Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lingua-Align: An Experimental Toolbox for Automatic Tree-to-Tree Alignment

In this paper we present an experimental toolbox for automatic tree-to-tree alignment based on a binary classification model. The aligner implements a recurrent architecture for structural prediction using history features and a sequential classification procedure. The discriminative base classifier uses a log-linear model in the current setup which enables simple integration of various features extracted from the data. The Lingua-Align toolbox provides a flexible framework for feature extraction including contextual properties and implements several alignment inference procedures. Various settings and constraints can be controlled via a simple frontend or called from external scripts. Lingua-Align supports different treebank formats and includes additional tools for conversion and evaluation. In our experiments we can show that our tree aligner produces results with high quality and outperforms unsupervised techniques proposed otherwise. It also integrates well with another existing tool for manual tree alignment which makes it possible to quickly integrate additional training material and to run semi-automatic alignment strategies.
THE NEOCLASSICAL AND 'NEW' CONCEPTS OF RENT-SEEKING

Rent-seeking is both ubiquitous and inevitable. One would think the best and easiest way to avoid the rent-seeking problem is to avoid establishing the institutions that create rents. What one may fail to recognize is that the problem is much more general, that it is the presence of or potential for rights that leads to rent-seeking behavior. All rights create rents by their very nature. Rent-seeking is both an agent-government phenomenon and an agent-agent phenomenon. The neoclassical rent-seeking concept has labelled the former as wasteful while ignoring the presence of the latter. The paper provides a different view of the problem and follows institutional concept of rent-seeking. K eywords: institutional economics, rent-seeking, government, public policy JEL Classifications: B52, D72, H11
Towards a Richer Understanding of Presence in Teaching in the Elementary School Environment

v LIST OF TABLES xii LIST OF FIGURES xiii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 Theoretical Framework and Background 2 Justification 6 Research Questions 8 Definition of Terms 9 Chapter Summary 10 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW 11 Presence as Awareness in Teaching 11 Observing and Listening to Develop Awareness 14 Teacher Decisions in Response to Awareness 16 Reflection as Link between Awareness and Action 18 Relationships as a Foundation for Teaching with Presence 22 Relationships with Colleagues and Administrators 26 Identity is Integral to Teaching with Presence 27 The Influence of Teacher Beliefs 31
Regulation of Ion Gradients across Myocardial Ischemic Border Zones: A Biophysical Modelling Analysis

The myocardial ischemic border zone is associated with the initiation and sustenance of arrhythmias. The profile of ionic concentrations across the border zone play a significant role in determining cellular electrophysiology and conductivity, yet their spatial-temporal evolution and regulation are not well understood. To investigate the changes in ion concentrations that regulate cellular electrophysiology, a mathematical model of ion movement in the intra and extracellular space in the presence of ionic, potential and material property heterogeneities was developed. The model simulates the spatial and temporal evolution of concentrations of potassium, sodium, chloride, calcium, hydrogen and bicarbonate ions and carbon dioxide across an ischemic border zone. Ischemia was simulated by sodium-potassium pump inhibition, potassium channel activation and respiratory and metabolic acidosis. The model predicted significant disparities in the width of the border zone for each ionic species, with intracellular sodium and extracellular potassium having discordant gradients, facilitating multiple gradients in cellular properties across the border zone. Extracellular potassium was found to have the largest border zone and this was attributed to the voltage dependence of the potassium channels. The model also predicted the efflux of from the ischemic region due to electrogenic drift and diffusion within the intra and extracellular space, respectively, which contributed to depletion in the ischemic region.
A Fully Convolutional Neural Network for Speech Enhancement

In hearing aids, the presence of babble noise degrades hearing intelligibility of human speech greatly. However, removing the babble without creating artifacts in human speech is a challenging task in a low SNR environment. Here, we sought to solve the problem by finding a `mapping' between noisy speech spectra and clean speech spectra via supervised learning. Specifically, we propose using fully Convolutional Neural Networks, which consist of lesser number of parameters than fully connected networks. The proposed network, Redundant Convolutional Encoder Decoder (R-CED), demonstrates that a convolutional network can be 12 times smaller than a recurrent network and yet achieves better performance, which shows its applicability for an embedded system: the hearing aids.
Recognizing emotion in speech using neural networks

Emotion recognition is an important factor of affective computing and has potential use in assistive technologies. In this paper we used landmark and other acoustic features to recognize different emotional states in speech. We analyzed 2442 utterances from the Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts corpus and extracted 62 features from each utterance. A neural network classifier was built to recognize different emotional states of these utterances. We obtained over 90% accuracy in distinguishing hot anger and neutral states, over 80% accuracy in distinguishing happy and sadness as well as in distinguishing hot anger and cold anger. We also achieved 62% and 49% accuracy for classifying 4 and 6 emotions respectively. We had 20% accuracy in classifying all 15 emotions in the corpus which is a large improvement over other studies. We plan to apply our work to developing a tool to help people who have difficulty in identifying emotion.
Properties of high-redshift Lyman-alpha clouds. I: Statistical analysis of the Schneider-Schmidt-Gunn quasars

Techniques for statistical analysis of the Lyman-alpha forest in high-redshift quasars are developed, and applied to the low-resolution (25 A) spectra of 29 of the 33 quasars in the Schneider-Schmidt-Gunn sample. We extrapolate each quasar's continuum shortward of Lyman-alpha emission, then consider each spectral bin of each quasar to be an (approximately) independent measurement of the absorption due to the Lyman-alpha clouds. With several thousand such measurements thus available, we can obtain good determinations of some interesting properties of clouds in the redshift range 2.5-4.3 without actually resolving any single cloud. We find that the mean absorption increases with z approximately as a power law (1 + z) exp (gamma + 1) with gamma = 2.46 +/- 0.37. The mean ratio of Lyman-alpha to Lyman-beta absorption in the clouds is 0.476 +/- 0.054. We also detect, and obtain ratios, for Lyma-gamma, delta, and possibly epsilon.
Recent advances in the Zymoseptoria tritici–wheat interaction: insights from pathogenomics

We examine the contribution of next generation sequencing (NGS) to our understanding of the interaction between the fungal pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici and its wheat host. Recent interspecific whole genome comparisons between Z. tritici and its close relatives provide evidence that Z. tritici has undergone strong adaptive evolution, which is attributed to specialization by Z. tritici on wheat. We also assess the contribution of recent RNA sequencing datasets toward identifying pathogen genes and mechanisms critical for disease. While these studies have yet to report a major effector gene, they illustrate that assembling reads to the reference genome is a robust method to identify fungal transcripts from in planta infections. They also highlight the strong influence that the wheat cultivar has on effector gene expression. Lastly, we suggest future directions for NGS-guided approaches to address largely unanswered questions related to cultivar and lifecycle dependent gene expression and propose that future experiments with Z. tritici be conducted on a single wheat cultivar to enable comparisons across experiments.
Cationic cobaltammines as anion receptors: a convenient synthesis and the X-ray structure of hexaamminecobalt(III) chloride dichromate monohydrate

Orange-colored single crystals of hexaamminecobalt(III) chloride dichromate monohydrate, [Co(NH3)6]ClCr2O7·H2O, were prepared by reacting hot aqueous solutions of hexaamminecobalt(III) chloride and potassium dichromate in a 1:1 molar ratio and allowing the mixture to cool slowly to room temperature. The salt was characterized by elemental analyses and spectroscopic studies. A single-crystal X-ray structure determination revealed that the salt crystallizes in space group P21/c with a = 10.0218(9), b = 9.3216(8), c = 16.2203(13) Å, β = 112.962(6)°, V = 1395.2(2) Å3, Z = 4 and R = 0.0326. In the salt, a strong network of hydrogen bonds (predominantly N–H···O, N–H···Cl–) between the hexaamminecobalt(III) cation, the water molecule, the chloride ion and oxygen atoms of the dichromate ion represents the second sphere coordination and suggests that [Co(NH3)6]3+ may be used as an anion receptor for the dichromate ion.
Cost Saving and the Freezing of Corporate Pension Plans

Many U.S. corporations have frozen defined benefit (DB) pension plans, replacing new DB promises with contributions to defined contribution (DC) plans. We estimate expected DB accruals from the age-service and salary distributions of a large sample of U.S. corporate pension plans with more than 1,000 employees. Comparing the counterfactual DB accruals to the actual increase in 401(k) and other DC contributions for firms that freeze, we find only partial compensation to employees for the lost DB accruals. Net of the increase in total DC contributions, firms save 2.7-3.6% of payroll per year, and over a 10-year horizon they save 3.1% of total firm assets. Workers would have to value the structure, choice, flexibility, or portability of DC plans by at least this much more to experience welfare gains from freezes. The forgone accruals and net cost effects are initially largest for older employees but over time become largest for middle-aged employees who plan to stay with the firms until retirement. Furthermore, the probability that a firm freezes a pension plan is positively related to the value of new accruals as a share of firm assets. While there are differences in the age-service distributions of firms that freeze versus those that do not, we find that the differential accrual effect is largely driven by differences in benefit factors and the relative importance of labor in the freeze firm's production function. The results overall support the hypothesis that pension freezes affect overall compensation and therefore that they change compensation costs relative to a worker's marginal product.
Habanero-Java: the new adventures of old X10

In this paper, we present the Habanero-Java (HJ) language developed at Rice University as an extension to the original Java-based definition of the X10 language. HJ includes a powerful set of task-parallel programming constructs that can be added as simple extensions to standard Java programs to take advantage of today's multi-core and heterogeneous architectures. The language puts a particular emphasis on the usability and safety of parallel constructs. For example, no HJ program using async, finish, isolated, and phaser constructs can create a logical deadlock cycle. In addition, the future and data-driven task variants of the async construct facilitate a functional approach to parallel programming. Finally, any HJ program written with async, finish, and phaser constructs that is data-race free is guaranteed to also be deterministic. HJ also features two key enhancements that address well known limitations in the use of Java in scientific computing --- the inclusion of complex numbers as a primitive data type, and the inclusion of array-views that support multidimensional views of one-dimensional arrays. The HJ compiler generates standard Java class-files that can run on any JVM for Java 5 or higher. The HJ runtime is responsible for orchestrating the creation, execution, and termination of HJ tasks, and features both work-sharing and work-stealing schedulers. HJ is used at Rice University as an introductory parallel programming language for second-year undergraduate students. A wide variety of benchmarks have been ported to HJ, including a full application that was originally written in Fortran 90. HJ has a rich development and runtime environment that includes integration with DrJava, the addition of a data race detection tool, and service as a target platform for the Intel Concurrent Collections coordination language
Causality test between health care expenditure and GDP in US: comparing periods

In the literature dedicated to the "health as a luxury good" question, health care expenditure (HCE) is hypothesized to be a function of GDP without considering any other relationships. In this paper, we argue that this could be a bilateral relationship: good health is considered as an input of the macroeconomic production function, stimulating the GDP. A modified version of the Granger (1969) causality test proposed by Toda and Yamamoto (1995) is investigated between GDP per capita and HCE per capita in United States for comparing the periods of 1965_1984, 1975_1994, 1985_2004 and 1965_2004. Results show these three periods have different causal relationships. At the beginning for 1965_1984, there exists a bilateral relationship. For the following period, there is a unidirectional relationship from HCE to GDP, and for the 1985_2004, a unidirectional GDP_HCE is significant. From the start to end of periods (1965_2004), a unidirectional relation from HCE to GDP is existed.
Understanding Earnings Instability: How Important are Employment Fluctuations and Job Changes?

Using three panel datasets (the matched CPS, the SIPP, and the newly available Longitudinal Employment and Household Dynamics (LEHD) data), we examine trends in male earnings instability in recent decades. In contrast to several papers that find a recent upward trend in earnings instability using the PSID data, we find that earnings instability has been remarkably stable in the 1990s and the 2000s. We find that job changing rates remained relatively constant casting doubt on the importance of labor market “churning. ” We find some evidence that earnings instability increased among job stayers which lends credence to the view that greater reliance on incentive pay increased instability of worker pay. We also find an offsetting decrease in earnings instability among job changers due largely to declining unemployment associated with job changes. One caveat to our findings is that we focus on men who have positive earnings in two adjacent years and thus ignore men who exit the labor force or re-enter after an extended period. Preliminary investigation suggests that ignoring these transitions understates the rise in earnings instability over the past two decades.
The evolution of substructure in galaxy, group and cluster haloes – II. Global properties

In a previous paper, we described a new method for including detailed information about substructure in semi-analytic models of dark matter halo formation based on merger trees. In this paper, we present the basic predictions of our full model of halo formation. We first describe the overall properties of substructure in galaxy, group or cluster haloes at the present day. We then discuss the evolution of substructure, and the effect of the mass-accretion history of an individual halo on the mass function and orbital grouping of its subhalo population. We show, in particular, that the shape of the subhalo mass function is strongly correlated with the formation epoch of the halo. In a third paper in this series, we will compare the results of our semi-analytic method with the results of self-consistent numerical simulations of halo formation.
Inhibitor of Apoptosis Protein-Like Protein-2 as a Novel Serological Biomarker for Breast Cancer

Inhibitor of apoptosis protein-like protein-2 (ILP-2) has only been detected in the testis and in lymphoblastoid cells. Although previous studies have not reported the presence of ILP-2 in breast cancer tissues, this study indicates the presence of ILP-2 in breast cancer serum samples. To validate whether ILP-2 is a novel serological biomarker for breast cancer, we conducted two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2DE) and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry analysis on 400 breast cancer serum samples and 40 non-cancer serum samples (i.e., healthy controls). We then performed a Western blot analysis of 10 breast cancer serum samples and 10 non-cancer serum samples. Finally, we analyzed 35 serum samples from healthy controls or subjects with breast cancer, other types of cancer, galactophore hyperplasia or breast cancer post-surgery by using 2DE and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Our results indicate that ILP-2 is a novel breast cancer biomarker in the peripheral blood.
Diversity, Identity and Leadership

This paper is one of several drawn from the findings of a research project entitled Integrating Leadership and Diversity in Leadership in Further Education funded by the Centre for Excellence in Leadership (CEL) and conducted by Jacky Lumby, Kalwant Bhopal, Martin Dyke, and Felix Maringe at the University of Southampton and Marlene Morrison at Oxford Brookes University. In this section we introduce the aims, purposes, and parameters of the research, and identify those aspects with which this paper is primarily concerned. The Full Report is available at: http://www.lums. lancs.ac. uk/leadership/cel/ Further Education has an historic commitment to providing inclusive education and training opportunities. In consequence, it has sustained an enduring engagement with issues of diversity and inclusion related to learners. The Green Paper Further Education: Raising Skills, Improving Life Chances (DfES, 2006) notes what has been achieved: ‘Many colleges are exemplars in the diversity of their students and staff, serving as a resource that is available to, and valued by, all sections of their community’ (op cit, para. 2.35). However, the paper also suggests that ‘there is more to be done to address the current lack of diversity within the workforce. Too many minority groups continue to be under-represented, especially at senior levels, and face barriers to progression in the sector’ (DfES, 2006, para. 4.34). The sector is increasingly seeking means to address these and other issues related to a diverse workforce. Within this context, diverse leadership is emphasised as key to achieving organizational effectiveness and to modelling values of equity for learners and the wider community (DfES, 2005). However, previous research by Lumby et al (2005) suggests that achieving diversity in leadership presents formidable challenges, not least because it raises questions about what is meant by diversity, and whether assumptions about its meaning are shared. As importantly, it raised concerns about whether there is, as yet, universal support for seeking a more diverse and inclusive leadership, what this might ‘look like’, and whether it would, in itself, lead to more effective leadership.
An exponential-linear backoff algorithm for contention-based wireless networks

In this paper, a backoff mechanism, Exponential Linear Backoff Algorithm (ELBA), is proposed to improve system performance over contention-based wireless networks. In the ELBA, the variation of contention window size is combined both exponentially and linearly, dependent on the network load, as indicated by the number of consecutive collisions. In the ELBA scheme, a threshold is set to determine the network load. If the contention window size is smaller than the threshold, a light network load, the contention window is tuned exponentially. Conversely, if the contention window size is larger than the threshold, a heavy network load, the contention window size is tuned linearly. The numerical results show that the ELBA provides a better system throughput and collision rate in both light and heavy network loads than the related backoff schemes, including binary exponential backoff (BEB), exponential increase exponential decrease (EIED) and linear increase linear decrease (LILD).
Exploiting Parallelism on Keccak: FPGA and GPU Comparison

One of the methods to ensure information integrity is the use of hash functions, which generates a stream of bytes (hash) which must be unique. But most functions can no longer prevent malicious attacks and ensure that the information have just a hash. In order to solve this problem, the National Institute of S tandards and Technology (NIS T) convened the scientific community through a competition to create a new hash function standard, called S HA-3. This work is proposed to explore one of the finalist algorithms in the competition, the Keccak, and subsequently implement the propose pipeline architecture in FPGA with intuit to obtain performance data. Finally, it will be compared the pipeline implementation of keccak with implementations on GPUs.
Causes and Labor Market Consequences of Producer Heterogeneity

Essay I studies establishment-level employment changes in the Swedish Manufacturing sector over the 1972-96 period. The results show that modest changes in the aggregated employment record have been the resulting sum of rather large gross flows of jobs and that this constant reshuffling of jobs has important implications for the workforce and is closely related to process of economic growth. Shifts in employment across industries or other observable characteristic of establishments cannot explain the different employment outcomes across establishments. Essay II (with Altin Vejsiu) studies the determinants of plant closures in Swedish Manufacturing. From our theoretical framework we derive and empirically test hypotheses regarding the linkages between the probability of plant failure and industry-specific characteristics; local labor market conditions; and plant-specific sources of heterogeneity, including insider mechanisms in wage determination, plant specific human capital, selection mechanisms and technology vintage effects. Our results suggest that all these factors matter in ways that by and large conform to the a priori hypotheses. Essay III investigates the importance of access to product markets in explaining the spatial wage distribution by estimating the parameters of a spatial labor demand model. The model takes into account the effects of sorting of heterogeneous labor and heterogeneity in transportation costs. The results are consistent with the idea that increasing returns to scale together with transportation costs is an important driving force behind urban agglomeration and sizeable spatial wage differentials.Essay IV (with Harry Holzer and Julia Lane) presents a dynamic analysis of workers who persistently have low earnings over a period of three or more years. Some of these workers manage to escape from this low-earning status over subsequent years, while many do not. We analyze the characteristics of persons and especially of their firms and jobs that enable some to improve their earnings status over time.