Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Selecting Optimal Feature Template Subset for CRFs

Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are the state-of-the-art models for sequential labeling problems. A critical step is to select optimal feature template subset before employing CRFs, which is a tedious task. To improve the efficienc y of t his step, we pro-pose a new method that adopts the maximum entropy (ME) model and maximum entropy Markov models (MEMMs) instead of CRFs considering the homology be-tween ME, MEMMs, and CRFs. Moreover, empirical studies on the efficiency and effectiveness of the method are conducted in the field of Chinese text chunking, whose performance is ranked the first place in task two of CIPS-ParsEval-2009.
Wood 14C Dating with AixMICADAS: Methods and Application to Tree-Ring Sequences from the Younger Dryas Event in the Southern French Alps

Abstract The AixMICADAS facility is in part dedicated to research on radiocarbon (14C) calibration by means of various archives. For this purpose, we are improving upon the capacity to accurately date subfossil wood. In the current study, nine chemical pretreatment protocols are tested on six wood samples of known ages. The optimization based on 14C ages, 13C/12C ratios, carbon % and overall mass yield % leads us to favor the acid-base-acid-bleaching pretreatment (ABA-B). This efficient method is shown to provide a residue of holocellulose with optimal blanks equivalent to an age of 51,300 14C BP with a standard deviation of 1500 yr based on 25 analyses. The seven wood samples from the Sixth International Radiocarbon Intercomparison (SIRI) are then analyzed as a further verification of the accuracy of our method. As a first scientific contribution, we studied two tree-ring sequences from subfossil pines (Barb12 and Barb17) collected in the southern French Alps. New 14C analyses were performed at high resolution (every third year) and are shown to agree well with results obtained previously by high precision β-counting on CO2 from large samples at lower resolution for Barb17 and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) data for Barb12. The new 14C series are then matched to the Kauri and YDB chronologies: the new sequence of Barb12-17 tentatively corresponds to the interval between 12,836 and 12,594 cal BP within the Younger Dryas cold period. The 14C comparison between the Barb12-17 sequence from France and the Kauri sequence from New Zealand allows calculating the 14C Inter-Hemispheric Gradient (IHG), with an average value of ca. 57 yr. The IHG stayed relatively high throughout the studied period. Interestingly, the IHG exhibits a transient maximum value (ca. 100 yr) during the period of rapid Δ14C rise (12,750–12,720 cal BP), a behavior that could be due to a delayed response of the Southern Hemisphere.
Eliciting Additive Reward Functions for Markov Decision Processes

Specifying the reward function of a Markov decision process (MDP) can be demanding, requiring human assessment of the precise quality of, and tradeoffs among, various states and actions. However, reward functions often possess considerable structure which can be leveraged to streamline their specification. We develop new, decision-theoretically sound heuristics for eliciting rewards for factored MDPs whose reward functions exhibit additive independence. Since we can often find good policies without complete reward specification, we also develop new (exact and approximate) algorithms for robust optimization of imprecise-reward MDPs with such additive reward. Our methods are evaluated in two domains: autonomic computing and assistive technology.
A dynamic model simulating the symbiotic effects in aquaponic systems

A dynamic simulation model for a closed-loop aquaponic system was designed based on biological and physical sub-models of both the greenhouse cultivation system and the aquaculture system. The complete model exists mainly of two components: (1) a complete greenhouse climate simulator including the cropping system and (2) the aquaculture system including recirculation system, PVC-containers and others for fish production. The fish cultivation system was calibrated for two systems of 600 and 1000 m 2 greenhouse system with 700 or 3000 kg peak biomass of tilapia fish ( Oreochromis niloticus ) production. For validation and test, the model system was built in small scale at the site of Copenhagen University, Denmark, i.e. a greenhouse compartment of 100 m 2 with three fish ponds dimensioned to the size needed for crop irrigation using a combination of leafy vegetables and herbs, and two varieties of fish, i.e. pike perch ( Sander lucioperca ) and tilapia. The modelled combined system was implemented in a greenhouse simulator environment (The Virtual Greenhouse). Simulation studies where performed with the full model using tomato crop and a variation of fish cultures; i.e. the aquaculture ponds were set to a range of constant water temperatures for separate scenario studies, increasing with 2°C from 14 to 34°C. A standard Venlo type shelter of 1000 m 2 was used for that. The aquaculture system was dimensioned to the crops need of nutrients such that it produces 9 Mt tilapia fish yearly of which a peak system biomass content of 3t fish system -1 was calculated. The fish feed was given to the optimum and the minimum intake capacity of fresh water at 12°C was calculated from transpiration and evaporation losses, as other water was recycled in the closed system. Simulation results indicate that greenhouse climate is influenced through the aquaculture system with increased humidity levels and decreased use of energy for heating and CO 2 supply. The amount of energy saving for greenhouse heating increases with fish pond water temperature, while due to the metabolic activity inside the aquaculture system energy consumption for heating the water increased only little in that range. Total energy saving (energy for greenhouse heating and the aquaponics system) increases almost linear with increased pond temperature with 41 MJ m -2 K -1 year -1 . The developed model is useful for planning aquaponic systems and can be used as input model for predictive climate control in greenhouses with combined aquaculture production.
Please Scroll down for Article International Journal of Inclusive Education Inclusive Education: Recipe Book or Quest. on Diversity in the Classroom and Educational Research Inclusive Education: Recipe Book or Quest. on Diversity in the Classroom and Educational Research

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Teaching that takes into account the increasing range of diOE erences between pupils is often calledìnclusive education'. The practice of inclusive education in The Netherlands is informed by educational research that has mainly produced`recipes' for eOE ective education with a view to academic success. This research has tended to reduce diOE erences between pupils to a limited number of characteristics and to reduce educational outcomes to academic success in the basics. Inspired by ethnic and gender studies, it is argued for an approach to inclusive education in which social±cultural outcomes as well as academic excellence are taken seriously and diversity is not restricted to a few standard characteristics of pupils. With reference to the authors' own research, it will be shown that the development of this broad interpretation of inclusive education demands educational research that does not merely produce recipes for dealing with certain characteristics of pupils. Research should help teachers to re¯ect on how diversity is manifested in their own classroom practice and suggest alternative forms of action and behaviour to achieve inclusive education.
Hiding in Plain Sight: A Tale of Trust and Mistrust inside a Community of Citizen Reporters

The large volume of user-generated content on the Social Web puts a high burden on the participants to evaluate the accuracy and quality of such content. Researchers have been trying to address this problem by focusing on discovering in- fluential entities inside social platforms to guide their ranking algorithms. Often these entities correspond to people or orga- nizations already influential in the real-world. However, not everywhere in the world is there a right to and protection of free speech. In countries where the traditional media cannot report the truth, anonymity becomes a necessity for citizens who want to exercise their right of free-speech in the service of their community. But is it possible for anonymous individuals to become influ- ential and gain the trust of a community? In this paper, we discuss the case of a community of Twitter citizen reporters, located in a Mexican city plagued by the drug cartels fighting for control of territory. Our analysis shows that the most in- fluential individuals inside the community were anonymous accounts. Neither the Mexican authorities, nor the drug car- tels were happy about the real-time citizen reporting of crime or anti-crime operations in an open social network such as Twitter, and we discovered external pressures to this com- munity and its influential players to change their reporting behavior.
X-ray structure determination of human profilin II: A comparative structural analysis of human profilins.

Human profilins are multifunctional, single-domain proteins which directly link the actin microfilament system to a variety of signalling pathways via two spatially distinct binding sites. Profilin binds to monomeric actin in a 1:1 complex, catalyzes the exchange of the actin-bound nucleotide and regulates actin filament barbed end assembly. Like SH3 domains, profilin has a surface-exposed aromatic patch which binds to proline-rich peptides. Various multidomain proteins including members of the Ena/VASP and formin families localize profilin:actin complexes through profilin:poly-L-proline interactions to particular cytoskeletal locations (e.g. focal adhesions, cleavage furrows). Humans express a basic (I) and an acidic (II) isoform of profilin which exhibit different affinities for peptides and proteins rich in proline residues. Here, we report the crystallization and X-ray structure determination of human profilin II to 2.2 A. This structure reveals an aromatic extension of the previously defined poly-L-proline binding site for profilin I. In contrast to serine 29 of profilin I, tyrosine 29 in profilin II is capable of forming an additional stacking interaction and a hydrogen bond with poly-L-proline which may account for the increased affinity of the second isoform for proline-rich peptides. Differential isoform specificity for proline-rich proteins may be attributed to the differences in charged and hydrophobic residues in and proximal to the poly-L-proline binding site. The actin-binding face remains nearly identical with the exception of five amino acid differences. These observations are important for the understanding of the functional and structural differences between these two classes of profilin isoforms.
Generating Questions from OpenLearn study units

OpenLearn is a large online educational repository which can be used as a resource for developing and testing Question Generation (QG) systems. OpenLearn is described in detail and its advantages are discussed. To illustrate the use of OpenLearn for QG, a QG system, Ceist 2 , is presented which generates questions from OpenLearn content. Ceist is also offered as a case study for how existing NLP tools can be used to build a QG system, and should provide useful information to those considering the development of their own QG system.
Empirical Acquisition of Word-Sense Distinctions

Applications currently make use of many kinds of lexical information: categorial relations ("dog" is-a "canine"), synonymy ("pooch" same-as "dog") and word associations ("walk" occurs-often-with "dog"). However, an important type of information, differentia, is often omitted, especially in broad-coverage applications. Differentia are properties that distinguish a concept from others belonging to the same higher-level category. For instance, both beagles and wolfhounds are hounds, but the former are small, whereas the latter are quite large. Applications should incorporate differentia to provide finer word-sense distinctions and to facilitate inference of information not mentioned in the text. Determining the differentia is a difficult task, since the available knowledge sources define these properties using natural language. For instance, WordNet (Miller 1990), a commonly used source of lexical knowledge, provides explicit information on categorial relationships but leaves the differentia implicit in the definitions. This work will investigate empirical approaches for extracting these properties from machine readable dictionaries (MRD’s) and text corpora. The result will be lexical relations between the word being defined and words used in the definition. There has been some work on deriving differentia, but these have relied predominantly on manually developed heuristics. Here, corpus-derived associations will augment such heuristics for extracting information from MRD’s. Furthermore, this work will investigate a novel use of Bayesian networks for representing the various types of lexical knowledge in order to model the uncertainty in the relations and support integration of statistical and analytical knowledge. Dictionary definitions use certain fixed patterns, often with prepositional phrases, to indicate differentia. However, since prepositions are highly ambiguous, the same pattern can be used for different properties. To address this problem, syntactic pattern matching will be applied to each definition to identify potential properties. Then, statistical classification will be used to select the most plausible ones. To support this work, a representative sample of definitions will be annotated to indicate the properties that apply. This will serve as the primary training data for the classifier. To allow for a fallback mechanism, a separate classifier will be trained on the semantic role annotations in the second Copyright (~) 1998, American Association for Artificial In
Lowering the cost of test with a scalable ATE custom processor and timing IC containing 400 high-linearity timing verniers

This paper presents the architecture of the Omni ASIC, a highly integrated and scalable ATE processor and timing IC. This ASIC includes a complete pattern generator and 50 channels of timing, format, and fail processing. The IC includes 400 low-power timing verniers with a linearity error of less then 30 ps
Response of Onion to Different Organic Amendments in Central Uganda

Onion is one of the most important vegetable crops grown in Uganda, because of its nutritional and economic value. However, production of onion in Uganda is very low due to nutritional imbalances in the soil. Therefore, soil fertility remains one of the key areas of focus in sustaining onion production. A field experiment was conducted to assess the response of onion variety Red Creole C-5 to different soil organic amendments at Kyambogo University during the period February 2016 and January 2017. The experiment was laid out in a randomized complete block design with four replications. The treatments included T0: without manure (control), T1: green manure (GM), T2: farmyard manure (FYM) and T3: compost manure (CM). Data collected included: plant height, root length, plant fresh and dry weight, number of leaves per plant, fresh and dry weight of bulbs, diameter of bulbs and commercial yield computed. Data were analysed using Genstat. There was significant response of onion to the different soil organic amendments. Onion plant height, number of leaves, root length, dry and fresh weight and bulb weight were high in farmyard manure, followed by compost manure and lastly green manure, compared to the control. The highest yield (12,000 kg/ha) was obtained from the plots amended with farmyard manure as opposed to the control. It was therefore concluded that farmyard manures had a greater effect on the agronomic and yield performance of onion. Future study with more than one onion genotype is recommended so as to widen the scope of this result.
Estimation for maximum instantaneous current through supply lines for CMOS circuits

We present new techniques for estimating the maximum instantaneous current through the power supply lines for CMOS circuits. We investigate four different approaches: (1) timed-ATPG-based approach; (2) probability-based approach; (3) genetic algorithm-based approach; and (4) integer linear programming (ILP) approach. The first three approaches produce a tight lower bound on the maximum current. The ILP-based approach produces the exact solutions for small circuits, and tight upper bounds of the solutions for large circuits. Our experimental results show that the upper bounds produced by the ILP approach combined with the lower bounds produced by the other three approaches confine the exact solution for the maximum instantaneous current to a small range.
Family trio phasing and missing data recovery

Although there exist many phasing methods for unrelated adults or pedigrees, phasing and missing data recovery for data representing family trios is lagging behind. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap by considering the following problem. Given a set of genotypes partitioned into family trios, find for each trio a quartet of parent/offspring haplotypes explaining each trio without recombinations and recovering the SNP values missed in given genotype data. Our contributions include: formulating the pure-parsimony trio phasing without recombinations and the trio missing data recovery problems; proposing new greedy and integer linear programming based solution methods; extensive experimental validation of proposed methods showing advantage over the previously known methods.
Learning from History: Volatility and Financial Crises

We study the effects of volatility on the probability of financial crises by constructing a cross-country database spanning 211 years. We find that volatility is not a significant predictor of crises whereas unexpected high and low volatilities are. Low volatility leads to banking crises and both high and low volatilities make stock market crises more likely, while volatility in any form has little impact on currency crises. The volatility-crisis relationship becomes stronger when financial markets are more prominent and less regulated. Finally, low-risk environments are conducive to greater buildup of risk-taking, providing empirical support for the Minsky hypothesis.
Prevalence of Essential Tremor on Arosa Island, Spain: a Community-based, Door-to-Door Survey

Background The prevalence of essential tremor (ET) is still not well understood and the various studies performed to date have generated highly variable results. Few epidemiologic studies on the prevalence of ET have been reported from Spain. Methods A one-stage door-to-door survey was conducted on Arosa Island, northwestern Spain, to determine the prevalence of ET in the population aged 65 years and older. The diagnostic criteria for ET were the presence of non-dystonic head tremor or moderate- to severe-amplitude tremor on at least four tests of the revised Washington Heights-Inwood Genetic Study of Essential Tremor (WHIGET) Scale. Results A total of 65 individuals with ET (28 males, 37 females) were identified, resulting in a crude prevalence of 8.63% (adjusted rate 8.42%). Prevalence increased with advancing age. There were no significant differences in prevalence between sexes in any of the age groups. Among the prevalent cases, 12.3% (n = 8) had been previously diagnosed. Only 29.2% (n = 19) reported functional disability caused by tremor. A family history of tremor was reported in 35.4% (n = 23). Discussion The prevalence of ET was higher than that seen in similar populations in Spain and other countries. A high proportion of those with ET were previously undiagnosed. Since Arosa Island has been a relatively isolated area, these results might indicate a predominant role, at least in the elderly, for genetic factors in the development of ET.
A <25 μW CMOS monolithic photoplethysmographic sensor with distributed 1b delta-sigma light-to-digital convertor

This paper presents CMOS monolithic PPG sensor with distributed 1b delta-sigma light-to-digital convertor (LDC). Proposed unbiased photodiode (PD) based circuit with fully integrated PD in the same die efficiently performs direct light to digital conversion, and the distributed architecture further improves the dynamic range. The implemented sensor, fabricated in standard 0. 18μm CMOS process, achieves 20.4 pArms equivalent noise with <25 μW power consumption, and successfully performs a reflective PPG measurement at wrist and finger, with both pulsed and continuous LED light.
Time-domain simulations of the acoustic streaming produced by a propagating wave radiated by a circular piston

Results of numerical simulations of the sound field produced by a circular piston in a rigid baffled are presented. The aim was to calculate the acoustic streaming and the flow of mass generated by the sound field. For this purpose, the classical finite-difference time-domain method was implemented, and the complete equations of conservation of mass and conservation of momentum were used together with the state equation for and adiabatic process in and ideal gas. Thermal effects were neglected to simplify the problem. The obtained numerical results illustrate the applicability of the method. The simulations show that a net flow of mass is produced along the axis of the piston, which correspond to the jet-like wind effect in a beam of sound.
False discovery and false nondiscovery rates in single-step multiple testing procedures

Results on the false discovery rate (FDR) and the false nondiscovery rate (FNR) are developed for single-step multiple testing procedures. In addition to verifying desirable properties of FDR and FNR as measures of error rates, these results extend previously known results, providing further insights, particularly under dependence, into the notions of FDR and FNR and related measures. First, considering fixed configurations of true and false null hypotheses, inequalities are obtained to explain how an FDR- or FNR-controlling single-step procedure, such as a Bonferroni or Sidak procedure, can potentially be improved. Two families of procedures are then constructed, one that modifies the FDR-controlling and the other that modifies the FNR-controlling Sidak procedure. These are proved to control FDR or FNR under independence less conservatively than the corresponding families that modify the FDR- or FNR-controlling Bonferroni procedure. Results of numerical investigations of the performance of the modified Sidak FDR procedure over its competitors are presented. Second, considering a mixture model where different configurations of true and false null hypotheses are assumed to have certain probabilities, results are also derived that extend some of Storey's work to the dependence case.