Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Competing Grammars in theComprehension of Questions and Relative Clauses in L1 German-L2 English

Grammar competition has been invoked to account for optionality when mutually exclusive parameter settings co-exist during periods of diachronic change (e.g. Kroch 1994, 2001; Pintzuk 1999). Roeper’s (1999) Universal Bilingualism applies this thinking to individual speakers by proposing that every individual develops an underlying bilingual competence where two properties exist in a language which cannot be stated within a single grammar. Yang (2000, 2002, 2004) has formalised this sort of approach in the framework of variational learning. He proposes that children acquiring their first language do not switch parametric options on or off; rather, parameters are set in a probabilistic fashion and distinct options may coexist in a single speaker. In this way, he accounts for variability during the course of both L1A and diachronic change. The grammar competition idea has not been explored to the same extent in generative SLA research. There are a few notable exceptions. Zobl & Liceras (2005, 2006), for example, point out that diachronic grammar competition provides a useful framework for the analysis of L2 data as distinct parametric settings seem to co-exist in both individual L2A and diachronic change, giving rise to extended periods of optionality. Amaral & Roeper (in press) extend Universal Bilingualism by developing a multiple grammars approach to L2A. Slabakova (2008: 116) suggests that variational learning is “logically extendable” to L2A. Drawing on Slabakova, the present paper extends a variational analysis to L2A on the basis of comprehension of questions and relative clauses in L2 English by L1 German speakers. The paper is organised as follows: the relevant morphosyntactic properties of German and English are outlined in Section 2. Section 3 discusses the application of the variational learning model to L2A, under the general assumptions of Full Transfer/Full Access (Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996). A picture interpretation experiment that tests the predictions of a variational approach to L2A is presented in the final sections of the paper, and its results discussed.
CTCF/cohesin organize the ground state of chromatin-nuclear speckle association

The interchromatin space in the cell nucleus contains various membrane-less nuclear bodies. Recent findings indicate that nuclear speckles, comprising a distinct nuclear body, exhibit interactions with certain chromatin regions in a ground state. Key questions are how this ground state of chromatin-nuclear speckle association is established and what are the gene regulatory roles of this layer of nuclear organization. We report here that chromatin structural factors CTCF and cohesin are required for full ground state association between DNA and nuclear speckles. Disruption of ground state DNA-speckle contacts via either CTCF depletion or cohesin depletion had minor effects on basal level expression of speckle-associated genes, however we show strong negative effects on stimulus-dependent induction of speckle-associated genes. We identified a putative speckle targeting motif (STM) within cohesin subunit RAD21 and demonstrated that the STM is required for chromatin-nuclear speckle association. In contrast to reduction of CTCF or RAD21, depletion of the cohesin releasing factor WAPL stabilized cohesin on chromatin and DNA-speckle contacts, resulting in enhanced inducibility of speckle-associated genes. In addition, we observed disruption of chromatin-nuclear speckle association in patient derived cells with Cornelia de Lange syndrome (CdLS), a congenital neurodevelopmental diagnosis involving defective cohesin pathways, thus revealing nuclear speckles as an avenue for therapeutic inquiry. In summary, our findings reveal a mechanism to establish the ground organizational state of chromatin-speckle association, to promote gene inducibility, and with relevance to human disease.
Odor source distance is predictable from time-histories of odor statistics for large scale outdoor plumes

Odor plumes in turbulent environments are intermittent and sparse. Lab-scaled experiments suggest that information about the source distance may be encoded in odor signal statistics, yet it is unclear whether useful and continuous distance estimates can be made under real-world flow conditions. Here we analyze odor signals from outdoor experiments with a sensor moving across large spatial scales in desert and forest environments to show that odor signal statistics can yield useful estimates of distance. We show that achieving accurate estimates of distance requires integrating statistics from 5-10 seconds, with a high temporal encoding of the olfactory signal of at least 20 Hz. By combining distance estimates from a linear model with wind-relative motion dynamics, we achieved source distance estimates in a 60×60 m2 search area with median errors of 3-8 meters, a distance at which point odor sources are often within visual range for animals such as mosquitoes.
ROOT-N CONSISTENCY OF INTERCEPT ESTIMATORS IN A BINARY RESPONSE MODEL UNDER TAIL RESTRICTIONS

The intercept of the binary response model is not regularly identified (i.e., $\sqrt n$ consistently estimable) when the support of both the special regressor V and the error term ε are the whole real line. The estimator of the intercept potentially has a slower than $\sqrt n$ convergence rate, which can result in a large estimation error in practice. This paper imposes additional tail restrictions which guarantee the regular identification of the intercept and thus the $\sqrt n$-consistency of its estimator. We then propose an estimator that achieves the $\sqrt n$ rate. Last, we extend our tail restrictions to a full-blown model with endogenous regressors.
Higher order couple stress theory of plates and shells

New higher order models of the couple stress plates and shells have been developed here. The 3‐D equations of the linear couple stress elasticity have been presented in an orthogonal system of coordinates. For the creation of 2‐D models of plates and shells the curvilinear system of coordinates related to the middle surface of the shell has been used along with a special hypothesis based on assumptions that consider the fact that the considered plates and shells are thin. Higher order theory is based on the expansion of the 3‐D equations of the linear couple stress theory of elasticity into Fourier series in terms of Legendre polynomials. The stress and strain tensors, as well as vectors of displacements and rotation have been expanded into Fourier series in terms of Legendre polynomials with respect to thickness. Thereby, all equations of the linear couple stress theory of elasticity (including generalized Hooke's law) have been transformed to the corresponding equations for the Legendre polynomials coefficients. Then, in the same way as in the classical theory of elasticity, a system of differential equations in terms of displacements with boundary conditions for the Legendre polynomials coefficients has been obtained. All equations for higher order theory of the couple stress plates in Cartesian and polar coordinates as well as for cylindrical and spherical shells in coordinates related to the shells geometry have been developed and presented here in detail. The obtained equations can be used for calculating the stress‐strain and for modelling thin walled structures in macro, micro and nano scale when considering micropolar couple stress and rotation effects.
Perimeter Control of Multiregion Urban Traffic Networks With Time-Varying Delays

In this paper, an adaptive perimeter control problem is studied for urban traffic networks with multiple regions, time-varying state, and input delays. After defining state variables by partition the accumulation variable of each region, a system model is formulated as nonlinear ordinary differential equations based on the concept of macroscopic fundamental diagram. Both the travel times of vehicles as well as evacuation process of traffic jams are first introduced into the system dynamics, and they are modeled as input and state delays, respectively. The control objective is to stabilize the number of vehicles in each region to desired values. By employing the model reference adaptive control scheme and asymptotical sliding mode technique, two filters and adaptive laws for control parameters are designed by using only the information of the reference model. With properly constructed Lyapunov functions, the stability of tracking error with regard to the reference signals is analyzed. Lastly, a simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Injectable Calcium Hydroxylapatite Microspheres (Radiesse)

Injectable calcium hydroxylapatite (Radiesse) received FDA approval in 2006 for the correction of facial lipoatrophy and moderate to severe facial wrinkles. This product consists of microspheres of a synthetic bone suspended in a methylcellulose gel matrix. Because the product is thicker than the hyaluronic acids, it is used for the correction of moderate to severe wrinkles, such as deep nasolabial folds. It is also used ‘‘off-label’’ to treat multiple areas of the face, nose, and hands. Radiesse is injected into the subdermal plane, and correction lasts approximately 1 year after injection.
Effective and efficient estimation of distribution algorithms for permutation and scheduling problems

Estimation of Distribution Algorithm (EDA) is a branch of evolutionary computation that learn a probabilistic model of good solutions. Probabilistic models are used to represent relationships between solution variables which may give useful, human-understandable insights into realworld problems. Also, developing an effective PM has been shown to significantly reduce function evaluations needed to reach good solutions. This is also useful for real-world problems because their representations are often complex needing more computation to arrive at good solutions. In particular, many real-world problems are naturally represented as permutations and have expensive evaluation functions. EDAs can, however, be computationally expensive when models are too complex. There has therefore been much recent work on developing suitable EDAs for permutation representation. EDAs can now produce state-of-the-art performance on some permutation benchmark problems. However, models are still complex and computationally expensive making them hard to apply to real-world problems. This study investigates some limitations of EDAs in solving permutation and scheduling problems. The focus of this thesis is on addressing redundancies in the Random Key representation, preserving diversity in EDA, simplifying the complexity attributed to the use of multiple local improvement procedures and transferring knowledge from solving a benchmark project scheduling problem to a similar real-world problem. In this thesis, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem benchmarks as well as significantly reducing both the computational effort required to build the probabilistic model and the number of function evaluations. We also achieve competitive results on project scheduling benchmarks. Methods adapted for solving a real-world project scheduling problem presents significant improvements.
ASSESSING REFLECTIVE MODELS IN MARKETING RESEARCH: A COMPARISON BETWEEN PLS AND PLSc ESTIMATES

The present study aims at contributing to the growing discourse on analytical methods in marketing research by highlighting the use of Consistent Partial Least Squares (PLSc) estimation to assess reflective models used in marketing literature. Specifically, it demonstrates the significance of using PLSc and compares it with the traditional PLS. The results show that PLSc is more robust than traditional PLS in estimating convergent validity and path coefficients, and yields better power – coefficient of determination (R2) and effect size (f 2). It is also found that PLSc generates better holdout results than traditional PLS. This study complements and extends prior research on PLSc, and subsequently serves as a resource for marketing researchers who use variance-based approach in their research. Implications, guidelines and future research directions are discussed.
Clinical Applications of Stem Cells in Craniofacial Surgery

Few areas of translational medicine carry as much excitement and hope as stem cell therapies. Because of recent advances in material science and stem cell and developmental biology that help to target molecules and pathways to restore the body’s regenerative capacity, the ‘‘engineering’’ of missing tissue is quickly becoming a reality. Classically, tissue engineering has been thought to require external regenerative resources including a scaffold, cells, and growth factors. The allure of providing an exact replica of a missing bone that incorporates to become indistinguishable from self, has the capacity to heal and grow, is resistant to infection, and has minimal morbidity is a ‘‘holy grail’’ to all surgeons who work with bone. This article attempts to shed light on the use of stem cells for craniofacial reconstruction, including important principles learned from other scientiﬁc disciplines, relevant animal models for tissue engineering, early clinical reports from our experience and that of others, and future directions.
New qualitative criteria for solutions of Volterra integro-differential equations

Abstract In this paper, we consider certain non-linear scalar Volterra integro-differential equations and Volterra integro-differential systems of first order. We investigate the boundedness, stability, uniformly asymptotic stability, integrability and square integrability of solutions to the scalar equations and the system considered. The technique used to prove the results of the paper is based on the second method of Lyapunov. From the obtained results, we extend and improve some related results that can be found in the literature.
CISing Up Service Learning: A Systematic Review of Service Learning Experiences in Computer and Information Science

The benefits of service learning in computer and information science (CIS) are believed to be significant, ranging from providing students with real-world experiences to retaining students to positively impacting community partners. Although there are many benefits of service learning, the CIS domain does impose unique costs for integrating service learning into the curriculum. Yet there is little systematic research to help the CIS community understand best practices for maximizing benefits while minimizing costs. Experience reports about service learning courses in CIS have appeared in the literature annually since 2000, and thus we address this gap in knowledge by conducting a systematic review and content analysis of 84 experience reports from the The ACM Guide to Computing Literature. We synthesize the current state of service learning in CIS as well as derive recommendations for best practices and future research directions.
Strong constraints on light dark matter interpretation of the EDGES signal

Recently the EDGES collaboration reported an anomalous absorption signal in the sky-averaged 21-cm spectrum around $z=17$. Such a signal may be understood as an indication for an unexpected cooling of the hydrogen gas during or prior to the so called Cosmic Dawn era. Here we explore the possibility that dark matter cooled the gas through velocity-dependent, Rutherford-like interactions. We argue that such interactions require a light mediator that is highly constrained by 5th force experiments and limits from stellar cooling. Consequently, only a hidden or the visible photon can in principle mediate such a force. Neutral hydrogen thus plays a sub-leading role and the cooling occurs via the residual free electrons and protons. We find that these two scenarios are strongly constrained by the predicted dark matter self-interactions and by limits on millicharged dark matter respectively. We conclude that the 21-cm absorption line is unlikely to be the result of gas cooling via the scattering with a dominant component of the dark matter. An order 1\% subcomponent of millicharged dark matter remains a viable explanation.
Topological Degree for Pseudomonotone Potential Operators

In this note we give an extension of a recent result concerning the fact that the topological degree of a coercive map is one still remains true for a pseudomonotone potential map between a reflexive Banach space and its dual space. Some considerations concerning the solution property of degree required in applications are also appended.
Tritium resources available for fusion reactors

The tritium required for ITER will be supplied from the CANDU production in Ontario, but while Ontario may be able to supply 8 kg for a DEMO fusion reactor in the mid-2050s, it will not be able to provide 10 kg at any realistic starting time. The tritium required to start DEMO will depend on advances in plasma fuelling efficiency, burnup fraction, and tritium processing technology. It is in theory possible to start up a fusion reactor with little or no tritium, but at an estimated cost of $2 billion per kilogram of tritium saved, it is not economically sensible. Some heavy water reactor tritium production scenarios with varying degrees of optimism are presented, with the assumption that only Canada, the Republic of Korea, and Romania make tritium available to the fusion community. Results for the tritium available for DEMO in 2055 range from zero to 30 kg. CANDU and similar heavy water reactors could in theory generate additional tritium in a number of ways: (a) adjuster rods containing lithium could be used, giving 0.13 kg per year per reactor; (b) a fuel bundle with a burnable absorber has been designed for CANDU reactors, which might be adapted for tritium production; (c) tritium production could be increased by 0.05 kg per year per reactor by doping the moderator with lithium-6. If a fusion reactor is started up around 2055, governments in Canada, Argentina, China, India, South Korea and Romania will have the opportunity in the years leading up to that to take appropriate steps: (a) build, refurbish or upgrade tritium extraction facilities; (b) extend the lives of heavy water reactors, or build new ones; (c) reduce tritium sales; (d) boost tritium production in the remaining heavy water reactors. All of the alternative production methods considered have serious economic and regulatory drawbacks, and the risk of diversion of tritium or lithium-6 would also be a major concern. There are likely to be serious problems with supplying tritium for future fusion reactors.
Question tags in translation. An investigation into the translatability of English question tags into Dutch

Canonical question tags feature prominently in spoken English, where they display great versatility. At face value they are meant to elicit a response from a co-participant in the form of (dis)agreement with the proposition to which the tag has been added. Their pragmatic scope is, however, considerably broader: they serve as politeness strategies but also emphasize the speaker’s convictions or mark accusations. Like many other languages, Dutch does not have a similar structure, which raises questions as to what devices Dutch employs to serve the same purpose as question tags. This contrastive study examines such correspondents in a parallel corpus of English novels and their Dutch translations. Three structures can be identified: pragmatic markers, clause-final parentheticals and combinations of these. The data indicate a preference for pragmatic markers (most notably he and toch ), which predominantly appear either as invariant tags or clause-medially, indicating subtle shifts in utterance interpretation.
Incidence of stellar rotation on the explosion mechanism of massive stars

Abstract Hydrodynamical instabilities may either spin-up or down the pulsar formed in the collapse of a rotating massive star. Using numerical simulations of an idealized setup, we investigate the impact of progenitor rotation on the shock dynamics. The amplitude of the spiral mode of the Standing Accretion Shock Instability (SASI) increases with rotation only if the shock to the neutron star radii ratio is large enough. At large rotation rates, a corotation instability, also known as low-T/W, develops and leads to a more vigorous spiral mode. We estimate the range of stellar rotation rates for which pulsars are spun up or down by SASI. In the presence of a corotation instability, the spin-down efficiency is less than 30%. Given observational data, these results suggest that rapid progenitor rotation might not play a significant hydrodynamical role in the majority of core-collapse supernovae.
A new large solid angle multi-element silicon drift detector system for low energy X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy

Low-energy X-ray fluorescence (LEXRF) is an essential tool for bio-related research of organic samples, whose composition is dominated by light elements. Working at energies below 2 keV and being able to detect fluorescence photons of lightweight elements such as carbon (277 eV) is still a challenge, since it requires in-vacuum operations to avoid in-air photon absorption. Moreover, the detectors must have a thin entrance window and collect photons at an angle of incidence near 90 degrees to minimize the absorption by the protective coating. Considering the low fluorescence yield of light elements, it is important to cover a substantial part of the solid angle detecting ideally all emitted X-ray fluorescence (XRF) photons. Furthermore, the energy resolution of the detection system should be close to the Fano limit in order to discriminate elements whose XRF emission lines are often very close within the energy spectra. To ensure all these features, a system consisting of four monolithic multi-element silicon drift detectors was developed. The use of four separate detector units allows optimizing the incidence angle on all the sensor elements. The multi-element approach in turn provides a lower leakage current on each anode, which, in combination with ultra-low noise preamplifiers, is necessary to achieve an energy resolution close to the Fano limit. The potential of the new detection system and its applicability for typical LEXRF applications has been proved on the Elettra TwinMic beamline.
Low Mach number limit for the compressible magnetohydrodynamic equations in a periodic domain

This paper studies the convergence of the compressible isentropic magnetohydrodynamic equations to the corresponding incompressiblemagnetohydrodynamic equations with ill-prepared initial data in a periodic domain.We prove that the solution to the compressible isentropic magnetohydrodynamic equations with small Mach number exists uniformly in the time interval as long as that to the incompressible one does. Furthermore,we obtain the convergence result for the solutions filtered by the group of acoustics.