Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Variable past participles in Portuguese perfect constructions

Abstract Some Portuguese verbs have two past participle forms: one regular (stem + -do), and the other irregular (often identical to the first person singular present indicative). Per grammars, the perfect auxiliaries ter/haver take regulars, while irregulars appear with passive/adjectival ser/estar. To test these claims, we analyzed naturally-occurring data from Brazil (twentieth century) and Portugal (nineteenth and twentieth). We coded 1077 tokens from 21 verbs for ten predictors and performed mixed-effects logistic regressions in R. Irregulars appear with ter/haver 54% overall and in 68% of cases from Portugal. Our results demonstrate that past participle choice is determined by the interaction of several linguistic factors. While lexical verb is the most significant predictor of participle selection, verbs with irregular participles identical to the first person singular present indicative occur in the irregular significantly more than other verbs. We conclude that analogical processes underpin the variation. This conclusion allows us to adjudicate between competing accounts of past participle choice in Portuguese.
Is Responsible Investment under-proportionally Researched?

We contribute to the research policy literature by pioneering the development of a sufficiently reliable and generically applicable benchmarking approach for research area output quantity and/or quality. In our development, we overcome substantial structural problems such as the ignorance of books and monographs or the inconsistent citation behaviour differences between research areas. Our approach offers various new opportunities to stakeholders of the research process. For instance, governments, research funding bodies or researchers could benefit from a traffic light system for research area performance and competitiveness, which universities could also use for strategic decision making on their national research assessment submissions. We illustrate our approach for the interdisciplinary research area of responsible investment, which is backed by a trillion $ industry, and find it to experience under-proportional aggregated (quality weighted) research output. This signals to governments, which already legislatively support responsible investment, the need for additional research support and to researchers a less competitive but relevant research area.
The Effects of Social Networking Sites on Students' Studying and Habits.

Social media is important to communicate with people, share/ask information, and follow/evaluate/interpret the events, etc. for everyone at the present time. The positive and negative effects of social networking sites on students’ studying and habits were examined in this research. The study was conducted on 220 students in vocational school of higher education. The data were collected with the help of a questionnaire designed for gathering the students’ opinions about the digital technologies and social media. The results revealed that the digital technologies and social networking sites have negative impact on students’ studying and habits. Some suggestions related to the findings were presented in the study.
The influence of socioeconomic status on adolescent leadership in Colorado public high schools

A number of studies investigate the differential treatment of students in education based on gender, race, or disability. Few examine the indicator of socioeconomic status (SES), particularly in relation to student leadership participation. This study examined the occurrence of low SES adolescents in positions of leadership among Colorado public high schools. Through a correlational explanatory survey design, data analyses confirmed the null hypotheses that there was no relationship between the SES of adolescents and adolescents serving in leadership positions in urban or rural public high schools in Colorado. Post-hoc analyses yielded additional information related to what types of activities are more likely to have low SES adolescent leaders: (1) Low SES students were more involved in leadership while attending low SES schools; (2) low SES students were more likely to serve in positions of leadership in certain types of activities; and, (3) school SES was shown to influence the types of activities where low SES student leaders serve. Public high schools represent ideal environments for influencing leadership development of low SES adolescents. This study proposed incorporating a leadership curriculum that identifies potential leaders, provides ongoing support and training, develops leadership skills through school and community partnerships, and eliminates pay-to-play policies for extracurricular activities. Although this study presented significant findings, additional research on low SES adolescent leadership is warranted to determine whether leadership opportunities are sufficient for low SES adolescent leaders to transfer leadership skills into adulthood and out of a low socioeconomic environment.
A Design of Two Sub-Stage Square-Root Nyquist Matched Filter

A pair of matched filters whose cascade response satisfies the Nyquist criterion can guarantee the inter-symbol interference (ISI)-free transmission for band-limited communication systems. For a linear phase finite impulse response square root Nyquist filter, it is necessary to strike a balance between the stop-band attenuation (SBA) and ISI performance. This paper proposes a novel approach for obtaining the square root Nyquist filter by adopting two sub-stage cascade filters group, which is known as the compensated half-band (HB) filter group (CHFG). The first sub-stage of the CHFG is a HB filter which can guarantee the required SBA performance on low computational complexity; whereas, the second sub-stage is an ISI compensation filter to ensure that the cascaded response of two CHFGs satisfies the Nyquist criterion. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed CHFG can either achieve better SBA/ISI performance or reduce the computational complexity.
Three-Dimensional Synchrotron Virtual Paleohistology: A New Insight into the World of Fossil Bone Microstructures

Abstract The recent developments of phase-contrast synchrotron imaging techniques have been of great interest for paleontologists, providing three-dimensional (3D) tomographic images of anatomical structures, thereby leading to new paleobiological insights and the discovery of new species. However, until now, it has not been used on features smaller than 5–7 μm voxel size in fossil bones. Because much information is contained within the 3D histological architecture of bone, including an ontogenetic record, crucial for understanding the paleobiology of fossil species, the application of phase-contrast synchrotron tomography to bone at higher resolutions is potentially of great interest. Here we use this technique to provide new 3D insights into the submicron-scale histology of fossil and recent bones, based on the development of new pink-beam configurations, data acquisition strategies, and improved processing tools. Not only do the scans reveal by nondestructive means all of the major features of the histology at a resolution comparable to that of optical microscopy, they provide 3D information that cannot be obtained by any other method.
CASCADE: Contextual Sarcasm Detection in Online Discussion Forums

The literature in automated sarcasm detection has mainly focused on lexical-, syntactic- and semantic-level analysis of text. However, a sarcastic sentence can be expressed with contextual presumptions, background and commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose a ContextuAl SarCasm DEtector (CASCADE), which adopts a hybrid approach of both content- and context-driven modeling for sarcasm detection in online social media discussions. For the latter, CASCADE aims at extracting contextual information from the discourse of a discussion thread. Also, since the sarcastic nature and form of expression can vary from person to person, CASCADE utilizes user embeddings that encode stylometric and personality features of users. When used along with content-based feature extractors such as convolutional neural networks, we see a significant boost in the classification performance on a large Reddit corpus.
Categorization and deductive reasoning: predictors of instrumental activities of daily living performance in adults with brain injury.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive relationship of categorization and deductive reasoning abilities to performance of instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) among adults with brain injury. METHOD A correlational research design was used to examine the performance of 19 patients from a neurosurgery acute care unit on Toglia's Category Assessment (TCA), the Deductive Reasoning test (DR), and the Observed Tasks of Daily Living-Revised. RESULTS Multiple regression analysis indicated that categorization and deductive reasoning accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in IADL performance scores, with deductive reasoning making the greater contribution. Demographic characteristics such as age and education reduced the power of the previous variables, especially of the categorization. CONCLUSION The results of this study indicate that assessments of categorization and deductive reasoning abilities of persons with brain injury may be good predictors of IADL functional performance. Results support the use of the TCA and DR as quick measures of a person's cognitive and functional abilities. Furthermore, this study provides preliminary results to support that categorization and deductive reasoning abilities are fundamental for the performance of IADL skills.
RCS COMPUTATION USING A PARALLEL IN-CORE AND OUT-OF-CORE DIRECT SOLVER

Application to RCS computation of a higher order solver based on the surface integral approach is presented. The solver uses a direct method to solve the corresponding algebraic system of equations. Two versions of the solver are available: in-core and out-of-core. Both are e-ciently implemented as parallel codes using Message Passing Interface libraries. Several benchmark structures are analyzed showing the reliability, performance, and versatility to run in a wide variety of computer platforms, of the solver. The results shown are illustrative of what is the maximum frequency of analysis of the structures for a given type of simulation platform.
The first Loranthaceae fossils from Africa

Abstract An ongoing re-investigation of the early Miocene Saldanha Bay (South Africa) palynoflora, using combined light and scanning electron microscopy (single grain method), is revealing several pollen types new to the African fossil record. One of the elements identified is Loranthaceae pollen. These grains represent the first and only fossil record of Loranthaceae in Africa. The fossil pollen grains resemble those produced by the core Lorantheae and are comparable to recent Asian as well as some African taxa/lineages. Molecular and fossil signals indicate that Loranthaceae dispersed into Africa via Asia sometime during the Eocene. The present host range of African Loranthaceae and the composition of the palynoflora suggest that the fossil had a range of potential host taxa to parasitise during the early Miocene in the Saldanha Bay region.
International Journal of Management Sciences and Business Research, 2013 ISSN (2226-8235) Vol-3, Issue 1

The role of this research manuscript was to examine the drivers or determinants of pension funds’ investment in risky assets, particularly the paper analyzed Tanzanian pension funds investment in equities as a risky asset proxy variable. Since the financial crisis of 2007 exposed the globe into a painful pension crisis culminated by the dominance of risk shifting investment incentives over risk management once in most pension plans, until to date the information about which incentives characterize Tanzanian pension funds investment practices was simply not adequate. Using both quantitative and qualitative research approaches, the later employing interview, observations, and survey questionnaires to collect primary data from a sample of 100 stakeholders, while the former supplemented the missing qualitative information and involved a panel of four pension funds’ secondary data from 2003 through 2011 obtained from their audited annual reports. Upon econometric analysis using R-software, risk bearing capacity, funds maturity, and a share of active employees were the explaining variables towards pensions’ investment in equities, concurrent with risky shifting hypothesis. The Tanzanian social security regulatory authority (SSRA) should intervene and advice the plans to tilt their investment strategies towards safe assets for the benefit of current and future tax payers.
Mucosal pathobiology and molecular signature of epithelial barrier dysfunction in the small intestine in irritable bowel syndrome

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is one of the most prevalent gastrointestinal disorders in developed countries. Its etiology remains unknown; however, a common finding, regardless of IBS subtype, is the presence of altered intestinal barrier. In fact, signaling and location of cell‐to‐cell adhesion proteins, in connection with increased immune activity, seem abnormal in the intestinal epithelium of IBS patients. Despite that most research is performed on distal segments of the intestine, altered permeability has been reported in both, the small and the large bowel of all IBS subtypes. The small intestine carries out digestion and nutrient absorption and is also the site where the majority of immune responses to luminal antigens takes place. In fact, the upper intestine is more exposed to environmental antigens than the colon and is also a site of symptom generation. Recent studies have revealed small intestinal structural alterations of the epithelial barrier and mucosal immune activation in association with intestinal dysfunction, suggesting the commitment of the intestine as a whole in the pathogenesis of IBS. This review summarizes the most recent findings on mucosal barrier alterations and its relationship to symptoms arising from the small intestine in IBS, including epithelial structural abnormalities, mucosal immune activation, and microbial dysbiosis, further supporting the hypothesis of an organic origin of IBS.
Cardiovascular Outcomes of PCSK9 Inhibitors: With Special Emphasis on Its Effect beyond LDL-Cholesterol Lowering

PCSK9 inhibitors, monoclonal antibodies, are novel antihypercholesterolemic drugs. FDA first approved them in July 2015. PCSK9 protein (692-amino acids) was discovered in 2003. It plays a major role in LDL receptor degradation and is a prominent modulator in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) metabolism. PCSK9 inhibitors are monoclonal antibodies that target PCSK9 protein in liver and inhibiting this protein leads to drastically lowering harmful LDL-C level in the bloodstream. Despite widespread use of the statin, not all the high-risk patients were able to achieve targeted level of LDL-C. Using PCSK9 inhibitors could lead to a substantial decrement in LDL-C plasma level ranging from 50% to 70%, either as a monotherapy or on top of statins. A large number of trials have shown robust reduction of LDL-C plasma level with the use of PCSK9 inhibitors as a monotherapy or in combination with statins in familial and nonfamilial forms of hypercholesterolemia. Moreover, PCSK9 inhibitors do not appear to increase the risk of hepatic and muscle-related side effects. PCSK9 inhibitors proved to be a highly potent and promising antihypercholesterolemic drug by decreasing LDL-R lysosomal degradation by PCSK9 protein. Statin drugs are known to have some pleiotropic effects. In this article, we are also focusing on the effects of PCSK9 inhibitor beyond LDL-C reduction like endothelial inflammation, atherosclerosis, its safety in patients with diabetes, obesity, and chronic kidney disease, and its influence on neurocognition and stroke.
Global reorganisation of cis-regulatory units upon lineage commitment of human embryonic stem cells

Long-range cis-regulatory elements such as enhancers coordinate cell-specific transcriptional programmes by engaging in DNA looping interactions with target promoters. Deciphering the interplay between the promoter connectivity and activity of cis-regulatory elements during lineage commitment is crucial for understanding developmental transcriptional control. Here, we use Promoter Capture Hi-C to generate a high-resolution atlas of chromosomal interactions involving ~22,000 gene promoters in human pluripotent and lineage-committed cells, identifying putative target genes for known and predicted enhancer elements. We reveal extensive dynamics of cis-regulatory contacts upon lineage commitment, including the acquisition and loss of promoter interactions. This spatial rewiring occurs preferentially with predicted changes in the activity of cis-regulatory elements and is associated with changes in target gene expression. Our results provide a global and integrated view of promoter interactome dynamics during lineage commitment of human pluripotent cells. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.21926. 001
Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Treatment can Unmask Periodic Limb Movements in Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea

To test the hypothesis that obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) can mask concurrent periodic limb movements during sleep (PLMS), which becomes evident or worsens after treatment with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), the present study investigated the frequency of PLMS during polysomnography (PSG) for OSA diagnoses and for CPAP titration in consecutive patients with OSA. A total of 142 consecutive patients (29 women and 113 men; mean age of 53±10 years; body mass index of 31±6 kg/m2) referred to PSG for OSA diagnostic (PSG1) and CPAP titration (PSG2) on two different nights were retrospectively evaluated. The frequency of patients with PLMS index>5 events per hour of sleep was 13 (9%) in PSG1 and 18 (13%) in PSG2. Only four patients had PLMS index>5 in both PSGs. A decrease of the PLMS index was observed in two of the four patients who sustained PLMS index>5 in PSG2 compared to PSG1. These findings showed that the CPAP treatment can unmask but not exacerbate PLMS in patients with OSA.
The New Propbank: Aligning Propbank with AMR through POS Unification

We present a corpus which converts the sense labels of existing Propbank resources to a new uniﬁed format which is more compatible with AMR and more robust to sparsity. This adopts an innovation of the Abstract Meaning Representation project (Banarescu et al., 2013) in which one abstracts away from different, related parts of speech, so that related forms such as “insert” and “insertion” could be represented by the same roleset and use the same semantic roles. We note that this conversion also serves to make the different English Propbank corpora released over the years consistent with each other, so that one might train and evaluate systems upon that larger combined data. We present analysis of some appealing characteristics of this ﬁnal dataset, and present preliminary results of training and evaluating SRL systems on this combined set, to spur usage of this challenging new dataset.
Ehrlichia muris in Ixodes cookei Ticks, Northeastern United States, 2016–2017

Ehrlichia muris is an agent of human ehrlichiosis. To determine its geographic spread in the United States, during 2016–2017, we tested 8,760 ticks from 45 states. A distinct clade of E. muris found in 3 Ixodes cookei ticks from the northeastern United States suggests transmission by these ticks in this region.
Hyperpolarized 13C Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Reveals the Rate-Limiting Role of the Blood–Brain Barrier in the Cerebral Uptake and Metabolism of l-Lactate in Vivo

The dynamics of l-lactate transport across the blood–brain barrier (BBB) and its cerebral metabolism are still subject to debate. We studied lactate uptake and intracellular metabolism in the mouse brain using hyperpolarized 13C magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). Following the intravenous injection of hyperpolarized [1-13C]lactate, we observed that the distribution of the 13C label between lactate and pyruvate, which has been shown to be representative of their pool size ratio, is different in NMRI and C57BL/6 mice, the latter exhibiting a higher level of cerebral lactate dehydrogenase A (Ldha) expression. On the basis of this observation, and an additional set of experiments showing that the cerebral conversion of [1-13C]lactate to [1-13C]pyruvate increases after exposing the brain to ultrasound irradiation that reversibly opens the BBB, we concluded that lactate transport is rate-limited by the BBB, with a 30% increase in lactate uptake after its disruption. It was also deduced from these results that hyperpolarized 13C MRS can be used to detect a variation in cerebral lactate uptake of <40 nmol in a healthy brain during an in vivo experiment lasting only 75 s, opening new opportunities to study the role of lactate in brain metabolism.
Chemical Composition of Hura Crepitans Seeds and Antimicrobial Activities of its Oil

Seeds of Hura crepitans (Sandbox tree) were decorticated, milled and homogenized to flour from which oil was extracted using solvent extraction method. Proximate, mineral and fatty acid compositions, as well as, antimicrobial activity of Hura creptians seed flour and oil were determined using standard test methods. Results of these determinations show that the seed has high crude fat content and is very rich in magnesium. Oleic acid is the most abundant fatty acid and contains more unsaturated fatty acids, but showed no observable antimicrobial activity against the test organisms; E. coli, P. aeruginosa, S. aureus and C. albicans.
Frontal Eye Field Inactivation Reduces Saccade Preparation in the Superior Colliculus but Does Not Alter How Preparatory Activity Relates to Saccades of a Given Latency

Abstract A neural correlate for saccadic reaction times (SRTs) in the gap saccade task is the level of low-frequency activity in the intermediate layers of the superior colliculus (iSC) just before visual target onset: greater levels of such preparatory iSC low-frequency activity precede shorter SRTs. The frontal eye fields (FEFs) are one likely source of iSC preparatory activity, since FEF preparatory activity is also inversely related to SRT. To better understand the FEF’s role in saccade preparation, and the way in which such preparation relates to SRT, in two male rhesus monkeys, we compared iSC preparatory activity across unilateral reversible cryogenic inactivation of the FEF. FEF inactivation increased contralesional SRTs, and lowered ipsilesional iSC preparatory activity. FEF inactivation also reduced rostral iSC activity during the gap period. Importantly, the distributions of SRTs generated with or without FEF inactivation overlapped, enabling us to conduct a novel population-level analyses examining iSC preparatory activity just before generation of SRT-matched saccades. When matched for SRTs, we observed no change during FEF inactivation in the relationship between iSC preparatory activity and SRT-matched saccades across a range of SRTs, even for the occasional express saccade. Thus, while our results emphasize that the FEF has an overall excitatory influence on preparatory activity in the iSC, the communication between the iSC and downstream oculomotor brainstem is unaltered for SRT-matched saccades.