Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics

Infant-directed speech contains dominantly multi-word utterances. Segmenting speech into linguistic units is crucial for language acquisition. This study inquires if prosodic cues exist in speech and mark syntactic units. Participants were Quebec-French speakers. In Experiment 1 participants read determiner+noun and pronoun+verb utterances. Nouns and verbs were pseudo-words (e.g., mige, krale) counterbalanced in their occurrences in the utterances. Their prosodic properties (duration, pitch, intensity) were measured. Results showed that the two categories did not differ in prosody: noun versus verb productions of these pseudo-words were equivalent. Experiment 2 tested whether larger utterances were produced with prosodic cues supporting grammatical categories and phrasal groupings. The same pseudo-words were the final words (counterbalanced) in 1) [determiner+adjective+noun] and 2) [[determiner+noun]+verb] structures. Results showed that the last word as nouns versus verbs differed significantly in duration, pitch and intensity. Moreover, the initial consonant of verb productions was longer, with a distinct preceding pause. The word preceding the verb (2) exhibited categorical and boundary cues, differing from the word preceding the noun in (1) in duration, pitch and intensity. We suggest that the acoustic cues may help infants first parse larger utterances and then acquire the syntactic properties of phrases and words based on their distribution.
Severe subcutaneous, muscular and visceral coenurosis in a goat

Coenurosis (gid or sturdy) is a zoonotic disease that is caused by Taenia multiceps metacestode. It is common in small ruminants. The cysts in sheep are more cerebral, while are noncerebral in goats. Coenurosis decreases production, and results in the death of the affected animals and in the disposal of the organs or even carcasses in severe infection. The present study describes severe subcutaneous coenuri associated with contamination in other tissues including the skeletal muscles and visceral organs. A remarkable clinical observation was the aggregation of cysts in variable sizes in the subcutaneous tissue of whole body. Subcutaneous tissue is not a common site for cyst formation. Coenurosis was confirmed based on the morphological characteristics of the cysts including the clusters of protoscolices and rostellar hooks.
Determining the Argument Quality of Pre-service Science Teachers Regarding to Socio-scientific Issues: YouTube as a Source of Argumentation

The aim of this study is to examine the quality of the written argument of pre-service science teachers on certain socio-scientific issues and their opinions about the process. The study group consisted of 26 pre-service science teachers (18 females, 8 males) studying in the 3rd grade of a state university designated with respect to the purposeful sampling method of the study group. In the study, a case study pattern is adopted from qualitative research designs. The data source of the study consisted of sugar loading in pregnancy, raw / loose milk and processed / pasteurized milk, written arguments for the SSI of the nuclear power plant, pre-service science teachers' journals, researcher notes and semi-structured focus group interviews. The data obtained in the study were analysed according to descriptive and content analysis techniques. At the end of the research, it was determined that the quality of argument increased positively during the implementation when the written arguments of pre-service science teachers were examined after class discussion. In the evaluation of the research process, it was determined that pre-service teachers' awareness of the SSI and the YouTube supported classroom discussion process contributed positively to life skills and science process skills such as decision making, hypothesis building, discussion, analytical thinking.
Does firm Size moderate the relationship between rational strategic planning and Performance?

Assessing the impact of rational strategic planning on firm performance has been central in strategic management research during the last three decades. This paper revisits this important issue by giving special attention to the operationalization of the concepts of rational strategic planning and performance, and including firm size as a contingency factor. A quantitative empirical study conducted on European, American and Asian firms reveals a positive association between strategic planning and performance regardless of firm size.
Soft 3D Reconstruction for View Synthesis

Fig. 1. Progress of rendering virtual views of difficult scenes containing foliage, wide baseline occlusions and reflections. View ray and texture mapping ray visibility is modelled softly according to a distribution of depth probabilities retained from the reconstruction stage. This results in soft edges, soft occlusion removal, partial uncertainty of depth in textureless areas, and soft transitions between the dominant depths in reflections.
How E-Servqual Affects Customer's Online Purchase Intention?

With the boom of Internet, Internet has become one of the consumers’ online shopping channels. However, there is different in online shopping situation is because of consumers in different cultures and countries have different online shopping behavior is worth to discuss. This study is to explore the Internet users’ online shopping situation in developing country, Malaysia, and 118 questionnaire respondents were collected. Statistical analysis software SPSS 17.0 and AMOS 6.0 were used to analyze the impact on e-service quality, satisfaction, trust, and purchase intention. The model fit of this study was in an acceptable level, and this indicates that the theoretical model of this study supports the description of e-service quality for e-retailers that online shopping situation will be effected by trust and satisfaction. The result of this study will be available for those who interested in developing a transnational e-retailer as a reference, as well as academic research on cross-cultural comparative analysis.
Transporter-targeted prodrug delivery to improve oral bioavailability of saquinavir

Saquinavir (SQV) is the first antiretroviral protease inhibitor approved by Food and Drug Administration in the United States for the treatment of HIV infection due to its potent anti-HIV activity. However, some unfavorable properties including low aqueous solubility, low intestinal absorption and fast biotransformation lead to its poor oral bioavailability and limited therapeutic efficacy. The objective of this dissertation project is to investigate whether stereoisomerized peptide prodrugs targeting influx transporter system could improve intestinal absorption and oral bioavailability of SQV. Four stereoisomeric dipeptide prodrugs of SQV including L-valine-L-valine-SQV (LLS), L-valine-D-valine-SQV (LDS), D-valine-L-valine-SQV (DLS) and D-valine-Dvaline-SQV (DDS) and two amino acid prodrugs including L-valine-SQV (LS) and Dvaline-SQV (DS) were synthesized and investigated using in vitro cell culture models. All dipeptide prodrugs exhibit improved aqueous solubility, lowered cytotoxicity, and reduced P-gp/MRP2-mediated efflux activities regardless of stereochemistry in promoieties. SQV attached with L-isomers shows higher affinity for peptide transporters but lower stability and higher toxicity, whereas conjugation with D-isomers can enhance stability and reduce toxicity, but not be recognized by peptide transporters. Subsequently,
A CCEPT : A Programmer-Guided Compiler Framework for Practical Approximate Computing

Approximate computing trades off accuracy for better performance and energy efﬁciency. It offers promising optimization opportunities for a wide variety of modern applications, from mobile vision to data analytics. Recent approaches to approximate computing have relied on either manual program modiﬁcation, based exclusively on programmer reasoning, or opaque automatic transformations, which sacriﬁce programmer control. We describe A CCEPT , a comprehensive framework for approximation that balances automation with programmer guidance. It includes C/C++ type qualiﬁers for constraining approximation, a compiler analysis library that identiﬁes regions of approximable code, an autotuning system that automatically chooses the best approximation strategies, and a feedback mechanism that explains how annotations can be improved for better approximation opportunities. A CCEPT automatically applies a variety of approximation techniques, including hardware acceleration, while ensuring their safety. We apply A CCEPT to nine workloads on a standard desktop, an FPGA-augmented mobile SoC, and an energy-harvesting sensor device to evaluate the annotation process. We observe average speedups of 2.3 × , 4.8 × , and 1.5 × on the three platforms, respectively.
Usefulness of serum gamma glutamyl transferase in assessing severity of preeclampsia

Introduction: Pre-eclampsia is a multisystem disorder, unique to pregnant women after twenty weeks of gestation. In India the incidence of pre-eclampsia is reported to be 8-10% of the pregnancy. It contributes significantly to maternal and perinatal mortality and morbidity. Among the biochemical markers, uric acid and LDH have been extensively studied in pregnancy induced hypertensive disorders. Very limited studies are available about the role of GGT in preeclampsia. This study intended to know the correlate the biochemical levels of GGT, LDH and Uric acid with the severity of pre-eclampsia. Materials and Methods: 50 pregnant women clinically diagnosed as preeclampsia after 20 weeks of gestation between 18-35 yrs of age group. Preeclampsia is diagnosed based on the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) criteria. Cases were classified into two groups mild preeclampsia (Group II) and severe preeclampsia (group III). 50 Age matched healthy normotensive pregnant women after 20 weeks of gestation enrolled in the study as controls and categorized as Group I. Results: Serum AST, ALT, LDH and uric acid levels were increased in cases compared to controls. Serum LDH is significantly increased in severe pre-eclamptic cases compared to controls. There was no significant correlation observed between GGT with serum LDH and Uric acid. ROC curve indicates that Serum LDH is the better indicator of severity in preeclampsia when compared to serum GGT and uric acid. Conclusion: Serum LDH and uric acid are the better indicators of severity in preeclampsia when compared to serum GGT
“Comparison of Cardiovascular Risk Factors between Sedentary and Non Sedentary Workersin Rajshahi Metropolitan Area”

Background: Cardio vascular disease (CVD) is one of the most common non communicable diseases which causes mortality and morbidity in both developed and developing countries. Although there are many other causes of cardiovascular diseases, sedentary life style is a notable cause of CVD. It is revealed that there is higher prevalence of CHD reported in sedentary workers. More than two million deaths each year are attributable to physical inactivity. Aim of the study: The aim of this study was to compare cardiovascular risk factors between sedentary & non sedentary workers. Methods and Materials: This cross sectional comparative study was carried out in the Department of Physiology and the Department of Biochemistry of Rajshahi Medical College & Hospital from January to December 2016. A total sample of 60 healthy adults was included in this study and divided into two equal groups.In Group I there were 30 sedentary workers and in Group II there were 30 non-sedentary workers. Fasting lipid profile and fasting blood sugar were measured by using semi auto analyzer (EMP-168 Biochemical Analyzer). Unpaired t-test and chi-square test was employed for the statistical analysis of data to compare each group. Results: BMI, waist circumference, hip circumference, and waist/hip ratio, Blood pressure (systolic and diastolic), serum level of triglyceride, total cholesterol, low density lipoprotein (LDL) and glucose were found significantly higher in sedentary workers than in non-sedentary workers where the p value was<0.05. However HDL-C did not show any significant difference between sedentary and non-sedentary workers. Conclusion: The present study found that beside HDL-C, all other parameters are significantly higher in sedentary workers. As a result, all the findings are favor of developing cardiovascular diseases. So a comprehensive non-sedentary life style should be designed to prevent cardiovascular diseases and to prevent premature mortality related to cardiovascular diseases. However it is necessary to carry out longitudinal study in Cohort with large sample size to confirm our findings.
The Trade Effects of Environmental Provisions in Preferential Trade Agreements

The international community has acknowledged that international trade can be an effective means of helping to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Traditionally, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) were designed to promote trade flows. PTAs have become more comprehensive and now also cover non-economic policy areas, such as the environment. This chapter examines whether the inclusion of environmental provisions in PTAs changes the observed overall positive contribution that PTAs make to economic outcomes and thereby to the economic objectives of the SDGs. Specifically, we ask whether the inclusion of environmental provisions in PTAs reduces export flows between PTA partner countries. Using a novel data set on environmental provisions in PTAs, we estimate gravity type panel regressions. We find that membership in PTAs including more environmental provisions is associated with less trade among trade partners compared to PTAs that include less or no environmental provisions. This negative effect of environmental provisions is fully driven by the negative effect on South-North trade flows, i.e. exports from developing to high-income countries.
Score-Informed Source Separation of Choral Music

Choral music recordings are a particularly challenging target for source separation due to the choral blend and the inherent acoustical complexity of the ‘choral timbre’. Due to the scarcity of publicly available multi-track choir recordings, we create a dataset of synthesized Bach chorales. We apply data augmentation to alter the chorales so that they more faithfully represent music from a broader range of choral genres. For separation we employ Wave-U-Net, a time-domain convolutional neural network (CNN) originally proposed for vocals and accompaniment separation. We show that Wave-U-Net outperforms a baseline implemented using score-informed NMF (non-negative matrix factorization). We introduce score-informed Wave-U-Net to incorporate the musical score into the separation process. We experiment with different score conditioning methods and show that conditioning on the score leads to improved separation results. We propose a ‘score-guided’ model variant in which separation is guided by the score alone, bypassing the need to specify the identity of the extracted source. Finally, we evaluate our models (trained on synthetic data only) on real choir recordings and find that in the absence of a large training set of real recordings, NMF still performs better than Wave-U-Net in this setting. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to study source separation of choral music.
The Impact of Immigrant Peers on Native Students' Academic Achievement in Countries Where Parents of Immigrants are Relatively Skilled

This study examines how exposure to immigrant students affects the academic achievement of native students in the three largest immigrant-receiving countries – United States, Australia, and Canada. Using a large cross-country dataset, variation in the share of immigrant children between different grade levels within schools is exploited to identify the impact of immigrant peers. I find that exposure to immigrant children has dissimilar effects on native students' achievements across the three countries. While exposure has a positive impact on Australian natives, it has a negative impact on Canadian natives. Exposure has no effect on U.S. natives. More importantly, I find that institutional factors, such as the way in which countries organise their educational systems, have a crucial bearing on how immigrant students affect their peers.
Exogenous γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) affects pollen tube growth via modulating putative Ca-permeable membrane channels and is coupled to negative regulation on glutamate decarboxylase Guang-Hui Yu*, Jie Zou*, Jing Feng, Xiong-Bo Peng, Ju-You Wu, Ying-Liang Wu, Ravishankar Palanivelu and Meng-Xiang S

γ-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) is implicated in pollen tube growth, but the molecular and cellular mechanisms that it mediates are largely unknown. Here, it is shown that exogenous GABA modulates putative Ca-permeable channels on the plasma membranes of tobacco pollen grains and pollen tubes. Whole-cell voltage-clamp experiments and noninvasive micromeasurement technology (NMT) revealed that the influx of Ca increases in pollen tubes in response to exogenous GABA. It is also demonstrated that glutamate decarboxylase (GAD), the rate-limiting enzyme of GABA biosynthesis, is involved in feedback controls of Ca-permeable channels to fluctuate intracellular GABA levels and thus modulate pollen tube growth. The findings suggest that GAD activity linked with Ca-permeable channels relays an extracellular GABA signal and integrates multiple signal pathways to modulate tobacco pollen tube growth. Thus, the data explain how GABA mediates the communication between the style and the growing pollen tubes.
WORK POLLUTION IN HEALTH CARE AND EDUCATION SECTOR FROM SPAIN AND POLAND

Science and Education, 2018, Issue 3 76 UDC: 159.9 DOI: https://doi.org/10.24195/2414-4665-2018-3-10 Larysa Zhuravlova, Doctor of Psychology, professor, Head of the Department of Theoretical and Practical Psychology, Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University, 40, Velyka Berdychivska Str. , Zhytomyr, Ukraine, Bogdan Pietrulewicz, dr hab. PhD of Psychology, professor, Department of Psychological Research Methods, Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland Laval University, Canada Anna Pazdyka, Master of Science in Psychology, PhD сandidate Universitat Rovira and Virgili in Tarragona, Spain,
Factors Affecting Acceptance Of SMS Marketing

This study intends to explore the factors affecting Thais’ acceptance of mobile marketing. Previous studies have shown significant differences between informativeness, entertainment, and permission. Moreover, transparency of information disclosure and image congruence have not been studied in this context. We found that personalization, informativeness, entertainment, transparency of information disclosure, and subjective norms are factors affecting acceptance. The sample population accepts a marketing message by considering mainly its value/utility and opinion of reference group; they accept mobile marketing based on utilitarian reasons more than hedonic consumption.
PII: S0010-0277(00)00157-8

The notion that visual attention can operate over visual objects in addition to spatial locations has recently received much empirical support, but there has been relatively little empirical consideration of what can count as an `object' in the ®rst place. We have investigated this question in the context of the multiple object tracking paradigm, in which subjects must track a number of independently and unpredictably moving identical items in a ®eld of identical distractors. What types of feature clusters can be tracked in this manner? In other words, what counts as an `object' in this task? We investigated this question with a technique we call target merging: we alter tracking displays so that distinct target and distractor locations appear perceptually to be parts of the same object by merging pairs of items (one target with one distractor) in various ways ± for example, by connecting item locations with a simple line segment, by drawing the convex hull of the two items, and so forth. The data show that target merging makes the tracking task far more dif®cult to varying degrees depending on exactly how the items are merged. The effect is perceptually salient, involving in some conditions a total destruction of subjects' capacity to track multiple items. These studies provide strong evidence for the object-based nature of tracking, con®rming that in some contexts attention must be allocated to objects rather than arbitrary collections of features. In addition, the results begin to reveal the types of spatially organized scene components that can be independently attended as a function of properties such as connectedness, part structure, and other types of perceptual grouping. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Sacred Sites, Humanitarian Assistance and the Politics of Land Grabbing in Eastern Sri Lanka: the Case of Deegavapi

Eastern Province is ethnically and religiously diverse having Sinhalese, Muslims and Tamils as well as smaller, but distinct communities such as Portuguese Burghers and Veddas who live in close proximity to one another. The inter-ethnic relations were disturbed time to time by the war, ethnic riots, tsunami, the stateaided colonization programmes as well as attacks by the LTTE on civilians; nevertheless, a pattern of peaceful coexistence has prevailed in the long run. After the end of the war, the government started a programme for rebuilding the East (Nagenahira Navodaya). The Eastern Provincial Council was established under the leadership of a newly elected Chief Minister, who incidentally, was an ex-LTTE cadre. The process of ethnic reconciliation, however, has been hampered by a variety of unresolved issues such as rival claims to scarce land, ill-conceived and partisan state policies, politics of land grabbing, development programmes lacking conflict-sensitivity and, above all, religiously-inspired sectarian tensions within and between religions. Efforts to demarcate, rehabilitate and expand the Deegavapi sacred site, identifying it as an exclusive Sinhala Buddhist heritage and its possible implications for the land rights, demonstrate how land rights are intricately tied up with heightened ethnic and religious identities and sentiments. This paper examines the circumstances under which the politics of preservation and restoration of the Deegavapi sacred site has infringed on the land rights of the Muslims.
Pneumonia and Host Defense in the Elderly

The population worldwide continues to age, with those over the age of 80 years constituting the fastest-growing sector of the population. As one ages, infectious complications become more frequent, leading to higher rates of hospitalization. This is also true for the lung, where pneumonia is one of the most frequent causes for hospitalization in the elderly and is the number 3 cause of death in the United States. Several unique changes occur with aging, both in the structure and the function of the respiratory system itself and in the immune system, which increase the predisposition and the potential severity of pneumonia as one ages. In this review, we will highlight the risk factors that are associated with the increased incidence of pneumonia in the elderly and will explore the changes that occur with aging, with focus on the innate and the adaptive immune systems that increase their predisposition to infections.
Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Prognosis Based In A Cut-Off Value For Plasma Basic Fibroblast Growth Factor Expression

Background: Angiogenesis is regulated by angiogenic factors such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) that may be deregulated in lung cancer. The aim of this study was to find out a pattern of VEGF and bFGF protein expression in exhaled breath condensate (EBC) and serum of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients and healthy volunteers (smokers and nonsmokers) to obtain early diagnostic values to discriminate initial stages of disease.