Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the prediction of population totals from sample surveys based on rotating panels

The paper deals with the prediction (estimation) of the aggregate value of a variable on the basis of micro data from partly overlapping samples. This problem is of considerable interest for economic data, e.g. household budget data. We are particularly concerned with the interplay between the sampling design (degree of rotation) and the covariance structure of the data vector in a situation where the micro data are generated by a variance components mechanism with two components, one of which represents unobserved individual factors. The optimal choice of predictor is discussed, both with respect to the level of the variable under consideration and with respect to its change between two successive periods. Not to be quoted without permission from author(s). Comments welcome.
Isolation, characterization and optimization of EPSs produced by a cold-adapted Marinobacter isolate from Antarctic seawater

Abstract Marinobacter sp. W1-16 from Antarctic surface seawater was analysed for the production of extracellular polymeric substances (EPSs). Enhancement of the EPS biosynthesis was carried out by evaluating the influences of the carbon source (type and concentration), temperature, pH and salinity. EPS yields varied strongly depending on sugar substrate and temperature, while pH and salinity did not strongly affect levels of EPS production. Marinobacter sp. W1-16 produced the highest quantity of EPSs when growing at 15°C and pH 8, in the presence of 2% glucose and 3% NaCl. The EPS chemical characterization revealed a molecular weight of about 260 kDa. Colorimetric assays determined a higher quantity of carbohydrate than of proteins and uronic acids, as well as the presence of sulphate, in the extracted EPSs. The monosaccharidic composition resulted in Glc:Man:Gal:GalN:GalA:GlcA in relative molar proportions of 1:0.9:0.2:0.1:0.1:0.01. Some biotechnological potentialities (i.e. emulsifying and cryoprotective actions, and heavy metal binding properties) of the EPSs were proved, suggesting possible industrial and bioremediation applications.
Spoof Detection Using Source, Instantaneous Frequency and Cepstral Features

This work describes the techniques used for spoofed speech detection for the ASVspoof 2017 challenge. The main focus of this work is on exploiting the differences in the speech-specific nature of genuine speech signals and spoofed speech signals generated by replay attacks. This is achieved using glottal closure instants, epoch strength, and the peak to side lobe ratio of the Hilbert envelope of linear prediction residual. Apart from these source features, the instantaneous frequency cosine coefficient feature, and two cepstral features namely, constant Q cepstral coefficients and mel frequency cepstral coefficients are used. A combination of all these features is performed to obtain a high degree of accuracy for spoof detection. Initially, efficacy of these features are tested on the development set of the ASVspoof 2017 database with Gaussian mixture model based systems. The systems are then fused at score level which acts as the final combined system for the challenge. The combined system is able to outperform the individual systems by a significant margin. Finally, the experiments are repeated on the evaluation set of the database and the combined system results in an equal error rate of 13.95%.
Dynamic Standby Prediction for Leakage Tolerant Microprocessor Functional Units

Leakage power is projected to comprise approximately 50% of the processor's power for sub 65 nm technologies. Much of this power is consumed in the processor's functional units. Accordingly, leakage control techniques are employed to reduce leakage in these functional units. Many of these techniques are dynamic and are based on an input sleep signal to initiate a low leakage mode. However, since most of these leakage control techniques are based on circuit level schemes, such techniques inherently lack information about the operational profile of the functional units they manage. This limitation is usually handled statically by using a fixed length counter that generates the sleep signal when the functional unit is idle for a specified number of cycles. In this paper, the limitations of the static sleep signal generation approach are identified, and the use of a dynamic alternative that is capable of adopting the counter length to the running application is proposed. In order to assess the accuracy of the proposed dynamic sleep signal generator, the length of the sleep period following the sleep signal generation is used as a metric to identify the usefulness of utilizing the dynamic approach. Experimental results for the dynamic alternative shows up to 98% accuracy in predicting the length of the standby period compared to an average of 40-60% in the static case, which translates into increased leakage savings. This is achieved while consuming 360 muW of overhead power at 1 GHz
Concept-Based Parsing For Speech Translation

As part of the JANUS speech-to-speech translation project[5], we have developed a translation system that successfully parses full utterances and is effective in parsing spontaneous speech, which is often syntactically ill-formed. The system is concept-based, meaning that it has no explicit notion of a sentence but rather views each input utterance as a potential sequence of concepts. Generation is performed by translating each of these concepts in whole phrases into the target language, consulting lookup tables only for low-level concepts such as numbers. Currently, we are working on an appointment scheduling task, parsing English, German, Spanish, and Korean input and producing output in those same languages and also Japanese.
Important psychosocial factors to target in nutrition interventions to improve diet in Inuvialuit communities in the Canadian Arctic.

BACKGROUND With increasing chronic disease amongst Inuvialuit in the Canadian Arctic, research on dietary behaviours and their determinants in this population is needed to develop nutritional behaviour change intervention strategies. The present study aimed to assess the knowledge, self-efficacy and intentions towards healthy eating and healthy eating behaviours of Inuvialuit adults in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada. METHODS The Adult Impact Questionnaire was developed from behavioural theories and workshops held in the communities. It was conducted with adult Inuvialuit (≥19 years) from randomly selected households in three NWT communities to collect data on the psychosocial constructs of healthy food knowledge, self-efficacy and intentions, and the dietary behaviours of healthy and unhealthy food acquisition and preparation. Associations between demographic, socioeconomic, psychosocial constructs and behaviours were analysed using multivariate linear regression. RESULTS The 228 participants [mean (SD) age 43.4 (13.6) years; response rates 65-85%] acquired non-nutrient-dense foods a mean (SD) of 2.7 (3.0) times more frequently than nutrient-dense, low sugar and low fat foods. Increased intention was associated with a greater frequency of acquiring healthy foods (β=0.17, P=0.012) and a lower frequency of acquiring unhealthy foods (β=-0.18, P=0.008). Overall, participants reported using food preparation methods that reduce fat content slightly more than methods that add fat [mean (SD) score 0.3 (1.9)]. Use of healthier food preparation methods was associated with higher levels of healthy food knowledge (β=0.26, P<0.001), self-efficacy (β=0.29, P<0.001) and intentions (β=0.22, P=0.001). CONCLUSIONS Healthy food intention was the construct most significantly associated with all three healthier dietary behaviours. Interventions that target intentions to change food choice and preparation may be effective strategies to improve dietary intake in Inuvialuit populations.
A Weighted Combination of Speech with Text-based Models for Arabic Diacritization

The majority of studies on Arabic diacritization have employed textually inferred features alone. This paper proposes a novel approach, where the weighted combination of speech with a text-based model is used to allow linguistically-insensitive acoustic information to correct and complement the errors generated by the text model’s diacritic predictions. The acoustic model is based on Hidden Markov Models and the textual model on Conditional Random Fields. The combination brings significant reduction in error rates across all metrics, especially in case endings, which are the most difficult to predict. It gives results superior to those of conventional methods, with diacritic and word error rates of 1.5 and 4.9 inclusive of case endings, and 1.0 and 2.7 exclusive of them.
Pressure-Transient Responses of Fractures With Variable Conductivity and Asymmetric Well Location

Fractures often influence production in hydrocarbon reservoirs, yet the pressure transients observed in the wells might not show the conventional well-test signatures. In this case, the effect of fractures on production would be misinterpreted or even completely missed. The heterogeneous nature of fractured reservoirs makes them difficult to characterize and develop. In addition, the location of a producer within the fracture network also affects the pressure response; however, conventional well-test analysis assumes that the producer is located in symmetrical fracture networks. In this paper we investigate the effects of variations in fracture conductivity and location of the producer in the fracture network on the pressure-transient responses. To overcome the limitations of the dual-porosity (DP) model, this study uses a discrete fracture/matrix (DFM) modeling technique and an unstructured-grid reservoir simulator to generate pressure transients in all analyzed fracture networks. Our rigorous and systematic geoengineering work flow enables us to correlate the pressure transients to the known geological features of the simulated reservoir model. We observed that the simulated pressure transients vary significantly depending on the location of the producer in the fracture network and the properties of the fractures that the producer intercepts. Our findings enable us to interpret some unconventional features of intersecting fractures with variable conductivity. We observed that the behavior of two intersecting fractures, in which the well asymmetrically intercepts a finite-conductivity fracture, can be similar to that of a well intercepting a fracture in a connected fracture network with uniform fracture conductivity. Furthermore, a well intercepting a finite-conductivity fracture in naturally fractured reservoirs (NFRs) with both finite- and infinite-conductivity fractures would yield a DP response (V-shape) that might otherwise be absent if the fracture network is assumed to have uniform conductivity.
Association between CTL Precursor Frequency to HLA-C Mismatches and HLA-C Antigen Cell Surface Expression

Previous studies showed the relevance of the cytotoxic T-cell precursor (CTLp) frequency assay for prediction of the outcome of HLA mismatched hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT). Recently, it has been shown that HLA-C cell surface expression is correlated with virus specific cytotoxic T-cell responses and viremia control in HIV patients. The aim of the current study was to investigate the association between HLA-C antigen expression and the CTLp frequency to the mismatched HLA-C antigen. In total 115 recipient–donor pairs, for whom a successful CTLp assay was performed, were evaluated for this pilot study. All donor–recipient pairs were matched at 9/10 alleles with a single mismatch at the HLA-C locus. Antigen expression level of the mismatched HLA-C allele for each recipient and donor was based on the mean fluorescence intensity (MFI) values as described by Apps et al. (1). The cell surface expression of recipient’s mismatched HLA-C antigen was significantly lower among CTLp negative (n = 59) compared to CTLp positive (n = 56) pairs (154 and 193 MFI units, respectively, p = 0.0031). This difference was more pronounced in donor–recipient pairs that were mismatched for amino-acid residue-116 located in the groove of the HLA-C antigen, suggesting that the importance of peptide binding in the allo-recognition. Furthermore, in the particular case of low expression of the recipient mismatched HLA-C antigen (MFI < 115), CTLp reactivity depended on HLA-C expression level in the donor, the median MFI of donor’s mismatched HLA-C antigen was 114 in CTLp negative cases (n = 26), while in CTLp positive cases (n = 15) the median MFI of donor’s HLA-C antigen was 193 (p = 0.0093). We conclude that the expression level of the donor and recipient mismatched HLA-C antigens affect CTLp outcome. HLA-C antigen expression levels in combination with the CTLp assay may prove useful for the prediction of the clinical outcome of HLA-C mismatched HCT.
Action-Specific Value Signals in Reward-Related Regions of the Human Brain

Estimating the value of potential actions is crucial for learning and adaptive behavior. We know little about how the human brain represents action-specific value outside of motor areas. This is, in part, due to a difficulty in detecting the neural correlates of value using conventional (region of interest) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyses, due to a potential distributed representation of value. We address this limitation by applying a recently developed multivariate decoding method to high-resolution fMRI data in subjects performing an instrumental learning task. We found evidence for action-specific value signals in circumscribed regions, specifically ventromedial prefrontal cortex, putamen, thalamus, and insula cortex. In contrast, action-independent value signals were more widely represented across a large set of brain areas. Using multivariate Bayesian model comparison, we formally tested whether value–specific responses are spatially distributed or coherent. We found strong evidence that both action-specific and action-independent value signals are represented in a distributed fashion. Our results suggest that a surprisingly large number of classical reward-related areas contain distributed representations of action-specific values, representations that are likely to mediate between reward and adaptive behavior.
The VNC-Tokens Dataset

Idiomatic expressions formed from a verb and a noun in its direct object position are a productive cross-lingual class of multiword expressions, which can be used both idiomatically and as a literal combination. This paper presents the VNC-Tokens dataset, a resource of almost 3000 English verb–noun combination usages annotated as to whether they are literal or idiomatic. Previous research using this dataset is described
Assessing Wolf Motor Function Test as Outcome Measure for Research in Patients After Stroke

Background and Purpose— The Wolf Motor Function Test (WMFT) is a new time-based method to evaluate upper extremity performance while providing insight into joint-specific and total limb movements. This study addresses selected psychometric attributes of the WMFT applied to a chronic stroke population. Methods— Nineteen individuals after stroke and with intact cognition and sitting balance were age- and sex-matched with 19 individuals without impairment. Subjects performed the WMFT and the upper extremity portion of the Fugl-Meyer Motor Assessment (FMA) on 2 occasions (12 to 16 days apart), with scoring performed independently by 2 random raters. Results— The WMFT and FMA demonstrated agreement (P <0.0001) between raters at each session. WMFT scores for the dominant and nondominant extremities of individuals without impairment were different (P ≤0.05) from the more and less affected extremities of subjects after stroke. The FMA score for the more affected extremity of subjects after stroke was different (P ≤0.05) from the dominant and nondominant extremities. However, the FMA score for the less affected upper extremity of individuals after stroke was not different (P >0.05) from the dominant and nondominant extremities of individuals without impairment. The WMFT and FMA scores were related (P <0.02) for the more affected extremity in individuals after stroke. Conclusions— The interrater reliability, construct validity, and criterion validity of the WMFT, as used in these subject samples, are supported.
Triassic alkaline magmatism and mineralization in the Xiong'ershan area, East Qinling, China

The Qinling orogenic belt is a complex subduction–accretion–collision orogen that welded the North China Craton and the Yangtze Craton during the final continental collision in the Triassic. The Xiong'ershan area, located in east Qinling, exposes a typical Triassic syenite pluton and several contemporaneous Mo, Au, and Cu deposits. The aegirine–augite syenites and syenites from the Mogou pluton are characterized by alkalic to peralkalic (total alkali Na2O + K2O = 13.95–14.63 wt.%, CaO = 0.06–2.87 wt.%), and shoshonitic features (K2O = 11.86–14.34 wt.%). Zircon LA–ICP–MS U–Pb dating of the aegirine–augite syenite and syenite yield emplacement ages of 232.5 ± 0.6 and 221.8 ± 0.7 Ma, indicating multiple pulses of magmatism. Evidence from zircon Hf isotopes; occurrence of mafic microgranular enclaves; heterogeneous peralkaline composition; and wide ranges of MgO, Ni, and other trace elements suggest that the parental magma was mainly sourced from partial melting of Archean to Paleoproterozoic crustal sources, mixed with juvenile mantle‐derived mafic magmas. The Mogou pluton was probably emplaced in the tectonic transition from syn‐collision to post‐collision settings and accompanying slab break‐off process, from the commencement of collision at approximately 245 Ma and post‐collisional extension at approximately 210 Ma. Gold, molybdenum, and copper deposits formed during the interval of 255–208 Ma, and the close temporal and spatial relationship between these Triassic polymetallic deposits and the Mogou alkaline pluton invokes a genetic linkage. The heat source for magmatism and related metallogeny is correlated to a hot upwelling asthenospheric mantle that caused partial melting of the Archean to Paleoproterozoic crustal basement, resulting in magma mixing between the two end‐members.
Slow and Go: Pulsing slip rates on the creeping section of the San Andreas Fault

Rising and falling slip rates on the creeping section of the San Andreas Fault have been inferred from variations of recurrence intervals of characteristically repeating microearthquakes, but this observation has not previously been confirmed using modern geodetic data. Here we report on observations of this “pulsing” slip obtained from advanced multitemporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data, confirmed using continuous GPS sites of the Plate Boundary Observatory. The surface deformation time series show a strong correlation to the previously documented slip rate variations derived from repeating earthquakes on the fault interface, at various spatial and temporal scales. Time series and spectral analyses of repeating earthquake and InSAR data reveal a quasiperiodic pulsing with a roughly 2 year period along some sections of the fault, with the earthquakes on the fault interface lagging behind the far‐field deformation by about 6 months. This suggests a temporal delay between the pulsing crustal strain generated by deep‐seated shear and the time‐variable slip on the shallow fault interface, and that at least in some places this process may be cyclical. There exist potential impacts for time‐dependent seismic hazard forecasting in California and, as it becomes better validated in the richly instrumented natural laboratory of the central San Andreas Fault, the process used here will be even more helpful in characterizing hazard and fault zone rheology in areas without California's geodetic infrastructure.
Prototype and Chimera-Type Galectins in Placentas with Spontaneous and Recurrent Miscarriages

Galectins are galactose binding proteins and, in addition, factors for a wide range of pathologies in pregnancy. We have analyzed the expression of prototype (gal-1, -2, -7, -10) and chimera-type (gal-3) galectins in the placenta in cases of spontaneous abortions (SPA) and recurrent abortions (RA) in the first trimester. Fifteen placental samples from healthy pregnancies were used as a control group. Nine placentas were examined for spontaneous abortions, and 12 placentas for recurrent abortions. For differentiation and evaluation of different cell types of galectin-expression in the decidua, immunofluorescence was used. For all investigated prototype galectins (gal-1, -2, -7, -10) in SPA and RA placenta trophoblast cells the expression is significantly decreased. In the decidua/extravillous trophoblast only gal-2 expression was significantly lowered, which could be connected to its role in angiogenesis. In trophoblasts in first-trimester placentas and in cases of SPA and RA, prototype galectins are altered in the same way. We suspect prototype galectins have a similar function in placental tissue because of their common biochemical structure. Expression of galectin 3 as a chimera type galectin was not found to be significantly altered in abortive placentas.
Prevention of Glucocorticoid‐Induced Apoptosis in Osteocytes and Osteoblasts by Calbindin‐D28k

This study show for the first time that calbindin‐D28k can prevent glucocorticoid‐induced bone cell death. The anti‐apoptotic effect of calbindin‐D28k involves inhibition of glucocorticoid induced caspase 3 activation as well as ERK activation.
A regional informatics platform for coordinated antibiotic-resistant infection tracking, alerting, and prevention.

BACKGROUND We developed and assessed the impact of a patient registry and electronic admission notification system relating to regional antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on regional AMR infection rates over time. We conducted an observational cohort study of all patients identified as infected or colonized with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and/or vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) on at least 1 occasion by any of 5 healthcare systems between 2003 and 2010. The 5 healthcare systems included 17 hospitals and associated clinics in the Indianapolis, Indiana, region. METHODS We developed and standardized a registry of MRSA and VRE patients and created Web forms that infection preventionists (IPs) used to maintain the lists. We sent e-mail alerts to IPs whenever a patient previously infected or colonized with MRSA or VRE registered for admission to a study hospital from June 2007 through June 2010. RESULTS Over a 3-year period, we delivered 12 748 e-mail alerts on 6270 unique patients to 24 IPs covering 17 hospitals. One in 5 (22%-23%) of all admission alerts was based on data from a healthcare system that was different from the admitting hospital; a few hospitals accounted for most of this crossover among facilities and systems. CONCLUSIONS Regional patient registries identify an important patient cohort with relevant prior antibiotic-resistant infection data from different healthcare institutions. Regional registries can identify trends and interinstitutional movement not otherwise apparent from single institution data. Importantly, electronic alerts can notify of the need to isolate early and to institute other measures to prevent transmission.
Deep neural networks for wild fire detection with unmanned aerial vehicle

Wildfire threatens people's lives and livelihoods. Wildfires kill hundreds of thousand people worldwide each year. Disaster information services are required to save lives and reduce economic losses when wildfire occurs. However, manned airplanes are too expensive to operate for frequent wildland monitoring. Satellite images cannot be used for early wildfire detection due to low temporal resolution and low spatial resolution. Unmanned aerial vehicles are cost-effective means to provide high resolution images for wildfire detection. A wildfire detection system utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles was developed with deep convolutional neural networks. The system achieved high accuracy for wide range of aerial photographs.