Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adversarial Machine Learning And Speech Emotion Recognition: Utilizing Generative Adversarial Networks For Robustness

Deep learning has undoubtedly offered tremendous improvements in the performance of state-of-the-art speech emotion recognition (SER) systems. However, recent research on adversarial examples poses enormous challenges on the robustness of SER systems by showing the susceptibility of deep neural networks to adversarial examples as they rely only on small and imperceptible perturbations. In this study, we evaluate how adversarial examples can be used to attack SER systems and propose the first black-box adversarial attack on SER systems. We also explore potential defenses including adversarial training and generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance robustness. Experimental evaluations suggest various interesting aspects of the effective utilization of adversarial examples useful for achieving robustness for SER systems opening up opportunities for researchers to further innovate in this space.
Central and Peripheral Changes in Anterior Corneal Topography after Orthokeratology and Laser in situ Keratomileusis

To compare the values of the data on the central and peripheral curvature of the cornea in order to determine the differences between the overall corneal curvature after custom laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK) and orthokeratology procedures in correcting refractive error. We evaluated 12 patients undergoing orthokeratology for the correction of myopia spherical equivalent (OD, mean±SD = -3.67 ± 2.16D; OS, mean±SD = -4.02 ± 2.21D), 10 patients undergoing custom LASIK surgery (OD, mean±SD = -4.25 ± 2.43D; OS, mean±SD = -4.41 ± 3.01D). The values of the front corneal surfaces were derived using Medmont E300 corneal topographer Version 4.9. 0.0 (Medmont, Camberwell, Victoria, Australia) prior to and at least 3 months after each treatment with samples taken from the center of the cornea and 4 points to each side of the horizontal meridian at intervals of 1 mm. Among the two clinical groups, no statistically significant differences on OD and OS were found for the spherical equivalent (p = 0.756 and p = 0.423). The refractive power of elevation became positive in the central nasal (4 mm) and temporal regions (4 mm). The changes in OD were statistically significant (p<0.001) in nasal 2 mm after orthokeratology compared to the value for the case of LASIK. The OS date of postminus pre-orthokeratology compared with that of LASIK exhibited significant differences on the nasal region (2-3 mm) and temporal region (2-3 mm) (p<0.001). The differences in the changes in the front corneal curvature between LASIK and orthokeratology reveal a much different mechanism for alternating corneal power. The changes in the corneal surface refractive power are 2 to 3 times greater in LASIK procedures than in orthokeratology for both central and peripheral regions. [Han-Yin Sun, Hsiu-Wan Yang, I-Tsung Wu, Jung-Kai Tseng and Shun-Fa Yang. Central and Peripheral Changes in Anterior Corneal Topography after Orthokeratology and Laser in situ keratomileusis. Life Sci J 2013;10(2):555-559] (ISSN:1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite. com. 81
Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain?

If ethnic actors represent ethnic groups as essentialized natural groups despite the fact that ethnic essences do not exist, we must understand why. This article presents a hypothesis and evidence that humans process ethnic groups (and a few other related social categories) as if they were species because their surface similarities to species make them inputs to the livingkinds mental module that initially evolved to process specieslevel categories. The main similarities responsible are (1) categorybased endogamy and (2) descentbased membership. Evolution encouraged this because processing ethnic groups as speciesat least in the ancestral environmentsolved adaptive problems having to do with interactional discriminations and behavioral prediction. Coethnics (like conspecifics) share many strongly intercorrelated properties that are not obvious on first inspection. Since interaction with outgroup members is costly because of coordination failure due to different norms between ethnic groups, thinking of ethnic groups as species adaptively promotes interactional discriminations towards the ingroup (including endogamy). It also promotes inductive generalizations, which allow acquisition of reliable knowledge for behavioral prediction without too much costly interaction with outgroup members. The relevant cognitivescience literature is reviewed, and cognitive fieldexperiment and ethnographic evidence from Mongolia is advanced to support the hypothesis.
6 Distinct Pathologic Roles for Glycogen Synthase Kinase 3 in Colorectal Cancer Progression

Toshinari Minamoto1, Masanori Kotake1,3, Mitsutoshi Nakada2, Takeo Shimasaki4, Yoshiharu Motoo4 and Kazuyuki Kawakami1 1Division of Translational and Clinical Oncology, Cancer Research Institute, 2Department of Neurosurgery, Graduate School of Medical Science, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, 3Department of Surgery, Ishikawa Prefectural Central Hospital, Kanazawa, 4Department of Medical Oncology, Kanazawa Medical University, Uchinada, Ishikawa, Japan
Contrast medium-induced nephropathy. Aspects on incidence, consequences, risk factors and prevention

Contrast media-induced nephropathy (CIN) is a well-known complication of radiological examinations employing iodine contrast media (I-CM). The rapid development and frequent use of coronary interventions and multi-channel detector computed tomography with concomitant administration of relatively large doses of I-CM has contributed to an increasing number of CIN cases during the last few years. Reduced renal function, especially when caused by diabetic nephropathy or renal arteriosclerosis, in combination with dehydration, congestive heart failure, hypotension, and administration of nephrotoxic drugs are risk factors for the development of CIN. When CM-based examinations cannot be replaced by other techniques in patients at risk of CIN, focus should be directed towards analysis of number and type of risk factors, adequate estimation of GFR, institution of proper preventive measures including hydration and post-procedural observation combined with surveillance of serum creatinine for 1–3 days. For the radiologist, there are several steps to consider in order to minimise the risk for CIN: use of “low-” or “iso-osmolar” I-CM and dosing the I-CM in relation to GFR and body weight being the most important as well as utilizing radiographic techniques to keep the I-CM dose in gram iodine as low as possible below the numerical value of estimated GFR. There is as yet no pharmacological prevention that has been proven to be effective.
Efficacy of blanching techniques and solar drying in maintaining the quality attributes of Cowpea leaves

African indigenous vegetables are an excellent low cost source of nutrients in diets. Their availability is constrained by seasonality hence peaks and lows. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of blanching and solar drying as means of dehydration on nutrient composition of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) leaf vegetable. The blanched samples were subjected to hot water treatment for 2 minutes at 94C followed by cold water treatment at 8C for 2 minutes and then solar dried. One sample was blanched in pure water and another in salty water and the last sample was dried without blanching. The fresh and dehydrated samples were analyzed for selected proximate constituents, vitamins, minerals, anti-nutrients, colour change and sensory characteristics. Blanching and solar drying had little effect on most proximate and mineral elements. However, ascorbic acid, beta carotene and total phenolic content were most affected. Solar dried without blanching recorded the highest vitamin retention levels at 68.02% for beta carotene and 68.39% for ascorbic acid unlike blanching in pure water and solar drying at 55.58% for β_carotene and 21.08% for ascorbic acid and blanching in salty water and solar drying at 52.78% for beta carotene and 20.24% for ascorbic acid. In addition, solar drying without blanching recorded the highest retention total phenolic content at 149.91% exceeding the fresh sample by around 49.91%. However, blanching in pure water and solar drying and blanching in salty water and solar drying recorded retention levels of 62.58% and 65.79% of total phenolic content respectively. On the other hand, solar drying without blanching, blanching in pure water and solar drying and blanching in salty water and solar drying recorded a loss of 5.87%, 10.77% and 11.17% of oxalates and 37.22%, 69.98% and 58.7% of nitrates respectively from the fresh sample. Blanching and solar drying had a varied effect on the sensory quality. Cooked fresh, solar dried without blanching, blanched in pure water and solar dried and blanched in salty water and solar dried cowpea leaves recorded an average of 5.91, 4.91, 4.46 and 3.46 consumer rating respectively on a standard seven points hedonic scale. Solar drying without blanching was the simplest convenient technology for preserving nutrients, especially when cowpea leaves are abundantly
Levels of voluntary disclosure in IPO prospectuses: an empirical analysis

This paper focuses on how forecasts information is disclosed in IPO prospectuses. In France, managers report either detailed forecasts or only a brief summary. We investigate the determinants and consequences of the varying levels of detail provided in these forecasts. Based on a sample of 82 IPOs on the Euronext Paris market (2000-2002), we show that only two variables are associated with highly detailed forecast disclosures: forecast horizon and firm age. We also find that the forecast error decreases as the level of detail in the forecast disclosures increases. This finding is robust to our reverse causality test (Heckman two-stage self-selection procedure) and suggests that the level of detail in forecast disclosures enhances the reliability of earnings forecasts.
Intrinsic Religiosity and Adolescent Depression and Anxiety: The Mediating Role of Components of Self-Regulation

Intrinsic Religiosity and Adolescent Depression and Anxiety: The Mediating Role of Components of Self-Regulation Brent Black School of Family Life, BYU Master of Science This study examined the possible mediating role of the emotional, behavioral, and cognitive components of self-regulation as they relate to adolescent intrinsic religiosity and the internalizing problems of teen depression and anxiety. The sample included 459 adolescent respondents from one wave of the Flourishing Families Project, an ongoing longitudinal study. Through the use of Structural Equation Modeling, results showed that cognitive self-regulation partially mediated the relationship between intrinsic religiosity and adolescent depression. Additionally, emotional self-regulation, but not behavioral self-regulation was found to be negatively linked with both depression and anxiety. These findings provide clinicians with greater direction when working with depressed or anxious teens who also have a religious/spiritual framework.
Reversing the Trend: The Recent Expansion of the Reverse Mortgage Market

Reverse mortgages allow elderly homeowners to tap into their housing wealth without having to sell or move out of their homes. However, very few eligible homeowners have used reverse mortgages to achieve consumption smoothing until recently when the reverse mortgage market in the United States witnessed substantial growth. This paper examines 1989-2007 loan-level reverse mortgage data and presents a number of findings. First, I show that recent reverse mortgage borrowers are significantly different from earlier borrowers in many respects. Second, I find that borrowers who take the line-of-credit payment plan, single male borrowers, and borrowers with higher house values exit their homes sooner than other reverse mortgage borrowers. Third, I combine the reverse mortgage data with county-level house price data to show that elderly homeowners are more likely to purchase reverse mortgages when the local housing market is at its peak. This finding suggests that the 2000-05 housing market boom may be partially responsible for the rapid growth of reverse mortgage markets. Lastly, I show that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage limits, which cap the amount of housing wealth that an eligible homeowner can borrow against, have no effect on the demand for reverse mortgages. The findings have important implications to both policy-making and the economics of housing and aging.
Managerial attention to exploitation versus exploration: Toward a dynamic perspective on ambidexterity

Managerial attention to exploitation and exploration has a strong influence on organizational performance. However, there is hardly any knowledge about whether senior managers need to adjust their distribution of attention to exploitation and exploration in response to major changes in demand patterns in their industry. Drawing on the analysis of a panel data set of 86 firms in the information technology industry exposed to an economic recession and recovery, we find that successfully navigating an economic downturn demands more managerial attention to exploration, while leveraging the subsequent upswing requires more attention to exploitation. As such, this study contributes to the literature by providing a dynamic perspective on ambidexterity: that is, senior managers need to redistribute their attention to exploration and exploitation to effectively meet the changing environmental demands over time.
Public Education and Pensions in Democracy: A Political Economy Theory

This paper presents a dynamic politico-economic theory of fiscal policy to explain the simultaneous existence of public education and pensions in modern democracies. The driving force of the model is the intergenerational conflict over the allocation of the public budget. Successive generations of voters choose fiscal policies through repeated elections. The political power of elderly voters creates the motive for adults to support public investment in the human capital of future generations, since it expands future pension possibilities. We characterize the Markov perfect equilibrium of the voting game in a small open economy. The equilibrium can reproduce qualitative and quantitative features of intergenerational fiscal policies in modern economies.
Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets Dependence of the Martian radiation environment on atmospheric depth: Modeling and measurement

The energetic particle environment on the Martian surface is inﬂuenced by solar and heliospheric modulation and changes in the local atmospheric pressure (or column depth). The Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) on board the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity on the surface of Mars has been measuring this eﬀect for over four Earth years (about two Martian years). The anticorrelation between the recorded surface Galactic Cosmic Ray-induced dose rates and pressure changes has been investigated by Rafkin et al. (2014) and the long-term solar modulation has also been empirically analyzed and modeled by Guo et al. (2015). This paper employs the newly updated HZETRN2015 code to model the Martian atmospheric shielding eﬀect on the accumulated dose rates and the change of this eﬀect under diﬀerent solar modulation and atmospheric conditions. The modeled results are compared with the most up-to-date (from 14 August 2012 to 29 June 2016) observations of the RAD instrument on the surface of Mars. Both model and measurements agree reasonably well and show the atmospheric shielding eﬀect under weak solar modulation conditions and the decline of this eﬀect as solar modulation becomes stronger. This result is important for better risk estimations of
Hallucinations in Neural Machine Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems have reached state of the art perfor-mance in translating text and are in wide deployment. Yet little is understood about how these systems function or break. Here we show that NMT systems are susceptible to producing highly pathological translations that are completely untethered from the source material, which we term hallucinations . Such pathological translations are problematic because they are are deeply disturbing of user trust and easy to ﬁnd with a simple search. We describe a method to generate hallucinations and show that many common variations of the NMT architecture are susceptible to them. We study a variety of approaches to reduce the frequency of hallucinations, including data augmentation, dynamical systems and regularization techniques, showing that data augmentation signiﬁcantly reduces hallucination frequency. Finally, we analyze networks that produce hallucinations and show that there are signatures in the attention matrix as well as in the hidden states of the decoder.
Exploring the Influence of ENSO on African Vegetation Variability Using Multidimensional Map Algebra

This research explores ENSO-related spatial and temporal regional African vegetation variability over different land covers using monthly 1982-1999 AVHRR NDVI imagery. Multidimensional map algebra (MMA), a processing language for spatio-temporal data, is used for data integration and analysis. Results suggest that in southern Africa and the western Sahel the ENSO cold phase is associated with enhanced vegetation intensity, particularly in shrubland. In the western Sahel, the ENSO warm phase is associated with suppressed vegetation intensity for woodland and cropland. In these regions the ENSO cold phase is associated with increased spatial and temporal vegetation variability.
A Review of Standard Text Classification Practices for Multi-label Toxicity Identification of Online Content

Language toxicity identification presents a gray area in the ethical debate surrounding freedom of speech and censorship. Today’s social media landscape is littered with unfiltered content that can be anywhere from slightly abusive to hate inducing. In response, we focused on training a multi-label classifier to detect both the type and level of toxicity in online content. This content is typically colloquial and conversational in style. Its classification therefore requires huge amounts of annotated data due to its variability and inconsistency. We compare standard methods of text classification in this task. A conventional one-vs-rest SVM classifier with character and word level frequency-based representation of text reaches 0.9763 ROC AUC score. We demonstrated that leveraging more advanced technologies such as word embeddings, recurrent neural networks, attention mechanism, stacking of classifiers and semi-supervised training can improve the ROC AUC score of classification to 0.9862. We suggest that in order to choose the right model one has to consider the accuracy of models as well as inference complexity based on the application.
POPULATION DENSITY AND BIOMASS OF THE WILD PREY SPECIES IN A TROPICAL DECIDUOUS FOREST, CENTRAL INDIA

For proper management of a wildlife reserve, it is essential to estimate density and biomass of herbivores that in turn determine the density of carnivores. We estimated the population density and biomass of three ungulates and two other species in the Melghat Tiger Reserve, Central India. The study was conducted from September 2010 to April 2011. We used distance sampling to estimate the population density of wild prey species. The 225km2 intensive study area was found to have high prey species density (69.5±8.3 individuals/km2), with gray langur being the abundant prey species (42.9±7.2 individuals/km2), followed by sambar (10.5±3.5 individuals/km2), gaur (5.8±1.7 individuals/km2), barking deer (2.7±0.3 individuals/km2), and peafowl (7.6±0.6 individuals/km2). When the density figures were multiplied by the average weight of each prey species, biomass of 6501.8 kg/km2 was obtained.
Dickinsonia costata — the first evidence of neoteny in Ediacaran organisms

Some of the most famous organisms of the Late Precambrian are representatives of the genus Dickinsonia. Four species of Dickinsonia are found throughout the section, characterized by macrofossils, on the southeastern White Sea area. However, their distribution is uneven. Two species, D. costata and D. tenuis are the most common, while the other two occur sporadically. At the lower levels (Verkhovka Formation) thinsegmented D. tenuis is the most frequently encountered. There are few imprints that can be attributed to D. costata, and all of them are of small size. Numerous specimens of D. costata, representing all available for study stages of ontogeny, are present only at the upper stratigraphic levels — in the Zimnie Gory and Erga formations. The statistical analysis of Dickinsonia imprints from a number of fossil assemblages in the southeastern White Sea shows an existence of two distinct groups that could represent different stages of ontogeny of a single species — D. tenuis. All the features of the juvenile D. tenuis — a round body, enlarged head part and a small number of trunk isomers — are distinctive features of D. costata. These features are preserved in mature D. costata. The most likely explanation of this phenomenon is the origin of D. costata from D. tenuis by neoteny. How to cite this article: Zakrevskaya M.A., Ivantsov A.Yu. 2017. Dickinsonia costata — the first evidence of neoteny in Ediacaran organisms // Invert. Zool. Vol.14. No.1. P.92–98. doi: 10.15298/invertzool.14. 1.13
Low-Redshift Damped Lyα Galaxies toward the Quasars B2 0827+243, PKS 0952+179, PKS 1127–145, and PKS 1629+120

We present optical and near-infrared ground-based imaging results on four low-redshift damped Lyα (DLA) galaxies. The corresponding DLA systems were discovered in our Hubble Space Telescope spectroscopic surveys for DLA lines in known strong Mg II absorption-line systems toward the quasars B2 0827+243 (zDLA = 0.525), PKS 0952+179 (zDLA = 0.239), PKS 1127-145 (zDLA = 0.313), and PKS 1629+120 (zDLA = 0.532). Two of the four DLA galaxies have confirmed slit redshifts, one has a photometric redshift consistent with the absorption-line redshift, and the fourth identification is based on the galaxy's proximity to the quasar sight line. The DLA galaxies span a mixture of morphological types from patchy, irregular, and low surface brightness to spiral galaxies. The luminosities range from 0.02L to 1.2L. We also discovered several extremely red objects (EROs) in two of these fields and discuss the possibility that they are associated with the DLA galaxies. These observations add to the small but growing list of DLA galaxies at low redshift. At the present time, 14 DLA galaxies in the redshift range 0.05 ≲ z ≲ 1 have been studied. The distributions of DLA galaxy properties for these 14 cases are discussed, and some important trends emerge. Low-luminosity dwarf galaxies with small impact parameters dominate this small sample. Also, four of the five highest column density systems, which dominate in the determination of the cosmological neutral gas mass density, arise in low surface brightness dwarf galaxies. Zwaan et al. have shown that only 15% of the neutral gas at the present epoch is contained in low surface brightness galaxies. Thus, if the low-redshift DLA galaxy trends hold up with larger samples, it would indicate that a different population of objects is responsible for the bulk of the neutral hydrogen gas in the universe at z ≈ 0.5.