Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE TIMING OF ISLAND EFFECTS IN NONNATIVE SENTENCE PROCESSING

Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, this study investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called island constraints) in first- and second-language (L1 and L2) sentence processing. The results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect L1 and L2 comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, these results show that the timing of island effects in L1 compared to L2 sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fit versus filled gaps) signaling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Even though L1 English speakers showed immediate sensitivity to filled gaps but not to lack of semantic fit, proficient German-speaking learners of English as a L2 showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in L2 processing is based on semantic feature matching rather than being structurally mediated as in L1 comprehension.
Examining the Effects of One- and Three-Dimensional Spatial Filtering Analyses in Magnetoencephalography

Spatial filtering, or beamforming, is a commonly used data-driven analysis technique in the field of Magnetoencephalography (MEG). Although routinely referred to as a single technique, beamforming in fact encompasses several different methods, both with regard to defining the spatial filters used to reconstruct source-space time series and in terms of the analysis of these time series. This paper evaluates two alternative methods of spatial filter construction and application. It demonstrates how encoding different requirements into the design of these filters has an effect on the results obtained. The analyses presented demonstrate the potential value of implementations which examine the timeseries projections in multiple orientations at a single location by showing that beamforming can reconstruct predominantly radial sources in the case of a multiple-spheres forward model. The accuracy of source reconstruction appears to be more related to depth than source orientation. Furthermore, it is shown that using three 1-dimensional spatial filters can result in inaccurate source-space time series reconstruction. The paper concludes with brief recommendations regarding reporting beamforming methodologies in order to help remove ambiguity about the specifics of the techniques which have been used.
The Green Fingerprint: Decreasing energy consumption with Decision Support Systems

Sustainable business development is a challenge that requires both organizational change and changes to individual behavior. We report on the design and implementation of an app-based decision support system designed to promote environmentally responsible behavior among individuals in a B2B setting. The app, known as the "Green Fingerprint" was designed in collaboration with a commercial real estate firm and subsequently deployed in several tenant sites in the greater Stockholm area. We measured energy productivity defined as revenue in Swedish Kronor/kilowatt hours of electricity consumption. Over a two year period participating firms were able to significantly increase energy productivity by as much as much as 100% as a result of direct feedback and adopting conservation techniques recommended by the system. Increased energy productivity resulted in annual energy costs that were substantially less than if energy productivity had not increased.
On the advantages of approximate vs. complete verification: bigger models, faster, less memory, usually accurate

We have been exploring LURCH, an approximate (not necessarily complete) alternative to traditional model checking based on a randomized search algorithm. Randomized algorithms like LURCH have been known to outperform their deterministic counterparts for search problems representing a wide range of applications. The cost of an approximate strategy is the potential for inaccuracy. If complete algorithms terminate, they find all the features they are searching for. On the other hand, by its very nature, randomized search can miss important features. Our experiments suggest that this inaccuracy problem is not too serious. In the case studies presented here and elsewhere, LURCHS random search usually found the correct results. Also, these case studies strongly suggest that LURCH can scale to much larger models than standard model checkers like NuSMV and SPIN. The two case studies presented in this paper are selected for their simplicity and their complexity. The simple problem of the dining philosophers has been widely studied. By making the dinner more crowded, we can compare the memory and runtimes of standard methods (SPIN) and LURCH. When hundreds of philosophers sit down to eat, both LURCH and SPIN can find the deadlock case. However, SPINS memory and runtime requirements can grow exponentially while LURCHS requirements stay quite low. Success with highly symmetric, automatically generated problems says little about the generality of a technique. Hence, our second example is far more complex: a real-world flight guidance system from Rockwell Collins. Compared to NuSMV, LURCH performed very well on this model. Our random search finds the vast majority of faults (close to 90%); runs much faster (seconds and minutes as opposed to hours); and uses very little memory (single digits to 10s of megabytes as opposed to 10s to 100s of megabytes). The rest of this paper is structured as follows. We begin with a theoretical rationale for why random search methods like LURCH can be incomplete, yet still successful. Next, we note that for a class of problems, the complete search of standard model checkers can be overkill. LURCH is then briefly introduced and our two case studies are presented.
Studies on lipid digestion in the preruminant calf. The source of lipolytic activity in the abomasum

1. Lipolytic and proteolytic activities and pH values were determined in secretions collected from innervated abomasal pouches and in abomasal contents from preruminant calves given liquid diets. 2. No lipolytic activity was detected in pouch secretions collected during 1 h after feeding, though lipolytic activity was present in abomasal contents; pepsin (EC 3.4.23.1) and rennin (EC 3.4.23.4) were present in both pouch secretions and abomasal contents. The pH values of pouch secretions ranged from 1.2 to 1.8 and those of abomasal contents from 4.2 to 5.9. 3. When diet was placed directly into the abomasal pouch soon after feeding, the pH values of pouch and abomasal contents decreased similarly (i.e. from 6.3 to approximately 5). Protease activity (U/ml) of pouch contents ranged from 0.1 to 0.8 and that of abomasal contents from 0.1 to 0.2. No lipolytic activity was detected in pouch contents, though abomasal contents contained 0.6 to 1.2 U/ml and when the diet contained milk-fat as the dietary fat source considerable lipolysis of triglycerides containing shorter-chain fatty acids was found. 4. It is concluded that there is no significant secretion of lipolytic enzymes by the fundal mucosa and that the lipolysis of triglycerides in the abomasum of the preruminant calf is due predominantly to a lipolytic enzyme in saliva.
Singers take center stage! Personality traits and stereotypes of popular musicians

Despite some evidence that performing musicians tend to have distinct personality characteristics, there is little understanding of how specific positions in bands might be correlated with certain traits. Moreover, there is the possibility that such correlations are exaggerated via stereotypic social perception. In an online sample of popular musicians (including 87 bassists, 48 drummers, 115 guitarists, and 30 vocalists), we evaluated (a) differences in self-reported personality characteristics along the Big Five dimensions; and (b) perceptions of each kind of musician in terms of social category membership (e.g., “What are guitar players like? ”). Singers were significantly more extraverted than bassists, and more open to experience than drummers. Whereas there were few differences among other musicians in self-reported personality, the various categories evinced stereotypes that were moderated by participants’ own positions in the band. For example, bass players were generally seen as the most agreeable band members, but this was especially true in the eyes of the bassists themselves. Results are interpreted with reference to biases associated with social categorization and group membership.
Effects of Solar Active Regions on Meridional Flows

The aim of this Letter is to extend our previous study of the solar-cycle variations of meridional flows and to investigate their latitudinal and longitudinal structure in the subphotospheric layer, especially their variations in magnetic regions. Helioseismology observations indicate that mass flows around active regions are dominated by inflows into those regions. On average, those local flows are more important around the leading magnetic polarities of active regions than around the following polarities and depend on the evolutionary stage of particular active regions. We present a statistical study based on MDI/SOHO observations of 1996-2002 and show that this effect explains a significant part of the cyclic change of meridional flows in near-equatorial regions, but not at higher latitudes. A different mechanism driving solar-cycle variations of the meridional flow probably operates.
Neuro-mechanics of muscle coordination during recumbent pedaling in post-acute stroke patients

Motor impairment after stroke has been hypothesized to be related, among others, to impairments in the modular control of movement. In this study we analyzed muscle coordination and pedal forces during a recumbent pedaling exercise from a sample of post-acute stroke patients (n=5) and a population of age-matched healthy individuals (n=4). Healthy subjects and the less impaired patients showed a shared modular organization of pedaling based on 4 similar muscle synergies. The most impaired patient, characterized by a Motricity Index of 52/100, showed a reduced complexity (only 2 muscle synergies for the affected side). Differences between healthy subjects and post-stroke patients in the execution of the task were identified in terms of unbalance in mechanical work production, which well corresponded to the level of impairment. This pedaling unbalance could be traced back to different activation strategies of the 4 identified modules. Investigation on a more representative sample will provide a full characterization of the neuro-mechanics of pedaling after stroke, helping our understandings of the disruption of motor coordination at central level after stroke and of the most effective solutions for functional recovery.
High Quality Sinusoidal Modeling of Wideband Speech for the Purposes of Speech Synthesis and Modification

This paper describes an efficient sinusoidal modeling framework for high quality wide band (WB) speech synthesis and modification. This technique may serve as a basis for speech compression in the context of small footprint concatenative Text to Speech systems. In addition, it is a useful representation for voice transformation and morphing purposes, e.g., simultaneous pitch modification and spectral envelope warping. The conventional sinusoidal modeling is enhanced with an adaptive frequency dithering mechanism, based on a degree of voicing analysis. Considerable reduction of the amount of model parameters is achieved by high band phase extension. The proposed model is evaluated and compared to the alternative STRAIGHT framework [1]. Being simpler and considerably more efficient than STRAIGHT, it outperforms it in speech quality for both speech reconstruction and transformation.
Shades of gray: a closer look at emails in the gray area

Every day, millions of users spend a considerable amount of time browsing through the messages in their spam folders. With newsletters and automated notifications responsible for 42% of the messages in the user's inboxes, inevitably some important emails get misclassified as spam. Unfortunately, users are often unable to take security related decisions, and tools provide no assistance to easily distinguish harmless commercial messages from the ones that are most certainly malevolent. Most of the previous studies focused on the detection of spam. Instead, in this paper we look into the often overlooked area of gray emails, i.e., those messages that cannot be clearly categorized one way or the other by automated spam filters. In particular, we analyze real-world emails by grouping them into clusters of bulk email campaigns. Our approach is able to automatically classify and reduce by half the gray emails area with only 0.2% false positives. Moreover, we identify a number of campaign features that can be used to predict the campaign category and we discuss their effectiveness and their limitations. Our experiments show that a large fraction of emails in the gray area are composed of legitimate bulk emails: newsletters, notifications, and marketing offers. The latter appears to be a large e-marketing business industry that has grown into a complex infrastructure for sending legitimate bulk emails. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-world empirical study of such emails.
Exploring and Explaining Public Attitudes towards the European Integration Process in Northern Ireland

Abstract Despite the emergence of a ‘Europe of the regions’, changes in the territorial governance arrangements of various countries, and the more pro‐EU stance of regionalist parties, studies of citizens’ attitudes towards the EU tend to focus on the member state level and neglect to examine patterns and determinants of opinion amongst sub‐state regions. Reflecting its distinct political and social context, this paper provides a detailed examination of the attitudes of the Northern Ireland electorate towards the EU. It uses time series evidence to track long‐term shifts in public opinion over time. It then compares contemporary support and opposition for the integration process in Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. Finally, it uses linear regression estimation to examine which individual‐level factors affect attitudes towards the integration process in Northern Ireland. The evidence shows that attitudes have become steadily more pro‐EU over time and that opinion in Northern Ireland is more favourable compared to attitudes in England, Scotland and Wales. Results from a multivariate analysis show that level of education, religious status, party support and national economic appraisals contribute to attitudes towards the integration process.
Depression in caregivers of demented patients is associated with altered immunity: impaired proliferative capacity, increased CD8+, and a decline in lymphocytes with surface signal transduction molecules (CD38+) and a cytotoxicity marker (CD56+ CD8+)

Changes in relevant immune parameters, including function, were found to be associated with depression in elderly caregiver wives of demented patients. We studied the relationship between immune cell phenotype and T cell proliferative capacity of such caregivers to levels of stress and depression over the course of a support group intervention. The data indicate the strongest association between depression (of all stress parameters) and impaired T cell proliferative capacity. Depression was also most strongly (of stress parameters) associated with a shift in T cell populations with an increase in CD8+ T cells, and a reduced percentage of CD38+ cells in both CD8+ and CD4+ T cell populations. Since CD38 is a signal transduction factor, it was interesting that a decreased percentage of CD38+ cells correlated with impaired T cell function (proliferation). Another significant difference was the reduction in natural killer (NK) cells as well as the percentage of the CD56+ component of the CD8+ population. This latter subset is important in MHC‐unrestricted cytotoxicity, and has been found expanded in healthy centenarians. This study shows that both chronic stress, and depression in particular, and age have deleterious effects on T cells, and together could significantly contribute to the higher risk of disease and mortality associated with being a caregiver of a demented individual.
Historygrams: Enabling Interactive Global Illumination in Direct Volume Rendering using Photon Mapping

In this paper, we enable interactive volumetric global illumination by extending photon mapping techniques to handle interactive transfer function (TF) and material editing in the context of volume rendering. We propose novel algorithms and data structures for finding and evaluating parts of a scene affected by these parameter changes, and thus support efficient updates of the photon map. In direct volume rendering (DVR) the ability to explore volume data using parameter changes, such as editable TFs, is of key importance. Advanced global illumination techniques are in most cases computationally too expensive, as they prevent the desired interactivity. Our technique decreases the amount of computation caused by parameter changes, by introducing Historygrams which allow us to efficiently reuse previously computed photon media interactions. Along the viewing rays, we utilize properties of the light transport equations to subdivide a view-ray into segments and independently update them when invalid. Unlike segments of a view-ray, photon scattering events within the volumetric medium needs to be sequentially updated. Using our Historygram approach, we can identify the first invalid photon interaction caused by a property change, and thus reuse all valid photon interactions. Combining these two novel concepts, supports interactive editing of parameters when using volumetric photon mapping in the context of DVR. As a consequence, we can handle arbitrarily shaped and positioned light sources, arbitrary phase functions, bidirectional reflectance distribution functions and multiple scattering which has previously not been possible in interactive DVR.
Lesbians and Bisexual Women in the Eyes of Scientific Psychology

Social science research has contributed to the destigmatization of homosexuality which, in turn, has affected the topics researchers choose to study. We examined psychological research that focused on lesbians and bisexual women from 1975 to 2001 to determine if the frequency and content of this research reflect the increasingly positive view of sexual minorities in society. The results indicate that non-heterosexual people were included in less than 1 percent of published research, and lesbians and bisexual women were significantly less likely to be studied than gay and bisexual men. Content analysis of 533 abstracts followed by cluster analysis of 520 abstracts revealed four conceptual frameworks that characterized this body of research: Gender Identity, Attitudes towards Lesbians, Lesbians as Problems, and Life in Heterosexist Society. Together, changes over time in the quantity and emphasis of research shed light on how lesbianism and bisexuality have been constructed in psychological studies and highlight the politics of lesbian-bisexual visibility.
Classroom Instruction and the Mathematics Achievement of Non-English Learners and English Learners

ABSTRACT The authors, in a nonexperimental randomized study, used national data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) to examine present instructional practices for Grade 5 mathematics classrooms and its impact on achievement for White non-Hispanic non–English language learners (ELLs), Hispanic non-ELLs, and Hispanic English language learners. The following research questions were addressed: (a) Were there significant differences in mathematics instructional practices among White non-Hispanic non-ELLs, Hispanic non-ELLs, and Hispanic-ELLs? (b) What were the effects of the mathematical instructional practices on fifth-grade mathematics achievement for these groups? Findings reveal that students’ mathematics achievement in previous grades directly impacted students’ achievement in future grades. Findings also demonstrated limited variance in the instructional practices used by teachers.
North American Gentrification? Revanchist and Emancipatory Perspectives Explored

By offering a response to recent calls for a ‘geography of gentrification’, the author attempts to move on from the intractable theoretical divisions and overgeneralizations that continue to pervade the gentrification literature. The research described in this paper takes the form of a comparative assessment of the gentrifying neighbourhoods of South Parkdale, Toronto, Canada, and Lower Park Slope, New York City, USA. A central part of this research has been an engagement with two contrasting academic discourses on gentrification, the ‘emancipatory city’ (a Canadian construct) and the ‘revanchist city’ (a US construct), to examine how gentrification may or may not have changed since these discourses were produced and articulated. The author combines narratives from in-depth interviews (with a particular focus on displaced tenants) with supplementary data from secondary sources and demonstrates that gentrification is neither emancipatory nor revanchist in either case. This has important implications for how gentrification is understood and evaluated in Canada and the USA. Although one can see crucial broad similarities both in the causes and in the effects of gentrification in each neighbourhood (which would appear to endorse casual references to ‘North American gentrification’), the process is also differentiated according to contextual factors, and the nuances of the gentrification process are illuminated and clarified by international comparison. In sum, the author points to the need to exercise caution in referring to ‘North American gentrification’, especially as a geography of gentrification is only in its infancy.
Mesenchymal Stromal Cells: Inhibiting PDGF Receptors or Depleting Fibronectin Induces Mesodermal Progenitors with Endothelial Potential

Realizing the full therapeutic potential of mesenchymal stromal/stem cells (MSCs) awaits improved understanding of mechanisms controlling their fate. Using MSCs cultured as spheroids to recapitulate a three‐dimensional cellular environment, we show that perturbing the mesenchymal regulators, platelet‐derived growth factor (PDGF) receptors or fibronectin, reverts MSCs toward mesodermal progenitors with endothelial potential that can potently induce neovascularization in vivo. MSCs within untreated spheroids retain their mesenchymal spindle shape with abundant smooth muscle α‐actin filaments and fibronectin‐rich matrix. Inhibiting PDGF receptors or depleting fibronectin induces rounding and depletes smooth muscle α‐actin expression; these cells have characteristics of mesenchymoangioblasts, with enhanced expression of mesendoderm and endoderm transcription factors, prominent upregulation of E‐cadherin, and Janus kinase signaling‐dependent expression of Oct4A and Nanog. PDGF receptor‐inhibited spheroids also upregulate endothelial markers platelet endothelial cell adhesion molecule 1 and vascular endothelial‐cadherin and secrete many angiogenic factors, and in vivo they potently stimulate neovascularization, and their MSCs integrate within functional blood vessels that are perfused by the circulation. Thus, MSC potency and vascular induction are regulated by perturbing mesenchymal fate. Stem Cells 2014;32:694–705