Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Robust pitch determination using nonlinear state-space embedding

A robust method for detecting periodicity and measuring fundamental frequency in speech and other signals is proposed. The method is based on concepts originally developed for analyzing chaotic time-series. A signal segment is transformed into trajectory in m-dimensional state space by using embedding procedure. Close pairs of points on the trajectory with the distance between them less than prescribed neighborhood radius are found and their time separations are computed. A periodicity histogram for the distribution of computed time separations is characterized by distinct peaks corresponding to pitch period and its multiples for periodic regions, and by the absence of such peaks for aperiodic regions. The proposed method does not suffer from the limitations of other short-term pitch-estimation techniques. Updated information and demo software can be found at www.soundmathtech. com/pitch.
Residents' attitudes toward tourism development in Macao: a path model.

En el marco de la teoria del intercambio social, este estudio ha tratado de examinar las percepciones y actitudes hacia el desarrollo del turismo en Macao residentes. En concreto, este estudio ha investigado las relaciones estructurales entre el apoyo de los residentes y de restriccion en el desarrollo del turismo y sus impactos turisticos percibidos positivos y negativos, la dependencia laboral, el apego de la comunidad, y la participacion de decision. Analisis de la ruta se utiliza para el analisis de datos. Los resultados indican que las percepciones de los residentes se ven influidos por la union de la comunidad y la participacion de la decision, y su apoyo para el desarrollo turistico se pueden predecir por su percepcion de los impactos del turismo y la participacion de decision. Los resultados apoyan la teoria de cambio social en el contexto de Macao
Relationship between task‐related gamma oscillations and BOLD signal: New insights from combined fMRI and intracranial EEG

Cognitive neuroscience relies on two sets of techniques to map the neural networks underlying cognition in humans: recordings of either regional metabolic changes (fMRI or PET) or fluctuations in the neural electromagnetic fields (EEG and MEG). Despite major advances in the last few years, an explicit linkage between the two is still missing and the neuroimaging community faces two complementary but unrelated sets of functional descriptions of the human brain. Such an explicit framework, linking the two approaches in potentially complex cognitive tasks and in a variety of brain regions would permit to combine them into fine spatio‐temporally‐grained human brain mapping procedures. We combined fMRI and intra‐cranial EEG recordings of the same epileptic patients during a semantic decision task and found a close spatial correspondence between regions of fMRI activations and recording sites showing EEG energy modulations in the gamma range (>40 Hz). Our findings further support previous findings that gamma band modulations co‐localize with BOLD variations and also indicate that fMRI may be used as a constraint to improve source reconstruction of gamma band EEG responses. Hum Brain Mapp, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Host-Seeking Height Preferences of Aedes albopictus (Diptera: Culicidae) in North Central Florida Suburban and Sylvatic Locales

ABSTRACT The response of Aedes albopictus to the BG-Sentinel, Omni-directional-Fay-Prince, and Mosquito MagnetX traps was evaluated in four suburban and four sylvatic habitats in north-central Florida to ascertain potential height preference of this species. These traps, which are primarily designed to attract diurnal mosquitoes, were set at 1 and 6 m and were evaluated during 40 trapping periods over 4 mo. We collected 45,640 mosquitoes, representing 26 species from 10 genera, the most common being Aedes albopictus, Ae. vexans, Coquilletidia perturbons, Culex nigripalpus, Aedes infirmatus, Ae. triseriatus, and Psorophora ferox. Although significantly more Ae. albopictus were captured at 1 m above ground than at 6 m, fewer were captured in sylvatic habitats than suburban habitats. Although not statistically different, the BG-Sentinel caught more Ae. albopictus compared with the other two traps regardless of locale. These results suggest that, although Ae. albopictus was captured as high as 6 m, the majority seek hosts at or below 1-m heights. This further supports prior research that, although Ae. albopictus has been shown to disseminate West Nile virus, it has not been implicated as a major vector for the virus, which is likely because of its propensity to feed on ground-dwelling hosts. The study also shows how trap type, trap heights, and environments influence sampling estimates when determining species abundance.
Performance of cotton in traditional paddy fields of Uttara Kannada district, Karnataka.

The study was undertaken in Uttar Kannada district of Karnataka State. The two major Taluks viz., Mundagod and Haliyal where paddy has been largely replaced by cotton were selected for the study. From each taluka, 30 farmers growing paddy and 30 farmers growing cotton were selected randomly for the study. The growth rates in area, production and productivity of cotton for Uttar kannada district were 7.27 per cent, 17.01 per cent and 6.11 per cent, respectively. Whereas, paddy registered a growth rate of -1.74 per cent in case of area, - 2.16 per cent in production and -1.69 per cent in case of productivity. The cost of cultivation of cotton was higher than that of paddy but the gross returns were also higher in cotton cultivation resulting in higher net returns compared to these from paddy. Change in temperature (78.33% of farmers) and change in rainfall patterns (70.00% of farmers) were the major reasons for the farmers to shift over to cotton cultivation from their traditional paddy cultivation. Among the financial factors responsible for this shift in cultivation, the major ones were high income from cotton (76.79 % of farmers) and low income from paddy (70 % of farmers).
Domain-aware web service clustering based on ontology generation by text mining

According to the growth of the Web, the number of Web services is increased rapidly and efficient Web service discovery has become an important and challenging task. To overcome this issue, in this paper we proposed a Web service clustering method through calculating the semantic similarity of Web services using novel ontology learning method. The method uses terms similarity and terms specificity for ontology generation. Amount of domain specific information included in the term is identified as a specificity of the term. To calculate the similarity of Web services using generated ontology, this paper defines new logic based filters. If calculating similarity using the generated ontology failed, then applied information-retrieval-based methods. Empirical study of our novel approach has proved the effectiveness of clustering process. Further, experimental results show that our clustering approach works efficiently and performs better than existing approaches.
The consideration of organizational issues during the systems development process: An empirical analysis

The lack of consideration of organizational issues in systems development can lead to project failure. A review of the literature and a pre-test survey suggested classifying organizational issues into five categories and examining how these are considered by IT managers. A postal survey with responses from 64 senior IT specialists over a cross section of industry and commerce showed that there is a general awareness of the importance of organizational issues but there was little consensus on how they should be addressed in the development process. These IT managers were consistent in spending most effort on the issues perceived as most important from the list of 14 issue provided, but there was considerable variation in which specific issues they rated most important. In general those organizational issues with a 'technical' aspect were given more prominence than those which are less tangible, but which may be more critical to a system's success.
Integrating Attributional and Distributional Information in a Probabilistic Model of Meaning Representation

In this paper we present models of how meaning is represented in the brain/mind, based upon the assumption that children develop meaning representations for words using two main sources of information: information derived from their concrete experience with objects and events in the world (which we refer to as attributional information) and information implicitly derived from exposure to language (which we refer to as distributional information). In the first part of the paper we present a model developed using self-organising maps (SOMs) starting from speaker-generated features (properties that speakers considered to be important in defining and describing the meaning of a word). This model captures meaning similarity between words based solely upon attributional information and has been shown to be successful in predicting a number of behavioural semantic effects. In the second part of the paper, we present a probabilistic model that goes beyond attributional information alone, integrating this information with distributional information derived from text corpora. The ability of this integrated model to learn semantic relationships is demonstrated with reference to comparable probabilistic models that use only attributional or distributional information.
International Conference on Ambient Systems , Networks and Technologies ( ANT-2012 ) Energy-aware Peering Routing Protocol for indoor hospital Body Area Network Communication

The recent research in Body Area Networks (BAN) is focused on making its communication more reliable, energy efficient, secure, and to better utilize system resources. In this paper we propose a novel BAN network architecture for indoor hospital environments, and a new mechanism of peer discovery with routing table construction that helps to reduce network traffic load, energy consumption, and improves BAN reliability. We have performed extensive simulations in the Castalia simulation environment to show that our proposed protocol has better performance in terms of reduced BAN traffic load, increased number of successful packets received by nodes, reduced number of packets forwarded by intermediate nodes, and overall lower energy consumption compared to other protocols. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of [name organizer]
Corporate Governance and Managerial Incompetence: Lessons from Kmart

Modern corporate governance scholars often extol an activist role by institutional investors in directing corporate activity. Widely viewed as a solution to the "collective action" problems that inhibit such activism by individual investors, institutional investors are praised for adding value to corporations through their participation in the decision making process. The ouster of Joseph Antonini as Chief Executive Officer of Kmart Corporation in 1995 might be taken as a vindication of this view, because substantial evidence indicates that institutional investors played a crucial role in influencing Kmart's board of directors to remove him. In this Article, Professor Smith challenges this potential reading of the events at Kmart and poses the fundamental question of whether institutional investor activism designed to address perceived incompetence among corporate managers consistently adds value to corporations in which such activism is present. Professor Smith analyzes the effect of internal and external forces on managers, particularly on Antonini and Kmart's directors, and derives two fundamental lessons: (1) External constraints are ineffective in solving managerial incompetence; and (2) Investor activism will often be counterproductive because it destroys the value of centralized decision making.
On the local rigidity of Einstein manifolds with convex boundary

Let (M, g) be a compact Einstein manifold with non-empty boundary. We prove that Killing fields at the boundary extend to Killing fields of any (M, g) provided the boundary is weakly convex and a simple condition on the fundamental group holds. This gives a new proof of the classical infinitesimal rigidity of convex surfaces in Euclidean space and generalizes the result to Einstein metrics of any dimension.
Silent Stores and Store Value Locality

Value locality, a recently discovered program attribute that describes the likelihood of the recurrence of previously seen program values, has been studied enthusiastically in the recent published literature. Much of the energy has focused on refining the initial efforts at predicting load instruction outcomes, with the balance of the effort examining the value locality of either all register-writing instructions or a focused subset of them. Surprisingly, there has been very little published characterization of or effort to exploit the value locality of data words stored to memory by computer programs. This paper presents such a characterization, including detailed source-level analysis of the causes of silent stores, proposes both memory-centric (based on message passing) and producer-centric (based on program structure) prediction mechanisms for stored data values, introduces the concept of silent stores and new definitions of multiprocessor false sharing based on these observations, and suggests new techniques for aligning cache coherence protocols and microarchitectural store handling techniques to exploit the value locality of stores. We find that realistic implementations of these techniques can significantly reduce multiprocessor data bus traffic and are more effective at reducing address bus traffic than the addition of Exclusive state to a MS I coherence protocol. We also show that squashing of silent stores can provide uniprocessor speedups greater than the addition of store-to-load forwarding.
Helminth and Intestinal Protozoa Infections, Multiparasitism and Risk Factors in Champasack Province, Lao People's Democratic Republic

Background Detailed investigations of multiparasitism are scarce in the Mekong River basin. We assessed helminth (trematode, nematode, and cestode), and intestinal protozoa infections, and multiparasitism in random population samples from three different eco-epidemiological settings in Champasack province, southern Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), and determined underlying risk factors. Methodology Two stool samples were collected from 669 individuals aged ≥6 months over consecutive days and examined for helminth infections using the Kato-Katz method. Additionally, one stool sample per person was subjected to a formalin-ethyl acetate concentration technique for diagnosis of helminth and intestinal protozoa infections. Questionnaires were administered to obtain individual and household-level data pertaining to behavior, demography and socioeconomic status. Risk factors for hepato-biliary and intestinal parasitic infections and multiparasitism were determined using multiple logistic regressions analyses. Principal Findings Multiple species intestinal parasite infections were common: 86.6% of the study participants harbored at least two and up to seven different parasites concurrently. Regarding nematode infections, hookworm was the most prevalent species (76.8%), followed by Ascaris lumbricoides (31.7%) and Trichuris trichiura (25.0%). Regarding trematodes, Opisthorchis viverrini and Schistosoma mekongi infections were found in 64.3% and 24.2% of the participants, respectively. Infections with intestinal protozoa were rare. Conclusions/Significance There is a pressing need to intensify and sustain helminth control interventions in the southern part of Lao PDR. Given the high prevalence with nematode and trematode infections and the extent of multiparasitism, preventive chemotherapy is warranted. This intervention should be coupled with health education and improved access to clean water and adequate sanitation to consolidate morbidity control and enhance sustainability.
Unemployed Needn’t Apply: Unemployment Status, Legislation, and Interview Requests

This research investigates whether and when a job applicant’s unemployment status (i.e., employed, short-term unemployed, or long-term unemployed) affects the probability of receiving an interview request by examining interview request rates in the presence of versus absence of unemployment status antidiscrimination legislation. In response to 3,335 fictitious resumes sent to 1,237 online job postings in Los Angeles and New York City, we received an overall interview request rate of 10.37. Long-term unemployed applicants were less likely to receive an interview request than short-term unemployed applicants in Los Angeles but not in New York City, which has unemployment status antidiscrimination legislation. These findings are supplemented with self-report survey data about perceptions of the unemployed from 200 hiring personnel in New York City and Los Angeles. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed for the unemployment, job search, and selection literatures.
Integrate the GM(1,1) and Verhulst Models to Predict Software Stage Effort

Software effort prediction clearly plays a crucial role in software project management. In keeping with more dynamic approaches to software development, it is not sufficient to only predict the whole-project effort at an early stage. Rather, the project manager must also dynamically predict the effort of different stages or activities during the software development process. This can assist the project manager to reestimate effort and adjust the project plan, thus avoiding effort or schedule overruns. This paper presents a method for software physical time stage-effort prediction based on grey models GM(1,1) and Verhulst. This method establishes models dynamically according to particular types of stage-effort sequences, and can adapt to particular development methodologies automatically by using a novel grey feedback mechanism. We evaluate the proposed method with a large-scale real-world software engineering dataset, and compare it with the linear regression method and the Kalman filter method, revealing that accuracy has been improved by at least 28% and 50%, respectively. The results indicate that the method can be effective and has considerable potential. We believe that stage predictions could be a useful complement to whole-project effort prediction methods.
Relationship between salt consumption measured by 24-h urine collection and blood pressure in the adult population of Vitória (Brazil)

High salt intake is related to an increase in blood pressure and development of hypertension. However, currently, there are no national representative data in Brazil using the gold standard method of 24-h urine collection to measure sodium consumption. This study aimed to determine salt intake based on 24-h urine collection in a sample of 272 adults of both genders and to correlate it with blood pressure levels. We used a rigorous protocol to assure an empty bladder prior to initiating urine collection. We excluded subjects with a urine volume <500 mL, collection period outside of an interval of 23-25 h, and subjects with creatinine excretion that was not within the range of 14.4-33.6 mg/kg (men) and 10.8-25.2 mg/kg (women). The mean salt intake was 10.4±4.1 g/day (d), and 94% of the participants (98% of men and 90% of women) ingested more than the recommended level of 5 g/d. We found a positive association between salt and body mass index (BMI) categories, as well as with salt and blood pressure, independent of age and BMI. The difference in systolic blood pressure reached 13 mmHg between subjects consuming less than 6 g/d of salt and those ingesting more than 18 g/d. Subjects with hypertension had a higher estimated salt intake than normotensive subjects (11.4±5.0 vs 9.8±3.6 g/d, P<0.01), regardless of whether they were under treatment. Our data indicate the need for interventions to reduce sodium intake, as well the need for ongoing, appropriate monitoring of salt consumption in the general population.
Polyglutamine Diseases-Understanding the Mechanism of Pathogenesis

Protein misfolding has been implicated in a large number of diseases, which are now grouped under the name of Protein conformational disorders (PCDs). Few examples of diseases that fall in this group are Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease. All these disorders are characterized by sets of protein that misfold and aggregate in specific tissues. In order to identify and develop possible routes of therapeutic strategies, scientists have discovered several modifiers for these fatal diseases. These modifiers, primarily identified using models systems, include heat shock proteins, components of UPS pathway and autophagy, transcription factors, detoxifying enzymes, several RNA binding proteins, and RNA species, among other examples. These reviews will focus primarily on cellular processes that are affected in Polyglutamine disorders.
Ab initio molecular dynamics study of CaSiO3 perovskite at P-T conditions of earth's lower mantle

First-principles molecular dynamics calculations were performed in order to investigate the structure and properties of what is thought to be the third most abundant phase in the Earth’s lower mantle, CaSiO3 perovskite. The commonly assumed cubic structure was found to be stable at high temperatures T 1000– 2000 K and unstable at low temperatures at all pressures. For this structure we investigate the thermal equation of state and the Gruneisen parameter. We predict that the ground state of CaSiO3 perovskite is tetragonal space group I 4/ mcm. At room temperature an orthorhombic structure space group Imma is possible, which explains puzzling experimental X-ray powder diffraction patterns. We consider the structure relation between the Imma and the I 4/ mcm structures and show that the Imma structure can be obtained by a counterintuitive symmetry-lowering transition on increasing temperature.
Hopf Monoids in semi-additive Varieties

We study Hopf monoids in entropic semi-additive varieties (equivalently, entropic Jónsson-Tarski varieties and categories of semimodules over a commutative semiring, respectively) with an emphasis on adjunctions related to the enveloping monoid functor and the primitive element functor. These investigations are based on the concept of the abelian core of a semi-additive variety variety and its monoidal structure in case the variety is entropic. We also complement the study of generalized finite duals. MSC 2010: Primary 08B99, Secondary 16T05