Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Efficient Large-scale Semi-supervised Multi-label Classifier Capable of Handling Missing labels

Multi-label classification has received considerable interest in recent years. Multi-label classifiers have to address many problems including: handling large-scale datasets with many instances and a large set of labels, compensating missing label assignments in the training set, considering correlations between labels, as well as exploiting unlabeled data to improve prediction performance. To tackle datasets with a large set of labels, embedding-based methods have been proposed which seek to represent the label assignments in a low-dimensional space. Many state-of-the-art embedding-based methods use a linear dimensionality reduction to represent the label assignments in a low-dimensional space. However, by doing so, these methods actually neglect the tail labels - labels that are infrequently assigned to instances. We propose an embedding-based method that non-linearly embeds the label vectors using an stochastic approach, thereby predicting the tail labels more accurately. Moreover, the proposed method have excellent mechanisms for handling missing labels, dealing with large-scale datasets, as well as exploiting unlabeled data. With the best of our knowledge, our proposed method is the first multi-label classifier that simultaneously addresses all of the mentioned challenges. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method outperforms stateof-the-art multi-label classifiers by a large margin, in terms of prediction performance, as well as training time.
Ten Years of SeaWinds on QuikSCAT for Snow Applications

The scatterometer SeaWinds on QuikSCAT provided regular measurements at Ku-band from 1999 to 2009. Although it was designed for ocean applications, it has been frequently used for the assessment of seasonal snowmelt patterns aside from other terrestrial applications such as ice cap monitoring, phenology and urban mapping. This paper discusses general data characteristics of SeaWinds and reviews relevant change detection algorithms. Depending on the complexity of the method, parameters such as long-term noise and multiple event analyses were incorporated. Temporal averaging is a commonly accepted preprocessing step with consideration of diurnal, multi-day or seasonal averages.
Virus-stimulated neutrophils in the tumor microenvironment enhance T cell-mediated anti-tumor immunity

The tumor microenvironment (TME) fosters tumors by attenuating anti-tumor immunity, reinforcing tumor cell survival and increasing angiogenesis. Among the constituents of the TME, here, we focused on tumor-associated neutrophils (TANs). First, we found that the combination of poly I:C and inactivated Sendai virus particles (hemagglutinating virus of Japan envelope; HVJ-E) synergistically suppressed tumor growth in the B16-F10 melanoma mouse model. In this model, poly I:C contributed to the recruitment of CD11b+Ly6G+ neutrophils to the TME, and co-injection of poly I:C and HVJ-E increased CD11b+Ly6G+FAS+ TAN in the TME. Depletion of neutrophils abolished the synergistic anti-tumor effect of HVJ-E and poly I:C in B16-F10 tumors. We revealed that C-X-C motif chemokine ligand 2 (CXCL2) is produced in the TME by poly I:C, but HVJ-E enhanced neutrophil infiltration of the TME does not occur. An anti-CXCL2 antibody inhibited the tumor suppression by HVJ-E+poly I:C. HVJ-E in combination with recombinant CXCL2 protein or CXCL2 pDNA suppressed mouse melanoma by increasing cytotoxic T lymphocyte activity against B16-F10 melanoma, which was abolished by an anti-Ly6G antibody. HVJ-E directly and indirectly increased FAS and ICAM-1 expression in cultured bone marrow-derived naïve neutrophils. Thus, HVJ-E activates anti-tumor immunity via anti-tumorigenic neutrophils in the TME. An HVJ-E vector containing the CXCL2 gene may be applicable as a novel cancer gene therapy strategy.
Success rate of myringoplasty at Groote Schuur Hospital.

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to determine the success rate of myringoplasty surgery performed at Groote Schuur Hospital and to evaluate some of the presumed prognostic factors. DESIGN The study design was a retrospective analytical cohort. Setting. Groote Schuur Hospital (tertiary medical centre), Cape Town. Subjects. This study assessed the success rate of 341 myringoplasty operations performed by surgeons in the Department of Otolaryngology from January 2005 to December 2009. OUTCOME MEASURES An unsuccessful operation was classified as a residual perforation seen at the 3-month follow-up visit that remained present at all subsequent visits. Presumed prognostic factors such as the rank of the surgeon, size of the perforation, location of the perforation, graft used and whether it was a revision procedure, were also evaluated. Where possible, the audiometric gain following surgery was calculated. RESULTS The overall success rate in terms of an intact tympanic membrane following myringoplasty was 71%. The average improvement in pure tone average following myringoplasty was 12.4 dB. In 64% of patients, socially acceptable hearing levels were present postoperatively (air-conduction of less than 30 dB). None of the presumed prognostic factors was a statistically significant determinant (p>0.05). CONCLUSION The success rate for myringoplasty (in terms of perforation closure) of 71% at Groote Schuur Hospital compares well with that quoted in the literature. There is no ethical dilemma from a surgical outcomes perspective of registrars performing myringoplasties.
Overexpression of Dlx2 leads to postnatal condyle degradation

Distal-less homeobox 2 (Dlx2), a member of the Dlx family of transcription factors, is important for the development of craniofacial tissues. Previous studies based on knock-out mutant mice revealed that Dlx2 primarily disturbed the development of tissues from maxillary arch. The present study used a transgenic mouse model to specifically overexpress Dlx2 in neural crest cells in order to investigate the role of Dlx2 overexpression in post-natal condyle in mice. The model was constructed and the phenotype observed using gross observation, micro-CT scan and histological examination. The model determined that overexpression of Dlx2 may lead to postnatal condyle malformation, subchondral bone degradation and irregular histological structure of the condylar cartilage. In addition, the expression of osteocalcin in the condyle region was markedly downregulated, whereas expression of msh homeobox 2 was upregulated. The results of the present study suggest that Dlx2 overexpression in cranial neural crest cells would disrupt the development of post-natal condyle, which demonstrates that the expression level and the spatiotemporal expression patterns of Dlx2 may be important in regulating the development of post-natal condyle in mice, and also offered a possible temporal-mandibular joint osteoarthritis model animal for future studies.
Introduction: Conversational humor: Forms, functions and practices across cultures

In addition to the several journals dedicated to the study of humor, there have been a substantial number of special issues on humor, both in linguistics journals and in journals in other fields in recent years (cf. Attardo 2003; Dynel 2008b, 2017; Dynel et al. 2016; Dynel and Sinkeviciute 2017; Kotthoff 2006a; Lurie and Gurian 2015), not to mention laughter (Wagner and Vöge 2010). This is in addition to the myriad of books on the subject of humor, all of which give an indication of the scale of – and perpetually growing interest in – humor research across a wide range of disciplines and methodological approaches. Dynel (2008a) presents a comprehensive summary of the complexity and diversity of humor studies in the field of linguistics, from the earlier semantic and pragmatic theories through to the various cognitive approaches to the study of humor, most of which focused primarily on description of canned jokes and narratives, however. As Dynel points out (idem, p. 3), there is much more complexity to humor than joke telling, and the subsequent term conversational humor (cf. Coates 2007) is better suited to capture the diverse aspects of humor (word play, pun, witticism, tease, mockery, sarcasm, irony, banter, black humor, subversive humor (Holmes and Marra 2002), and fantasy humor (Hay 2001) etc.), some of which also exist in their own right in a non-humorous way. (See also Béal and Mullan 2013 for a discussion of the difficulty of humor categories and labels when applied to a cross-cultural comparison of conversational humor.) Coates defines conversational humor as referring to all kinds of “humorous talk occurring in the informal conversation of friends” (2007: 29). This term was
Transmit Energy Focusing for DOA Estimation in MIMO Radar With Colocated Antennas

In this paper, we propose a transmit beamspace energy focusing technique for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar with application to direction finding for multiple targets. The general angular directions of the targets are assumed to be located within a certain spatial sector. We focus the energy of multiple (two or more) transmitted orthogonal waveforms within that spatial sector using transmit beamformers which are designed to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain at each receive antenna. The subspace decomposition-based techniques such as MUSIC can then be used for direction finding for multiple targets. Moreover, the transmit beamformers can be designed so that matched-filtering the received data to the waveforms yields multiple (two or more) data sets with rotational invariance property that allows applying search-free direction finding techniques such as ESPRIT or parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC). Unlike previously reported MIMO radar ESPRIT/PARAFAC-based direction finding techniques, our method achieves the rotational invariance property in a different manner combined also with the transmit energy focusing. As a result, it achieves better estimation performance at lower computational cost. The corresponding Cramer-Rao bound is derived and its dependence on the number of waveforms used is discussed. Simulation results also show the superiority of the proposed technique over the existing techniques.
Integration of the Video Response App FlipGrid in the Business Writing Classroom

In business English writing classes, second language learners can be reticent to speak about their writings. To combat this and give students more opportunities to practice speaking and allow instructors the ability to measure the engagement, a video capture tool is needed that will enable students to have conversations asynchronously and produce the language vocally outside of class. Recently a tool was developed where speaking tasks can be created using a video response service called FlipGrid. This web-based educational technology tool gives instructors the means to help students increase their productive language skills by increasing the time students spend speaking outside class, with the added accountability of video. Both spontaneous and planned vocal practice assignments can be created with this tool resulting in more student engagement and speaking practice. This paper discusses the need and rationale for using the service and shares the results of a class evaluation after implementing the video capture tool in a business writing class. The assessment discovered that students found the tool easy to use and noticed increases with both their perceived time speaking English between classes and their perceived English-speaking confidence.
Forms of Address in the Spanish Language Curriculum in the United States: Actualities and Aspirations

Abstract:This current study reports the findings of sociolinguistic research investigating the place of the voseo in the Spanish language curriculum in the United States. The study describes the results of questionnaire responses from 177 US Spanish teachers and survey responses from 560 US college students of Spanish. Both instruments sought to identify the presence or absence of vos, the second person singular pronoun, in Spanish language textbooks and instruction and the respondents' understanding of the voseo vis-à-vis grammatically and culturally appropriate usage. The results indicate that the voseo is simply not included in texts, not taught by the teachers, and not learned by the students. Given that up to two-thirds of the Latin American population are denoted as voseo users, the profession should address this gap in Spanish language instruction. The article concludes with recommendations for curriculum, instruction, and professional development to facilitate the inclusion of the voseo in the Spanish curriculum in the United States.
Factors and processes contributing to resilience: The resilience framework.

Resilience is becoming an increasingly popular concept for research and application in the field of prevention. Because of reduced funding for services to help at-risk children and families, information on low cost methods for increasing resilience to negative life events is critically needed. A better understanding of ways to increase resilience in all children holds great promise for improving the effectiveness of preventive community, school, and family services. A shift in focus from risk to resilience, according to Thrner (1995), has developed partially from a frustration with such a pervasive emphasis on the identification of risk factors. Whi1e a risk-focused approach has been very helpful in the public health field in the reduction of infectious diseases, more complex diseases of life style require a more comprehensive approach including proteelive and resilience mechanisms (Rutter, 1993). A paradigmshift appears to be occurring towards an increasing emphasis on optimism and hope as opposed to the frustration and despair that can occur from an emphasis on risk processes.
Mother-Infant Interaction in the Emergence of a Tool-Using Skill at Mealtime: A Process of Affordance Selection

ABSTRACT This study provides a detailed description of the process of the emergence of the utensil-using skill of infants to control encounters with food and mother-infant joint action that surrounds the emergence of this context-specific skill. Longitudinal observations from the first contact with a utensil to the beginning of successful self-feeding with a utensil found that there was an extended period of exploratory utensil use that precedes the use of the utensil for the goal of feeding around which adults organized the environment where such feeding-irrelevant activities of the infants were tolerated. Subsequently, adults gradually introduced and highlighted the opportunities for infants' functional feeding encounters, often by adjusting the position of objects on the table. Overall, we found the process of what may be called affordance selection—in which a definite set of opportunities for action among many available were selected by adults to invite certain spontaneous behaviors of developing infants. This study adds to the growing realization that normally occurring experiences of rich affordances matter in the development of specific behavior in a given cultural context.
Tax Reform with Endogenous Borrowing Limits and Incomplete Asset Markets

This paper studies different income tax reforms in an infinite horizon economy with a progressive labor income tax code, incomplete markets an endogenous borrowing constraints on capital holdings. In particular, it assumes that households can break their trading arrangements by going into financial autarky, in which case they are excluded from future asset trade. The endogenous limits are then determined at the level at which households are indifferent between defaulting and paying back their debt. These limits are significantly different from zero and they get looser with a higher labor income, a property that is consistent with US data on credit limits. The reforms we study area all revenue neutral and they eliminate capital income taxes but they differ in the changes to the labor income tax code. Our results illustrate that a successful reform has to combine the increase in average labor taxes with an increase in the progressivity of the labor income tax code. On the one hand, this reduces the disposable income of the rich, leading to lower savings and to a lower aggregate capital. On the other hand, it allows the poor and middle income households to supply less labor and consume and more after the reform, increasing the aggregate welfare both in the long run an throughout the transition.
General Participative Media Single Image Restoration

This paper describes a method to restore degraded images captured in general participative media --- fog, turbid water, sand storm, etc. To obtain generality, we, first, propose a novel interpretation of the participative media image formation by considering the color variation of the media. Second, we introduce that joining different image priors is an effective alternative for image restoration. The proposed method contains a Composite Prior supported by statistics collected on both haze-free and degraded participative environment images. The key of the method is joining two complementary measures --- local contrast and color. The results presented for a variety of underwater and haze images demonstrate the power of the method. Moreover, we showed the potential of our method using a special dataset for which a reference haze-free image is available for comparison.
Enhanced lexicon based model for web forum answer detection

A Web forum is an online community that connects people with common interest together. Within the forum, members interact to share knowledge, expertise and resources. A major issue in detecting web forum answers is to establish a good relationship between the question and the candidate answer. This relationship is often established using lexical features. Web forum text, unlike news articles, is faced with noise challenges, and this hinders the performance of lexical features. In this paper, we investigate the effect of noise on most of the common lexical features used in mining web forum answers with a view of normalizing it to enhance the performance of the features. We propose 13 lexical features for exploration. These features belong to four different quality dimensions that can guarantee good answers. We empirically address the following questions in the paper. What category of noise is more rampant in web forum? What lexical mining features are more susceptible to noise? Will normalization of forum corpus enhance the performance of lexical features in detecting web forum answers? We used three publicly available datasets of varying technical degrees for the experiments. The experimental results revealed that proper normalization of web forum corpora can yield up to 9% increase in the performance of the lexical features.
Does Clinical Management Improve Outcomes following Self-Harm? Results from the Multicentre Study of Self-Harm in England

Background Evidence to guide clinical management of self-harm is sparse, trials have recruited selected samples, and psychological treatments that are suggested in guidelines may not be available in routine practice. Aims To examine how the management that patients receive in hospital relates to subsequent outcome. Methods We identified episodes of self-harm presenting to three UK centres (Derby, Manchester, Oxford) over a 10 year period (2000 to 2009). We used established data collection systems to investigate the relationship between four aspects of management (psychosocial assessment, medical admission, psychiatric admission, referral for specialist mental health follow up) and repetition of self-harm within 12 months, adjusted for differences in baseline demographic and clinical characteristics. Results 35,938 individuals presented with self-harm during the study period. In two of the three centres, receiving a psychosocial assessment was associated with a 40% lower risk of repetition, Hazard Ratios (95% CIs): Centre A 0.99 (0.90–1.09); Centre B 0.59 (0.48–0.74); Centre C 0.59 (0.52–0.68). There was little indication that the apparent protective effects were mediated through referral and follow up arrangements. The association between psychosocial assessment and a reduced risk of repetition appeared to be least evident in those from the most deprived areas. Conclusion These findings add to the growing body of evidence that thorough assessment is central to the management of self-harm, but further work is needed to elucidate the possible mechanisms and explore the effects in different clinical subgroups.
THE ROLE OF MOTIVATION, GENDER, AND LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES IN EFL PROFICIENCY

Thesis (M.A.)--American University of Beirut, Dept. of Education, 2006. ;"Advisor: Dr. Ghazi Ghaith, Professor, Education Department--Member of Committee: Dr. Kassim Shaaban, Professor, English Department--Member of Committee: Dr. Saouma Bou Jaoude, Profes
An Event Notification Service based on XML Messaging on Different Transport Technologies

With the size and increasing complexity of telecom networks, there is a need to interconnect management systems at different levels. This requires information flow across many applications in a domain independent way. XML is a widely deployed standard which is being used for integration of network management system(NMS) with other applications. We examine the performance of different transport mechanisms, JMS, CORBA, HTTP and RMI for an XML message based event Notification Service. To improve the performance of XML message based event notifications, event grouping is examined and is found to perform well.
Psychopathy and choice of immediate versus delayed punishment.

This study tested the hypothesis that psychopathic Ss would show less preference for immediate shock than would nonpsychopathic Ss. 12 psychopathic and 12 nonpsychopathic criminals and 19 noncriminals were presented with 6 trials in which they were required to choose between an immediate shock and 1 delayed 10 sec. The results confirmed the hypothesis (p <,001). The psychopaths chose immediate shock 55.5% of the time while the nonpsychopaths chose it 82.3% of the time. The preference for immediate shock increased over trials for the nonpsychopathic Ss but not for the psychopathic ones. The results were interpreted in terms of a conditioned fear hypothesis.
A preliminary evaluation of word representations for named-entity recognition

We use different word representations as word features for a named-entity recognition (NER) system with a linear model. This work is part of a larger empirical survey, evaluating different word representations on different NLP tasks. We evaluate Brown clusters, Collobert and Weston (2008) embeddings, and HLBL (Mnih & Hinton, 2009) embeddings of words. All three representations improve accuracy on NER, with the Brown clusters providing a larger improvement than the two embeddings, and the HLBL embeddings more than the Collobert and Weston (2008) embeddings. We also discuss some of the practical issues in using embeddings as features. Brown clusters are simpler than embeddings because they require less hyperparameter tuning.
eer Entrepreneurs , jobs , and trade

We propose a simple theory of endogenous firm productivity, unemployment, and top income inequality. High-talented individuals choose to become self-employed entrepreneurs and acquire more managerial (human) capital; whereas low-talented individuals become workers and face the prospect of equilibrium unemployment. In a two-country global economy, trade openness raises firm productivity, increases top income inequality, and may reduce welfare in the country exporting the good with lower relative labormarket frictions. Trade openness reduces firm productivity, lowers top income inequality, and necessarily raises welfare in the other country. The effect of trade on unemployment is ambiguous. Unilateral job-creating policies increase welfare in both countries. However, they reduce unemployment and raise top income inequality in the policy-active country; and reduce top income inequality while increasing unemployment in the policy-passive country. & 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.