Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gated Word-Character Recurrent Language Model

We introduce a recurrent neural network language model (RNN-LM) with long short-term memory (LSTM) units that utilizes both character-level and word-level inputs. Our model has a gate that adaptively finds the optimal mixture of the character-level and word-level inputs. The gate creates the final vector representation of a word by combining two distinct representations of the word. The character-level inputs are converted into vector representations of words using a bidirectional LSTM. The word-level inputs are projected into another high-dimensional space by a word lookup table. The final vector representations of words are used in the LSTM language model which predicts the next word given all the preceding words. Our model with the gating mechanism effectively utilizes the character-level inputs for rare and out-of-vocabulary words and outperforms word-level language models on several English corpora.
Persistent Airway Inflammation after Resolution of Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection in Rats

Neurogenic inflammation is markedly potentiated in airways that are infected with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Aims of this study were to determine whether this potentiation persists after the virus is cleared, investigate the mechanism of postviral potentiation, and define whether prophylaxis with a MAb against the RSV fusion protein (palivizumab) prevents this effect. Thirty days after inoculation, no evidence of active RSV infection was found in the airway epithelium by plaque assay or immunostaining and no viral nucleic sequences were detected by PCR, yet capsaicin-induced plasma extravasation in the airways that were infected 30 d earlier with RSV was still significantly larger compared with pathogen-free controls. Substance P content in lung tissues and capsaicin-induced release of this peptide from sensory nerves were significantly increased at 30 d. The administration of palivizumab 24 h before virus inoculation prevented the development of abnormal neurogenic inflammatory responses. Our data suggest that the airways remain abnormally susceptible to the proinflammatory effects of sensory nerves after RSV infection is cleared, as a result of changes in sensory innervation, and that this abnormality can be prevented by passive prophylaxis against RSV.
Human Papillomavirus Types 52 and 58 Are Prevalent in Uterine Cervical Squamous Lesions from Japanese Women

Objective. To estimate the prevalence and genotypes of high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) focusing HPV 16, 18, 52, and 58 in Japan. Methods. Liquid-base cytology specimens were collected from Japanese women (n = 11022), aged 14–98. After classifying cytodiagnosis, specimens were analyzed for HPV DNA by the multiplex polymerase chain reaction method, where 1195 specimens were positive for cervical smear, except adenomatous lesions. Result. HPV genotypes were detected in 9.5% of NILM and 72.2% of ASC-US or more cervical lesions. In positive cervical smears, HPV genotypes were HPV 52 at 26.6%, HPV 16 at 25.2%, HPV 58 at 21.8%, and HPV 18 at 7.1%. Most patients infected with HPV 16 were between 20–29 years old, decreasing with age thereafter. As for HPV 52 and 58, although the detection rate was high in 30- to 39-year-olds, it also was significant in the 50s and 60s age groups. Conclusion. In Japan, as a cause of abnormal cervical cytology, HPV52 and 58 are detected frequently in addition to HPV 16. In older age groups, HPV 52 and 58 detection rates were higher than that observed for HPV 16. After widespread current HPV vaccination, we still must be aware of HPV 52 and 58 infections.
Oral care for patients with cardiovascular disease and stroke.

BACKGROUND The authors describe how oral disease, particularly periodontal disease, may place certain patients at increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease and stroke. RESULTS Although the precise mechanisms of interaction are not clear, two biological mechanisms that may explain the relationship are presented. In addition, the authors describe the dental management issues that need to be understood in treating patients compromised by cardiovascular disease. CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS The patient with cardiovascular disease may present a challenge to the dental health care provider, depending on the degree of hemodynamic compromise and the stability of his or her condition.
The Language of Glosses in L2 Reading on Computer: Learners' Preferences

Comprehension difficulties in reading authentic texts make adaptations such as vocabulary glossing helpful. A study of forty readers in third-semester Spanish attempted to ascertain their behavior, specifically whether non-native learners of a second language who read a second language text on a computer screen access glossed vocabulary more frequently when the glosses are written in L1 or in L2. Reading a computerized Spanish-language passage containing 67 glossed items, some students could consult a translation into English and others a synonym in Spanish. Results tracked the number of items viewed in order to determine their preference. Students also responded to a number of survey questions about reading on the computer.
Two routes to personalized politics

This article describes two opposing types of political personalization: centralizing and decentralizing personalization. The first implies the centralization of political power in the hands of a few leaders, while the latter indicates a diffusion of group power among its components: individual politicians. We start by proposing definitions of the types and subtypes of centralized and decentralized personalization and review the literature in search of evidence of their occurrence. We then demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed typology by examining personalization trends in various aspects of Israeli politics and conclude with a discussion of the challenges that personalization set for liberal democracies.
The Reduction of the Electron Abundance during the Pre-explosion Simmering in White Dwarf Supernovae

Prior to the explosion of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf in a Type Ia supernova there is a long “simmering,” during which the 12C +12C reaction gradually heats the white dwarf on a long (~103 yr) timescale. Piro & Bildsten showed that weak reactions during this simmering set a maximum electron abundance Ye at the time of the explosion. We investigate the nuclear reactions during this simmering with a series of self-heating, at constant pressure, reaction network calculations. Unlike in AGB stars, p captures onto 22Ne and heavier trace nuclei do not play a significant role. The 12C abundance is sufficiently high that the neutrons preferentially capture onto 12C , rather than iron group nuclei. As an aid to hydrodynamical simulations of the simmering phase, we present fits to the rates of heating, electron capture, change in mean atomic mass, and consumption of 12C in terms of the screened thermally averaged cross section for 12C +12C . Our evaluation of the net heating rate includes contributions from electron captures into the 3.68 MeV excited state of 13C . This results in a slightly larger energy release, per 12C consumed, than that found by Piro & Bildsten, but less than that released for a burn to only 20Ne and 23Na . We compare our one-zone results to more accurate integrations over the white dwarf structure to estimate the amount of 12C that must be consumed to raise the white dwarf temperature, and hence to determine the net reduction of Ye during simmering.
An Examination of Individual Level Factors in Stress and Coping Processes: Perspectives of Chinese International Students in the United States

No empirical research has focused solely upon understanding the stress and coping processes of Chinese international students in the United States. This qualitative inquiry examines the individual-level variables that affect the stress-coping process of Chinese international students and how they conceptualize and adapt to their stress at an American university. Results indicate individual variables, such as age, gender, field of study, length of stay, acculturation style, and coping strategies, show significant influences on stress levels among students. These results can be used to help Chinese international students adapt to the American educational environment and improve the services and programs American universities deliver to their foreign students.
SKI: Exposing Kernel Concurrency Bugs through Systematic Schedule Exploration

Kernel concurrency bugs are notoriously difficult to find during testing since they are only triggered under certain instruction interleavings. Unfortunately, no tools for systematically subjecting kernel code to concurrency tests have been proposed to date. This gap in tool support may be explained by the challenge of controlling precisely which kernel interleavings are executed without modifying the kernel under test itself. Furthermore, to be practical, prohibitive runtime overheads must be avoided and tools must remain portable as the kernel evolves. In this paper, we propose SKI, the first tool for the systematic exploration of possible interleavings of kernel code. SKI finds kernel bugs in unmodified kernels, and is thus directly applicable to different kernels. To achieve control over kernel interleavings in a portable way, SKI uses an adapted virtual machine monitor that performs an efficient analysis of the kernel execution on a virtual multiprocessor platform. This enables SKI to determine which kernel execution flows are eligible to run, and also to selectively control which flows may proceed. In addition, we detail several essential optimizations that enable SKI to scale to real-world concurrency bugs. We reliably reproduced previously reported bugs by applying SKI to different versions of the Linux kernel and to the FreeBSD kernel. Our evaluation further shows that SKI was able to discover, in widely used and already heavily tested file systems (e.g., ext4, btrfs), several unknown bugs, some of which pose the risk of data loss.
Seeking a ‘critical mass’: middle-class parents’ collective engagement in city public schooling

A growing body of literature has begun to explore the individual identities, motivations, and school choices of middle-class, typically white, parents who choose to reside in socioeconomically and racially mixed central city neighborhoods. Drawing on qualitative research in three US cities, we argue that a focus on middle-class parents’ collective engagement in schooling is particularly important in under-resourced urban contexts. In these environments, we show, middle-class parents’ use of social networks often extends beyond basic information-sharing about school quality to encompass a range of activities undertaken with other families ‘like them’ who have also chosen to enroll their children in an urban public school. We find that, in some instances, middle-class parents’ collective actions can benefit an entire class or school. Yet in other instances, their activation of social capital can contribute to processes of social reproduction in urban schooling by excluding or marginalizing low-income students and their families.
Cultural Relativity in Perceiving Emotion From Vocalizations

A central question in the study of human behavior is whether certain emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness, are recognized in nonverbal cues across cultures. We predicted and found that in a concept-free experimental task, participants from an isolated cultural context (the Himba ethnic group from northwestern Namibia) did not freely label Western vocalizations with expected emotion terms. Responses indicate that Himba participants perceived more basic affective properties of valence (positivity or negativity) and to some extent arousal (high or low activation). In a second, concept-embedded task, we manipulated whether the target and foil on a given trial matched in both valence and arousal, neither valence nor arousal, valence only, or arousal only. Himba participants achieved above-chance accuracy only when foils differed from targets in valence only. Our results indicate that the voice can reliably convey affective meaning across cultures, but that perceptions of emotion from the voice are culturally variable.
Safety and efficacy of a 6-month home-based exercise program in patients with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy

Background: Previous randomized controlled trials investigating exercise training programs in facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) patients are scarce and of short duration only. This study assessed the safety and efficacy of a 6-month home-based exercise training program on fitness, muscle, and motor function in FSHD patients. Methods: Sixteen FSHD patients were randomly assigned to training (TG) and control (CG) groups (both n = 8) in a home-based exercise intervention. Training consisted of cycling 3 times weekly for 35 minutes (combination of strength, high-intensity interval, and low-intensity aerobic) at home for 24 weeks. Patients in CG also performed an identical training program (CTG) after 24 weeks. The primary outcome was change in peak oxygen uptake (VO2 peak) measured every 6 weeks. The principal secondary outcomes were maximal quadriceps strength (MVC) and local quadriceps endurance every 12 weeks. Other outcome measures included maximal aerobic power (MAP) and experienced fatigue every 6 weeks, 6-minute walking distance every 12 weeks, and muscle characteristics from vastus lateralis biopsies taken pre- and postintervention. Results: The compliance rate was 91% in TG. Significant improvements with training were observed in the VO2 peak (+19%, P = 0.002) and MAP by week 6 and further to week 24. Muscle endurance, MVC, and 6-minute walking distance increased and experienced fatigue decreased. Muscle fiber cross-sectional area and citrate synthase activity increased by 34% (P = 0.008) and 46% (P = 0.003), respectively. Dystrophic pathophysiologic patterns were not exacerbated. Similar improvements were experienced by TG and CTG. Conclusions: A combined strength and interval cycling exercise-training program compatible with patients’ daily professional and social activities leads to significant functional benefits without compromising muscle tissue.
Surveillance versus ablation for incidentally diagnosed small renal tumours: the SURAB feasibility RCT.

BACKGROUND There is uncertainty around the appropriate management of small renal tumours. Treatments include partial nephrectomy, ablation and active surveillance. OBJECTIVES To explore the feasibility of a randomised trial of ablation versus active surveillance. DESIGN Two-stage feasibility study: stage 1 - clinician survey and co-design work; and stage 2 - randomised feasibility study with qualitative and economic components. METHODS Stage 1 - survey of radiologists and urologists, and development of patient information materials. Stage 2 - patients identified across eight UK centres with small renal tumours (< 4 cm) were randomised (1 : 1 ratio) to ablation or active surveillance in an unblinded manner. Randomisation was carried out by a central computer system. The primary objective was to determine willingness to participate and to randomise a target of 60 patients. The qualitative and economic data were collected separately. RESULTS The trial was conducted across eight centres, with a site-specific period of recruitment ranging from 3 to 11 months. Of the 154 patients screened, 36 were eligible and were provided with study details. Seven agreed to be randomised and one patient was found ineligible following biopsy results. Six patients (17% of those eligible) were randomised: three patients received ablation and no serious adverse events were recorded. The 3- and 6-month data were collected for four (67%) and three (50%) out of the six patients, respectively. The qualitative substudy identified factors directly impacting on the recruitment of this trial. These included patient and clinician preferences, organisational factors (variation in clinical pathway) and standard treatment not included. The health economic questionnaire was designed and piloted; however, the sample size of recruited patients was insufficient to draw a conclusion on the feasibility of the health economics. CONCLUSIONS The trial did not meet the criteria for progression and the recruitment rate was lower than hypothesised, demonstrating that a full trial is presently not possible. The qualitative study identified factors that led to variation in recruitment across the sites. Implementation of organisational and operational measures can increase recruitment in any future trial. There was insufficient information to conduct a full economic analysis. TRIAL REGISTRATION Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN31161700. FUNDING This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment programme and will be published in full in Health Technology Assessment; Vol. 21, No. 81. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information.
Interval Bipartite Consensus of Networked Agents Associated With Signed Digraphs

This paper solves consensus problems for networked agents whose interactions with each other are described by signed digraphs. The Laplacian matrix of a signed digraph is studied by introducing rooted cycles, and the relationship between it and the spanning tree condition is addressed. In particular, the Laplacian matrix of a signed digraph with spanning trees is positive stable if and only if there is at least one negative rooted cycle; otherwise, it has exactly one zero eigenvalue if and only if either there exist no rooted cycles or all existing rooted cycles are positive. It is shown that all agents reach interval bipartite consensus if their associated signed digraph has a spanning tree. Further, the consensus values of all agents depend only on the initial states of those agents which are associated with root vertices. The developed consensus results are applicable for multi-agent systems with both continuous-time and discrete-time dynamics. Illustrative examples are provided to demonstrate interval bipartite consensus performances for multi-agent systems associated with different signed digraphs which all contain spanning trees but are not strongly connected.
Distributed learning in cognitive radio networks: Multi-armed bandit with distributed multiple players

We consider a cognitive radio network with distributed multiple secondary users, where each user independently searches for spectrum opportunities in multiple channels without exchanging information with others. The occupancy of each channel is modeled as an i.i. d. Bernoulli process with unknown mean. Users choosing the same channel collide, and none or only one receives reward depending on the collision model. This problem can be formulated as a decentralized multi-armed bandit problem. We measure the performance of a decentralized policy by the system regret, defined as the total reward loss with respect to the optimal performance under the perfect scenario where all channel parameters are known to all users and collisions among secondary users are eliminated through perfect scheduling. We show that the minimum system regret grows with time at the same logarithmic order as in the centralized counterpart, where users exchange observations and make decisions jointly. We propose a basic policy structure that ensures a Time Division Fair Sharing (TDFS) of the channels. Based on this basic TDFS structure, decentralized policies can be constructed to achieve this optimal order while ensuring fairness among users. Furthermore, we show that the proposed TDFS policy belongs to a general class of decentralized polices, for which a uniform performance benchmark is established. All results hold for general stochastic processes beyond Bernoulli and thus find a wide area of potential applications including multi-channel communication systems, multi-agent systems, web search and advertising, and social networks.
Paradigm free mapping with sparse regression automatically detects single‐trial functional magnetic resonance imaging blood oxygenation level dependent responses

The ability to detect single trial responses in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies is essential, particularly if investigating learning or adaptation processes or unpredictable events. We recently introduced paradigm free mapping (PFM), an analysis method that detects single trial blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) responses without specifying prior information on the timing of the events. PFM is based on the deconvolution of the fMRI signal using a linear hemodynamic convolution model. Our previous PFM method (Caballero‐Gaudes et al., 2011: Hum Brain Mapp) used the ridge regression estimator for signal deconvolution and required a baseline signal period for statistical inference. In this work, we investigate the application of sparse regression techniques in PFM. In particular, a novel PFM approach is developed using the Dantzig selector estimator, solved via an efficient homotopy procedure, along with statistical model selection criteria. Simulation results demonstrated that, using the Bayesian information criterion to select the regularization parameter, this method obtains high detection rates of the BOLD responses, comparable with a model‐based analysis, but requiring no information on the timing of the events and being robust against hemodynamic response function variability. The practical operation of this sparse PFM method was assessed with single‐trial fMRI data acquired at 7T, where it automatically detected all task‐related events, and was an improvement on our previous PFM method, as it does not require the definition of a baseline state and amplitude thresholding and does not compromise on specificity and sensitivity. Hum Brain Mapp, 2013. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
‘Any one of these boat people could be a terrorist for all we know!’ Media representations and public perceptions of ‘boat people’ arrivals in Australia

In April 2009 a boat (named the ‘SIEV 36’ by the Australian Navy) carrying 49 asylum seekers exploded off the north coast of Australia. Media and public debate about Australia’s responsibility to individuals seeking asylum by boat was instantaneous. This paper investigates the media representation of the ‘SIEV 36’ incident and the public responses to media reports through online news fora. We examined three key questions: 1) Does the media reporting refer back to and support previous policies of the Howard Government? 2) Does the press and public discourse portray asylum arrivals by boat as a risk to Australian society? 3) Are journalists following and applying industry guidelines about the reporting of asylum seeker issues? Our results show that while there is an attempt to provide a balanced account of the issue, there is variation in the degree to which different types of reports follow industry guidelines about the reporting of issues relating to asylum seekers and the use of ‘appropriate’ language.