Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
RuPAWS: A Russian Adversarial Dataset for Paraphrase Identification

Paraphrase identification task can be easily challenged by changing word order, e.g. as in “Can a good person become bad? ”. While for English this problem was tackled by the PAWS dataset (Zhang et al., 2019), datasets for Russian paraphrase detection lack non-paraphrase examples with high lexical overlap. We present RuPAWS, the first adversarial dataset for Russian paraphrase identification. Our dataset consists of examples from PAWS translated to the Russian language and manually annotated by native speakers. We compare it to the largest available dataset for Russian ParaPhraser and show that the best available paraphrase identifiers for the Russian language fail on the RuPAWS dataset. At the same time, the state-of-the-art paraphrasing model RuBERT trained on both RuPAWS and ParaPhraser obtains high performance on the RuPAWS dataset while maintaining its accuracy on the ParaPhraser benchmark. We also show that RuPAWS can measure the sensitivity of models to word order and syntax structure since simple baselines fail even when given RuPAWS training samples.
SSR7000: A Synchronized Corpus of Ultrasound Tongue Imaging for End-to-End Silent Speech Recognition

This article presents SSR7000, a corpus of synchronized ultrasound tongue and lip images designed for end-to-end silent speech recognition (SSR). Although neural end-to-end models are successfully updating the state-of-the-art technology in the field of automatic speech recognition, SSR research based on ultrasound tongue imaging has still not evolved past cascaded DNN-HMM models due to the absence of a large dataset. In this study, we constructed a large dataset, namely SSR7000, to exploit the performance of the end-to-end models. The SSR7000 dataset contains ultrasound tongue and lip images of 7484 utterances by a single speaker. It contains more utterances per person than any other SSR corpus based on ultrasound imaging. We also describe preprocessing techniques to tackle data variances that are inevitable when collecting a large dataset and present benchmark results using an end-to-end model. The SSR7000 corpus is publicly available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
A position statement on the use of intravascular imaging in India

In India, the use of invasive physiological indices and intracoronary imaging technologies for percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) optimization principally occurs in the research setting with limited penetration in real-world clinical practice. Hence, there was a need to develop a position statement to provide guidance for adoption of intravascular imaging in routine clinical practice in India. As the first step, a multiple-choice questionnaire was provided to 25 leading interventional cardiologists in India to understand the use of intravascular imaging techniques in clinical practice. The collated survey results were evaluated along with literature evidence, clinical tips, and techniques at a scientific meeting. The position statement elaborated here comprises expert opinions and recommendations that will help the interventional cardiology community to understand the role of intravascular imaging and enhance the appropriate adoption of intravascular imaging into routine practice in India to optimize clinical outcomes for patients with coronary artery disease undergoing PCI.
Brown, Katherine and Tarlinton, Rachael E. (2016) Is gibbon ape leukaemia virus still a threat? Mammal Review . ISSN 1365-2907

1. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, an outbreak of lymphoma and leukaemia in gibbons (Hylobatidae), attributed to the retrovirus gibbon ape leukaemia virus (GALV), was widely reported in the literature. The virus was described as infecting 11% of captive gibbons in the USA and as a worldwide threat, with cases in both south east Asia, which is the native habitat of gibbons, and in gibbon colonies across north America 2. Since this time, GALV has been discussed as a to captive gibbons, a risk to humans handling primates and a potential factor in primate based
Involvement of JunD in Transcriptional Activation of the Orphan Receptor Gene nur77 by Nerve Growth Factor and Membrane Depolarization in PC12 Cells

nur77, an immediate-early gene that encodes an orphan nuclear receptor, is rapidly and transiently induced by nerve growth factor (NGF) stimulation or membrane depolarization in the rat pheochromocytoma-derived cell line PC12. The Nur77 protein can act as a potent transcription activator and may function to regulate the expression of downstream genes in response to extracellular stimuli. We show here that activation of nur77 by NGF treatment and membrane depolarization is signalled through distinct pathways. These distinct signals appear to converge on the same transcription factors acting on the same promoter elements. We show that nur77 activation by both processes requires two cis-acting APi-like elements, NAPI and NAP2, which contain the core sequence TGCGTCA centered at 67 and 38 nucleotides upstream of the transcription start site. The NAP elements can confer inducibility by NGF and membrane depolarization on an otherwise unresponsive heterologous promoter. We identified JunD as a key mediator of nur77 activation by reason of the following observations. (i) JunD, but not CREB or other members of the Fos/Jun family, is a component of NAP binding activity in PC12 cell nuclear extracts. (ii) JunD, but not other Fos/Jun family members, specifically transactivates the nur77 promoter through the NAP elements (iii) A dominant-negative mutant of JunD effectively abolishes the activation of nur77 by either NGF treatment or membrane depolarization. These data draw a contrast between the regulation of nur77 with that of c-fos, in which the sequence requirements for activation by NGF treatment and membrane depolarization appear separable, and CREB appears to play a
Development of a Multilingual CCG Treebank via Universal Dependencies Conversion

This paper introduces an algorithm to convert Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks to Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) treebanks. As CCG encodes almost all grammatical information into the lexicon, obtaining a high-quality CCG derivation from a dependency tree is a challenging task. Our algorithm relies on hand-crafted rules to assign categories to constituents, and a non-statistical parser to derive full CCG parses given the assigned categories. To evaluate our converted treebanks, we perform lexical, sentential, and syntactic rule coverage analysis, as well as CCG parsing experiments. Finally, we discuss how our method handles complex constructions, and propose possible future extensions.
The First Year Inventory: A longitudinal follow-up of 12-month-olds to 3 years of age

The First Year Inventory (FYI) is a parent-report measure designed to identify 12-month old infants at risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The FYI taps behaviors that indicate risk in the developmental domains of sensory-regulatory and social-communication functioning. This longitudinal study is a follow-up of 699 children at 3 years of age from a community sample whose parents completed the FYI when their children were 12 months old. Parents of all 699 children completed the Social Responsiveness Scale – Preschool version (SRS-P) and the Developmental Concerns Questionnaire (DCQ) to determine age 3 developmental outcomes. In addition, children deemed at-risk for ASD based on liberal cut points on the FYI, SRS-P, and/or DCQ were invited for in-person diagnostic evaluations. We found 9 children who had a confirmed diagnosis of ASD from the sample of 699. ROC analyses determined that a two-domain cutoff score yielded optimal classification of children: 31% of those meeting algorithm cut-offs had ASD and 85% had a developmental disability or concern by age three. These results suggest that the FYI is a promising tool for identifying 12-month old infants who are at risk for an eventual diagnosis of ASD.
Nunc profana tractemus. Detecting Code-Switching in a Large Corpus of 16th Century Letters

This paper is based on a collection of 16th century letters from and to the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger. Around 12,000 letters of this exchange have been preserved, out of which 3100 have been professionally edited, and another 5500 are available as provisional transcriptions. We have investigated code-switching in these 8600 letters, first on the sentence-level and then on the word-level. In this paper we give an overview of the corpus and its language mix (mostly Early New High German and Latin, but also French, Greek, Italian and Hebrew). We report on our experiences with a popular language identifier and present our results when training an alternative identifier on a very small training corpus of only 150 sentences per language. We use the automatically labeled sentences in order to bootstrap a word-based language classifier which works with high accuracy. Our research around the corpus building and annotation involves automatic handwritten text recognition, text normalisation for ENH German, and machine translation from medieval Latin into modern German.
DO CORPORATE GOVERNANCE MECHANISMS TRULY ACT AS THE DRIVERS OF SHAREHOLDER VALUE IN THE BANKING SECTOR IN BANGLADESH? EVIDENCE FROM THE ECONOMIC PROFIT PERSPECTIVE

This study examines whether corporate governance mechanisms (CGMs) truly act as the drivers of shareholder value (SV) in the banking sector in Bangladesh from the economic profit perspective. The study employs a random-effects model to test hypotheses in a sample of 29 banks listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange for the period 2014–2018. Relying on the test results of CGMs on SV measured from the economic profit perspective, this study finds that only the independent audit committee acts as a driver of truly creating shareholder value. Contrary to expectations, other CGMs in the analysis (e.g. board size, independent non-executive directors, audit committee size, audit committee meetings, and institutional shareholding) are not found to create true shareholder value. The outcomes of the study are a matter of concern for the regulatory bodies of the Bangladeshi banking sector and institutions involved in constructing the code of corporate governance, as the existing CGMs are suboptimal in the sense that they do not truly act as value-driving mechanisms for shareholder value. ____________________________________ new patterns in the explanatory power of on the sense that they do not act as value-driving value are weak stewardship.
Multibaseline phase unwrapping for INSAR topography estimation

Multibaseline Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometry (INSAR) can be successfully exploited for automatic phase unwrapping and high quality Digital Elevation Model (DEM) reconstruction. The information coming from several interferograms with different baselines increases the elevation ambiguity interval and allows automatic phase unwrapping. The height of each pixel in the image is considered as a random variable: a Maximum-Likelihood (ML) estimation of the height is carried out by exploiting the probability density function of the interferometric phase, that depends on the local coherence value. After phase unwrapping is possible to combine all the information available, getting a combined DEM that is more reliable than each single DEM. Results obtained using ERS-1/2 SAR data gathered over Vesuvius and Etna are presented. In both cases an accuracy better than 8 meters was obtained.
Monolayer Junctions via Nanoparticles: A High-yield, Scalable Solution for Ambient-stable Molecular Devices

—Electrically contacting monolayers of molecules en- ables devices that can exploit their intrinsic functionality for novel applications ranging from electronics based on quantum properties to tailored photonics and analyte-selective sensors. Various electrical molecular functionalities have been demon- strated, for example diodes [1], negative differential resistors [2], switches [3], electroluminescence [4] and molecular sensing [5]. These proof-of-concept experiments, however, were mainly performed with single-molecule junctions created by mechanical manipulation, which are not mass-fabrication compatible. By using a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) rather than single- molecule junctions, the intrinsic functionality of the molecular building blocks can be exploited without requiring sub- atomic control over the junction geometry. Nevertheless, it has not yet been possible to fabricate SAM-based devices without compromising ﬁlm integrity, functionality or mass-fabrication compatibility. Here, we present a generic process based on a layer of metallic nanoparticles deposited onto the SAM in a conformal and non-destructive fashion, which simultaneously addresses all mentioned issues enabling high-yield mass-fabrication of ambient-stable devices. Statistical analysis of several thousand devices shows that the nanoparticle layer allows the fabrication of metal–molecule–metal junctions with active areas ranging in size from several thousand µ m 2 down to thousands of nm 2 , with high device-to-device reproducibility and without metal- ﬁlament formation. Systematic variation of the SAM composition further demonstrates that the intrinsic molecular properties are not affected by the nanoparticle layer or the subsequent top metallization. The concept is generic to mono- and multilayers and opens an avenue for the integration of molecular building blocks into a solid-state, wafer-scale architecture that is scalable down to the single-molecule entity.
Search for the Theta(+) pentaquark in the reactions gamma p ->(K)over-bar(0)K(+)n and gamma p ->(K)over-bar(0)K(0)p

The exclusive reactions gamma p ->(K) over bar (0)K(+)n and gamma p ->(K) over bar (0)K(0)p have been studied in the photon energy range 1.6-3.8 GeV, searching for evidence of the exotic baryon Theta(+)(1540) in the decays Theta(+)-> nK(+) and Theta(+)-> pK(0). Data were collected with the CLAS detector at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The integrated luminosity was about 70 pb(-1). The reactions have been isolated by detecting the K+ and proton directly, the neutral kaon via its decay to K-S ->pi(+)pi(-) and the neutron or neutral kaon via the missing mass technique. The mass and width of known hyperons such as Sigma(+), Sigma(-) and Lambda(1116) were used as a check of the mass determination accuracy and experimental resolution. Approximately 100 000 Lambda(*)(1520)'s and 150 000 phi's were observed in the (K) over bar (0)K(+)n and (K) over bar (0)K(0)p final state, respectively. No evidence for the Theta(+) pentaquark was found in the nK(+) or pK(S) invariant mass spectra. Upper limits were set on the production cross section of the reaction gamma p ->(K) over bar (0)Theta(+) as functions of center-of-mass angle, nK(+) and pK(S) masses. Combining the results of the two reactions, the 95% C.L. upper limit on the total cross section for a resonance peaked at 1540 MeV was found to be 0.7 nb. Within most of the available theoretical models, this corresponds to an upper limit on the Theta(+) width, Gamma(+)(Theta), ranging between 0.01 and 7 MeV.
Automating Horizon Scanning in Future Studies

We introduce document retrieval and comment generation tasks for automating horizon scanning. This is an important task in the field of futurology that collects sufficient information for predicting drastic societal changes in the mid- or long-term future. The steps used are: 1) retrieving news articles that imply drastic changes, and 2) writing subjective comments on each article for others’ ease of understanding. As a first step in automating these tasks, we create a dataset that contains 2,266 manually collected news articles with comments written by experts. We analyze the collected documents and comments regarding characteristic words, the distance to general articles, and contents in the comments. Furthermore, we compare several methods for automating horizon scanning. Our experiments show that 1) manually collected articles are different from general articles regarding the words used and semantic distances, 2) the contents in the comment can be classified into several categories, and 3) a supervised model trained on our dataset achieves a better performance. The contributions are: 1) we propose document retrieval and comment generation tasks for horizon scanning, 2) create and analyze a new dataset, and 3) report the performance of several models and show that comment generation tasks are challenging.
ENTOMOPATHOGENIC FUNGUS AS A PROMISING AGENT FOR THE RASPBERRY CANE MIDGE

weather conditions, particularly on humidity. In the more humid 2015, the contrast between two varieties in response to B. bassiana was more pronounced. The efficacy of treatment with 10 7 CFU/ml fungal suspension was less than 60 % for cv. 1 and 100 % (all larvae died) for cv. 2. The results of this re- search evidence that the suppression of raspberry cane midge by the potential biocontrol agent depends on berry cultivar, weather conditions and B. bassiana dose. Larvae number and their mortality as well as degree of bark splits occupancy is mainly determined by the differences in raspberry variety and their response to weather changes, and also by the impact of weather on insect population. These results confirm the data of Russian and foreign researchers that 10 7 CFU/ml concentration of B. bassiana provides a marked effect on Diptera pests.
Feasibility of irrigation monitoring with cosmic-ray neutron sensors

Abstract. Accurate soil moisture (SM) monitoring is key in irrigation as it can greatly improve water use efficiency. Recently, cosmic-ray neutron sensors (CRNSs) have been recognized as a promising tool in SM monitoring due to their large footprint of several hectares. CRNSs also have great potential for irrigation applications, but few studies have investigated whether irrigation monitoring with CRNSs is feasible, especially for irrigated fields with a size smaller than the CRNS footprint. Therefore, the aim of this study is to use Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the feasibility of monitoring irrigation with CRNSs. This was achieved by simulating irrigation scenarios with different field dimensions (from 0.5 to 8 ha) and SM variations between 0.05 and 0.50 cm3 cm−3. Moreover, the energy-dependent response functions of eight moderators with different high-density polyethylene (HDPE) thickness or additional gadolinium thermal shielding were investigated. It was found that a considerable part of the neutrons that contribute to the CRNS footprint can originate outside an irrigated field, which is a challenge for irrigation monitoring with CRNSs. The use of thin HDPE moderators (e.g. 5 mm) generally resulted in a smaller footprint and thus stronger contributions from the irrigated area. However, a thicker 25 mm HDPE moderator with gadolinium shielding improved SM monitoring in irrigated fields due to a higher sensitivity of neutron counts with changing SM. This moderator and shielding set-up provided the highest chance of detecting irrigation events, especially when the initial SM was relatively low. However, variations in SM outside a 0.5 or 1 ha irrigated field (e.g. due to irrigation of neighbouring fields) can affect the count rate more than SM variations due to irrigation. This suggests the importance of retrieving SM data from the surrounding of a target field to obtain more meaningful information for supporting irrigation management, especially for small irrigated fields.
PHYSIOLOGICAL AND BIOCHEMICAL CHANGES ACCOM-PANYING POLLINATION IN ORCHID FLOWER'S.

In a previous paper of this series (19), data have been presented to show that pollination in orchid flowers brings about considerable changes in their water balance. The present paper deals with the change in respiratory activity, catalase activity, and chemical constituents as consequences of pollination and auxin treatment. The general methods used in sampling and treatment of flowers are essentially the same as that earlier described (19). A general conclusion, based on all experimental facts presented in both papers, is also given here.
Identification of glutathione-S-transferase gene polymorphisms in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients attending Abdullahi Wase

Glutathione-S-transferases (GSTs) are a family of antioxidant enzymes that include several classes with various polymorphisms. This work was aimed at investigating the association between the polymorphisms of the GSTT1 gene and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). The frequency of GSTT1 genotypes in T2DM patients and non-diabetic controls were studied. A total of 30 diagnosed cases of type 2 diabetes mellitus were selected from the diabetes clinic section of Abdullahi Wase Specialist Hospital, Kano Nigeria. A total of 30 non-diabetic individuals were also selected as control from the outpatient department (OPD) section of the hospital. All the subjects were assessed for fasting blood sugar (FBS), body mass index (BMI), Systolic and Diastolic Blood Pressures (SBP and DBP) and the genotypes of GSTT1 were determined using multiplex polymerase chain reaction (mPCR) techniques. FBS and BMI were significantly high (P<0.05) in diabetics (225.58±83.58mg/dL and 27.53±3.99kg/m 2 respectively) as compared to the non-diabetic controls (90.85±14.87mg/dL and 21.46±4.36kg/m 2 respectively). There were no significant differences (P<0.05) for SBP and DBP in the diabetics (125.73±20.72mmHg and 85.83±13.65mmHg respectively) as compared to the non-diabetic controls (117.33±3.04mmHg and 79.90±10.05mmHg respectively). This implies that the body weight of the diabetic patients is increased being a risk factor in diabetes mellitus. Furthermore, the GSST1 positive polymorphism was present in 95% of the samples analyzed (i.e. diabetics and controls). There was no presence of the deletion polymorphism in the two groups. This implies that there was no association of GSTT1 polymorphisms with T2DM in the studied population; Even though GSTT1 is associated with T2DM in other populations. Other polymorphisms of GST should be studied to ascertain their roles in the pathogenesis of T2DM in this population.
Microsoft Word-wp cover11_2015_est.docx

The hypothesis that active community involvement is beneficial for health finds strong support in the medical literature and in most policy guidelines for active ageing in OECD countries. We test it empirically documenting that lagged voluntary work is significantly correlated with later changes in various aggregated and disaggregated health indicators. However, when controlling for panel attrition, endogeneity and reverse causality, the positive effect of voluntary work remains robust only for a limited number of indicators. We calculate the monetary equivalent of health-related subjective wellbeing benefits of volunteer work with the compensating variation approach and compare it with benefits in terms of the social value of increased longevity.