Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Approximating Spanners and Directed Steiner Forest

It was recently found that there are very close connections between the existence of additive spanners (subgraphs where all distances are preserved up to an additive stretch), distance preservers (subgraphs in which demand pairs have their distance preserved exactly), and pairwise spanners (subgraphs in which demand pairs have their distance preserved up to a multiplicative or additive stretch) [Abboud-Bodwin SODA’16 8 J.ACM’17, Bodwin-Williams SODA’16]. We study these problems from an optimization point of view, where rather than studying the existence of extremal instances, we are given an instance and are asked to find the sparsest possible spanner/preserver. We give an O(n3/5 + ε)-approximation for distance preservers and pairwise spanners (for arbitrary constant ε > 0). This is the first nontrivial upper bound for either problem, both of which are known to be as hard to approximate as Label Cover. We also prove Label Cover hardness for approximating additive spanners, even for the cases of additive 1 stretch (where one might expect a polylogarithmic approximation, since the related multiplicative 2-spanner problem admits an O(log n)-approximation) and additive polylogarithmic stretch (where the related multiplicative spanner problem has an O(1)-approximation). Interestingly, the techniques we use in our approximation algorithm extend beyond distance-based problem to pure connectivity network design problems. In particular, our techniques allow us to give an O(n3/5 + ε)-approximation for the Directed Steiner Forest problem (for arbitrary constant ε > 0) when all edges have uniform costs, improving the previous best O(n2/3 + ε)-approximation due to Berman et al. [ICALP’11] (which holds for general edge costs).
Measuring the similarity between implicit semantic relations from the web

Measuring the similarity between semantic relations that hold among entities is an important and necessary step in various Web related tasks such as relation extraction, information retrieval and analogy detection. For example, consider the case in which a person knows a pair of entities (e.g. Google, YouTube), between which a particular relation holds (e.g. acquisition). The person is interested in retrieving other such pairs with similar relations (e.g. Microsoft, Powerset). Existing keyword-based search engines cannot be applied directly in this case because, in keyword-based search, the goal is to retrieve documents that are relevant to the words used in a query -- not necessarily to the relations implied by a pair of words. We propose a relational similarity measure, using a Web search engine, to compute the similarity between semantic relations implied by two pairs of words. Our method has three components: representing the various semantic relations that exist between a pair of words using automatically extracted lexical patterns, clustering the extracted lexical patterns to identify the different patterns that express a particular semantic relation, and measuring the similarity between semantic relations using a metric learning approach. We evaluate the proposed method in two tasks: classifying semantic relations between named entities, and solving word-analogy questions. The proposed method outperforms all baselines in a relation classification task with a statistically significant average precision score of 0.74. Moreover, it reduces the time taken by Latent Relational Analysis to process 374 word-analogy questions from 9 days to less than 6 hours, with an SAT score of 51%.
Interference-resistant LPTV-MMSE equalization

The problem of recovering a digital communication signal distorted by a linear time-invariant channel and contaminated by severe co-channel or adjacent-channel digital interference is addressed in this paper. The proposed linear periodically time-varying (LPTV) receiver jointly performs channel equalization and interference suppression, without requiring explicit knowledge or estimation of the interfering channel. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique, whose performance exhibit a remarkable robustness with respect to varying interference power level.
The MAPKKK Gene Family in Gossypium raimondii: Genome-Wide Identification, Classification and Expression Analysis

Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades are conserved signal transduction pathways in all eukaryotic organisms. MAPKKKs (MAPK kinase kinases) operate at the top levels of these cascades. Recently, this family of genes has been systematically investigated in Arabidopsis, rice and maize, but has not yet been characterized in cotton. In this study, we identified 78 putative MAPKKK genes in the genome of the diploid cotton, Gossypium raimondii. They were classified into three subfamilies, of which 12 were ZIK, 22 were MEKK and 44 were Raf. The ZIK and MEKK genes displayed a scattered genomic distribution across 11 of the 13 chromosomes, whereas Raf genes were distributed across the entire genome. Their conserved patterns observed for introns and additional domains were consistent with the evolutionary relationships inferred from the phylogenetic analysis within subfamily. Transcriptome sequencing data were used to investigate their transcript profiles in mature leaves, 0 day and 3 days post-anthesis (DPA) ovules. Sixty MAPKKK genes were expressed, of which 41 were strongly expressed in mature leaves. Twelve MAPKKK genes were more highly expressed in 3-DPA ovules than in 0-DPA ovules. Our results provide a foundation for future evolutionary and functional characterizations of MAPKKK genes in cotton and probably other Gossypium plants.
The Romanization of poverty: Spatial stigmatization of Roma neighborhoods in Turkey

Abstract: This article aims to reveal the multidimensional aspects of social exclusion of Roma in Turkey, which manifests itself in the stigmatized space of Roma neighborhood. In our analysis, we do not depict ‘Roma’ distinctively as an ethnic category but as a ‘low status’ in the society that is embedded in the stigmatized places. We argue that those from a Roma neighborhood hold a common “stigmatized spatial identity”, regardless of their ethnicity, which determines the processes of poverty and social exclusion in different spheres of life. In order to unfold the process of social exclusion that we refer to as the “Romanization of poverty”, our study provides analysis under the analytical category of spatial stigmatization intertwined with insecure livelihood.
Fuzzy Logic Control for a Speed Control of Induction Motor using Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation

This paper presents design and implements a voltage source inverter type space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) for control a speed of induction motor. This scheme leads to be able to adjust the speed of the motor by control the frequency and amplitude of the stator voltage, the ratio of stator voltage to frequency should be kept constant. The fuzzy logic controller is also introduced to the system for keeping the motor speed to be constant when the load varies. The experimental results in testing the 0.22 kW induction motor from no-load condition to rated condition show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. Keywords—Fuzzy logic control, space vector pulse width modulation, induction motor.
Classes of Sum-of-Sinusoids Rayleigh Fading Channel Simulators and Their Stationary and Ergodic Properties

– Channel simulators based on Rice’s sum-of-sinusoids are playing an important role in mobile fading channel modelling. However, the parameters of the sum-of-sinusoids have to be determined sophisticated to fully exploit the great potential that this powerful procedure has to offer. This paper provides a fundamental work on the stationary and ergodic properties of sum-of-sinusoids-based Rayleigh fading channel simulators. Altogether eight classes of Rayleigh fading channel simulators are introduced, where four of them are new. Each individual class is systematically investigated with respect to its stationary and ergodic properties. This allows us to establish general conditions under which the sum-of-sinusoids procedure results in a stationary and ergodic channel simulator. Moreover, with the help of the proposed classification scheme, several popular parameter computation methods are investigated concerning their usability to design efficient fading channel simulators. The treatment of the problem shows that if and only if the gains and frequencies are constant quantities and the phases are random variables, then the sum-of-sinusoids defines a stationary and ergodic stochastic process. For simplicity reasons, we restrict our investigations to Rayleigh fading channels, but the presented results are of general interest, wherever the principle of Rice’s sum-of-sinusoids is employed.
The costs of fluid overload in the adult intensive care unit: is a small-volume infusion model a proactive solution?

Purpose Fluid overload (FO) in critically ill patients remains a challenging clinical dilemma, and many continuous intravenous (IV) medications in the US are being delivered as a dilute solution, adding significantly to a patient’s daily intake. This study describes the costs and outcomes of FO in patients receiving multiple continuous infusions. Materials and methods A retrospective study was conducted using a hospital administrative database covering >500 US hospitals. An FO cohort included adult intensive care unit (ICU) patients with a central line receiving IV loop diuretics and 2+ continuous IV infusions on 50%+ of their ICU days; a directly matched non-FO cohort included patients without IV diuretic use. The primary outcome of the study was total hospitalization costs per visit. Additional outcomes were ICU costs, mortality, total and ICU length of stay (LOS), 30-day readmission rates, and ventilator use. Unadjusted descriptive analysis was performed using chi-squared or paired t-tests to compare outcomes between the two cohorts. Results A total of 63,974 patients were identified in each cohort. The total hospitalization cost per visit for the FO cohort was US$15,344 higher than the non-FO cohort (US$42,386 vs US$27,042), and the ICU cost for the FO cohort was US$5,243 higher than the non-FO cohort (US$10,902 vs US$5,659). FO patients had higher mortality (20% vs 16.8%), prolonged LOS (11.5 vs 8.0 days), longer ICU LOS (6.2 vs 3.6 days), higher risk of 30-day readmission (21.8% vs 21.3%), and ventilator usage (47.7% vs 28.3%) than the non-FO cohort (all P<0.05). Conclusion In patients receiving multiple continuous infusions, FO is associated with increased health care resources and costs. Maximally concentrating medications and proactively providing continuous medications in small-volume infusions (SVI) could be a potential solution to prevent iatrogenic FO in critically ill patients. Further prospective research is warranted to assess the impact of the SVI dispensing model on patient outcomes and health care costs.
Animal Welfare and Human Ethics: A Personality Study

We revisit the long-standing question whether there is a relation between animal welfare and human ethics. Therefore, we elicit concern for animal welfare in an incentivized, direct, and real setup: Subjects choose between intensive farming versus organic living conditions for a hen. Guaranteeing organic living conditions is costly, but implies organic feed, access to daylight, and more space. We compare the interest in animal welfare with morally relevant dispositions in subjects, relying on well-established measures such as Machiavellianism scores and the Big 5 personality test. The data confirm a strong, positive relation between caring for animal welfare and moral dispositions.
Financial Value of Reputation: Evidence from the eBay Auctions of Gmail Invitations

In a marketplace of repeated transactions with asymmetric information, theory predicts that sellers with a good reputation have a higher probability of sale and receive a higher transaction price. In this paper, I test this theory using more than 55,000 auctions of Gmail invitations on eBay, essentially a market of homogeneous goods with non-enforceable contracts. This is an ideal environment to test the theory because it allows a clean separation of the reputation e¤ects from other controlling factors. This study provides evidence in favor of the theoretical predictions because sellers who improve their reputation from the lowest to the next quintile experience a 6.2% higher probability of sale and a 6.1% hike in the implied buyer valuation after adjusting for truncation bias from failed auctions and explicitly controlling for seller skills. This study also shows that in addition to a dimension of reputation universal across di¤erent product markets, the product-speci c dimension of reputation signi cantly a¤ects the auction outcomes. JEL Classi cation: D82, D44, L15, G14
Using Bigrams in Text Categorization

In the past decade a sufficient effort has been expended on attempting to come up with a document representation which is richer than the simple Bag-Of-Words (BOW). One of the widely explored approaches to enrich the BOW representation is in using n-grams (usually bigrams) of words in addition to (or in place of) single words (unigrams). After more than ten years of unsuccessful attempts to improve the text categorization results by applying bigrams, many researchers agree that there might be a certain limitation in usability of bigrams for text categorization. We analyze the related works and discuss possible reasons for this limitation. In addition, we demonstrate our own attempt to incorporate bigrams in a document representation based on distributional clusters of unigrams, and report (statistically insignificant) improvement to our baseline results on the 20 Newsgroups (20NG) dataset. Nevertheless, the reported result is (to our knowledge) the best categorization result ever achieved on this highly popular dataset.
Amygdala, Medial Prefrontal Cortex, and Hippocampal Function in PTSD

Abstract: The last decade of neuroimaging research has yielded important information concerning the structure, neurochemistry, and function of the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Neuroimaging research reviewed in this article reveals heightened amygdala responsivity in PTSD during symptomatic states and during the processing of trauma‐unrelated affective information. Importantly, amygdala responsivity is positively associated with symptom severity in PTSD. In contrast, medial prefrontal cortex appears to be volumetrically smaller and is hyporesponsive during symptomatic states and the performance of emotional cognitive tasks in PTSD. Medial prefrontal cortex responsivity is inversely associated with PTSD symptom severity. Lastly, the reviewed research suggests diminished volumes, neuronal integrity, and functional integrity of the hippocampus in PTSD. Remaining research questions and related future directions are presented.
The Immunologic Basis for Severe Neonatal Herpes Disease and Potential Strategies for Therapeutic Intervention

Herpes simplex viruses types 1 and 2 (HSV-1 and HSV-2) infect a large proportion of the world's population. Infection is life-long and can cause periodic mucocutaneous symptoms, but it only rarely causes life-threatening disease among immunocompetent children and adults. However, when HSV infection occurs during the neonatal period, viral replication is poorly controlled and a large proportion of infants die or develop disability even with optimal antiviral therapy. Increasingly, specific differences are being elucidated between the immune system of newborns and those of older children and adults, which predispose to severe infections and reflect the transition from fetal to postnatal life. Studies in healthy individuals of different ages, individuals with primary or acquired immunodeficiencies, and animal models have contributed to our understanding of the mechanisms that control HSV infection and how these may be impaired during the neonatal period. This paper outlines our current understanding of innate and adaptive immunity to HSV infection, immunologic differences in early infancy that may account for the manifestations of neonatal HSV infection, and the potential of interventions to augment neonatal immune protection against HSV disease.
I Think Immigrants “Kind of Fall Into Two Camps”: Boundary Work by U.S.-Born Community Members in St. Louis, Missouri

To understand how educational policies are created and supported for immigrants and their children, we must explore how community members make sense of broader immigrant/immigration discourses. Guided by theories of “boundary work,” grounded analyses of 27 interviews with U.S.-born residents in metropolitan St. Louis (a community with diverse and increasing immigration) revealed conflicting and ambivalent discourses. Respondents’ opinions shifted as they conceptualized affiliations and borders—real and symbolic—between themselves and foreign-born individuals. The discussion will address how the “hardening” or “blurring” of such boundaries can affect the development and support of educational policies for immigrants and refugees.
Linear-Time Succinct Encodings of Planar Graphs via Canonical Orderings

Let G be an embedded planar undirected graph that has n vertices, m edges, and f faces but has no self-loop or multiple edge. If G is triangulated, we can encode it using 4/3m-1 bits, improving on the best previous bound of about 1.53m bits. In case exponential time is acceptable, roughly 1.08m bits have been known to suffice. If G is triconnected, we use at most $(2.5+2\log{3})\min\{n,f\}-7$ bits, which is at most 2.835m bits and smaller than the best previous bound of 3m bits. Both of our schemes take O(n) time for encoding and decoding.
Towards a model of language contact and change in the English-lexifier creoles of Africa and the Caribbean

The Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles (AECs) exhibit fascinating combinations of disparate typological characteristics. I present a model of post-formative (“post-creolization”) contact and change and provide a comprehensive inventory of contact constellations in Africa and the Caribbean. I conduct a comparative analysis of causative constructions in seven African and Caribbean AECs, argue for the notional separation of the traditional creolist terms “superstrate”, “lexifier”, “substrate” and “adstrate”, and account for the linguistic-structural relevance of these distinctions. The model can explain the typological diversity within and across the AECs, help elucidate their genealogical and areal differentiation, and contribute to our understanding of the processes and outcomes of language contact and change in multilingual ecologies.
Optimal third root asymptotic bounds in the statistical estimation of thresholds

This paper is concerned with estimating the intersection point of two densities, given a sample of both of the densities. This problem arises in classification theory. The main results provide lower bounds for the probability of the estimation errors to be large on a scale determined by the inverse cube root of the sample size. As corollaries, we obtain probabilistic bounds for the prediction error in a classification problem. The key to the proof is an entropy estimate. The lower bounds are based on bounds for general estimators, which are applicable in other contexts as well. Furthermore, we introduce a class of optimal estimators whose errors asymptotically meet the border permitted by the lower bounds.
Trading Down: Unemployment, Inequality and Other Risks of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

Proponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) emphasize its prospective economic benefits, with economic growth increasing due to rising trade volumes and investment. Widely cited projections suggest modest GDP gains after ten years, varying from less than half a percentage point in the United States to 13 percent in Vietnam. However, these projections assume full employment and constant income distribution in all countries excluding some of the major risks of trade liberalization. In this paper, we provide alternative projections of the TPP’s economic effects using the United Nations Global Policy Model. Allowing for changes in employment and income distribution, we obtain very different results. We find that the benefits to economic growth are even smaller than those projected with full-employment models, and are negative for Japan and the United States. More important, we find that the TPP will likely lead to losses in employment and increases in inequality.
Cogging torque reduction in flux-switching permanent magnet machines by rotor pole shaping

Cogging torque in flux-switching permanent magnet machines (FSPMs) is relatively high compared with other types of PM machines because of their unique doubly salient structure. Reducing the cogging torque in the FSPM machine is of particular importance to make it a viable alternative to conventional rotor-PM machines. A new pole shaping method has been proposed to reduce the cogging torque. The validity of the proposed method has been confirmed by analytical methods and finite element analysis based simulation. The influence of the proposed pole shaping method on the back-EMF and average electromagnetic torque have also been investigated.
Impaired Orthographic Processing in Chinese Dyslexic Children: Evidence From the Lexicality Effect on N400

ABSTRACT This study used the lexicality effects on N400 to investigate orthographic processing in children with developmental dyslexia. Participants performed a Go/No-Go semantic judgment task; three types of stimuli—real characters (RC), pseudocharacters (PC), and noncharacters (NC)—were embedded in No-Go trials. Two types of lexicality effects (RC vs. NC and PC vs. NC) were used to reflect the sensitivity to Chinese orthographic knowledge. In typical developing children, NC elicited a more negative N400 in frontal sites and a less negative N400 in bilateral posterior sites than RC and PC. The reversed lexicality effects in anterior and posterior sites support the dual-mechanism for lexical retrieval. Children with dyslexia revealed a more negative N400 for NC in frontal sites compared with RC, suggesting that they remained sensitive to orthographic familiarity. However, no difference between NC and PC was observed, suggesting a weakness in capturing Chinese orthographic knowledge in children with dyslexia.