Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Organization of tongue articulation for vowels

Abstract This paper proposes a few basic concepts of motor organization for tongue articulation in relation to articulatory modeling and its control. Our physiological and morphological studies in pursuit of a realistic model of speech production are summarized as three levels of control organization: peripheral mechanisms, motor command generation, and sensorimotor integration. Peripheral organization of articulators can be modeled as a mass-spring system. Tongue musculature is represented as an orthogonal system consisting of two pairs of antagonistic muscles. The low-level control organization is the motor command generator, which transforms intended articulatory trajectories into tiers of motor command sequences. In our model, the input information to the motor command generator is hypothesized as the articulatory trajectory of a vector sum of tongue muscle forces which is derived from electromyographic (EMG) data. The high-level of control organization is the sensorimotor integration which is thought to perform a mapping between auditory and articulatory representations. Our data have suggested that distributions of vowel targets in the muscle force space and in the auditory space are compatible. This topological compatibility in vowel representations implies a tight auditory-articulatory linkage that permits a direct bi-directional mapping between intended motor vowel articulation and its auditory pattern.
Taxonomy and Survey of Location Management Systems

In wireless mobile computing, location management is introduced whenever users move from one place to another. In order to track a mobile user, the system must store information about their current location and report new locations to a home base station. Numerous techniques have been proposed to optimally manage the location of mobile hosts in mobile networks. This paper attempts to present a more structured and comprehensive analysis of the current location management techniques architectures and their technology enablers. We discuss some of the principal issues involved in location management and present a taxonomy and survey of location management strategies that have been proposed in the literature over the years for mobile computing systems.
Psychological Capital

The concept of approaching psychological capital (PsyCap) as an influencer on behaviors and results at both an individual and an organizational level is gaining support from a growing body of research. However, to date, the construct and impact of the PsyCap on adolescents’ behavioral outcomes have not been tested. If tested, an understanding of the psychological construct and its impact could be helpful for teachers and administrators in adjusting institutional methodology in accordance with the mental health status of the students. We explore the impact of PsyCap and the moderating role of perceived social support. We also adopt an innovative perspective to detect how to reduce problem behaviors. A construct of PsyCap of adolescents and the relationships among PsyCap, perceived social support, and behavioral problems is proposed. The findings provide a strong evidence-based recommendation for the use of PsyCap in a public school education management.
Hippocampal activation in patients with mild cognitive impairment is necessary for successful memory encoding

Background: Episodic memory enables us to consciously recollect personally experienced past events. Memory performance is reduced in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), an at-risk condition for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Patients and methods: We used functional MRI (fMRI) to compare brain activity during memory encoding in 29 healthy elderly subjects (mean age 67.7 (SD 5.4) years) and 21 patients with MCI (mean age 69.7 (SD 7.0) years). Subjects remembered a list of words while fMRI data were acquired. Later, they had to recognise these words among a list of distractor words. The use of an event related paradigm made it possible to selectively analyse successfully encoded items in each individual. We compared activation for successfully encoded words between healthy elderly subjects and patients with MCI. Results: The main intergroup difference was found in the left hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions for the patients with MCI compared with healthy subjects during successful encoding. Conclusion: These results suggest that in patients with MCI, an increase in MTL activation is necessary for successful memory encoding. Hippocampal activation may help to link newly learned information to items already stored in memory. Increased activation in MTL regions in MCI may reflect a compensatory response to the beginning of AD pathology.
Political Talking Partners and Civic Engagement : An Application of Egocentric Social Network Analysis in the Field of Political Science

for their valuable comments; however, all errors are my own. This is a work in progress; please do not cite or reference. Abstract: The existing literature on civic engagement in the United States has focused on face-to-face interactions as the key to acquiring both the desire and skills necessary to participate in civil society. However, few works have focused on the relationship between individuals' political talking networks and civic engagement on a nationwide level. One notable exception to this general oversight is Lake and Huckfeldt (1998), who present evidence suggesting a link between the frequency of interaction with political talking partners and civic engagement. Making use of public opinion data from the Cross-National Election Studies' United States study (Beck, et al., 1992), the current study extends the work of Lake and Huckfeldt in two parts. The first assesses the relationship between frequency of interaction in the political talking network and multiple indicators of civic engagement. The second addresses the relationship between attitudinal disagreement in political talking networks and civic engagement. The results suggest a positive relationship between frequency of interaction and civic engagement, and also between the amount of disagreement in the network and civic engagement. The methodological and normative implications of these relationships are discussed.
Personality and Opportunity

This study examines the alternative ways that key personality traits—Agreeableness and Conscientiousness—work in conjunction with measures of situational opportunity in affecting offending and victimization simultaneously. More specifically, we explore (a) the extent to which the effects of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness on offending and victimization are mediated by opportunity, and (b) the extent to which the effects of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness on offending and victimization are moderated by opportunity. These interrelationships are estimated using path modeling of two waves of survey data from a 4-year panel study of 2,220 adolescents. Results suggest that the effects of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness on offending and/or victimization are partially mediated by situational opportunity. Regarding interaction effects, results show that the effects of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness are also moderated by measures of situational opportunity. These traits appear to protect against offending most notably at the highest levels of opportunity.
A large outbreak of Brainerd diarrhea associated with a restaurant in the Red River Valley, Texas.

BACKGROUND In June 1996, an outbreak of chronic diarrhea was reported to the Texas Department of Health (Austin). METHODS We initiated active case finding, performed 2 case-control studies, and conducted an extensive laboratory and environmental investigation. RESULTS We identified 114 persons with diarrhea that lasted > or = 4 weeks. Symptoms among 102 patients who were studied included urgency (87%), fatigue (86%), fecal incontinence (74%), and weight loss (73%); the median maximum 24-h stool frequency was 15 stools. Diarrhea persisted for > 6 months in 87% and for > 1 year in 70% of patients who were observed. Fifty-one (89%) of 57 ill persons had eaten at a particular restaurant within 4 weeks before onset, compared with 8 (14%) of 59 matched control subjects (matched odds ratio [OR], undefined; 95% confidence interval [CI], 11.2-infinity). At the restaurant, patients were more likely than their unaffected dining companions to have drunk tap water (OR, 2.8; 95% CI, 1.0-9.9) and to have eaten several specific food items, and they were less likely to have drunk iced tea made from boiled water and store-bought ice (OR, 0.3; 95% CI, 0.05-1.0). A multivariable model that included consumption of tap water and salad bar tomatoes best fit the data. The restaurant had multiple sanitary and plumbing deficiencies. Extensive laboratory and environmental testing for bacterial, parasitic, mycotic, and viral agents did not identify an etiologic agent. CONCLUSIONS The clinical, laboratory, and epidemiologic findings are consistent with those of previous outbreaks of Brainerd diarrhea. To our knowledge, this is the largest reported outbreak of Brainerd diarrhea associated with a restaurant.
Patent and Publication Activities of German Professors: An Empirical Assessment of Their Co-Activity

The growing importance of technology-relevant non-publication output of university research has come into the focus of policy-makers' interest. A fierce debate arose on possible negative consequences of the increasing commercialization of science, as it may come with a reduction in research performance. This paper investigates the relationship between publishing as a measure of scientific output and patenting for German professors active in a range of science fields. We combine bibliometric/technometric indicators and econometric techniques to show that patenting positively correlates with the publication output and quality of patenting researchers. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.
Joint Design of Transceivers for Multiple-Access Channels Using MMSE Decision Feedback Detection

We consider the joint design of transceivers for a multiple-access multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) system communicating over intersymbol interference (ISI) channels. The system we consider is equipped with the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) decision-feedback (DF) detector. Here, we explore a novel perspective of designing a transceiver that minimizes the arithmetic mean-square error (MSE) of MMSE-DF detection and satisfies a fixed-sum Gaussian mutual information constraint. For this optimization problem, a direct explicit solution is obtained. We show that the optimal solution is achieved if and only if uniform user mutual information and uniform symbol mutual information are both achieved. Uniform user mutual information is attained by successively solving a series of problems of minimizing individual user transmission power under fixed mutual information, whereas uniform symbol mutual information is maintained by applying the equal-diagonal QRS decomposition. We also show that, in addition to minimizing the arithmetic MSE of MMSE-DF detection, such uniform mutual information distribution has also other desirable properties: 1) The optimal detection order in terms of signal-to-interference-noise ratios (SINRs) for both the users and the symbols is the natural transmission order of the system; and 2) when the sum Gaussian mutual information is large, the performance of the optimum transceiver using the MMSE-DF receiver asymptotically approaches that of the maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver.
The Cognitive Turn of Contrastive Analysis: Empirical Evidence

L2 learners of ten notice input which is frequent, functional and perceptually salient. Frequency, functionality and salience can be induced by instruction. One possible source of salience is contrast-dependent teacher-induced salience which is defined via contrastive analysis. In an experiment conducted with 137 intermediate FL learners, Kupferberg and Olshtain (1996a) showed that contrastive metalinguistic input (CMI) facilitated the acquisition of difficult target structures. The present study partially replicates this experiment to test the effect of CMI on the acquisition of grammatical aspect in English by 57 English teachers and student teachers, advanced L2 learners, who were able to recognise the structure, but avoided production. The results of the two experiments are interpreted within a cognitive framework of L2 acquisition as an indication that the provision of CMI may enhance the production levels of difficult target structures.
How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas

The ability to promptly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stake- holders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. While the literature describes several approaches which aim to identify the emergence of new research topics early in their lifecycle, these rely on the assumption that the topic in question is already associated with a number of publications and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. Hence, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. In this paper, we begin to address this challenge by performing a study of the dynamics preceding the creation of new topics. This study indicates that the emergence of a new topic is anticipated by a significant increase in the pace of collaboration between relevant research areas, which can be seen as the ‘parents’ of the new topic. These initial findings (i) confirm our hypothesis that it is possible in principle to detect the emergence of a new topic at the embryonic stage, (ii) provide new empirical evidence supporting relevant theories in Philosophy of Science, and also (iii) suggest that new topics tend to emerge in an environment in which weakly interconnected research areas begin to cross-fertilise.
WHICH AB SCALE?: An Extension

The AB therapist “type” distinction appears to have potential for predicting differential therapeutic success. However, the proliferation of versions of the AB scale has led to confusion. In a recent attempt to reduce this confusion, Kemp and Stephens conducted a comparative analysis of nine different versions of the AB scale and recommended the continued use of three of these versions. The present investigation assessed the accuracy with which these three AB scale versions identify the same individual as an A or B. Considerable equivalence in predictive efficiency was found between the original Whitehorn-Betz 23-item version and a frequently used modification; however, the Campbell et al. 80-item revision was only minimally related to the other two versions, a finding which may account for recent contradictory findings using this version. Caution is recommended in future utilization of this latter revision as an assessment device presumably tapping similar aspects of cognitive-behavioral style as the scale versions used in other investigations of the AB therapist-type dimension.
Accuracy in Nonverbal Communication as Affected by Trait and State Anxiety

66 students from a midwest junior college participated in an investigation of the effects of trait and state anxiety on accuracy in interpreting nonverbal communication. The students were asked in normal and stress-induced settings to decode facial emotions from a series of slides depicting 6 categories of facial expressions. Analysis indicated that low trait-anxious subjects were more accurate in interpreting nonverbal facial expressions in stressful situations, whereas high trait-anxious subjects were superior in non-stressful situations but showed a significant deterioration in accuracy when subjected to situational stress.
randomizeR: An R package for the assessment and implementation of randomization in clinical trials

Randomization in clinical trials is the key design technique to ensure the comparability of treatment groups. Although there exist a large number of software products which assist the researcher to implement randomization, no tool which would cover a wide range of procedures and allow the comparative evaluation of the procedures under practical restrictions has been proposed in the literature so far. The R package randomizeR addresses this need. The paper includes a detailed description of the randomizeR package that serves as a tutorial for the generation of randomization sequences and the assessment of randomization procedures.
Persistent Organic Pollutants and Type 2 Diabetes: A Prospective Analysis in the Nurses’ Health Study and Meta-analysis

Background: Prospective data regarding persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D) are limited, and the results for individual POPs are not entirely consistent across studies. Objectives: We prospectively examined plasma POP concentrations in relation to incident T2D and summarized existing evidence in a meta-analysis. Methods: Plasma polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (DDE), and hexachlorobenzene (HCB) concentrations were measured in 1,095 women who were free of diabetes at blood draw in 1989–1990 and participated in two case–control studies in the Nurses’ Health Study. We identified 48 incident T2D cases through 30 June 2008. We conducted a literature search in PubMed and EMBASE through December 2011 to identify prospective studies on POPs in relation to diabetes. We used a fixed-effects model to summarize results. Results: After multivariable adjustment, plasma HCB concentration was positively associated with incident T2D [pooled odds ratio (OR) 3.59 (95% CI: 1.49, 8.64, ptrend = 0.003) comparing extreme tertiles]. Other POPs were not significantly associated with diabetes. After pooling our results with those of six published prospective studies that included 842 diabetes cases in total, we found that HCB and total PCBs both were associated with diabetes: the pooled ORs were 2.00 (95% CI: 1.13, 3.53; I2 = 21.4%, pheterogeneity = 0.28) and 1.70 (95% CI: 1.28, 2.27; I2 = 16.3%, pheterogeneity = 0.30) for HCB and total PCBs, respectively. Conclusions: These findings support an association between POP exposure and the risk of T2D.
Comparative Genomic Hybridization Analysis of Two Predominant Nordic Group I (Proteolytic) Clostridium botulinum Type B Clusters

ABSTRACT Comparative genomic hybridization analysis of 32 Nordic group I Clostridium botulinum type B strains isolated from various sources revealed two homogeneous clusters, clusters BI and BII. The type B strains differed from reference strain ATCC 3502 by 413 coding sequence (CDS) probes, sharing 88% of all the ATCC 3502 genes represented on the microarray. The two Nordic type B clusters differed from each other by their response to 145 CDS probes related mainly to transport and binding, adaptive mechanisms, fatty acid biosynthesis, the cell membranes, bacteriophages, and transposon-related elements. The most prominent differences between the two clusters were related to resistance to toxic compounds frequently found in the environment, such as arsenic and cadmium, reflecting different adaptive responses in the evolution of the two clusters. Other relatively variable CDS groups were related to surface structures and the gram-positive cell wall, suggesting that the two clusters possess different antigenic properties. All the type B strains carried CDSs putatively related to capsule formation, which may play a role in adaptation to different environmental and clinical niches. Sequencing showed that representative strains of the two type B clusters both carried subtype B2 neurotoxin genes. As many of the type B strains studied have been isolated from foods or associated with botulism, it is expected that the two group I C. botulinum type B clusters present a public health hazard in Nordic countries. Knowing the genetic and physiological markers of these clusters will assist in targeting control measures against these pathogens.
Teachers’ views of their assessment practice

The main aim of this research was to analyse teachers’ views of pupil assessment. The theoretical framework was based on existing literature on advances and challenges of pupil assessment in regard to support for learning, fairness, educational partnership, feedback, and favourable methods. The data were gathered by means of a questionnaire designed for teachers of comprehensive schools. Teachers were first asked to describe a good (right/fair) and a bad (wrong/unfair) case of pupil assessment selected from the period of latest three years. Second, two lists of factors were presented, and respondents were asked to indicate which were the most influential in making pupil assessment either difficult or easy. One hundred twenty-six teachers completed and returned the questionnaire. A descriptive, mainly qualitative approach was used to analyse the data. The majority of positive views concerned the use of different assessment methods, an interactive approach, encouraging feedback, and criteria clarification. Negative views dealt with improper assessment methods, level of stringency, badly implemented assessment, and weak grounds for assessment. Three factors made assessment as difficult: interpretation of fairness, pupils with special needs, and pupils’ heterogeneity. On the other hand, versatile assessment methods, curriculum advice, and pupils’ good competencies made teachers’ assessment work easy.
Consolidation of Associative and Item Memory Is Related to Post-Encoding Functional Connectivity between the Ventral Tegmental Area and Different Medial Temporal Lobe Subregions during an Unrelated Task

It is well established that the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex (PrC) encode associative and item representations, respectively. However, less is known about how item and associative memories are consolidated. We used high-resolution fMRI in humans to measure how functional connectivity between these distinct medial temporal lobe regions with the ventral tegmental area (VTA) after a paired associate encoding task is related to both immediate and 24 h item and associative memory performance. We found that the strength of post-encoding functional connectivity between the VTA and CA1 selectively correlated with long-term associative memory, despite subjects actively engaging in an unrelated task during this period. Conversely, VTA–PrC functional connectivity during the same period correlated with long-term item memory. Critically, connectivity between VTA and these MTL regions were only related to memory tested at a 24 h delay, implicating midbrain connectivity in the consolidation of distinct forms of memory.
An evaluation of endo-β-D-mannanase (Hemicell) effects on broiler performance and energy use in diets varying in β-mannan content

Abstract Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the effects of a commercial endo-β-D-mannanase (Hemicell) on overall performance, MEn, net energy for gain, and some serum parameters of broilers fed diets varying in β-mannan level (experiment 1) and to evaluate effects of enzyme level on the same variables in broilers fed diet high in β-mannan (experiment 2). As a semipurified β-mannan source, guar gum was used to alter the dietary β-mannan level. In experiment 1, guar gum was added at 0, 0.5, 1, and 2% in a corn-soy-based starter diet with (0.05%) and without endo-β-D-mannanase supplementation in a 4 × 2 factorial design. Enzyme supplementation improved (P 0.10) final BW but improved 14-d feed:gain ratio at all inclusion levels. As in the first experiment, ME improved (P