Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reliability of computerized eye-tracking reaction time tests in non-athletes, athletes, and individuals with traumatic brain injury

Background: Eye tracking technologies and methodologies have advanced significantly in recent years. Specifically, the use of eye tracking to quantitatively measure oculomotor and psychophysiological constructs is gaining momentum. Reaction time has been measured in a number of different ways from a simple response to a stimulus to more challenging choice or discrimination responses to stimuli. Traditionally, reaction time is measured from the beginning of a stimulus event to a response event and includes both visual and motor response times. Eye tracking technology can provide a more discrete measurement of reaction time to include visual components such as visual latencies and visual speed, and can identify if the person was looking at the target area when a stimulus is presented. The aim of this paper was to examine the reliability of the simple reaction time, choice reaction time, and discriminate reaction time tests measured using eye tracking technology. Additionally, we sought to establish performance norms and examine gender differences in reaction time in the general population. A final objective was to conduct a preliminary comparison of reaction time measures across different populations including non-athletes, athletes, and individuals that had sustained a traumatic brain injury. Methods: A sample of 125 participants were recruited to undertake test-retest reliability, analysed using Cronbach’s alpha and intraclass correlation coefficients. A different data set of 1893 individuals, including athletes (n = 635), non-athletes (n = 627) and people with traumatic brain injury (n = 631) were compared using MANOVA to explore group differences in reaction time. Results: Results demonstrated that overall, the tests had good test-retest reliability. No significant differences were found for gender. Significant differences were found between groups with athletes performing best overall. Reaction times of people with traumatic brain injury were overall much more variable, showing very large standard deviations, than those of the non-athletes and athletes. Conclusions: Future research should consider the accuracy of eye movements and various demographic variables within groups.
Comparison of cadmium , zinc , manganese and nickel concentrations in fillets of selected species of food fish *

The aim of the study was to compare the concentration of cadmium, zinc, manganese and nickel in fillets of four popular fish species available on the Polish market: Nile tilapia and pangasius imported from fish farms in Asia; pollock, a marine fish species living in the wild; and rainbow trout farmed domestically. The highest cadmium levels were found in the muscles of pangasius and Nile tilapia. The highest levels of zinc, manganese and nickel were observed in the muscle tissue of pollock, which supports the view that marine fish are a valuable source of micronutrients in the human diet. However, the best ratio of concentrations of the metals analysed was noted in trout, which had the lowest levels of cadmium and nickel, which are particularly harmful to the aquatic environment, and significantly higher levels of zinc and manganese than in pangasius and tilapia. The results obtained in the study indicate that trout is the safest source of micronutrients for the consumer.
Phytoplankton community and limnology of Chatla floodplain wetland of Barak valley, Assam, North-East India

Key-words: limnology, habitats, phyotplankton, community, Chatla floodplain wetland Phytoplankton diversity was investigated over a period of two years (2006 to 2008) in Chatla floodplain wetland in Barak valley, Assam, North-East India. Site 1 and site 2 are two inlets and site 3 is a lentic system associated with vegetation cover of Calamus tenuis and Baringtonia acutangula. The floodplain has a unique hydrology because of the presence of different types of habitats (inlets, fisheries, beels and outlets) which maintains a network among the floodplains, rivers and streams. Phytoplankton community composition, density and diversity were studied in relation to environmental variables.All the variables were estimated by following standard methods. Phytoplankton was collected by plankton net and quantitative estimation was made by using Sedgwick Rafter counting cell. Phytoplankton community comprised 53 taxa represented by Chlorophyceae (31), Cyanophyceae (11), Bacillariophyceae (7), Euglenophyceae (1) and Dinophyceae (3). Phytoplankton taxa was dominated by Volvox sp. ,Nostoc sp. , Eunotia sp. , Navicula sp. , Euglena spp. and density was found highest in site 3 and lowest in site 1. Shannon diversity index (H � ) for phytoplankton community varied between 2.4 to 2.65 indicating fairly high species diversity. The varying magnitude of correlationship among environmental variables and phytoplankton species density as shown by Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) indicated that some of the environmental variables (water temperature, transparency, rainfall, nitrate and ammonia) are the driving factors for governing the phytoplankton species assemblages in Chatla floodplain wetland. Fluctuation of phytoplankton density and community composition in different habitats indicated various niche apportionment as well as anthropogenic influences.
Morphometric analysis of Eocene nummulitids in western and central Cuba: taxonomy, biostratigraphy and evolutionary trends

Megalospheric specimens of Nummulitidae from eight localities in western and central Cuba were morphometrically investigated using test characters described by 11 growth-independent and growth-invariant attributes that provide a complete geometric reconstruction of nummulitid equatorial morphology. The species Nummulites striatoreticulatus, Palaeonummulites trinitatensis, Operculinoides floridensis and O. soldadensis were classified by an agglomerative cluster analysis. Discriminant analysis yielded significant morphological separators between the species such as the backbend angle, marginal radius increase, perimeter ratio and first chamber length. The transition of tightness to laxity of the spiral was an important morphological separator at the generic level, representing a clear general trend coupled with the change in palaeodepth. Based on further discriminant analysis, an increase in proloculus size was detected in Nummulites striatoreticulatus from the middle Eocene to early late Eocene, supporting this important evolutionary pattern in many lineages of Nummulites. Operculinid forms showed an opposite and more weakly pronounced time-dependent trend in the size decrease of the proloculus. In the Cuban localities, Nummulites striatoreticulatus occurs from the Lutetian to Priabonian, while Palaeonummulites trinitatensis is restricted to the Bartonian to Priabonian. The moderately to loosely coiled operculinid taxa O. floridensis and O. soldadensis have longer stratigraphical ranges from the middle Eocene to probably the early Oligocene. Operculinoides floridensis and O. soldadensis show a broader variability in marginal radius increase, and thus probably occupied wider niches than N. striatoreticulatus. The latter seems to be restricted to the shelf edge and to the shallowest parts of the upper slope. A possible phylogenetic connection between Heterostegina and Operculinoides is suggested by the closest equatorial morphology of Heterostegina sp. indet. to tightly coiled forms of Operculinoides floridensis. Discriminant analysis documents the strongest similarities in perimeter ratio, backbend angle, initial marginal radius and proloculus mean diameter.
Supporting information for “ Single-Molecule Dynamics and Discrimination between Hydrophilic and Hydrophobic Amino Acids in Peptides , through Controllable , Stepwise Translocation across Nanopores ”

Alina Asandei1,†, Isabela S. Dragomir 2,† and Giovanni Di Muccio3 and Mauro Chinappi3 and Yoonkyung Park4 and Tudor Luchian2 1 Interdisciplinary Research Department, Department of Physics, Alexandru I. Cuza University, Iasi 700506, Romania 2 Department of Physics, Alexandru I. Cuza University, Iasi 700506, Romania, 3 Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Rome, Italy 4 Department of Biomedical Science and Research Center for Proteinaceous Materials (RCPM), Chosun University, Gwangju, Korea. * Correspondence: mauro.chinappi@uniroma2.it, y_k_park@chosun.ac. kr and luchian@uaic.ro † These authors contributed equally to this work.
Ethno-linguistic Groups during an Economic Recession: Low-income Earners in the 1990s' Finland

Little is known about low-income earners in the Swedish-speaking community in Finland, and particularly how this ethno-linguistic group positioned itself as compared with the Finnish speakers during the severe economic recession in the 1990s. Relating to the ethno-linguistic English-speaking minority in Quebec, we set out to study whether also Swedish speakers experienced a worsening of their economic position. Using register data from 1987–1999, we find that they did not, but rather improved their relative situation as compared with the Finnish speakers, although they on average had a higher propensity for being low-income earners also after the recession. In contrast to the situation in Quebec, no unfavourable language acts or educational reforms were imposed on the Swedish speakers during the study period. We see the results as reflecting a well-functioning welfare state, in which language acts and constitutional rights have worked to protect both ethno-linguistic groups.
Synthesis of ferrite nanoparticles Cu 1 − x Ag x Fe 2 O 4 and evaluation of potential antibacterial activity

Copper-silver ferrite nanoparticles synthesized by a simple and rapid solution combustion method using glycine as complexing agent. Cu-Ag nanoparticles were and characterized by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. In vitro assays were established as a means of evaluating the potential of interaction and mean inhibition rates on several strains using the diffusion method in liquid broth medium. Ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy analyses were applied for comparing relative amounts of strains eliminated or inhibited through physical sample mechanisms. Results indicated that the amount of silver ions in the copper ferrites influences the crystal microstructure and antibacterial properties of the
Genealogy of the extremal process of the branching random walk

The extremal process of a branching random walk is the point measure recording the position of particles alive at time $n$, shifted around the expected position of the minimal position. Madaule proved that this point measure converges, as $n \to \infty$, toward a randomly shifted, decorated Poisson point process. In this article, we study the joint convergence of the extremal process together with its genealogical informations. This result is then used to describe the law of the decoration in the limiting process, as well as to study the supercritical Gibbs measures of the branching random walk.
Incidental Vocabulary Learning Through Listening to Teacher Talk

This study investigated incidental learning of single-word items and collocations through listening to teacher talk. Although there are several studies that have investigated incidental vocabulary learning through listening, no intervention studies have explicitly investigated the extent to which listening to teachers in a classroom context might contribute to vocabulary learning. The present study fills this gap. Additionally, the study explored the relationship between vocabulary learning gains and two factors: frequency of occurrence and first language (L1) translation. A meaning-recall test and a multiple-choice test were used to evaluate learning gains. The results indicated that (a) listening to teacher talk has potential to contribute to vocabulary learning of both single-word items and collocations, (b) using L1 translation to explain target word meanings contributed to larger gains on the immediate posttest, (c) frequency of occurrence was not a significant predictor of incidental vocabulary learning.
Microstructure and thermoelectric properties of CrN and CrN/Cr2N thin films

CrN thin films with an N/Cr ratio of 95% were deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering onto (0 0 0 1) sapphire substrates. X-ray diffraction and pole figure texture analysis show CrN (1 1 1) epitaxial growth in a twin domain fashion. By changing the nitrogen versus argon gas flow mixture and the deposition temperature, thin films with different surface morphologies ranging from grainy rough textures to flat and smooth films were prepared. These parameters can also affect the CrNx system, with the film compound changing between semiconducting CrN and metallic Cr2N through the regulation of the nitrogen content of the gas flow and the deposition temperature at a constant deposition pressure. Thermoelectric measurements (electrical resistivity and Seebeck coefficient), scanning electron microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy imaging confirm the changing electrical resistivity between 0.75 and 300 , the changing Seebeck coefficient values between 140 and 230 , and the differences in surface morphology and microstructure as higher temperatures result in lower electrical resistivity while gas flow mixtures with higher nitrogen content result in single phase cubic CrN.
Far-Field ASR Using Low-Rank and Sparse Soft Targets from Parallel Data

Far-field automatic speech recognition (ASR) of conversational speech is often considered to be a very challenging task due to the poor quality of alignments available for training the DNN acoustic models. A common way to alleviate this problem is to use clean alignments obtained from parallelly recorded close-talk speech data. In this work, we advance the parallel data approach by obtaining enhanced low-rank and sparse soft targets from a close-talk ASR system and using them for training more accurate far-field acoustic models. Specifically, we (i) exploit eigenposteriors and Compressive Sensing dictionaries to learn low-dimensional senone subspaces in DNN posterior space, and (ii) enhance close-talk DNN posteriors to achieve high quality soft targets for training far-field DNN acoustic models. We show that the enhanced soft targets encode the structural and temporal interrelationships among senone classes which are easily accessible in the DNN posterior space of close-talk speech but not in its noisy far-field counterpart. We exploit enhanced soft targets to improve the mapping of far-field acoustics to close-talk senone classes. The experiments are performed on AMI meeting corpus where our approach improves DNN based acoustic modeling by 4.4% absolute (~8% rel.) reduction in WER as compared to a system which doesn’t use parallel data. Finally, the approach is also validated on state-of-the-art recurrent and time delay neural network architectures.
Bacteria of the γ-Subclass Proteobacteria Associated with Zooplankton in Chesapeake Bay

ABSTRACT The seasonal abundance of γ-subclass Proteobacteria, Vibrio-Photobacterium, Vibrio cholerae-Vibrio mimicus, Vibrio cincinnatiensis, and Vibrio vulnificus in the Choptank River of Chesapeake Bay associated with zooplankton was monitored from April to December 1996. Large (>202-μm) and small (64- to 202-μm) size classes of zooplankton were collected, and the bacteria associated with each of the zooplankton size classes were enumerated by fluorescent oligonucleotide direct count. Large populations of bacteria were found to be associated with both the large and small size classes of zooplankton. Also, the species of bacteria associated with the zooplankton showed seasonal abundance, with the largest numbers occurring in the early spring and again in the summer, when zooplankton total numbers were correspondingly large. Approximately 0.01 to 40.0% of the total water column bacteria were associated with zooplankton, with the percentage of the total water column bacteria population associated with zooplankton varying by season. A taxonomically diverse group of bacteria was associated with zooplankton, and a larger proportion was found in and on zooplankton during the cooler months of the year, with selected taxa comprising a larger percent of the Bacteria in the summer. V. cholerae-V. mimicus and V. vulnificus comprised the bulk of the large and small zooplankton-associated Vibrio-Photobacterium species. In contrast, V. cincinnatiensis accounted for less than 0.1 to 3%. It is concluded that water column and zooplankton bacterial populations vary independently with respect to species composition since no correlation was observed between taxa occurring with highest frequency in the water column and those in association with zooplankton.
Component greenhouse gas fluxes and radiative balance from two deltaic marshes in Louisiana: Pairing chamber techniques and eddy covariance

Coastal marshes take up atmospheric CO2 while emitting CO2, CH4, and N2O. This ability to sequester carbon (C) is much greater for wetlands on a per area basis than from most ecosystems, facilitating scientific, political, and economic interest in their value as greenhouse gas sinks. However, the greenhouse gas balance of Gulf of Mexico wetlands is particularly understudied. We describe the net ecosystem exchange (NEEc) of CO2 and CH4 using eddy covariance (EC) in comparison with fluxes of CO2, CH4, and N2O using chambers from brackish and freshwater marshes in Louisiana, USA. From EC, we found that 182 g C m−2 yr−1 was lost through NEEc from the brackish marsh. Of this, 11 g C m−2 yr−1 resulted from net CH4 emissions and the remaining 171 g C m−2 yr−1 resulted from net CO2 emissions. In contrast, −290 g C m2 yr−1 was taken up through NEEc by the freshwater marsh, with 47 g C m−2 yr−1 emitted as CH4 and −337 g C m−2 yr−1 taken up as CO2. From chambers, we discovered that neither site had large fluxes of N2O. Sustained‐flux greenhouse gas accounting metrics indicated that both marshes had a positive (warming) radiative balance, with the brackish marsh having a substantially greater warming effect than the freshwater marsh. That net respiratory emissions of CO2 and CH4 as estimated through chamber techniques were 2–4 times different from emissions estimated through EC requires additional understanding of the artifacts created by different spatial and temporal sampling footprints between techniques.
Role of Social Software Tools in Education: A Literature Review.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of literature on the role of Web 2.0 or social software tools in education.Design/methodology/approach – This paper is a critical and comprehensive review of a range of literature sources (until January 2009) addressing the various issues related to the educator's perspective of pedagogical effectiveness of social software tools.Findings – The paper provides insights about the: educational goals of using social software tools; benefits to the students, educators and institutions; challenges that may influence a social software initiative; and issues that need to be considered in a social software initiative.Research limitations/implications – It is hoped that the analysis, as captured in this paper, will highlight the different pedagogical roles of social software: communication, nurturing creativity and innovation, and collaborative learning. The paper will be of interest to researchers in the areas of social software and technology‐enabled learn.
Pauses in spontaneous written communication: A keystroke logging study

Spontaneous writing observed in chats, instant messengers, and social media has become established as productive modes of communication and discourse genres. However, they remain understudied from the perspective of writing process research. In this paper, we present an empirical study wherein keystrokes made by chat users in a game were recorded. The distributions of the inter-key intervals were analyzed and fitted with ex-Gaussian distribution equation, and an argument for psycholinguistic interpretation of the distribution parameters is presented. This analysis leads to establishing a threshold of 500 ms for the identification of pauses in spontaneous writing. Furthermore, we demonstrate that pauses longer than 1.2 s may correspond to higher-level linguistic processing beyond a single propositional expression (functional element of the discourse).
Co-evolution of lexical meaning & pragmatic use

According to standard linguistic theory, the meaning of an utterance is the product of conventional semantic meaning and general pragmatic rules on language use. To investigate how cultural evolution of language plays out under this picture of the semantics-pragmatics interface, we present a game theoretic model of the competition between types of language users, each endowed with a selection of lexical representations and a particular pragmatic disposition to act on them. Our model traces two evolutionary forces and their interaction: (i) pressure towards communicative efficiency and (ii) learning biases during the transfer of linguistic knowledge. We illustrate the model based on a case study on scalar implicatures. In this case study learning biases that favor simple semantic representations can foster the evolution of more sophisticated pragmatic reasoning types and so prevent the lexicalization of scalar implicatures.
Radiative feedbacks of dustin-snow over East Asia in CAM 4-BAM

Dust-in-snow on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) could reduce the visible snow albedo by changing surface optical properties and removing the snow cover through increased snowmelt, which leads to a significant positive radiative forcing and remarkedly alters the regional energy balance and the East Asian climate system. This study extends our previous investigation in dust-radiation interactions to investigate the dust-in-snow radiative forcing (SRF) and its feedbacks on the regional climate and the dust cycle over East Asia by use of the Community Atmosphere Model version 4 with a Bulk Aerosol Model pa5 rameterization of the dust size distribution (CAM4-BAM). Our results show that SRF increases the East Asian dust emissions significantly by 13.7% in the spring, countering a 7.6% decrease in the regional emissions by the dust direct radiative forcing (DRF). SRF also remarkedly enhances the whole dust cycle, including transport and deposition of dust aerosols over East Asia. The simulations indicate an increase in dust emissions of 5.1% due to the combined effect of DRF and SRF. Further analysis reveals that these results are mainly due to the regional climatic feedbacks induced by SRF over East Asia. By reducing the 10 snow albedo over the TP, the dust-in-snow mainly warms the TP to enhance its thermal effects by increasing the surface sensible and latent heat flux, which in turn increases the aridity and westerly winds over Northwest China and enhances the regional dust cycle. Additionally, the dust-in-snow also accelerates snow melting, reduces the snow cover, and then expands the East Asian dust source region area, which results in increasing the regional dust emissions. Hence, a significant feature of SRF on the TP can create a positive feedback loop to enhance the dust cycle over East Asia. 15 1 BNL-208015-2018-JAAM
Coupling Popov’s algorithm with subgradient extragradient method for solving equilibrium problems

Based on the recent works by Censor et al. (2011), Malitsky and Semenov (2014), and Hieu (2016), we propose a new scheme for solving pseudomonotone equilibrium problems in real Hilbert spaces. Weak and strong convergence results are suitably established. Our algorithm improves the recent one announced by Hieu not only from computational point of view, but also in some assumptions imposed on his main result. A comparative numerical study is carried out between three algorithms (the algorithms of Quoc-Muu-Hien (2008), Vedel-Semenov (2015) and Hieu (2016)) and the new one. Experimental results show that our algorithm is more efficient than the previous ones.