPEAKER INDEPENDENT PHONETIC RECOGNITION USING AUDITORY MODELLING AND RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORKS

Two speaker independent speech recognition experiments, regarding the automatic discrimination of the Italian alphabet I-set and E-set, two very difficult Italian phonetic classes, will be described. The speech signal is analyzed by a recently developed joint synchrony/mean-rate auditory processing scheme and a fully-connected feed-forward recurrent BP network was used for the classification stage. The achieved speaker independent mean recognition rate was 65%, for the Iset and 88% for the E-set showing rather satisfactory results given the difficulty of both tasks.
Shark: SQL and Analytics with Cost-Based Query Optimization on Coarse-Grained Distributed Memory

Abstract : Shark is a research data analysis system built on a novel coarse grained distributed shared-memory abstraction. Shark pairs query processing with deep data analysis, providing a unified system for easy data manipulation using SQL while pushing sophisticated analysis closer to its data. It scales to thousands of nodes in a fault tolerant manner. Shark can answer queries over 40 times faster than Apache Hive and run machine learning programs on large datasets over 25 times faster than equivalent MapReduce programs on Apache Hadoop. Unlike previous systems, Shark shows that it is possible to achieve these speedups while retaining a MapReduce-like execution engine, with the fine-grained fault tolerance properties that such an engine provides. Shark additionally provides several extensions to its engine, including table and column-level statistics collection as well as a cost-based optimizer, both of which we describe in depth in this paper. Cost-based query optimization in some cases improves the performance of queries with multiple joins by orders of magnitude over Hive and over 2 compared to previous versions of Shark. The result is a system that matches the reported speedups of MPP analytic databases against MapReduce while providing more comprehensive fault tolerance and complex analytics capabilities.
The Modic Vertebral Endplate and Marrow Changes: Pathologic Significance and Relation to Low Back Pain and Segmental Instability of the Lumbar Spine

SUMMARY: Two decades following their description, the significance of Modic vertebral endplate and marrow changes remains a matter of debate. These changes are closely related to the normal degenerative process affecting the lumbar spine, and their prevalence increases with age. However, the exact pathogenesis underlying these changes and their relation to segmental instability of the lumbar spine and to low back pain remain unclear. In this paper, we review the literature relevant to this topic and discuss the currently available evidence regarding the pathologic and clinical significance of Modic changes.
Venture Capital, Private Equity, Ipos, and Banking

Over the last few years, the importance of venture capital in fostering new firms has grown tremendously, not only in the U.S., but also in the international context, both in developed and in emerging economies. In recent years, venture capital (VC) investments across national borders have started to trend upwards. Foreign or cross-border investment in venture capital markets has increased from 10% of all venture capital investments in 1991 to 22.7% in 2008 (based on number of venture capital investments). An important driver of this increase is the significant upward trend in international venture capital investments in emerging nations over this time period. The number of venture capital investments by international investors as a fraction of total venture capital investments in emerging nations increased from 8.7% in 1991 to 56% in 2008. There has also been an increase, although more modest, in the number of international venture capital investments as a fraction of all venture capital investments in developed nations over the same time period (10.1% in 1991 to 20% in 2008). While the venture capital industry originated in the US, a number of non-US economies have developed their own venture capital industries, with a significant number of local venture capitalists investing in entrepreneurial firms in their own countries. At the same time, the Internet and other technologies have had a significant impact on financial markets and intermediaries such as venture capitalists, private equity firms, and investment banks (as well as commercial banks) over the last decade and a half. However, there has been relatively little research on the effects of
Happiness, eudaimonia, and other holy grails: What can job loss teach us about ‘One-size-fits-all’ theories of well-being?

Abstract Positive psychology has made significant advances in our understanding of well-being, yet agreement about the definition and nature of well-being remains elusive. This study explores the experience of well-being from a bottom-up, naturalistic point of view and compares these inductive notions with existing a priori theories. Using a qualitative-focused case study methodology, this paper explores how everyday people describe well-being in the context of job loss among a sample of 20 workers from the Ottawa, Canada technology sector. Findings support integrated conceptualizations of hedonia and eudaimonia while also potentially identifying new notions of well-being. Identified themes include (a) life evaluation, (b) transitory experiencing, (c) growth and grounding, (d) environmental mastery/stability, (e) mental ill-being/ill-health, and (f) motivational mindsets/conditions. This study shows well-being to be a rich, pluralistic construct which includes the non-dualistic notions of both subjectivity and objectivity as well as encompassing notions related to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of well-being.
Prognostic impact of diabetes mellitus on hepatocellular carcinoma: Special emphasis from the BCLC perspective

Background Diabetes mellitus (DM) is associated with higher incidence and poorer prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The influence of DM on patient survival in different HCC stages is not known. Methods A prospective dataset of 3,182 HCC patients was collected between 2002 and 2014. Patients were divided into three groups according to BCLC stages (BCLC stage 0 and stage A, BCLC stage B, BCLC stage C and stage D). We compared the cumulative survival rate of diabetic and non-diabetic patients in different BCLC groups. The correlation between DM and overall survival was also analyzed by multivariate Cox regression model within each group. Results DM is present in 25.2% of all patients. Diabetic patients had lower cumulative survival in BCLC stage 0 plus BCLC stage A group (log rank p<0.001), and BCLC stage B group (log rank p = 0.012), but not in BCLC stage C plus BCLC stage D group (log rank p = 0.132). Statistically significant differences in overall survival are found between diabetic and non-diabetic patients in BCLC stage 0 plus stage A group (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] = 1.45, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.08–1.93, p = 0.013), and BCLC stage B (adjusted HR = 1.77, 95% CI 1.24–2.51, p = 0.002). In contrast, the survival difference is not seen in BCLC stage C plus stage D group (adjusted HR = 1.09, 95% CI 0.90–1.30, p = 0.387). Conclusions DM is prevalent in HCC, and is associated with lower survival rate in HCC patients with BCLC stage 0 plus stage A and B, but not in those with BCLC stage C plus stage D.
HOW NATURE MAY MAKE US PUBLIC SPIRITED

We consider the classic puzzle of why people turn out for elections in substantial numbers even though formal analysis strongly suggests that rational agents would not vote. If one assumes that voters do not make systematic mistakes, the most plausible explanation seems to be that agents receive a warm glow from the act of voting itself. However, this begs the question of why agents feel a warm glow from participating in the electoral process in the first place. We approach this question from an memetic standpoint. More specifically, we consider a model in which social norms, ideas, values, or more generally, “memes” influence the behavior of groups of agents, and in turn, induce a kind of competition between value systems. We show for a range of situations that groups with a more public-spirited social norm have an advantage over groups that are not as public-spirited. We also explore conditions under which the altruistic behavior resulting from public-spiritedness is disadvantageous. The details depend on the costs of voting, the extent to which different types of citizens agree or disagree over the benefits of various public policies, and the relative proportions of various preference types in the population. We conclude that memetic evolution over social norms may be a force that causes individuals to internalize the benefits that their actions confer on others.
Impacts of Personality Traits on Consumer Innovation Success

Via a study of innovating and non-innovating German consumers, we explore links between the “Big Five” personality traits and successful accomplishment of three basic innovation process stages by consumer-innovators: (1) generating an idea for a new product or product improvement, (2) developing a prototype that implements that idea, and (3) diffusing the innovation to others. We find that personality traits are significantly associated with success differ at each stage. First, those who score higher on openness to experience are significantly more likely to have new product ideas. Second, being introverted and conscientious is significantly associated with successful prototyping. Third, those who possess high levels of conscientiousness are more likely to successfully commercially diffuse their innovations, whereas, in contrast, conscientiousness lowers the likelihood of successful peer-to-peer diffusion.
L-Indistinguishability For SL (2)

The notion of L-indistinguishability, like many others current in the study of L-functions, has yet to be completely defined, but it is in our opinion important for the study of automorphic forms and of representations of algebraic groups. In this paper we study it for the simplest class of groups, basically forms of SL(2). Although the definition we use is applicable to very few groups, there is every reason to believe that the results will have general analogues [12]. The phenomena which the notion is intended to express have been met–and exploited–by others (Hecke [5] § 13, Shimura [17]). Their source seems to lie in the distinction between conjugacy and stable conjugacy. If F is a field, G a reductive algebraic group over F, and the algebraic closure of F then two elements of G(F) may be conjugate in without being conjugate in G(F).