Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Occupation of the Senses: The Prosthetic and Aesthetic of State Terror

Colonial and settler colonial dispossession is performed through various forms of violence, justified by cultural, historical, religious and national imperatives. In this paper, I define one of these forms of violence as the occupation of the senses, referring to the sensory technologies that manage bodies, language, sight, time and space in the colony. This paper analyses the parades, marches and festivals performed in the Palestinian city space of occupied East Jerusalem; shares the slogans, chants and graffiti used by Israeli civil, religious and nationalist entities; and explores what is lived, seen, heard, felt and smelled by the colonized to uncover the political violence implicated in the occupation of the senses.
Phonological adaptation of English loanwords in Ammani Arabic

This thesis investigates the phonological adaptation of English loanwords in Ammani Arabic (AA) in order to enhance our understanding of phonological theory and of AA phonology. The thesis also serves as documentation of the dialect in a state of flux. In contrast to previous studies, this study accounts for the phonological adaptation of loanwords not only at the segmental level, but also at the suprasegmental/prosodic level, adopting moraic theory within an OT framework. To achieve this, a corpus of 407 established English loanwords are analysed as they are pronounced by 12 AA monolingual native speakers. The study reveals that the adaptation process is mainly phonological, albeit informed by phonetics and other linguistic factors. AA native phonology accounts for the numerous modifications that English loanwords undergo. It is shown that the adaptation process is geared towards unmarkedness in that faithfulness to the source input is violated in order to render the output unmarked. Unmarked structures in the adaptation process may arise even though their marked counterparts are equally attested in AA native phonology, giving rise to the Emergence of the Unmarked. With respect to segmental adaptation, results show that AA maps source segments onto their phonologically closest AA phonemes. However, source allophonic features that are contrastive in AA are faithfully mapped onto their AA phonemic counterparts. For syllabic adaptation, loanwords undergo a number of phonological processes, e.g. epenthesis and gemination, to accommodate ill-formed source syllables into AA phonotactic structure. The study shows that English source stress is mostly neglected in the adaptation process with stress assigned to the adapted phonological string according to AA stress constraints. The introduction of English loanwords has given rise to new data that invoked hidden phonological constraints that would have remained latent in AA phonology. This study has resulted in a better understanding of AA phonology by shedding light on various AA phonological aspects chief among which are gemination, stress assignment constraints, and syllable structure.
An empirical investigation on factors affecting perceived learning by training through simulations

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to make an exploratory investigation of the important factors affecting the students’ perception of learning using simulation. Design/methodology/approach This exploratory research focuses on how collective learning, satisfaction, fun, collaborative communication, and time committed for the simulation affect the learning perceived by the students in a business post graduate course. In all, 157 students in a management course were divided in 26 teams of 6 members each. At the end of the simulation, learners were examined through surveys about their perception of different aspects of the simulation. Findings The findings of this research study showed that only four of these factors (collective learning, satisfaction, collaborative communication, and time) affected the students’ perceived learning. Research limitations/implications The exploratory nature of this study, along with the small sample size and the detail that responses were gathered from a single course, limits the extent to which we can make generalizations from the results. Practical implications The results from this research represent an important contribution to the premise of use of simulation in education, broadening the research of perceived learning through the perspective of simulations and opening a path for further research in this field. Originality/value Preparedness of management students with simulation training is of importance to business organizations and B-schools. Simulations permit learners to solve real-world problems, and they offer an opportunity to test recently attained skills without risk. Simulations can permit learners to visualize, discover, and articulate explanations for phenomena that would otherwise be difficult to observe.
Effect of Virtual Social Networks on Nursing Students’ English Learning

Introduction Development of new virtual technologies has evolved teaching-learning process. As for the technologies, it can be refered to the use of virtual social networks in education. The current study aimed at exploring the effect of using virtual social networks on nursing students’ English learning. Methods The current study employed pretest-posttest plan with control group. The research population consisted of all nursing students of Malayer nursing school, Malayer, Iran, in 2015-2016, among which 30 students were selected by available sampling method, and then, randomly assigned to the control and experimental groups. Instruments used in the research consisted of learning tests (pretest with 0.87 reliability and posttest with 0.89 via test-retest and confirmation of formal validity by English teachers as experts). Paired t test was employed to analyze data by SPSS version 18. Results The research findings showed that the learning level of students who learned English via virtual social networks was more than that of students who learned it traditionally (t = 14.30 and plusmn; 2.48, P = 0.001). Conclusions Given the effect of virtual social networks on nursing students’ English learning, it is recommended to use this teaching technique in the teaching-learning process of medical education.
The Influence of Feminism on Self-Silencing and Friendship Quality in Women's Same-Sex Friendships

THE INFLUENCE OF FEMINISM ON SELF-SILENCING AND FRIENDSHIP QUALITY IN WOMEN’S SAME-SEX FRIENDSHIPS Alexandra Dainow Advisor: University of Guelph, 2014 Dr. Paula Barata This study examined how pro-feminist attitudes influenced self-silencing and friendship quality in women’s same-sex friendships (n = 226). In the whole sample of women, stronger pro-feminist attitudes were related to less self-silencing. In the selfidentified feminist women’s sub-sample (n = 143), their friendships with other feminist women were of higher quality than their friendships with non-feminist women. However, stronger pro-feminist attitudes were related to better friendship quality for both types of friendships. Overall self-silencing and the divided self mediated the positive relationship between pro-feminist attitudes and friendship quality for these self-identified feminist women. The strength of the relationship between self-silencing and friendship quality differed for self-identified feminist women’s friendships with feminist and non-feminist women. Self-silencing was more negatively correlated with friendship quality for selfidentified feminist women’s friendships with non-feminist women. These findings helped to elucidate an understanding of the influence of pro-feminist attitudes and self-silencing in different relational contexts.
Inter-speaker variability in audio-visual classification of word prominence

In this paper we present results for the audio-visual discrimination of prominent from non-prominent words on a dataset with 16 speakers and more than 5000 utterances. We collected data in an experiment where users were interacting via speech in a small game, designed as a Wizard-of-Oz experiment, with a computer. Following misunderstandings of one single word of the system, users were instructed to correct this word using prosodic cues only. Hence we obtain a dataset which contains the same word with normal and with high prominence. We extract an extensive range of features from the acoustic and visual channel. Thereby we also introduce fundamental frequency curvature as a measure. The analysis shows that there is a large variation from speaker to speaker in respect to the discrimination accuracy between prominent and non-prominent words as well to which features yield the best results. In particular we show that the visual channel is very informative for many of the speakers and that overall the feature capturing the mouth shape is the best individual feature. Furthermore, we show that a combination of the acoustic and visual features improves the performance for many of the speakers.
IN VITRO EVALUATION OF APICAL MICROLEAKAGE USING DIFFERENT ROOT-END FILLING MATERIALS

The objective of this study was to evaluate the apical leakage of retrograde cavities filled with Portland Cement (Concrebrás S/A-MG-Brazil), ProRoot MTA™ (Dentsply International, Johnson City, TN, USA) and Sealapex (Kerr Corporation, Orange, California, USA) with addition of zinc oxide (Odahcam Herpo Produtos Dentários Ltda, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil). Forty-two extracted single-rooted human teeth were decoronated and used for this study. The root canals were instrumented at 1.0mm short of the apical foramen using the step-back technique to an apical ISO size 60. The roots were obturated with gutta-percha points and sealer Sealapex (Kerr Corporation-USA) and then 3mm of each root apex was sectioned at a 90° angle. Ultrasonic retrograde preparation was performed with a diamond tip to 3mm depth and the roots were randomly divided into 3 groups according to the filling material: G1-Portland, G2-ProRoot MTA, G3- Sealapex zinc oxide-added cement. The root surfaces were covered with nail varnish up to 2mm from the apical foramen, immersed in simulated tissue fluid for 30 days, and then immersed in 0.2% Rhodamine B solution for 24 hours for evaluation of marginal leakage. The results showed mean leakage of 0.75, 0.35 and 0.35 for groups 1, 2 and 3, respectively; however, Kruskal-Wallis test revealed that there was no statistically significant difference among the results (p>0.05).
Management of inventory replenishment and available offerings for goods sold with optional value-added packages

Abstract In the highly competitive retail industry many retailers bundle goods with optional value-added packages to enhance the attraction of the goods and increase their revenue. Offering such packages affects the sales and hence the inventory management of the goods. To maximize the benefits of bundling, the package offerings should vary with the inventory level of the goods. In this paper we propose a model to analyze the joint optimal management of a single good and its associated package offering and inventory control for the good. We define a procedure to construct superior offerings, which are shown to contain the optimal package offerings for all inventory levels of the goods. After obtaining the structural properties of the superior offerings and applying an existing result on the optimal inventory control, we deduce that the optimal inventory management policy is of the reorder-point, order-up-to-level, or (s, S), type, and the optimal choice of the package offering at any given inventory level of the goods is one of the superior offerings. Numerical examples show that the joint optimization model can substantially improve profitability over the policy of offering the same packages all of the time.
Authorship Attribution Using a Neural Network Language Model

In practice, training language models for individual authors is often expensive because of limited data resources. In such cases, Neural Network Language Models (NNLMs), generally outperform the traditional non-parametric N-gram models. Here we investigate the performance of a feed-forward NNLM on an authorship attribution problem, with moderate author set size and relatively limited data. We also consider how the text topics impact performance. Compared with a well-constructed N-gram baseline method with Kneser-Ney smoothing, the proposed method achieves nearly 2.5% reduction in perplexity and increases author classification accuracy by 3.43% on average, given as few as 5 test sentences. The performance is very competitive with the state of the art in terms of accuracy and demand on test data.
Root physiological adaptations involved in enhancing P assimilation in mining and non-mining ecotypes of Polygonum hydropiper grown under organic P media

It is important to seek out plant species, high in phosphorus (P) uptake, for phytoremediation of P-enriched environments with a large amount of organic P (Po). P assimilation characteristics and the related mechanisms of Polygonum hydropiper were investigated in hydroponic media containing various concentrations of Po (1–8 mmol L-1) supplied as phytate. The mining ecotype (ME) showed significantly higher biomass in both shoots and roots compared to the non-mining ecotype (NME) at 4, 6, and 8 m mol L-1. Shoot P content of both ecotypes increased up to 4 mmol L-1 while root P content increased continually up to 8 mmol L-1 for the ME and up to 6 mmol L-1 for the NME. Root P content of the ME exceeded 1% dry weight under 6 and 8 mmol L-1. The ME had significantly higher P accumulation in both shoots and roots compared to the NME supplied with 6 and 8 mmol L-1. The ME showed higher total root length, specific root length, root surface area, root volume, and displayed significantly greater root length, root surface area, and root volume of lateral roots compared to the NME grown in all Po treatments. Average diameter of lateral roots was 0.17–19 mm for the ME and 0.18–0.21 mm for the NME. Greater acid phosphatase and phytase activities were observed in the ME grown under different levels of Po relative to the NME. This indicated fine root morphology, enhanced acid phosphatase and phytase activities might be adaptations to high Po media. Results from this study establish that the ME of P. hydropiper is capable of assimilating P from Po media and is a potential material for phytoremediation of polluted area with high Po.
Efficient Implementation of XML Security for Mobile Devices

The population of mobile devices capable of participating in the Internet has increased dramatically in the last few years. To include this population into the Web service world requires support for the most important features, in particular security at the message level. This paper covers our approach to implement XML security specifications on mobile devices that allows efficient single-pass processing of XML encryption and signatures. Furthermore, we propose extensions to security specifications to better take into account the needs of mobile devices. We demonstrate the performance of our implementation, as well as our proposed extensions, through experiments, carried out in a real mobile environment.
Coping with data-sparsity in example-based machine translation

Data-driven Machine Translation (MT) systems have been found to require large amounts of data to function well. However, obtaining parallel texts for many languages is time-consuming, expensive and difficult. This thesis aims at improving translation quality for languages that have limited resources by making use of the available data more efficiently. Templates or generalizations of sentence-pairs where sequences of one or more words are replaced by variables are used in the translation model to handle data-sparsity challenges. Templates are built from clusters or equivalence classes that group related terms (words and phrases). As generating such clusters can be time-consuming, clusters are automatically generated by grouping terms based on semantic-similarity, syntactical-coherence and context. Data-sparsity is also a big challenge in statistical language modeling. In many MT systems, sophisticated tools are developed to make the translation models better but they still rely heavily on a restricted-decoder which uses unreliable language models that may not be well suited for translation tasks especially in sparse-data scenarios. Templates can also be used in Language Modeling. Limited training data also increases the number of out-of-vocabulary words and reduces the quality of the translations. Many of the present MT systems either ignore these unknown words or pass them on as is to the final translation assuming that they could be proper nouns. Presence of out-of-vocabulary words and rare words in the input sentence prevents an MT system from finding longer phrasal matches and produces low quality translations due to less reliable language model estimates. Approaches in the past have suggested using stems and synonyms of OOV words as replacements. This thesis uses an algorithm to find possible replacements which are not necessarily synonyms to replace out-of-vocabulary words as well as rare words based on the context in which these words appear. The effectiveness of each of the template-based approaches both in the translation model and in the language model are demonstrated for English→Chinese and English→French. The algorithm to handle out-of-vocabulary and rare words are tested on English→French, English→Chinese and English→Haitian. A Hybrid approach combining all the techniques is also studied in English→Chinese.
Clinical Efficacy and Safety of Ezetimibe on Major Cardiovascular Endpoints: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Background Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) about Ezetimibe's efficacy on patient-oriented outcomes have given discordant results. The aim of this study was to determine the net effect of Ezetimibe and of the widely marketed combination, Ezetimibe+simvastatin, on mortality and morbidity outcomes. Methods and Findings We searched for RCT on Ezetimibe using MEDLINE, CCTR, EMBASE, ClinicalTrials.gov databases up to December 2013, Merck and Novartis online registers, and personal communications. Two authors independently selected trials fulfilling these criteria: RCTs comparing Ezetimibe±statin or another lipid-lowering drug against placebo, or against the same lipid-lowering drug at the same dosage, with a follow-up at least 24 weeks and one or more of these outcomes: all-cause mortality, cardiovascular (CV) mortality, stroke, myocardial infarction (MI), cancer, serious adverse events (SAEs); we assessed the risk of bias using the Cochrane checklist. We extracted the data for major clinical events as a dichotomous measure, with the patient the unit of analysis. Pooled analysis was done with random and fixed effect based models. Trials comparing Ezetimibe plus a lipid-lowering drug against the same lipidlowering drug representing the net effect of Ezetimibe, showed a nonsignificant tendency toward damage for cancer, MI, stroke and SAEs. Ezetimibe+simvastatin vs. simvastatin alone showed a stronger tendency towards a higher risk for all-cause death (2.52; 0.65-9.74), CV death (3.04; 0.48-19.21), non-CV death (3.03; 0.12-73.50), MI (1.91; 0.42-8.70), stroke (2.38; 0.46-12.35), cancer (RR 11.11; 0.62-198.29), and SAEs (1.45; 0.95-2.23). Limitations include small numbers of events and inadequate power of the pooling. Trials comparing Ezetimibe+simvastatin vs placebo showed non-significant effects: MI (0.81; 0.66-1.00 p = 0.051), all-cause death (1.02; 0.95-1.09), CV death (0.91; 0.80-1.04), non-CV death (108; 0.99-1.18), stroke (0.86; 0.72-1.04), cancer (1.18; 0.80-1.74), SAEs (1.01; 0.96-1.06). Conclusions Ezetimibe±simvastatin had inconsistent effects on important outcomes. No firm conclusions are possible, but findings indicative of damage suggest much more selective use of Ezetimibe±simvastatin.
Pulmonary Hypertension Secondary to COPD

The development of pulmonary hypertension in COPD adversely affects survival and exercise capacity and is associated with an increased risk of severe acute exacerbations. Unfortunately not all patients with COPD who meet criteria for long term oxygen therapy benefit from it. Even in those who benefit from long term oxygen therapy, such therapy may reverse the elevated pulmonary artery pressure but cannot normalize it. Moreover, the recent discovery of the key roles of endothelial dysfunction and inflammation in the pathogenesis of PH provides the rationale for considering specific pulmonary vasodilators that also possess antiproliferative properties and statins.
Systematically Missing Subject-Level Data in Longitudinal Research Synthesis

When conducting research synthesis, the collection of studies that will be combined often do not measure the same set of variables, which creates missing data. When the studies to combine are longitudinal, missing data can occur on either the observation-level (time-varying) or the subject-level (non-time-varying). Traditionally, the focus of missing data methods for longitudinal data has been on missing observation-level variables. In this dissertation, we focus on missing subject-level variables where few methods have been developed or compared. We compare two multiple imputation approaches that have been proposed for missing subject-level data in single longitudinal studies: a joint modeling approach and a sequential conditional modeling approach. Based on analytical and empirical results for the case when all variables are normally distributed, we find the joint modeling approach to be preferable to the sequential conditional approach except when the covariance structure of the repeated outcome for each individual has homogenous variance and exchangeable correlation. Specifically, the regression coefficient estimates from an analysis incorporating imputed values based on the sequential conditional method are attenuated and less efficient than those from the joint method. Based on this preference, we develop a new joint model for multiple imputation of missing subject-level variables that models subjectand observation-level variables
Same-sex attraction, gender nonconformity, and mental health: The protective role of parental acceptance.

The current study assessed, separately for boys and girls, the moderating effects of mother/father acceptance in the relationship of same-sex attraction (SSA) and gender nonconformity (GNC) with psychological distress and social anxiety. Data were collected from 1,121 secondary school students (539 boys and 582 girls; Mage = 16.6) by means of a paper-pencil questionnaire. Multiple regression analyses showed that for boys, father acceptance moderated the associations of GNC with psychological distress and social anxiety. For boys with high levels of father acceptance, GNC was not significantly associated with psychological distress and social anxiety, when compared with boys with low and mean levels of father acceptance. Mother acceptance did moderate the association between SSA and social anxiety for girls. For girls with mean and high levels of mother acceptance, SSA was not associated with social anxiety, when compared with girls who reported low levels of acceptance by their mothers.