Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A joint factor analysis model for handling mismatched recording conditions in forensic automatic speaker recognition

In forensics automatic speaker recognition (FASR), one of the most important factors that degrades its performance is the mismatch in recording conditions (session variability). Recently, joint factor analysis (JFA) combined with Gaussian mixture model (GMM) has become the state-of-the-art technique to cope with session variability in speaker recognition. Its ability relies on accurate estimation of session variability subspace for the operating conditions of interest. This paper integrates JFA into evaluation of the strength of evidence in FASR and analyzes the performance of JFA in simulated forensic caseworks where mismatch appears. It also investigates a JFA based compensation technique to cope with the mismatch in telephone transmission conditions. Experiments on the Polyphone IPSC-03 database demonstrate that such a compensation method improves performance of FASR.
Using strategy trees in change management in clouds

Change management in a cloud environment is often complicated by the different needs of the cloud clients. Changes are not applied all at once. For example, a client may require that a change to the Platform-as-Service (PaaS) instance assigned to it must only be done on the weekend while another client allows for the change to be done at any time. The time periods at which changes can be applied may be specified in SLAs. A change deployment schedule for making changes to PaaS instances often depends on the cloud provider policies and on the SLAs between the clients and the cloud provider. Different sets of cloud provider policies may result in different deployment schedules. Changes are not always successful. This may result in a change being unsuccessful and a return to a previous state in order to re-start the change. Neither is desirable since it may be impact SLA guarantees such as service availability or service time that could result in the cloud provider paying out penalties. Since changes are not all applied at once it may be desirable to modify the change deployment schedule. For example, if an operator is not highly skilled or if the change's complexity is higher than expected then it may be preferable to apply the change during a time period when there are relatively few customers in order to minimize SLA violations. This paper shows how strategy trees can be incorporated into an autonomic change management system that could result in a switch of cloud provider policy sets to determine a new deployment schedule on the fly. Our experiments show that this approach can save time while minimizing SLA violations.
Service as collaboration: an integrated process in teaching and research. A response to Greenbank

This article is a response to Greenbank's (2006) The academic's role: the need for a re-evaluation? It is also a contribution to the ongoing debate about the need to develop a broader view of scholarship and the different activities related to it such as ‘teaching’, ‘research’ and ‘service to the community’. Arguments related to current research are presented to enhance a deeper understanding and more nuanced definition of ‘service’, which has been perceived by many academics as a confusing term that lacks professional status. ‘Collaboration’ is a better term for describing the interactivity between universities and the community, implying collaboration with practitioners. A holistic view of scholarship is suggested, where the integration of collaboration, teaching and research is seen as an interdependent whole instead of a hierarchy of functions.
Usability Testing of AMC Hospital's Website for Home Users: Case Study for On-Site Registration Design

This paper illustrates a usability testing methodology approach and evaluate of Academic Medical Center (AMC) hospital's Web site function as on-site registration. The approach involves collection of a set of data including video recording and questionnaire of users when they interact with system. A similar procedure of data collection and analysis can also be extended to study in the real environment of hospital Web site. Our approach is to find what determinants from view of usability testing procedure also influenced customers who interacted with Web site. The study design involved in conducting usability-based analyses are detailed and interface development of on-site registration is discussed. This article addresses the goals and methods of usability testing for AMC hospital's Web site; the current status of this practice in a variety of Web site environments, and try to finds the optimal link and suggestions between function design and usability testing.
Performance of fixed-point FFT's: Rounding and scaling considerations

The calculation of the discrete Fourier transform using a fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm with fixed-point arithmetic is considered. The input data is scaled to prevent overflow and to maintain accuracy. The implementation uses 16-bit fixed-point representation for the data and provides for double precision accumulation of sums and products. Algorithm variants as well as different rounding options are compared. Execution times for implementations based on a single chip signal processor are given. These show that a considerable increase in accuracy can be obtained with only a small penalty in execution time, by applying an alternating form of rounding rather than truncation.
Adenovirus gene transfer vector toxicity to mouse embryos: implications for human IVF.

BACKGROUND The promulgation and diversification of micromanipulation procedures which open the zona pellucida of the oocyte or early embryo is steadily increasing the chance that zygotes will encounter infectious viral agents or gene transfer vectors derived from these agents. Such interactions could lead to toxic effects on the embryo or to insertion of foreign genes into the germ line. Adenovirus is a ubiquitous human viral pathogen that is commonly used as a gene therapy vector. However, the toxicity of this virus or its vector derivatives to embryos has not been extensively investigated. METHODS In the present study, a mouse model was used to investigate the time of appearance of embryo toxicity, the manifestations of that toxicity, and the mechanism by which adenoviruses exert toxicity. The effects of exposure to adenovirus on in-vivo embryo development was also examined. RESULTS These vectors exerted no deleterious effects until after the 2-cell stage, where they caused developmental delay and disorganized cleavage. Toxicity was associated with expression of a lacZ reporter gene cloned into the vectors, and with the proportion of infectious particles within the virus preparations: preparations with a high proportion of 'empty capsids', including a preparation of wild-type virus, were less toxic than a replication-defective vector with a high proportion of functional, infectious particles. Subzonal insertion of adenovirus vector followed by embryo transfer led to a dramatic reduction in the number of embryos which developed to term-findings which establish the physiological significance of the findings from in-vitro culture. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that adenoviruses and their vector derivatives are not likely to insert genetic material into the germ line, but they may pose a significant threat to the viability of human embryos undergoing opening of the zona pellucida during IVF.
eading-order seismic imaging using curvelets

Curvelets are plausible candidates for simultaneous compression of seismic data, their images, and the imaging operator itself. We show that with curvelets, the leading-order approximation in angular frequency, horizontal wavenumber, and migrated location to common-offset CO Kirchhoff depth migration becomes a simple transformation of coordinates of curvelets in the data, combined with amplitude scaling. This transformation is calculated using map migration, which employs the local slopes from the curvelet decomposition of the data. Because the data can be compressed using curvelets, the transformation needs to be calculated for relatively few curvelets only. Numerical examples for homogeneous media show that using the leading-order approximation only provides a good approximation to CO migration for moderate propagation times. As the traveltime increases and rays diverge beyond the spatial support of a curvelet; however, the leading-order approximation is no longer accurate enough. This shows the need for correction beyond leading order, even for homogeneous media.
Changes in Family Composition

Abstract The current study sought to better define the impact of change on a college student population and how they perceived themselves as coping with change. One hundred and seven college students were asked to report any change they had experienced in their family composition and to complete the questionnaires assessing coherence, symptoms of adjustment, and coping. The results of this study indicated no significant differences between the group who reported a significant change in their family composition and those who had no change. The results are discussed with an emphasis on the implication of these findings for counseling with college students.
An Experiment in Integrating Sentiment Features for Tech Stock Prediction in Twitter

Economic analysis indicates a relationship between consumer sentiment and stock price movements. In this study we harness features from Twitter messages to capture public mood related to four Tech companies for predicting the daily up and down price movements of these companies’ NASDAQ stocks. We propose a novel model combining features namely positive and negative sentiment, consumer confidence in the product with respect to ‘bullish’ or ‘bearish’ lexicon and three previous stock market movement days. The features are employed in a Decision Tree classifier using cross-fold validation to yield accuracies of 82.93%,80.49%, 75.61% and 75.00% in predicting the daily up and down changes of Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) stocks respectively in a 41 market day sample.
Using MPEG DASH SRD for zoomable and navigable video

This paper presents a video streaming client implementation that makes use of the Spatial Relationship Description (SRD) feature of the MPEG-DASH standard, to provide a zoomable and navigable video to an end user. SRD allows a video streaming client to request spatial subparts of a particular video stream, which might be available in multiple resolutions. The paper outlines the design choices enabling the player to render DASH content supporting the SRD feature, such as (i) identifying the total amount of resolution layers and selecting the most appropriate one for the user's current selection (pan or zoom), and (ii) enabling a seamless switch between spatial subparts. Doing so, we provide practical implementation guidelines for applications and services that may want to use the SRD feature of MPEG DASH to provide zoomable and navigable video to end users. The video streaming client is implemented in JavaScript and extends dash.js, an MPEG DASH reference client implementation.
Media Framing of Trafficking

This article explores meaning-making processes around human trafficking, using the empirical example of the Slovene press. The analysis pinpoints how the topic appears in the media, what content emphases it receives in reporting, which aspects are dealt with and which are absent, and the implications of such framing. My reading of newspaper articles shows how trafficking appears within ‘frames’ that I label ‘criminalization’, ‘nationalization’, ‘victimization’ and ‘regularization’; together, these help to shape a specific anti-trafficking paradigm, one that depicts trafficking as a criminal issue and calls for stricter policing, saving victims and tightening borders. The frames as they appear in the Slovene press are unpacked here with the purpose of opening up space for understandings of trafficking that go beyond predominant representations.
Narrative Studies, Personal Stories, and Identity Transformation in the Mutual Help Context

A common way for researchers to think about mutual help organizations is as alternative treatments for people with problems in living. This approach, illustrated here in the context of a series of empirical studies conducted by the author, views people as service seekers. Although much can be gained from research in which there is collaboration between professionals and the self-help community, there remains a need for work that uses theories and methods consistent with the experiences of the members and the ethos of the organizations. A different way to understand mutual help organizations is to view them as normative narrative communities where identity transformation takes place. This approach forces us to listen to the personal stories that people tell about their lives. It has several advantages, including the reduction of professional centrism and the explicit linking of individual lives to community processes. A narrative studies framework also has the advantage of tying mutual help to a great deal of cross-disciplinary research, including cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology, and literary analysis. General features of models for understanding the role of narratives, autobiographical memory, and personal change through identity transformation are described in the context of mutual help organizations.
Ethylene is an endogenous stimulator of cell division in the cambial meristem of Populus

The plant hormone ethylene is an important signal in plant growth responses to environmental cues. In vegetative growth, ethylene is generally considered as a regulator of cell expansion, but a role in the control of meristem growth has also been suggested based on pharmacological experiments and ethylene-overproducing mutants. In this study, we used transgenic ethylene-insensitive and ethylene-overproducing hybrid aspen (Populus tremula × tremuloides) in combination with experiments using an ethylene perception inhibitor [1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP)] to demonstrate that endogenous ethylene produced in response to leaning stimulates cell division in the cambial meristem. This ethylene-controlled growth gives rise to the eccentricity of Populus stems that is formed in association with tension wood.
Political Issue or Policy Matter?

Throughout the third biennial review of broadcast ownership rules, it became clear that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) handled the issue as a policy matter, limiting the debate within the agency to selected groups of experts, rather than as a political matter, which would have involved a much wider range of participants. Accordingly, the authors'analysis shows howmost of the 12 studies the FCC used in its reviewfocused predominantly on economic aspects. Contextualizing media ownership primarily as an economic issue tends to disengage the broader public from such policy debates and facilitates the deregulatory agenda sought by the FCC's most active stakeholders and monitors—the regulated industries. Although this issue has begun to resonate with the broader public, such efforts to narrow the FCC's analytic perspective on media ownership rules marginalizes certain categories of stakeholders, as well as their issues and concerns, from the policy-making process.
γ‐Glutamylglutamine and Taurine Concentrations Are Decreased in the Cerebrospinal Fluid of Drug‐Naive Patients with Schizophrenic Disorders

Abstract: HPLC and gas chromatography‐mass spectrometry analyses of 18 amino acids, N‐acetylaspartate, N‐acetylaspartyglutamate, and 5‐hydroxyindoleacetic acid, derived from serotonin, and homovanillic acid, derived from dopamine, were performed in CSF collected from a group of patients with schizophrenia who either had been drug free for at least 1 year (n = 5) or were drug naive for psychotropic drugs (n = 21) and in 15 control subjects. Significant differences were found only for taurine (15% lower in the patients) and isoleucine (7% higher). A number of unidentified substances were detected, one of which proved to be markedly reduced (16%) among the schizophrenic patients. Liquid chromatography‐mass spectrometry with continuous flow‐fast atom bombardment interface allowed us to identify this substance as γ‐glutamyglutamine. The decreased level of γ‐glutamylglutamine may reflect a deficiency in the γ‐glutamyltransferase system, a system probably involved in glutamate uptake, or a deficiency in glutamine, an important precursor of releasable glutamate. Although glutamate was nonsignificantly reduced in the patients, it was one of the five substances (including γ‐glutamylglutamine) that were necessary for the best discrimination between the schizophrenic patients and the controls. These findings support the notion that the glutamatergic system is affected in schizophrenic disorders. In addition, they underscore the need to apply rigid bioanalytical techniques and use drug‐naive patients to gain in‐depth information on the pathophysiology of brain disorders such as schizophrenia.
IMRank: influence maximization via finding self-consistent ranking

Influence maximization, fundamental for word-of-mouth marketing and viral marketing, aims to find a set of seed nodes maximizing influence spread on social network. Early methods mainly fall into two paradigms with certain benefits and drawbacks: (1) Greedy algorithms, selecting seed nodes one by one, give a guaranteed accuracy relying on the accurate approximation of influence spread with high computational cost; (2) Heuristic algorithms, estimating influence spread using efficient heuristics, have low computational cost but unstable accuracy. We first point out that greedy algorithms are essentially finding a self-consistent ranking, where nodes' ranks are consistent with their ranking-based marginal influence spread. This insight motivates us to develop an iterative ranking framework, i.e., IMRank, to efficiently solve influence maximization problem under independent cascade model. Starting from an initial ranking, e.g., one obtained from efficient heuristic algorithm, IMRank finds a self-consistent ranking by reordering nodes iteratively in terms of their ranking-based marginal influence spread computed according to current ranking. We also prove that IMRank definitely converges to a self-consistent ranking starting from any initial ranking. Furthermore, within this framework, a last-to-first allocating strategy and a generalization of this strategy are proposed to improve the efficiency of estimating ranking-based marginal influence spread for a given ranking. In this way, IMRank achieves both remarkable efficiency and high accuracy by leveraging simultaneously the benefits of greedy algorithms and heuristic algorithms. As demonstrated by extensive experiments on large scale real-world social networks, IMRank always achieves high accuracy comparable to greedy algorithms, while the computational cost is reduced dramatically, about 10-100 times faster than other scalable heuristics.
Vitamin D protection from rat diabetic nephropathy is partly mediated through Klotho expression and renin–angiotensin inhibition

Abstract Objective: We hypothesised that vitamin D has a beneficial renal protective effect from diabetic nephropathy (DN). Methods: Four rat groups were included: normal control (control), type 2 diabetes for eight weeks (DM), treated group with angiotensin receptor blocker losartan (DM + L), and vitamin D-treated group started from the onset of diabetes (DM + Vit D). Results: In the both treated groups, we found a significant (p < .05) reduction in the renal pro-inflammatory and profibrotic markers induced by diabetes. Vitamin D caused more reduction in monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), transforming growth factor (TGFβ-1), and renin–angiotensin levels that gave better kidney function compared to the DM + L group. Conclusion: Vitamin D may have a valuable role in the renal protective effect from DN, this may occur via expression of its VDR, Klotho and blocking renin–angiotensin activation, so vitamin D should be considered as a target in renal prophylactic measures against DN.
Educational Adequacy Litigation in the American South: 1973–2009

For a decade prior and two following the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), educational finance litigation focused almost entirely on the equitable distribution of state educational financing, ending preferential disbursement of state funds. This culminated—and ended—in 1973, with the United States Supreme Court’s decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. Following Rodriguez, finance litigation cases moved to state courts, initially advancing under a state constitutional “equity” theory challenging the disparate and allegedly discriminatory method in which states chose to disburse state educational dollars. These cases were largely unsuccessful. However, beginning in the late 1980s, a new theory began to emerge, one contesting whether educational funding—regardless of how collected—was sufficient to meet state constitutional obligations to fund education for all children. These cases were far more successful and contributed significantly to defining the parameters of the educational clauses of state constitutions, which had previously been largely aspirational and legally amorphous. Virtually all of the states traditionally identified in the American South have experienced some level of “adequacy” litigation. Whether borne by reticence or economic inability, the legislatures of these states historically demonstrated less of a financial commitment to education than their extraregional peers. Following the post-Rodriguez federal trend, Southern courts were largely unreceptive to state equity litigation. However, beginning in the early 1980s, educational adequacy litigation in the South has been far more successful, resulting in a few cases to almost a singular level of judicial intervention in state educational policy. This article considers an overview of adequacy litigation in the American South, examining particularly the litigation in seven of the region’s states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
IcmF Is a Fusion between the Radical B12 Enzyme Isobutyryl-CoA Mutase and Its G-protein Chaperone*

Coenzyme B12 is used by two highly similar radical enzymes, which catalyze carbon skeleton rearrangements, methylmalonyl-CoA mutase and isobutyryl-CoA mutase (ICM). ICM catalyzes the reversible interconversion of isobutyryl-CoA and n-butyryl-CoA and exists as a heterotetramer. In this study, we have identified >70 bacterial proteins, which represent fusions between the subunits of ICM and a P-loop GTPase and are currently misannotated as methylmalonyl-CoA mutases. We designate this fusion protein as IcmF (isobutyryl-CoA mutase fused). All IcmFs are composed of the following three domains: the N-terminal 5′-deoxyadenosylcobalamin binding region that is homologous to the small subunit of ICM (IcmB), a middle P-loop GTPase domain, and a C-terminal part that is homologous to the large subunit of ICM (IcmA). The P-loop GTPase domain has very high sequence similarity to the Methylobacterium extorquens MeaB, which is a chaperone for methylmalonyl-CoA mutase. We have demonstrated that IcmF is an active ICM by cloning, expressing, and purifying the IcmFs from Geobacillus kaustophilus, Nocardia farcinica, and Burkholderia xenovorans. This finding expands the known distribution of ICM activity well beyond the genus Streptomyces, where it is involved in polyketides biosynthesis, and suggests a role for this enzyme in novel bacterial pathways for amino acid degradation, myxalamid biosynthesis, and acetyl-CoA assimilation.