Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A 3-d virtual head as a tool for speech therapy for children

Abstract A virtual talking head was adapted to show articulatory movements of the lips, jaw, tongue, and velum. A JavaScript program with a graphical user interface in HTML was developed for speech therapists to use the talking head as a tool in speech therapy. In an initial study children’s productions of words containing the sounds /s/ and /z/ were recorded and evaluated before and after two short learning lessons with an experimenter using the virtual head to explain the correct (prototypic) pronunciation of these sounds. Results show that several children could significantly enhance their speech production of the /s,z/ sound. Index Terms : computer animated speech, speech therapy, talking head 1. Introduction Speaking is a physiological procedure that manifests in the acoustic as well as in the optic domain. Hence, human speech is both audible and visible. Several properties of audible speech – especially intelligibility – can be enhanced by the visibility of natural speech movements [1] or synthetic speech movements [2]. A two-dimensional display of the tongue position was used for speech therapy since the 1980ies [3]. With current standard computer graphics technology, surfaces of 3-D objects can be displayed transparently. In this way a look through the facial skin of a virtual head can show articulators, which are usually hidden inside the oral cavity. This functionality enables a talking head to explain the articulatory movements that are necessary to produce a given phone chain in 3-D without slicing the head.
Efficient data reduction for large-scale genetic mapping

We present a fast and accurate algorithm for reducing large-scale genetic marker data to a smaller, less noisy, and more complete set of bins, representing uniquely identifiable locations on a chromosome. Our experimental results on real and synthetic data show that our algorithm runs in near-linear time, allowing for the analysis of millions of markers. Our algorithm reduces the problem scale while preserving accuracy, making it feasible to use existing genetic mapping tools without resorting to complex, time-intensive preprocessing methods to filter or sample the original data set. Additionally, our approach also decreases the uncertainty in genotype calls, improving the quality of the data. Preliminary results demonstrate that existing methods for marker ordering designed for the small scale settings perform with equivalent accuracy when given our reduced bin set as input.
Nicotinic activation of reticulospinal cells involved in the control of swimming in lampreys

In lampreys as in other vertebrates, brainstem centres play a key role in the initiation and control of locomotion. One such centre, the mesencephalic locomotor region (MLR), was identified physiologically at the mesopontine border. Descending inputs from the MLR are relayed by reticulospinal neurons in the pons and medulla, but the mechanisms by which this is carried out remain unknown. Because previous studies in higher vertebrates and lampreys described cholinergic cells within the MLR region, we investigated the putative role of cholinergic agonists in the MLR‐controlled locomotion. The local application of either acetylcholine or nicotine exerted a direct dose‐dependent excitation on reticulospinal neurons as well as induced active or fictive locomotion. It also accelerated ongoing fictive locomotion. Choline acetyltransferase‐immunoreactive cells were found in the region identified as the MLR of lampreys and nicotinic antagonists depressed, whereas physostigmine enhanced the compound EPSP evoked in reticulospinal neurons by electrical stimulation of this region. In addition, cholinergic inputs from the MLR to reticulospinal neurons were found to be monosynaptic. When the brainstem was perfused with d‐tubocurarine, the induction of swimming by MLR stimulation was depressed, but not prevented, in a semi‐intact preparation. Altogether, the results support the hypothesis that cholinergic inputs from the MLR to reticulospinal cells play a substantial role in the initiation and the control of locomotion.
Assessing Contractile Function When Ejection Fraction Is Normal: A Case for Strain Imaging.

Two-dimensional (2D) speckle-tracking echocardiography has, in recent years, emerged as a new method for assessing left ventricular systolic and diastolic function.1 The technique measures the movement of nonrandom coherent speckles in 2D echocardiographic images. Speckle-tracking measures myocardial deformation through the heart cycle rather than volumetric changes between end-diastole and end-systole, the standard method for calculating left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), which is dependent on image quality, the ability to accurately trace the endocardial border, and geometric assumptions required to estimate volumes from a 2D image.2 See Article by Palmieri et al Assessment of global longitudinal strain (GLS), obtained by 2D speckle-tracking echocardiography, requires the presence of sufficient amount of speckles within the myocardial wall for tracking to work and is now present as a semiautomatic function in many ultrasound machines and in off-line devices. Two-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiography has been shown to be a promising technique, and GLS provides an objective measurement of cardiac function, which has been demonstrated to be of prognostic value in the general population3 and in patients having a wide array of cardiac diseases, including patients with a myocardial infarction4 and patients with heart failure (HF) with reduced5 and preserved LVEF.6 Furthermore, myocardial deformation imaging has allowed for increasing recognition of subtle abnormalities of the LV function with a preserved LVEF. LV deformation is altered despite preserved LVEF in conditions predisposing to HF, including increasing age,7 hypertension,8 diabetes mellitus,9 stable angina,10 renal dysfunction,11 and obesity.12 Likewise, in patients with prevalent HF with preserved LVEF, longitudinal strain is impaired,13 despite a relative normal LVEF. These conditions are accompanied …
Disease-specific questionnaires such as the St George ’ s Respiratory Questionnaire , the Chronic Respiratory Disease Questionnaire , and the Clinical COPD

License. The full terms of the License are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. Permissions beyond the scope of the License are administered by Dove Medical Press Limited. Information on how to request permission may be found at: http://www.dovepress. com/permissions.php International Journal of COPD 2015:10 277–282 International Journal of COPD Dovepress
Ageing characteristics of RAP binder blends – what types of RAP binders are suitable for multiple recycling?

Two rolling thin-film oven-aged asphalts were blended with 15% and 50% of extracted reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) binders to investigate the effect of RAP content and properties on the long-term laboratory ageing characteristics of asphalt binders. The results from both chemical and rheological analyses indicate that the ageing characteristics of blended binders are dependent on fresh asphalt binders and that different virgin binders interact with different RAP binders differently and the performance grade (PG) adjustment is asphalt and RAP binder dependent. Some asphalts require higher PG adjustment than others. The mixing of virgin binders with RAP binders contributes to different stiffening effects based on the virgin asphalt–RAP interaction. The results show that the change in stiffness increase as a function of ageing times for RAP-blended binders is similar to that of a typical chemical ageing kinetic model, where the stiffness initially increases rapidly and then levels off at longer ageing times.
IPO Valuation in the New and Old Economies

We examine the valuation of accounting variables, growth opportunities, and insider retention for a sample of 1,625 IPOs from three time-periods: 1986-1990, January 1997 through March 2000 (designated as the boom period), and April 2000 through December 2001 (designated as the crash period). Specifically, we test for valuation differences in the boom and crash relative to the more stable 1980s. Additionally, we investigate whether accounting variables, growth, and insider retention of technology IPOs and internet IPOs are valued differently. Our major findings are as follows. For profitable non-tech firms in the 1980s, income, sales, RD but their income, book value, and insider retention are valued more. We also investigate whether first-day investors and investment bankers agree on the weights assigned to income, book value of equity, sales, R&D, industry comparables, and insider retention. We find that while the two groups value accounting variables and growth proxies differently, these differences are not economically important for the most part. With respect to insider retention, first day investors valued it less in the 1980s and during the crash period and more in the boom period, than do investment bankers. Additionally, investors value insider retention of tech, internet, and loss firms more than do investment bankers. First-day investors assign lower valuations to tech firms, internet firms, and loss firms than do investment bankers.
Experimental analysis of composite single-lap joints using digital image correlation and comparison with theoretical models

The demand for energy efficient, low weight structures has boosted the use of composite structures assembled using increased quantities of structural adhesives. Bonded structures may be subjected to severe working environments such as high temperature and moisture due to which the adhesive gets degraded over a period of time. This reduces the strength of a joint and leads to premature failure. Measurement of strains in the adhesive bondline at any point of time during service may be beneficial as an assessment can be made on the integrity of a joint and necessary preventive actions may be taken before failure. This paper presents an experimental approach of measuring peel and shear strains in the adhesive bondline of composite single-lap joints using digital image correlation. Different sets of composite adhesive joints with varied bond quality were prepared and subjected to tensile load during which digital images were taken and processed using digital image correlation software. The measured peel strain at the joint edge showed a rapid increase with the initiation of a crack till failure of the joint. The measured strains were used to compute the corresponding stresses assuming a plane strain condition and the results were compared with stresses predicted using theoretical models, namely linear and nonlinear adhesive beam models. A similar trend in stress distribution was observed. Further comparison of peel and shear strains also exhibited similar trend for both healthy and degraded joints. Maximum peel stress failure criterion was used to predict the failure load of a composite adhesive joint and a comparison was made between predicted and actual failure loads. The predicted failure loads from theoretical models were found to be higher than the actual failure load for all the joints.
Evaluation of Two New Automated Assays for Hepatitis B Virus Surface Antigen (HBsAg) Detection: IMMULITE HBsAg and IMMULITE 2000 HBsAg

ABSTRACT In recent years the diagnostic industry has developed new automated immunoassays for the qualitative detection of hepatitis B virus (HBV) surface antigen (HBsAg) in serum and plasma samples that are performed on analyzers that permit a high-speed throughput, random access, and primary tube sampling. The aim of the present study was the evaluation of two new automated HBsAg screening assays, IMMULITE HBsAg and IMMULITE 2000 HBsAg, from Diagnostic Products Corporation. The new HBsAg assays were compared to well-established tests (Auszyme Monoclonal [overnight incubation, version B], IMx HBsAg, AxSYM HBsAg, and Prism HBsAg [all from Abbott] and Elecsys HBsAg [Roche Diagnostics]). In the evaluation were included seroconversion panels, sera from the acute and chronic phases of infection, dilution series of various HBsAg standards, HBV subtypes and S gene mutants. To challenge the specificity of the new assays, sera from HBsAg-negative blood donors, pregnant women, and dialysis and hospitalized patients and potentially cross-reactive samples were investigated. IMMULITE HBsAg and IMMULITE 2000 HBsAg, although not as sensitive as the Elecsys HBsAg assay, were equivalent to the AxSYM HBsAg assay and showed a higher sensitivity than the Auszyme Monoclonal B and IMx HBsAg systems for detection of acute infection in seroconversion panels. The specificities (100%) of both IMMULITE assays on unselected blood donors and potentially interfering samples were comparable to those of the alternative assays after repeated testing. In conclusion, the new IMMULITE HBsAg and IMMULITE 2000 HBsAg assays show a good sensitivity for HBsAg detection compared to other well-established tests. The specificity on repeatedly tested samples was equivalent to that of the alternative assays. The rapid turnaround time, primary tube sampling, and on-board dilution make it an interesting assay system for clinical laboratory diagnosis.
Rhombomeric organization of vestibular pathways in larval frogs

Rhombencephalic subnuclei and projection pathways related to vestibular function were mapped in larval ranid frogs. The retention of overt postembryonic rhombomeres (r) allowed direct visualization of the locations of neurons retrogradely labeled with fluorescent dextran amines from the midbrain oculomotor complex, cerebellum, vestibular nuclei, and spinal cord. Oculomotor projecting vestibular neurons were mainly located in bilateral r1/2, ipsilateral r3, and contralateral r5–8, and spinal projecting vestibular neurons mainly in ipsilateral r4 and contralateral r5. Vestibular commissural neurons were located in r1–3 and r5–7 and were largely excluded from r4. Cerebellar projecting neurons included contralateral inferior olivary neurons in r8 and vestibular neurons in bilateral r6/7 and contralateral r1/2. Mapping these results onto adult anuran vestibular organization indicates that the superior vestibular nucleus derives from larval r1/2, the lateral vestibular nucleus from r3/4, and the major portions of the medial and descending vestibular nuclei from r5–8. The lateral vestibulospinal tract projects from an origin in r4, whereas a possible ascending tract of Deiters arises in r3. Rhombomere 5 contains a nuclear group that appears homologous to the tangential nucleus of fish, reptiles, and birds and thus likely serves gravistatic and linear vestibulomotor reflexes. Comparisons between frogs and other vertebrates suggest that vestibular neurons performing similar computational roles during head movements originate from the same segmental locations in different species. J. Comp. Neurol. 437:42–55, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Remodeling of Tumor Stroma and Response to Therapy

Solid tumors are intrinsically resistant to therapy. Cancer progression occurs when tumor cells orchestrate responses from diverse stromal cell types such as blood vessels and their support cells, inflammatory cells, and fibroblasts; these cells collectively form the tumor microenvironment and provide direct support for tumor growth, but also evasion from cytotoxic, immune and radiation therapies. An indirect result of abnormal and leaky blood vessels in solid tumors is high interstitial fluid pressure, which reduces drug penetration, but also creates a hypoxic environment that further augments tumor cell growth and metastatic spread. Importantly however, studies during the last decade have shown that the tumor stroma, including the vasculature, can be modulated, or re-educated, to allow better delivery of chemotherapeutic drugs or enhance the efficiency of active immune therapy. Such remodeling of the tumor stroma using genetic, pharmacological and other therapeutic approaches not only enhances selective access into tumors but also reduces toxic side effects. This review focuses on recent novel concepts to modulate tumor stroma and thus locally increase therapeutic efficacy.
Context Sensitive Lemmatization Using Two Successive Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Networks

We introduce a composite deep neural network architecture for supervised and language independent context sensitive lemmatization. The proposed method considers the task as to identify the correct edit tree representing the transformation between a word-lemma pair. To find the lemma of a surface word, we exploit two successive bidirectional gated recurrent structures - the first one is used to extract the character level dependencies and the next one captures the contextual information of the given word. The key advantages of our model compared to the state-of-the-art lemmatizers such as Lemming and Morfette are - (i) it is independent of human decided features (ii) except the gold lemma, no other expensive morphological attribute is required for joint learning. We evaluate the lemmatizer on nine languages - Bengali, Catalan, Dutch, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Romanian and Spanish. It is found that except Bengali, the proposed method outperforms Lemming and Morfette on the other languages. To train the model on Bengali, we develop a gold lemma annotated dataset (having 1,702 sentences with a total of 20,257 word tokens), which is an additional contribution of this work.
An experimental study of station keeping on an underactuated ASV

Dynamic positioning is an important application for marine vehicles that do not have the luxury of anchoring or mooring themselves. Such vehicles are usually large and have arrays of thrusters that allow for controllability in the sway as well as the surge and yaw axes. Most smaller boats however, are underactuated and do not possess control in the sway direction. This makes the control problem significantly more challenging. We address the station keeping problem for a small autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) with significant windage. The vehicle is required to hold station at a given position. We describe the design of a weighted controller that uses wind feed-forward to complement a line-of-sight guidance controller to achieve satisfactory performance under slow-varying moderate wind conditions. We test the control system in simulation and in field trials with a twin-propeller ASV. Experiments show that the controller works very well in moderate wind conditions allowing the ASV to keep station with a position error of approximately one vehicle length.
Investigating quality factors in object-oriented designs: an industrial case study

This paper aims at empirically exploring the relationships between most of the existing coupling and cohesion measures for object-oriented (OO) systems, and the fault-proneness of OO system classes. The underlying goal of such a study is to better understand the relationship between existing design measurement in OO systems and the quality of the software developed. The study described here is a replication of an analogous study conducted in an university environment with systems developed by students. In order to draw more general conclusions and to (dis)confirm the results obtained there, we now replicated the study using data collected on an industrial system developed by professionals. Results show that many of our findings are consistent across systems, despite the very disparate nature of the systems under study. Some of the strong dimensions captured by the measures in each data set are visible in both the university and industrial case study. For example, the frequency of method invocations appears to be the main driving factor of fault-proneness in all systems. However, there are also differences across studies which illustrate the fact that quality does not follow universal laws and that quality models must be developed locally, wherever needed.
Experiments on Greedy and Local Search Heuristics for ddimensional Hypervolume Subset Selection

Subset selection constitutes an important stage of any evolutionary multiobjective optimization algorithm when truncating the current approximation set for the next iteration. This appears to be particularly challenging when the number of solutions to be removed is large, and when the approximation set contains many mutually non-dominating solutions. In particular, indicator-based strategies have been intensively used in recent years for that purpose. However, most solutions for the indicator-based subset selection problem are based on a very simple greedy backward elimination strategy. In this paper, we experiment additional heuristics that include a greedy forward selection and a greedy sequential insertion policies, a first-improvement hill-climbing local search, as well as combinations of those. We evaluate the effectiveness and the efficiency of such heuristics in order to maximize the enclosed hypervolume indicator of candidate subsets during a hypothetical evolutionary process, or as a post-processing phase. Our experimental analysis, conducted on randomly generated as well as structured two-, three- and four-objective mutually non-dominated sets, allows us to appreciate the benefit of these approaches in terms of quality, and to highlight some practical limitations and open challenges in terms of computational resources.
Isolation And Identification Of Bacteria Associated With Neonatal Septiceamia At The Specialist Hospital, Bauchi.

A prospective study of neonatal septicemia undertaken at the specialist hospital Bauchi between January - March 2008 in which 101 samples were collected and analyzed. Bacterial growth was observed in 51 of the blood samples representing 50.5%. Six genera of organisms were identified as possible causes of neonatal sepsis. Staphylococcus aureus was isolated in 39.2% of the sample as the highest isolated while Pseudomonas aerogenosawas isolated in 3.9% of the samples as least isolate. A distribution of the organism according to age group indicated that 47.1% organisms were isolated during the early onset sepsis (0 - 7 days) with Escherichia coli having highest incidenceof 33.3%, 52.9% organisms were isolated during the late onset sepsis (8 - 28 days) with S. aureushaving high incidenceof 51.9%. A total of 45.1% of the organisms were isolatedin males while 54.9% organisms were isolated in females. The study indicates the neonatal septicemia is major causesof neonatal morbidity and mortality at the Specialist Hospital Bauchi Key Word: neonatal sepsis mobility
An increasing opine carbon bias in artificial exudation systems and genetically modified plant rhizospheres leads to an increasing reshaping of bacterial populations

To investigate how exudation shapes root‐associated bacterial populations, transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana plants that exuded the xenotopic compound octopine at low and high rates were grown in a nonsterile soil. Enumerations of both cultivable and octopine‐degrading bacteria demonstrated that the ratios of octopine degraders increased along with octopine concentration. An artificial exudation system was also set up in which octopine was brought at four ratios. The density of octopine‐degrading bacteria directly correlated with the input of octopine. Bacterial diversity was analysed by rrs amplicon pyrosequencing. Ensifer and Pseudomonas were significantly more frequently detected in soil amended with artificial exudates. However, the density of Pseudomonas increased as a response to carbon supplementation while that of Ensifer only correlated with octopine concentrations possibly in relation to two opposed colonization strategies of rhizosphere bacteria, that is, copiotrophy and oligotrophy.