Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Streamlining the front end of a speech recognizer

In this paper we seek to streamline various operations within the front end of a speech recognizer, both to reduce unnecessary computation and to simplify the conceptual framework. First, a novel view of the front end in terms of linear transformations is presented. Then we study the invariance property of recognition performance with respect to linear transformations (LT) at the front end. Analysis reveals that several LT steps can be consolidated into a single LT, which effectively eliminates the Discrete Co-sine Transform (DCT) step, part of the traditional MFCC (Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefﬁcient) front end. Moreover, a highly simpliﬁed, data-driven front-end scheme is proposed as a direct generalization of this idea. The new setup has no Mel-scale ﬁltering, another part of the MFCC front end. Experimental results show a 5% relative improvement on the Broadcast News task.
Blood pressure and risk of developing type 2 diabetes mellitus: the Women's Health Study.

AIMS To examine the relationship of blood pressure (BP) and BP progression with the subsequent development of type 2 diabetes. METHODS AND RESULTS We performed a prospective cohort study among 38 172 women free of diabetes and cardiovascular disease at baseline. Women were classified into four categories according to self-reported baseline BP (<120/75 mmHg, 120-129/75-84 mmHg, 130-139/85-89 mmHg and hypertension) and were further classified according to progression to a higher BP category during the first 48 months of follow-up. The main outcome measure was time to incident type 2 diabetes. During 10.2 years of follow-up, 1672 women developed type 2 diabetes. The multivariable adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) (95% confidence interval) for incident diabetes across BP categories were 0.66 (0.55-0.80), 1.0 (referent), 1.45 (1.23-1.71), and 2.03 (1.77-2.32) (P-value for trend <0.0001). Stratification by body mass index revealed similar results. Adjusted HRs (95% confidence intervals) for incident diabetes after 48 months among women who had no BP progression, women with BP progression but remaining normotensive, and women who developed hypertension during the first 48 months were 1.0, 1.26 (0.97-1.64), and 1.64 (1.33-2.02) compared with 2.39 (1.95-2.93) in women with baseline hypertension (P-value for trend <0.0001). CONCLUSION Baseline BP and BP progression are strong and independent predictors of incident type 2 diabetes among initially healthy women.
Measuring Information Leakage Using Generalized Gain Functions

This paper introduces g-leakage, a rich generalization of the min-entropy model of quantitative information flow. In g-leakage, the benefit that an adversary derives from a certain guess about a secret is specified using a gain function g. Gain functions allow a wide variety of operational scenarios to be modeled, including those where the adversary benefits from guessing a value close to the secret, guessing a part of the secret, guessing a property of the secret, or guessing the secret within some number of tries. We prove important properties of g-leakage, including bounds between min-capacity, g-capacity, and Shannon capacity. We also show a deep connection between a strong leakage ordering on two channels, C1 and C2, and the possibility of factoring C1 into C2C3, for some C3. Based on this connection, we propose a generalization of the Lattice of Information from deterministic to probabilistic channels.
Dynamic assembly of FtsZ regulated by GTP hydrolysis

FtsZ forms a cytokinetic ring, designated the Z ring, that directs cytokinesis in prokaryotes. It has limited sequence similarity to eukaryotic tubulins and, like tubulin, it has GTPase activity and the ability to assemble into various structures including protofilaments, bundles and minirings. By using both electron microscopy and sedimentation, we demonstrate that FtsZ from Escherichia coli undergoes a strictly GTP‐dependent polymerization and the polymers disappear as the GTP is consumed. Thus, FtsZ polymerization, like that of tubulin, is dynamic and regulated by GTP hydrolysis. These results provide the basis for the dynamics of the Z ring and favor a model in which the Z ring is formed by a nucleation event.
Figural effects in a syllogistic evaluation paradigm: an inspection-time analysis.

Robust biases have been found in syllogistic reasoning that relate to the figure of premises and to the directionality of terms in given conclusions. Mental models theorists (e.g., Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991) have explained figural bias by assuming that reasoners can more readily form integrated models of premises when their middle terms are contiguous than when they are not. Biases associated with the direction of conclusion terms have been interpreted as reflecting a natural mode of reading off conclusions from models according to a "first-in, first-out principle. " We report an experiment investigating the impact of systematic figural and conclusion-direction manipulations on the processing effort directed at syllogistic components, as indexed through a novel inspection-time method. The study yielded reliable support for mental-models predictions concerning the nature and locus of figural and directionality effects in syllogistic reasoning. We argue that other accounts of syllogistic reasoning seem less able to accommodate the full breadth of inspection-time findings observed.
A Pyrrhic Victory? - Bank Bailouts and Sovereign Credit Risk

We show that financial sector bailouts and sovereign credit risk are intimately linked. A bailout benefits the economy by ameliorating the under-investment problem of the financial sector. However, increasing taxation of the non-financial sector to fund the bailout may be inefficient since it weakens its incentive to invest, decreasing growth. Instead, the sovereign may choose to fund the bailout by diluting existing government bondholders, resulting in a deterioration of the sovereign's creditworthiness. This deterioration feeds back onto the financial sector, reducing the value of its guarantees and existing bond holdings and increasing its sensitivity to future sovereign shocks. We provide empirical evidence for this two-way feedback between financial and sovereign credit risk using data on the credit default swaps (CDS) of the Eurozone countries for 2007-10. We show that the announcement of financial sector bailouts was associated with an immediate, unprecedented widening of sovereign CDS spreads and narrowing of bank CDS spreads; however, post-bailouts there emerged a significant co-movement between bank CDS and sovereign CDS, even after controlling for banks' equity performance, the latter being consistent with an effect of the quality of sovereign guarantees on bank credit risk.
Why do I like it?: investigating the product-specificity of user experience

The concept of user experience (UX) has had a warm welcome in the research community since its introduction almost two decades ago. Still, there is no consensus on a unified definition of the concept nor is there agreement on how to best measure UX. In this paper, we argue that UX is context-dependent and most of all product-dependent in its nature. Accordingly, using the CUE model by Mahlke and Thüring [26], we hypothesized that the impact of perceived product attributes and emotional reactions on UX vary among different product types. We report on a study that showed these specific differences in the composition and impact of UX components, depending on product type. The outcome of the study lays ground for a product specific understanding and assessment of UX.
Anomalies of Sub-Diffractive Guided-Wave Propagation along 1 Metamaterial Nanocomponents 2

We describe our recent results on some of the anomalous propagation properties of subdiffractive guided modes along plasmonic or metamaterial cylindrical waveguides with core-shell structures, with particular attention to the design of optical subwavelength nanodevices. In our analysis, we compare and contrast the azimuthally symmetric modes, on which the previous literature has concentrated, with polaritonic guided modes, which propagate in a different regime close to the plasmonic resonance of the waveguide. Forward and backward modes may be envisioned in this latter regime, traveling with subdiffraction cross section along the cylindrical interface between plasmonic and nonplasmonic materials. In general, two oppositely oriented power flows arise in the positive and negative permittivity regions, consistent with our previous results in the planar geometry. Our discussion applies to a various range of frequencies, from RF to optical and UV, even if we are mainly focused on optical and infrared propagation. At lower frequencies, artificially engineered plasmonic metamaterials or natural plasmas may be envisioned to obtain similar propagation characteristics.
Blood-Brain Barrier Permeability of Normal Appearing White Matter in Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis

Background Multiple sclerosis (MS) affects the integrity of the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Contrast-enhanced T1 weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is widely used to characterize location and extent of BBB disruptions in focal MS lesions. We employed quantitative T1 measurements before and after the intravenous injection of a paramagnetic contrast agent to assess BBB permeability in the normal appearing white matter (NAWM) in patients with relapsing-remitting MS (RR-MS). Methodology/Principal Findings Fifty-nine patients (38 females) with RR-MS undergoing immunomodulatory treatment and nine healthy controls (4 females) underwent quantitative T1 measurements at 3 tesla before and after injection of a paramagnetic contrast agent (0.2 mmol/kg Gd-DTPA). Mean T1 values were calculated for NAWM in patients and total cerebral white matter in healthy subjects for the T1 measurements before and after injection of Gd-DTPA. The pre-injection baseline T1 of NAWM (945±55 [SD] ms) was prolonged in RR-MS relative to healthy controls (903±23 ms, p = 0.028). Gd-DTPA injection shortened T1 to a similar extent in both groups. Mean T1 of NAWM was 866±47 ms in the NAWM of RR-MS patients and 824±13 ms in the white matter of healthy controls. The regional variability of T1 values expressed as the coefficient of variation (CV) was comparable between the two groups at baseline, but not after injection of the contrast agent. After intravenous Gd-DTPA injection, T1 values in NAWM were more variable in RR-MS patients (CV = 0.198±0.046) compared to cerebral white matter of healthy controls (CV = 0.166±0.018, p = 0.046). Conclusions/Significance We found no evidence of a global BBB disruption within the NAWM of RR-MS patients undergoing immunomodulatory treatment. However, the increased variation of T1 values in NAWM after intravenous Gd-DTPA injection points to an increased regional inhomogeneity of BBB function in NAWM in relapsing-remitting MS.
Meis1 Regulates Epidermal Stem Cells and Is Required for Skin Tumorigenesis

Previous studies have shown that Meis1 plays an important role in blood development and vascular homeostasis, and can induce blood cancers, such as leukemia. However, its role in epithelia remains largely unknown. Here, we uncover two roles for Meis1 in the epidermis: as a critical regulator of epidermal homeostasis in normal tissues and as a proto-oncogenic factor in neoplastic tissues. In normal epidermis, we show that Meis1 is predominantly expressed in the bulge region of the hair follicles where multipotent adult stem cells reside, and that the number of these stem cells is reduced when Meis1 is deleted in the epidermal tissue of mice. Mice with epidermal deletion of Meis1 developed significantly fewer DMBA/TPA-induced benign and malignant tumors compared with wild-type mice, suggesting that Meis1 plays a role in both tumor development and malignant progression. This is consistent with the observation that Meis1 expression increases as tumors progress from benign papillomas to malignant carcinomas. Interestingly, we found that Meis1 localization was altered to neoplasia development. Instead of being localized to the stem cell region, Meis1 is localized to more differentiated cells in tumor tissues. These findings suggest that, during the transformation from normal to neoplastic tissues, a functional switch occurs in Meis1.
Identification of Three Interferon-Inducible Cellular Enzymes That Inhibit the Replication of Hepatitis C Virus

ABSTRACT Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a common cause of chronic hepatitis and is currently treated with alpha interferon (IFN-α)-based therapies. However, the underlying mechanism of IFN-α therapy remains to be elucidated. To identify the cellular proteins that mediate the antiviral effects of IFN-α, we created a HEK293-based cell culture system to inducibly express individual interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs) and determined their antiviral effects against HCV. By screening 29 ISGs that are induced in Huh7 cells by IFN-α and/or up-regulated in HCV-infected livers, we discovered that viperin, ISG20, and double-stranded RNA-dependent protein kinase (PKR) noncytolytically inhibited the replication of HCV replicons. Mechanistically, inhibition of HCV replication by ISG20 and PKR depends on their 3′-5′ exonuclease and protein kinase activities, respectively. Moreover, our work, for the first time, provides strong evidence suggesting that viperin is a putative radical S-adenosyl-l-methionine (SAM) enzyme. In addition to demonstrating that the antiviral activity of viperin depends on its radical SAM domain, which contains conserved motifs to coordinate [4Fe-4S] cluster and cofactor SAM and is essential for its enzymatic activity, mutagenesis studies also revealed that viperin requires an aromatic amino acid residue at its C terminus for proper antiviral function. Furthermore, although the N-terminal 70 amino acid residues of viperin are not absolutely required, deletion of this region significantly compromises its antiviral activity against HCV. Our findings suggest that viperin represents a novel antiviral pathway that works together with other antiviral proteins, such as ISG20 and PKR, to mediate the IFN response against HCV infection.
Informativeness of a novel multiallelic marker‐set comprising an F8 intron 21 and three tightly linked loci for haemophilia A carriership analysis

Summary. The extraordinary heterogeneous nature of the deleterious mutations in the F8 gene that lead to functional deficiency of clotting factor VIII in haemophilia A makes routine direct mutation profiling difficult. When direct mutation analysis cannot be performed or a causative/candidate mutation is not found, a second‐line approach to track the defective F8 gene within at‐risk families is linkage genetic analysis with, tried‐and‐tested, F8‐intragenic and/or extragenic non‐recombining multiallelic short tandem repeats (STR). Although several typing STR loci within and around F8 have been described, there is need for improving assessment, because the combined informativeness of available assays rarely reaches 100%. Here, we characterized a newly identified 0.28 cM‐resolution marker‐set, consisting of a dinucleotide STR located on F8 intron 21 (F8Int21; [AC]n) and three extragenic tetranucleotide STR located on GAB3 intron 1 (GAB3Int1; [TAAA]n) and TMLHE intron 1 (TMLHEInt1.1; [GAAA]n and TMLHEInt1.3; [ATTC]n). Heterozygosity rates determined in 100 unrelated females ranged from 0.25 (GAB3Int1) to 0.63 (F8Int21). The set rendered a combined informativeness of 0.91 for at least one marker and 0.60 for a minimum of two loci, with at least one F8‐intragenic. Multiallelic interlocus non‐random association analysis revealed that GAB3Int1 is not in significant gametic disequilibrium (GD) with F8Int21, F8Int9.2, TMLHEInt1.3 or TMLHEInt1.1. Gametic disequilibrium breakdown attests historical recombination between GAB3Int1 and the F8 gene. Through computational analysis of reference assembly sequence data, we note in the GD breakdown region and in the F8 gene a higher than average density of the 13‐mer CCNCCNTNNCCNC consensus motif, commonly associated with recombination hotspots.
An Evaluation of Patient Safety Event Report Categories Using Unsupervised Topic Modeling

Summary Objective: Patient safety event data repositories have the potential to dramatically improve safety if analyzed and leveraged appropriately. These safety event reports often consist of both structured data, such as general event type categories, and unstructured data, such as free text descriptions of the event. Analyzing these data, particularly the rich free text narratives, can be challenging, especially with tens of thousands of reports. To overcome the resource intensive manual review process of the free text descriptions, we demonstrate the effectiveness of using an unsupervised natural language processing approach. Methods: An unsupervised natural language processing technique, called topic modeling, was applied to a large repository of patient safety event data to identify topics, or themes, from the free text descriptions of the data. Entropy measures were used to evaluate and compare these topics to the general event type categories that were originally assigned by the event reporter. Results: Measures of entropy demonstrated that some topics generated from the un-supervised modeling approach aligned with the clinical general event type categories that were originally selected by the individual entering the report. Importantly, several new latent topics emerged that were not originally identified. The new topics provide additional insights into the patient safety event data that would not otherwise easily be detected. Conclusion: The topic modeling approach provides a method to identify topics or themes that may not be immediately apparent and has the potential to allow for automatic reclassification of events that are ambiguously classified by the event reporter.
Robustness in the Salus Scalable Block Store

This paper describes Salus, a block store that seeks to maximize simultaneously both scalability and robustness. Salus provides strong end-to-end correctness guarantees for read operations, strict ordering guarantees for write operations, and strong durability and availability guarantees despite a wide range of server failures (including memory corruptions, disk corruptions, firmware bugs, etc.). Such increased protection does not come at the cost of scalability or performance: indeed, Salus often actually outperforms HBase (the codebase from which Salus descends). For example, Salus' active replication allows it to halve network bandwidth while increasing aggregate write throughput by a factor of 1.74 compared to HBase in a well-provisioned system.
Discussion Quality Diffuses in the Digital Public Square

Studies of online social influence have demonstrated that friends have important effects on many types of behavior in a wide variety of settings. However, we know much less about how influence works among relative strangers in digital public squares, despite important conversations happening in such spaces. We present the results of a study on large public Facebook Pages where we randomly used two different methods---most recent and social feedback---to order comments on posts. We find that the social feedback condition results in higher quality viewed comments and response comments. After measuring the average quality of comments written by users before the study, we find that social feedback has a positive effect on response quality for both low and high quality commenters. We draw on a theoretical framework of social norms to explain this empirical result. In order to examine the influence mechanism further, we measure the similarity between comments viewed and written during the study, finding that similarity increases for the highest quality contributors under the social feedback condition. This suggests that, in addition to norms, some individuals may respond with increased relevance to high-quality comments.
Identification of biodiesel yield and its properties from microalgae Botryococcus sp isolated at Sembrong dam

Recently, the unceasing dependency upon fossil-based feedstock has triggered fuel shortages, volatility of fuel price hike and numerous discharging of carbon dioxide resulted from the burning of fossil fuel linked to global warming. Years ago there were many researches tried to find alternatives fuel as to resolve the dwindling of fuel stocks. The discoveries of high lipids content of microalgae have paved a way of instigating more research over microalgae. The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential of Botryococcus sp as an alternative sustainable and renewable biodiesel to diminish off immoderate dependency over fossil fuel. Botryococcus sp was isolated from Sembrong Dam water that is located in Johor Malaysia by using standard plating method and classified morphologically. The growth factors such as light, initial pH and rotation speed were optimized by adopting techniques from previous studies. Botryococcus sp biodiesel properties were conducted and compared with ASTM 6715 for fuel properties. The results show that, Sembrong Dam water quality is polluted as compared with Interim National Water Quality Standard, Malaysia (INWQS) and high concentration of chlorophyll-a in Dam Sembrong water is due to presence of algal blooms. It was found that Botryococcus sp has the best growth condition under illumination of 6000 lux, initial pH 7 and continuous rotation speed of 30 rpm. Under optimized and well-monitored cultivation, Botryococcus sp is able to yield a maximum oil content of 64.8%. The transesterification process has effectively converted the green crude to biodiesel up to 88%. The microalgae biodiesel quality is suitable to be used as fuel as it complies with ASTM 6715. On the basis of the results of this research, it can be concluded that Sembrong Dam water is polluted and undergoing eutrophication. Botryococcus sp isolated from Sembrong Dam is a great potential for biodiesel feedstock due its rich oil content.
Link mining: a new data mining challenge

A key challenge for data mining is tackling the problem of mining richly structured datasets, where the objects are linked in some way. Links among the objects may demonstrate certain patterns, which can be helpful for many data mining tasks and are usually hard to capture with traditional statistical models. Recently there has been a surge of interest in this area, fueled largely by interest in web and hypertext mining, but also by interest in mining social networks, security and law enforcement data, bibliographic citations and epidemiological records.
Classifiers: The Many Ways to Profile 'one' - A Case Study of Taiwan Mandarin

Due to the lack of a rigorous methodology and explicit criteria to distinguish between classifiers (C) and measure words (M), previous inventories of Mandarin C's, or geti liangci 個體量詞, vary greatly. Based on the insight that an M in a Chinese [Num C/M N] phrase is semantically substantive, while a C is semantically redundant and thus does not block numeral quantification or adjectival modification to the noun, this paper further proposes that while C/M both function as a multiplicand mathematically, with Num as the multiplier, C's value is necessarily 1 and M is not, thus ~1. Cognitively, however, the semantically redundant C serves to profile an inherent semantic feature of N and thus selects a narrow class of N's. With these explicit distinctions between C and M, we then re-examine the inventory of C's put forth in 國語日報量詞典 Mandarin Daily News Dictionary of Measure Words and offer a much more reliable list of C's in Taiwan Mandarin.