Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Aspiration of English voiceless stop consonants in Southern Sotho: a case study

This article investigates voice onset times (VOT) as produced by Southern Sotho speakers in their own language and in their pronunciation of English. Three levels of L2 proficiency are considered, namely those of Grade 7, Grade 12, and graduated Southern Sotho speakers of English—each group a minimum of five years apart. The purpose is to study the interaction between two similar, yet distinct consonantal systems in the process of language acquisition, viz. aspirated consonants of Southern Sotho and English. Of special theoretical interest is the fact that Southern Sotho possesses a dual system, in which presence or absence of aspiration is phonemic, in contrast with English, where aspiration is phonetically motivated and thus a predictable feature, dependent on factors such as position in a syllable, or of stress. Presence or absence of aspiration is often taken to be a notable trait characterizing the nativeness of second- language accents. The most important findings of this investigation are that VOT values of the three diverse groups do serve as a discriminative factor as long as the data sets are sufficiently large. In such large sets, the results support the general hierarchy for the place of articulation of voiceless aspirated stops in Southern Sotho as well as in the English accent of Southern Sotho speakers. When VOTs per group are considered, the pattern tends to get disturbed. On the grounds of the results, a specific kind of language interference rather than the usual one of negative language transfer is proposed. The theory of lexical frequency turns out not to be able to explain some specific findings, e.g. the behaviour of the bilabial [ph] in the English productions, especially that of the youngest group of speakers.
Adolescents' Self-Reports of Tobacco, Alcohol, and Marijuana use: Examining the Comparability of Video Tape, Cartoon and Verbal Bogus-Pipeline Procedures

Recent studies of smoking prevention have utilized procedures designed to motivate adolescents to provide truthful self-reports by convincing them that their smoking status can be verified by an independent (“bogus”) measure. The current study evaluated the effectiveness of three “bogus-pipeline” procedures hypothesized to increase the validity of self-reported cigarette smoking among 646 seventh graders from two suburban New York City schools. A second aim was to determine the extent to which “bogus-pipeline” procedures targeted specifically at cigarette smoking can indirectly increase the validity of self-reports of alcohol and marijuana use. Over-all, the observed bogus-pipeline effects were modest. Of the three procedures, both the video tape and cartoon presentation modes resulted in a slightly higher percentage of self-reported smoking behavior; only the cartoon presentation mode resulted in a higher percentage of drinking behavior. A reverse effect was observed for self-reported marijuana use in which subjects in the non-bogus-pipeline (control) condition reported significantly more marijuana use than those in the three bogus-pipeline conditions, suggesting overreporting in this population. It appears the validity of adolescents' self-reports may vary from population to population and from behavior to behavior in relation to the perceived social desirability of the specific behavior measured.
Why Do Only Some Galaxy Clusters Have Cool Cores?

Flux-limited X-ray samples indicate that about half of rich galaxy clusters have cool cores. Why do only some clusters have cool cores while others do not? In this paper, cosmological N-body + Eulerian hydrodynamic simulations, including radiative cooling and heating, are used to address this question as we examine the formation and evolution of cool core (CC) and noncool core (NCC) clusters. These adaptive mesh refinement simulations produce both CC and NCC clusters in the same volume. They have a peak resolution of 15.6 h−1 kpc within a (256 h−1 Mpc)3 box. Our simulations suggest that there are important evolutionary differences between CC clusters and their NCC counterparts. Many of the numerical CC clusters accreted mass more slowly over time and grew enhanced CCs via hierarchical mergers; when late major mergers occurred, the CCs survived the collisions. By contrast, NCC clusters experienced major mergers early in their evolution that destroyed embryonic CCs and produced conditions that prevented CC reformation. As a result, our simulations predict observationally testable distinctions in the properties of CC and NCC beyond the core regions in clusters. In particular, we find differences between CC versus NCC clusters in the shapes of X-ray surface brightness profiles, between the temperatures and hardness ratios beyond the cores, between the distribution of masses, and between their supercluster environs. It also appears that CC clusters are no closer to hydrostatic equilibrium than NCC clusters, an issue important for precision cosmology measurements.
Loss of nuclear TDP‐43 in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) causes altered expression of splicing machinery and widespread dysregulation of RNA splicing in motor neurones

Loss of nuclear TDP‐43 characterizes sporadic and most familial forms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). TDP‐43 (encoded by TARDBP) has multiple roles in RNA processing. We aimed to determine whether (1) RNA splicing dysregulation is present in lower motor neurones in ALS and in a motor neurone‐like cell model; and (2) TARDBP mutations (mtTARDBP) are associated with aberrant RNA splicing using patient‐derived fibroblasts.
Multiple Object Tracking Using Motion Vectors from Compressed Video

Motion vectors extracted from a compressed video file can be used to track objects in the video and it could be efficient as motion vectors provide trajectory information of the objects. However, tracking objects represented by the motion vectors can be inaccuracy because of camera movement, small size sets of motion vectors acting as noise, unmoving of the object and occlusion. These are conditions in most real world video application. The system in this paper uses the statistical and distributional information of motion vectors to overcome the problems with three stages. 1) Frame preprocessing uses a Mode reduction technique to remove unwanted motion vectors created from camera movements. 2) Intra-frame processing: k-means is used to segment and cluster moving objects. Statistical standard deviation is used to extract objects' torso and remove small size sets of motion vectors. 3) Inter-frame processing: By comparing the positional information between successive frames, tracking object in successive frames is assigned a same label. A copying rule is used to represent the stopping of the tracking object. The direction and velocity information of motion vector is used for the occlusion problems. Overall, an experiment on tracking multiple basketball players demonstrates a good result of the system.
Na escola se aprende que a diferença faz a diferença

Neste artigo, problematizo os limites das instituicoes sociais em lidar com os sujeitos que fogem as normas de genero. Deter-me-ei principalmente nas respostas que a escola tem dado aos/as estudantes que apresentam performances de genero que fogem ao considerado normal.
Healthy Mind, Healthy Habits: The Influence of Activity Involvement in Middle Childhood.

There is growing evidence that participating in extracurricular and out-of-school activities during adolescence is associated with both short- and long-term indicators of positive development (e.g., Eccles & Barber, 1999; Eccles & Templeton, 2002; Mahoney, 2000). Yet, few researchers have questioned whether these relations are solely the result of activity participation during adolescence or if they are the culmination of a process that began in middle childhood. Middle childhood is marked by many physical, cognitive, social, and contextual changes. It is during this time that children develop multiple cognitive skills, such as reasoning and the ability to reflect on one's accomplishments, experiences, and aspirations. Children's social worlds broaden as they begin to participate in organized out-of-school activities. The changes in children's abilities and skills coupled with the new contexts in which children develop suggest that middle childhood is an important period for the development of skills and beliefs through participation in out-of-school activities. Although entry into adolescence and adulthood brings new abilities and interests, some of the benefits of adolescent participation may not be realized unless the groundwork is laid in middle childhood. There is little evidence available concerning developmental hypotheses about the reasons or mechanisms for these associations. Longitudinal studies over extended periods of time afford an opportunity to examine positive and negative consequences of participation based on activity characteristics as well as other potential influences such as parental encouragement or child talent.
Encouraging the Inclusion of Evolutionary Psychology into Information Systems' Theoretical Repertoire as an Emerging Trend

Social and cognitive psychology frames have dominated IS researchers’ attention in developing and applying theory to explain human behavior in the context of IS. However with a few exceptions, the information systems literature has largely ignored the possible explanatory power of evolutionary psychology. This is a major omission, particularly as Darwin argued that perception and cognition, areas of IS interest, are the product of evolution of the human brain adapting to motivate behavior that supports productive decision-making. It seems appropriate for IS research to recognize that humans are an evolved, social, cognitive species. In this paper, we encourage IS scholars to appreciate the potential contribution of evolutionary psychology as an emerging trend to enrich the theoretical repertoire for information systems.
Exploring erotics in Emily Dickinson's correspondence with text mining and visual interfaces

This paper describes a system to support humanities scholars in their interpretation of literary work. It presents a user interface and Web architecture that integrates text mining, a graphical user interface and visualization, while attempting to remain easy to use by non specialists. Users can interactively read and rate documents found in a digital libraries collection, prepare training sets, review results of classification algorithms and explore possible indicators and explanations. Initial evaluation steps suggest that there is a rationale for "provocational" text mining in literary interpretation
Expressive Power and Complexity in Algebraic Logic

Two complexity problems in algebraic logic are surveyed: the satisfaction problem and the network satisfaction problem. Various complexity results are collected here and some new ones are derived. Many examples are given. The network satisfaction problem for most cylindric algebras of dimension four or more is shown to be intractable. Complexity is tied-in with the expressivity of a relation algebra. Expressivity and complexity are analysed in the context of homogeneous representations. The model-theoretic notion of interpretation is used to generalise known complexity results to a range of other algebraic logics. In particular a number of relation algebras are shown to have intractable network satisfaction problems.
Difficult conversations: Improving communication skills and relational abilities in health care*

Background: Communication skills and relational abilities are essential core competencies that are associated with improved health outcomes, better patient adherence, fewer malpractice claims, and enhanced satisfaction with care. Yet, corresponding educational opportunities are sorely underrepresented and undervalued. Objective: To evaluate the impact of an interdisciplinary experiential learning paradigm to improve communication skills and relational abilities of pediatric critical care practitioners. Design: Prepost design, including baseline, immediate follow-up, and 5-month self-report questionnaires. Setting: Tertiary care pediatric hospital, Children's Hospital Boston. Participants: One hundred six interdisciplinary clinicians with a range of experience levels and clinical specialties. Measurements: Participants rated their sense of preparation, communication and relational skills, confidence, and anxiety. Open-ended questions asked participants about lessons learned, aspects of the training they found most helpful, and suggestions to improve the training. Main Results: When questions were posed in a yes/no format, participants were nearly unanimous (93% to 98%) that the training had improved their sense of preparation, communication skills, and confidence immediately after and 5 months posttraining. Ninety percent of participants reported improvements in establishing relationships immediately after the training and 84% reported improvements 5 months posttraining. Eighty-two percent reported reduced anxiety immediately after training and 74% experienced reduced anxiety 5 months posttraining. On Likert items, 70% estimated their preparation had improved; 40% to 70% reported improvements in communication skills, confidence and anxiety, and 15% in relationship skills. Four qualitative themes emerged: identifying one's existing competence; integrating new communication skills and relational abilities; appreciating interdisciplinary collaboration; and valuing the learning itself. Conclusions: A 1-day experiential learning paradigm focused on communication skills and relational abilities was highly valued, clinically useful, and logistically feasible. Participants reported better preparation, improved communication and relational skills, greater confidence, and reduced anxiety. Participants deepened their understanding of family perspectives, recognized valuable existing competencies, and strengthened their commitment to interdisciplinary teamwork.
Contour Tracking by Enhancing Corners and Junctions

In a previous paper an approach was presented in which, given an approximated starting contour on the first frame, all the contours of the image sequence could be outlined automatically with the desired resolution. Although such an approach provided satisfactory results, singular isolated points, such as corners and junctions, gave rise to localization errors. The difficulties encountered at corners and junctions were analyzed and the edge operator was held to be the main cause of this failure. The gradient of Gaussian, which was used in the previous paper, must be replaced by a filter providing: (i) ridges in correspondence with discontinuities and (ii) local maxima at junctions and corners. Such a filter is introduced and its response to a white Gaussian noise is analyzed. The filter response is a dispersion index and, in particular, it is a generalization of the absolute central moment, i.e., the mean deviation. The edge map, generated by the filter, can be divided into two maps which represent the “positive mean deviation” and the “negative mean deviation,” respectively. Their difference is the mean deviation and provides ridges at the discontinuities (as well as a gradient of Gaussian) and local maxima at junctions and corners. Their sum is a classical DoG (difference of Gaussians). The two single maps provide two half-boundaries which other authors have proposed in order both to achieve maps of the edge points and to improve the procedure of boundary following.
Locality vs. criticality

Current memory hierarchies exploit locality of references to reduce load latency and thereby improve processor performance. Locality based schemes aim at reducing the number of cache misses and tend to ignore the nature of misses. This leads to a potential mis-match between load latency requirements and latencies realized using a traditional memory system. To bridge this gap, we partition loads as critical and non-critical. A load that needs to complete early to prevent processor stalls is classified as critical, while a load that can tolerate a long latency is considered non-critical. In this paper, we investigate if it is worth violating locality to exploit information on criticality to improve processor performance. We present a dynamic critical load classification scheme and show that 40% performance improvements are possible on average, if all critical loads are guaranteed to hit in the LI cache. We then compare the two properties, locality and criticality, in the context of several cache organization and prefetching schemes. We find that the working set of critical loads is large, and hence practical cache organization schemes based on criticality are unable to reduce the critical load miss ratios enough to produce performance gains. Although criticality-based prefetching can help for some resource constrained programs, its benefit over locality-based prefetching is small and may not be worth the added complexity.
Premature Atherosclerosis Associated With Monogenic Insulin Resistance

BackgroundThe common insulin resistance syndrome, with obesity, dyslipidemia, hyperglycemia, and hypertension, is associated with increased risk of atherosclerosis. Early atherosclerosis in rare monogenic forms of insulin resistance, however, has not been extensively documented. Cardiovascular end points were thus evaluated in subjects with Dunnigan-type familial partial lipodystrophy (FPLD) due to mutations at LMNA codon 482. Methods and ResultsFPLD subjects ≥35 years old were stratified by genotype for either the LMNA R482Q or R482W mutation. Twenty-three subjects were heterozygous mutation carriers, and 17 were R482/R482 homozygous family control subjects. All LMNA mutation carriers had FPLD with insulin resistance. In addition, LMNA mutation carriers had significantly more type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and dyslipidemia than normal family control subjects. Eight LMNA mutation carriers had coronary heart disease (CHD), compared with 1 normal control subject (OR 5.9, 95% CI 1.2 to 30.2). Six LMNA mutation carriers had CHD end points before age 55 years, and 4 of these, all women, had been hospitalized for CABG surgery between the ages of 35 and 54 years. ConclusionsRare LMNA mutations that underlie FPLD with insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia are also associated with early CHD, notably in women. This suggests that abnormalities of the nuclear envelope can result in a phenotype that recapitulates most of the important attributes of the common insulin resistance syndrome, including accelerated cardiovascular disease. FPLD thus appears to be an appropriate human monogenic model for the common insulin resistance syndrome.
A simple FSPN model of P2P live video streaming system

Peer to Peer (P2P) live streaming is relatively new paradigm that aims for streaming live video to large number of clients with low cost. Many such applications allready exist in the market, but, prior to creating such system it is necessary to analyze its performance via representative model that can provide good insight in system's behavior. Modeling and performance analysis of P2P live video streaming systems is challenging task which requires addressing many properties and issues of P2P systems that create complex combinatorial problem. Inspired by several related articles, in this paper we present our Fluid Stochastic Petri Net (FSPN) model for performance analysis of a mesh based P2P live video streaming system.
Confidence-driven Rewriting for Improved Translation

Some source texts are more difficult to translate than others. One way to handle such texts is to modify them prior to translation. Yet, a prominent factor that is often overlooked is the source translatability with respect to the specific translation system and the specific model that are being used. We present an approach, and an interactive tool implementing it, where source sentences are rewritten in order to maximize confidence estimates with respect to the translation model. The automatically-generated rewritings are then proposed for the user’s approval. Such an approach can reduce post-editing effort, replacing it by costeffective pre-editing that can be done by monolinguals.
Temporally Weighted Linear Prediction Features for Tackling Additive Noise in Speaker Verification

Text-independent speaker verification under additive noise corruption is considered. In the popular mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) front-end, the conventional Fourier-based spectrum estimation is substituted with weighted linear predictive methods, which have earlier shown success in noise-robust speech recognition. Two temporally weighted variants of linear predictive modeling are introduced to speaker verification and they are compared to FFT, which is normally used in computing MFCCs, and to conventional linear prediction. The effect of speech enhancement (spectral subtraction) on the system performance with each of the four feature representations is also investigated. Experiments by the authors on the NIST 2002 SRE corpus indicate that the accuracy of the conventional and proposed features are close to each other on clean data. For factory noise at 0 dB SNR level, baseline FFT and the better of the proposed features give EERs of 17.4% and 15.6%, respectively. These accuracies improve to 11.6% and 11.2%, respectively, when spectral subtraction is included as a preprocessing method. The new features hold a promise for noise-robust speaker verification.
Accurate Array-Based Measurement for Subthreshold-Current of MOS Transistors

A MOS transistor-array structure for accurate subthreshold current characterization is presented. Two architectural improvements called LCS and PES, and measured data treatment called MCC are utilized. The LCS, leakage current cut-off switch, reduces unwanted leakage current of the non-target devices which masks the target leakage current. The PES, potential equalizing supply, further reduces the masking current by setting source and drain terminals of the LCS equal. The MCC, masking current cancellation, improves measurement accuracy by subtracting remaining masking current. The proposed circuit structure and the procedure virtually eliminate usual constraint on the number of transistors that can be present in an array. The array structure also offers greater flexibility in choosing a row-column aspect ratio and allows different types of MOS transistors to be interweaved. Experimental array design consisting of 1023 low threshold voltage devices demonstrated accurate measurement of subthreshold leakage current with precision of a few picoamperes.