Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ANTIMICROBIAL ACTIVITY OF FLUORESCENT BENZANTHRONE IN AQUEOUS SOLUTION AND IN POLYLACTIC ACID FILM

1 Chemistry Department, Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia 2 University of Chemical Technology and Metallurgy, 1756 Sofia, Bulgaria 3 Institute of Microbiology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria 4 Center of Excellence for Advanced Materials Research (CEAMR), King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia 5 Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Faculty of Medicine, 1407 Sofia, Bulgaria *Corresponding Author Email: i.grabchev@chem.uni-sofia.bg
Knowledge Distillation for End-to-End Monaural Multi-Talker ASR System

End-to-end models for monaural multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR) have become an important and interesting approach when dealing with the multi-talker mixed speech under cocktail party scenario. However, there is still a large performance gap between the multi-speaker and single-speaker speech recognition systems. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that integrates teacher-student training with the attention-based end-to-end ASR model, which can do the knowledge distillation from the single-talker ASR system to multi-talker one effectively. First the objective function is revised to combine the knowledge from both single-talker and multi-talker labels. Then we extend the original single attention to speaker parallel attention modules in the teacher-student training based end-to-end framework to boost the performance more. Moreover, a curriculum learning strategy on the training data with an ordered signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) is designed to obtain a further improvement. The proposed methods are evaluated on two-speaker mixed speech generated from the WSJ0 corpus, which is commonly used for this task recently. The experimental results show that the newly proposed knowledge transfer architecture with an end-to-end model can sig-niﬁcantly improve the system performance for monaural multi-talker speech recognition, and more than 15% relative WER reduction is achieved against the traditional end-to-end model.
AK 12 / AK 19 PLGA-PEG-PLGA Triblock Polymer : Thermo-Gelation Properties and in vivo Biocompatibility

With increased standards and demands for therapeutic efficacy and patient safety, more and more drugs are expected to be delivered specifically to their targeted tissue in a controlled manner [1, 2]. Controlled-release drug delivery technologies not only allow drugs to be released over a period of time with a more efficacious plasma drug profile, but also provide patient-specific benefits, such as less frequent dosing and reduced magnitude and frequency of adverse events [3, 4]. As such, several sustained release formulations, such as polymer conjugates, liposomes and biodegradable microspheres, have been of interest to researchers, clinicians, patients and pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Quantifying importance of marine prey in the diets of two partially anadromous fishes

The importance of marine prey sources for partially anadromous fishes has received little study and is complicated by considerable plasticity in life history. We determined proportional contributions of marine, freshwater benthic, and freshwater pelagic prey to anadromous and resident Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus) and lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) from several partially anadromous populations in the Canadian Arctic. Bayesian mixing models (MixSIR) applied to d34S and d13C ratios in lake-specific models indicated that marine prey accounted for 90%–91% of anadromous Arctic char diet and 60%–66% of anadromous lake trout diet. When these estimates were combined with proportion of anadromous individuals in partially anadromous populations, marine food sources accounted for 31%–44% of Arctic char population productivity and 16%–26% of lake trout population productivity. Although future research is needed to refine and quantify variability around these estimates, our results will allow better predictions of the effects of anthropogenic stressors on partially anadro-
On the DemocraticWeights of Nations

Which voting weights ought to be allocated to single delegates of differently sized groups from a democratic fairness perspective? We operationalize the ‘one person, one vote’ principle by demanding every individual’s influence on collective decisions to be equal a priori. The analysis differs from previous ones by considering intervals of alternatives. New reasons lead to an old conclusion: weights should be proportional to the square root of constituency sizes if voter preferences are independent and identically distributed. This is knife-edged, however, in that preference polarization along constituency lines quickly calls for a Shapley value-based variation of simple proportionality.
The Addition of Hyaluronic Acid into Platelet-Rich Fibrin Lysate in Restoration of Senescent Human Dermal Fibroblasts Activities

Senescent human dermal fibroblasts had reduced capacity in proliferation and collagen synthesis. It is due to unresponsiveness against transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) stimulation. Either platelet-rich fibrin (PRF)-lysate or hyaluronic acid (HA) can restore TGF-β1 signaling pathway. To determine whether HA addition to PRF lysate has a better activity than PRF-lysate alone in restoring senescent human dermal fibroblasts (HDFs) activities. HDF isolated from six different human skins was divided into normal HDFs and senescent HDFs which are induced by serum starvation. The senescent groups were then given 50% PRF-lysate and various levels of HA. Amelioration of TGF-β1 signaling was measured by cellular proliferation index and collagen deposition. Addition of HA into PRF-lysate resulted in a significant increase in proliferation index and collagen deposition index than PRF-lysate alone. The best level of HA for this mixture ranged from 20.83 mM to 41.67 mM. HA in PRF lysate is an excellent candidate material for treating clinical signs related to senescent human dermal fibroblasts. Ethical permission: This experiment had gain approval from the local ethical committee, Ref: KE/FK/471/EC/2016 dated 17-05-2016.
Learning from Incidents to Reduce the Risk of Drowning in Swimming Pools: Implementation of Experience-Based Feedback Regarding Near-Misses in Four Public Facilities in France

The prevention of sports accidents must rely on a detailed knowledge of accident circumstances and risk factors. Today, very few studies have investigated in depth non-fatal drowning incidents that have occurred in public swimming pools (PSP). Learning from incidents seems likely to advance the knowledge of accident scenarios. This research study aimed to capture minor incidents that might identify safety lessons and preventive measures. Incidents of minor and major aquatic events were collected from four PSPs that had hosted 700,000 bathers per year. About 800 incidents and 300 aquatic rescues performed by lifeguards were recorded within a time frame of two and one-half years. The analysis of results offered insights both in terms of managing risk and preventing drownings. Drowning risk management could directly benefit from the results of this study. Methodological recommendations also provided suggestions to ensure the proper collection of non-fatal drowning incidents in PSPs.
Incidence, structure and interrelationships of subsyndromal depression symptomatology in prostate cancer patients

Background: Although it has similar disease burden effects as Major Depressive Episode, Subsyndromal Depression (SSD) has not yet been examined in prostate cancer (PCa) patients. Objective: To describe the prevalence of SSD, its symptom components, and relationships between those components, in a sample of PCa patients. Methods: 507 Australian PCa patients completed Zung Self-rating Depression Scale (ZSDS). The DSM-IV-TR 10 criteria for Major Depressive Episode were defined and used to detect SSD. Results: SSD occurred in 17.5% of the sample. Worthlessness and guilt, diminished ability to think or concentrate, and anhedonia were the most common symptoms reported. Anhedonia and concentration difficulties were the most powerful predictors of overall depressive status. Conclusion: Because of SSD’s damaging effects upon patients’ functioning and quality of life, it may be valuable to assess this form of depression in PCa patients and use the presenting symptomatology as potential goals for treatment planning (German J Psychiatry 2013; 16(3): 95-102).
THE ROLE OF SOCIOINDEXICAL EXPECTATION IN THE PERCEPTION OF GAY MALE SPEECH

During speech perception, listeners adjust expectations when given social information about a speaker; this effect has been demonstrated using many socially indexed phonetic cues. Previous sociophonetic studies have identified lengthened /s/ as one acoustic correlate of gay(-sounding) speech. This eye-tracking study examines a) how information about a speaker’s social identity affects listeners’ time course of lexical activation and b) how listener experience mediates this process. Participants completed a categorization task of /s/-lengthened /CVs/-/CVsC/ minimal pairs in two blocks: the first presented no information about speaker sexuality; the second introduced auditory social primes indexing the speaker as gay. Effects of social expectation were found as a function of listeners’ experience with gay speech. Highand low-experience groups behaved similarly before social primes were introduced. As predicted, target fixations were delayed as a result of these primes, but only by high-experience listeners, demonstrating the expectation-mediating role of listeners’ sociolinguistic experience.
Augmented CycleGANs for Continuous Scale Normal-to-Lombard Speaking Style Conversion

Lombard speech is a speaking style associated with increased vocal effort that is naturally used by humans to improve intelligibility in the presence of noise. It is hence desirable to have a system capable of converting speech from normal to Lombard style. Moreover, it would be useful if one could adjust the degree of Lombardness in the converted speech so that the system is more adaptable to different noise environments. In this study, we propose the use of recently developed Augmented cycle-consistent adversarial networks (Augmented CycleGANs) for conversion between normal and Lombard speaking styles. The proposed system gives a smooth control on the degree of Lom-bardness of the mapped utterances by traversing through different points in the latent space of the trained model. We utilize a parametric approach that uses the Pulse Model in Log domain (PML) vocoder to extract features from normal speech that are then mapped to Lombard-style features using the Augmented CycleGAN. Finally, the mapped features are converted to Lom-bard speech with PML. The model is trained on multi-language data recorded in different noise conditions, and we compare its effectiveness to a previously proposed CycleGAN system in experiments for intelligibility and quality of mapped speech.
Psychiatric Comorbidity in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Among People Seeking Treatment After the Marmara Earthquake

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine the current comorbidity of post-traumatic stress disorder among treatment-seeking people one year after the 1999 Marmara earthquake. Method: Subjects included in the study were between eighteen and sixty-five years of age, were seeking psychiatric treatment, were living in a prefabricated housing site. A face-to-face psychiatric interview lasting thirty to forty-five minutes was conducted with persons willing to participate in the study. The Turkish version of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV, Clinical Version
GENOTYPE ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS IN FOUR FULL-SIB PROGENY TRIALS OF PZNUS SYLVESTRZS ( L . ) WITH VARYING SITE INDICES

The importance of genotypex environment interactions for the breeding strategy of Pinus sylvestris in southern Sweden was investigated in 144 full-sib families (12 x 12 factorial cross) located at four test sites with contrasting site conditions and in two different climate zones (range of 1.5 degrees latitude and 205 m altitude). The traits assessed were height at 12 and 16 years in the field, height increment between 12 and 16 years, and diameter and volume at 16 years in the field. Performance across sites showed significant site effects for all traits. Also the female x site and male x site effects were significant for all traits but did not exceed 40 % of the total additive genetic effects, thus of minor importance compared to the additive effects. Type B genetic correlation estimates between the same trait at different test sites were moderate to high (range 0.38 to 0.97) and in most cases significant. Within sites, the female and male effects were significant for all traits. Estimated female x male variances reached at most 77 % of the estimated total additive genetic variances. Both age-age genetic correlations and trait-trait genetic correlations were generally high and significant O, c 0.05) for the time period 12-1 6 years in the field. The main implications for breeding are: that genotype x environment interactions are of little importance suggesting that a single breeding zone should be sufficient for this region; and that the major genetic effects are additive, so there is no need to consider the non-additive genetic effects in the current breeding programme.
Selection and Training Schemes for Improving TTS Voice Built on Found Data

This work investigates different selection and training schemes to improve the naturalness of synthesized text-to-speech voices built on found data. The approach outlined in this paper examines the combinations of different metrics to detect and reject segments of training data that can degrade the performance of the system. We conducted a series of objective and subjective experiments on two 24-hour single-speaker corpuses of found data collected from diverse sources. We show that using an even smaller, yet carefully selected, set of data can lead to a text-to-speech system able to generate more natural speech than a system trained on the complete dataset. Moreover, we show that training the system by fine-tuning from the system trained on the whole dataset leads to additional improvement in naturalness by allowing a more aggressive selection of training data.
The Impact of Strategic IT-Business Alignment : Evidence from Saudi Private Small and Midsize Enterprises

Strategic IT-business alignment is getting an increased attention from both researchers and practitioners because of its potential positive impact on firm’s performance. The Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) developed by Henderson and Venkatraman (1993) is a holistic framework that combines different alignment perspectives to provide a unified view on IT-business alignment. While SAM has been widely applied by theoreticians and practitioners in the Western IT research, its applicability in the Middle East is not clear with very few studies available. Aiming to fill this gap in knowledge, this study tested the impact of six alignment types described within SAM on financial performance of small and midsize enterprises (SME) in Saudi Arabia. Based on a sample of 454 IT directors and managers, the results of the study confirmed a positive impact of all types of alignment except for IT alignment, although the latter still showed an indirect positive impact through other forms of alignment. Implications for theory and practice are discussed and directions for further research are proposed.
Multi-Objective Constraint Optimization with Lexicographic Preference Models

In this paper, we consider algorithms for solving Multi-Objective Constraint Optimization Problems (MOCOP) with tradeoffs, which consist of elicited or observed preferences over decisions (feasible solutions) as described in [1]. In MOCOP, each decision is evaluated on a number of criteria, and can thus be associated with a vector of objective values, each component corresponding to a different criterion. The comparison between decisions is based on a comparison between objective vectors. The optimal decisions are those that are not dominated by any other decision due to some order relation, which respects the restrictions given by the tradeoffs. We focus on a branch-and-bound algorithm to find optimal solutions, which uses a minibuckets algorithm for generating the upper bound at each node, as proposed in [2]. A key issue is how one orders the objective vectors. The two most common methods are using a weighted sum, or a Pareto ordering. With a weighted sum model, one chooses a weight for each criterion in the objective vectors. The weights determine the tradeoffs between different objectives, i.e., how much of some objectives the decision maker would be happy to tradeoff against some amounts of other objectives. With the weighted sum model, it can be hard to decide on the appropriate weights. They can be timeconsuming to elicit, or there can be more than one person involved in the decision making process. With the Pareto or product ordering, two objective vectors are often incomparable, which leads to a rather weak pre-order
The effect of lyophilization on selected biologically active components (vitamin C, catalase, lysozyme), total antioxidant capacity and lipid oxidation in human milk

Human milk is rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids, as well as lysozyme, vitamin C and other bioactive compounds. The effect of lyophilization on the content of antioxidants (vitamin C and catalase CAT), bactericidal compounds (lysozyme), total antioxidant capacity (TAC) and lipid peroxidation in human milk was investigated in this study. Samples of mature human milk were collected from five healthy women who gave birth on the scheduled date and without complications. Freeze drying resulted in the removal of 88.2 % of the initial water content from milk. The human milk lyophilizate was readily soluble in water. Lyophilization had no effect on the content of primary (lipid peroxides LP) and secondary (thiobarbituric acid reactive substances TBARS) products of lipid oxidation. Freeze-drying led to a significant decrease in the vitamin C content and TAC values of milk (by 31 % and 16.5 %, respectively). Catalase and lysozyme were resistant to freeze-drying. Lyophilization induced a decrease in lysozyme content (9 %) and catalase activity (11 %) but these changes were not statistically significant. Low-temperature dehydration and rehydration of human milk lyophilizates promote satisfactory retention of biologically active ingredients and prevent the oxidation of human milk lipids. The results of this study indicate that lyophilization can be considered as an effective method for prolonging the shelf life of human milk.
Reduction Surgery for Emphysema Treatment : State-ofthe-Art and Perspectives

Lung volume reduction surgery (LVRS) has shown an improve for up to several years respiratory function, exercise capacity, and quality of life in selected patients with severe emphysema and low exercise capacity, particularly if upper-lobe predominance of disease is radiologically recognized. However, mortality and morbidity rates of LVRS have been not negligible leading to raising question as to the cost-effectiveness of the procedure and resulting in a progressive decline in its use although a considerable number of patients meet selection criteria and could potentially benefit of this treatment modality. In recent years, an active investigation aimed at developing less invasive strategies that might allow us to achieve long-term results as satisfactory as those of the standard LVRS method but with fewer adverse effects has been undertaken. So far, novel options including nonresectional surgical and endoscopic LVRS methods hold promise but results from large studies with long follow-up are awaited to help define the most effective interventional treatment options for patients with severe emphysema. In this literature review an analysis of the main issues related to LVRS including selection criteria, mechanisms of action, results of currently available surgical and endoscopic methods, and some potential future perspectives is provided.
3 Speech act annotation

Any type of linguistic annotation is a highly complex and interpretive process, but none more so than pragmatic annotation. The complexity inherent in this task (Leech et al. 2000) is mainly due to the fact that this type of annotation, unlike, for example, POS (part-of-speech) or semantic tagging/annotation, almost always needs to take into account levels above the individual word and may even need to refer to contextual information beyond those textual units that are commonly referred to as a ‘sentence’ or ‘utterance’. This is also why, in order to be able to produce large-scale and consistently annotated corpora, it is highly advisable to automate such an annotation process. This chapter, apart from providing an overview of, and guidelines for, representing and annotating pragmatic and other, ‘pragmatics-relevant’ information, will do so in the form of research into which means may be available to improve existing techniques (e.g. Stolcke et al. 2000 and Weisser 2002, 2003, 2004) for manual and automatic pragmatic annotation of corpora from different domains. One major part of this will be to try and determine the extent to which it is possible to improve the identification and subsequent annotation of pragmatics-related phenomena, based on insights gained from attempts at manual and automatic annotation. In so doing, I shall draw on a small set of materials from a number of annotated corpora that are freely available online, conducting an in-depth analysis of one file from each corpus (filenames provided below), with additional data from the corpora being consulted as and when necessary. The corpora used are the Trains 93 corpus (Heeman and Allen 1995), the Coconut Corpus (Di Eugenio et al. 1998), the Monroe Corpus (Stent 2000), and the Switchboard Corpus (Godfrey and Holliman 1997). The first three of these represent corpora of task-driven dialogues (Leech et al. 2000: 7), where two interlocutors need to work together to achieve a particular task, such
Precipitation Influence on the Distribution of Pore Pressure and Suction on a Coastal Hillside

The frequent interruption of roads in some freeways in Brazil due to slope failure has caused economic losses and potential harm to users. The paper presents data from a monitoring system installed at Serra do Mar in Santa Catarina State, Brazil. The slope monitored is called Morro do Boi and is located on BR-101 south, near the municipality of Itapema. It was stabilised using anchor and flexible metal mesh. Hence, all the pore water pressure measured is due to environmental changes. After approximately sixteen months of readings, it was possible to observe that the suction variation in the unsaturated layers presents a time delay in relation to the rainfall observed in the area. The ground water table presented a variation of about 1.5 m. The analyses of the data allowed establishing a trigger accumulated rainfall that reduces the negative pore water pressure to values below 10 kPa. So far, no significant positive pore water pressure has been observed above the ground water table.