Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing Algorithms for Discourse Segmentation

The structuring of discourse into multi-utterance segments has been claimed to correlate with linguistic phenomena such as reference, prosody, and the distribution of pauses and cue words. We discuss two methods for developing segmentation algorithms that take advantage of such correlations, by analyzing a coded corpus of spoken narratives. The coding includes a linear segmentation derived from an empirical study we conducted previously. Hand tuning based on analysis of errors guides the development of input features. We use machine learning techniques to automatically derive algorithms from the same input. Relative performance of the hand-tuned and automatically derived algorithms depends in part on how segment boundaries are defined. Both methods come much closer to human performance than our initial, untuned algorithms.
MoteTrack : An Indoor Location Detection System for Sensor Networks ∗

Wireless sensor networks enable various future applications of pervasive computing. A necessary component for building such applications is the ability to detect locations and use the user-context information in an effective way. We present MoteTrack, an indoor locating system for sensor networks. Based on RF signal strength, MoteTrack uses a two-phase approach to infer locations via a pre-computed reference database. To automate the database construction, we also developed a RF attenuation model, informed by the radio propagation literature. We have implemented MoteTrack on mica2 motes running on TinyOS and deployed it on one floor of an academic building. Our estimation errors at the 25%, 50% and 75% percentiles are 0.9, 1.7, and 2.7 meters respectively. Furthermore, we proposed a distributed architecture of MoteTrack using Bloom filters. Our java simulation results show that Bloom filters achieve significant amount of savings in terms of computation, communication and hence energy consumption which is usually the bottleneck of the sensor networks. Given the fact that the devices we used are small in size and relatively inexpensive, MoteTrack, with the option of a decentralized architecture, represents an attractive and powerful solution to the indoor location detection problem.
A review of the evidence for the effects of total dietary fat, saturated, monounsaturated and n-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids on vascular function, endothelial progenitor cells and microparticles

Vascular dysfunction is recognised as an integrative marker of CVD. While dietary strategies aimed at reducing CVD risk include reductions in the intake of SFA, there are currently no clear guidelines on what should replace SFA. The purpose of this review was to assess the evidence for the effects of total dietary fat and individual fatty acids (SFA, MUFA and n-6 PUFA) on vascular function, cellular microparticles and endothelial progenitor cells. Medline was systematically searched from 1966 until November 2010. A total of fifty-nine peer-reviewed publications (covering fifty-six studies), which included five epidemiological, eighteen dietary intervention and thirty-three test meal studies, were identified. The findings from the epidemiological studies were inconclusive. The limited data available from dietary intervention studies suggested a beneficial effect of low-fat diets on vascular reactivity, which was strongest when the comparator diet was high in SFA, with a modest improvement in measures of vascular reactivity when high-fat, MUFA-rich diets were compared with SFA-rich diets. There was consistent evidence from the test meal studies that high-fat meals have a detrimental effect on postprandial vascular function. However, the evidence for the comparative effects of test meals rich in MUFA or n-6 PUFA with SFA on postprandial vascular function was limited and inconclusive. The lack of studies with comparable within-study dietary fatty acid targets, a variety of different study designs and different methods for determining vascular function all confound any clear conclusions on the impact of dietary fat and individual fatty acids on vascular function.
'Engendering' Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs): The issues and the challenges

This paper discusses the 'engendering' of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), and the role of organisations such as Oxfam in supporting this process, at the country level and internationally. It is based on an evaluation assessing the extent to which Oxfam Great Britain's (GB's) work on PRSPs has been mainstreaming perspectives on gender and diversity. The evaluation was part of a larger gender mainstreaming evaluation, demonstrating Oxfam's strong commitment to promoting gender equality in its development work.
Diverse Learners

20 Gisela Ernst-Slavit is a professor of English as a second language education and bilingual education in the Department of Teaching and Learning and David Slavit is an associate professor of mathematics education in the Department of Teaching and Learning and the Department of Pure and Applied Mathematics, both with Washington State University Vancouver, Vancouver, Washington. Both authors contributed equally to the production of this manuscript. importance of the interplay of language and culture in the teaching of mathematics. This is particularly significant if we consider the increasing numbers of ELLs in today’s classrooms. Current census data indicate that school districts throughout the United States are increasingly serving a student population whose home languages and cultures are diverse. For the 1993-94 school year, the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition (NCELA) reported a national ELL student enrollment of 3,552,497. Ten years later, there were 4,999,481 school–aged ELLs in the U.S., reflecting approximately 10.3% of the student body. States with historically large percentages of ELLs continue to show increases in this student population (e.g., Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas). However, current data also show large and unexpected growth of schoolaged ELLs in states with historically low numbers (e.g., Tennessee, Indiana, Georgia, Nebraska, North Carolina, and South Carolina). While the number of linguistically and culturally diverse students is growing, the number of teachers with diverse backgrounds is not growing proportionally (Mercado, 2001; Nieto, 2004). In part, because of this asynchronous aspect of public schooling, the challenges of understanding and incorporating students’ linguistic and cultural capital into the instructional process intensifies for both individual teachers and school systems as a whole. But simultaneously, the demands of teaching mathematics to In a preservice mathematics methods class, David, a mathematics educator, shows the video “Good Morning Miss Toliver” (Toliver, 1993). This film features a public middle school teacher and her mathematics students from East Harlem in New York. The film depicts Miss Toliver using a variety of pedagogical strategies to arouse her students’ interests in math. Some of the strategies she uses include problem posing, integrating language arts into the teaching of mathematics, small group work, the application of mathematics to everyday real-world contexts, projectbased learning, family involvement, and current event analysis and application to mathematics. After viewing this short film, Becky raises her hand and states:
Quake : An Example Multi-User Network Application — Problems and Solutions in Distributed Interactive Simulations

Research efforts into the engineering of real-time, distributed, virtual environments for use over the Internet have flourished since DARPA’s first steps in this direction fifteen years ago. The video game “Quake” (from idSoftware), having been the first successful game in this genre, has seen its interface and network usage characteristics become something of a standard in the network entertainment world. As Quake-like games which promise more detailed character skins, richer environment textures, and “realer” physics are released in rapid succession, such applications are quickly becoming the most data-intensive, latency-abhorring, and generally demanding distributed programs running on today’s networks. With this in mind, we have chosen the freely available “Quake I” and “QuakeWorld” sources as the subjects for a series of experiments to determine what transport and network layer strategies result in the best game play for the user, and why. In modifying these sources, we have attempted to define the term “acceptable gameplay” in networked first person shooters, and obtained quantitative data capturing this notion. Furthermore, we have quantitatively demonstrated that the later QuakeWorld code exhibits, as predicted, better network performance than the earlier Quake I code.
Human action recognition in videos using motion impression image

Human action recognition in surveillance has become a hot topic in computer vision. In this paper, we develope a new method to recognize human action using motion information in video. Video sequence is compressed along time axis into a Motion Impression Image (MII), which is combined with two types of impression images from different views. One is a Period Impression Image (PII) by exploring the characteristics of the motion frequency. The other is an Optical Flow Impression Image (OFII) obtained from the analysis of motion mode. The proposed MII is a compact and time-invariant representation. Furthermore, it is simple and efficient to implement. After quantizing the combined MIIs, we feed them into a spatial pyramid matching kernel (SPMK) based classifier to recognize various human actions. At last, experiments on a known benchmark dataset demonstrate the better performance of the proposed approach against the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Prediction of Protein Function from Protein-Protein Interaction Network by Weighted Graph Mining

Protein-protein interaction network plays a key role in protein function prediction. Many previous studies attempted to assign the protein function by neighbor or the connected path way to known protein. However, since interacting proteins do not always correspond, their accuracy is limited. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to predict the protein function by weighted graph mining. Our proposed approach finds the functional frequent 2-node and 3-node patterns by labeling each protein node as a set of corresponding functions to predict the protein function without functional inconsistent between interacting protein. It also makes a selection from discovered frequent patterns by applying the weight to each edge so that we could compare which pattern is the most reliable for the function prediction. The function prediction is performed by matching the selected 2-node patterns, interacting with unannotated protein, with the frequent 3-node patterns. In the experiment, we used yeast protein interaction network which has functional frequent 3-node patterns and result shows 0.653 of function prediction accuracy. Compared with other methods’ performance, our approach is better.
The application of enterprise architecture approach to military concept development-Case study

Concept development and experimentation (CD&E) plays an important role in driving strategic transformation in the military community. Defence architecture frameworks, such as the NATO architecture framework, are considered excellent means to support CD&E. There is not much empirical evidence, however, to indicate how enterprise architectures (EA) are applied in the military community or particularly in military CD&E. Consequently, this paper describes and discusses empirical application of the EA approach in CD&E. The research method in the paper is a case study. Situational method engineering (SiME) is used as a framework to adapt the EA approach to the case project of the paper. The findings of the paper suggest that the EA is applicable to CD&E work, although all aspects of the original concept could not be expressed in the EA model of the case project. The results also show that the SiME method can support in applying the EA framework to the CD&E in the case project.
Joint work and power associated with acceleration and deceleration in tammar wallabies (Macropus eugenii)

SUMMARY Measurements of joint work and power were determined using inverse dynamics analysis based on ground reaction force and high-speed video recordings of tammar wallabies as they decelerated and accelerated while hopping over a force platform on level ground. Measurements were obtained over a range of accelerations ranging from -6 m s-2 to 8 m s-2. The goal of our study was to determine which joints are used to modulate mechanical power when tammar wallabies change speed. From these measurements, we also sought to determine which hind limb muscle groups are the most important for producing changes in mechanical work. Because our previous in vivo analyses of wallaby distal muscle function indicated that these muscle-tendon units favor elastic energy savings and perform little work during steady level and incline hopping, we hypothesized that proximal muscle groups operating at the hip and knee joint are most important for the modulation of mechanical work and power. Of the four hind limb joints examined, the ankle joint had the greatest influence on the total limb work, accounting for 89% of the variation observed with changing speed. The hip and metatarsophalageal (MP) joints also contributed to modulating whole limb work, but to a lesser degree than the ankle, accounting for 28% (energy production) and -24% (energy absorption) of the change in whole limb work versus acceleration, respectively. In contrast, the work produced at the knee joint was independent of acceleration. Based on the results of our previous in vivo studies and given that the magnitude of power produced at the ankle exceeds that which these muscles alone could produce, we conclude that the majority of power produced at the ankle joint is likely transferred from the hip and knee joints via proximal bi-articular muscles, operating in tandem with bi-articular ankle extensors, to power changes in hopping speed of tammar wallabies. Additionally, over the observed range of performance, peak joint moments at the ankle (and resulting tendon strains) did not increase significantly with acceleration, indicating that having thin tendons favoring elastic energy storage does not necessarily limit a tammar wallaby's ability to accelerate or decelerate.
Recruitment of women research participants: the Women's Health Registry at the University of Michigan.

OBJECTIVE The goal was to develop the Women's Health Registry, a research participant database that prospectively collects detailed information on potential research subjects to assist in linking them with open research protocols and to assess investigator use and satisfaction with this Registry. METHODS The Women's Health Registry was launched in 1999. Women aged > or =18 years were recruited to enroll in a database of women with interest in research participation and to complete a health questionnaire. Women's health researchers with IRB-approved projects were encouraged to apply for access to the Registry participants. In 2003, the first 15 investigators to use the Women's Health Registry were asked to participate in a standardized open-ended interview to assess investigator satisfaction with this recruitment tool. RESULTS The Women's Health Registry is currently populated with 2436 women: 36.8% aged 18-34, 39.9% aged 35-54, 16.8% aged 55-69, and 6.4% aged > or =70 years. Of these women, 84% are Caucasian and 8.5% are African American. Structured interviews with 13 of the 15 investigators contacted revealed that 36.4% of the total subject enrollment recruited by these investigators was recruited from the Women's Health Registry. In addition, Registry participants were more likely to enroll in their research protocols than women contacted through other methods. Most of the investigators' expectations from the Women's Health Registry were met, except for access to menopausal women. CONCLUSIONS The Women's Health Registry was successfully developed, and the goal of linking women with appropriate protocols was met with significant investigator satisfaction.
Examining bounded realness with generalized Nyquist loci in multivariable feedback configurations

In this paper, we propose an alternative frequency-domain interpretation about bounded realness and norm evaluation in the linear time-invariant (or simply LTI) multi-variable continuous-time feedback configuration setting. The technique can be implemented numerically as well as geometrically by means of a class of generalized Nyquist loci without open-loop unstable pole distribution, locus orientation pre-specification and unstable-pole-related encirclement counting. Different from the bounded real lemma and the Hamiltonian test that are essentially matrix algebraic approaches, the results here spot some new light on bounded realness in a complex functional and geometrical fashion. The generalized Nyquist approach is furthermore exploited carefully for the norm estimation in form of geometric bisection algorithms. Numerical examples are included to illustrate the main results.
Nuclear-Gene Targeting by Using Single-Stranded DNA Avoids Illegitimate DNA Integration in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii

ABSTRACT Homologous DNA recombination (HR) allows the deletion (knockout), repair (rescuing), and modification of a selected gene, thereby rendering a functional analysis of the gene product possible. However, targeting of nuclear genes has been an inefficient process in most eukaryotes, including algae, plants, and animals, due to the dominance of integration of the applied DNA into nonhomologous regions of the genome. We have shown for the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii by repairing a previously introduced truncated aminoglycoside 3′-phosphotransferase gene, aphVIII, that single-stranded DNA can recombine with a homologous endogenous DNA region of interest. Nonhomologous DNA integration appeared to be more than 100-fold reduced compared with the use of double-stranded DNA, thus allowing isolation of the homologous recombinants. We propose that this method will be applicable to direct targeting of nuclear C. reinhardtii genes.
Kernel sparse representation based classification for undersampled problem

Sparse representation for classification (SRC) has attracted much attention in recent years. It usually performs well under the following assumptions. The first assumption is that each class has sufficient training samples. In other words, SRC is not good at dealing with the undersampled problem, i.e., each class has few training samples, even single sample. The second one is that the sample vectors belonging to different classes should not distribute on the same vector direction. However, the above two assumptions are not always satisfied in real-world problems. In this paper, we propose a novel SRC based algorithm, i.e., kernel sparse representation based classifier for undersampled problem (KSRC-UP) to perform classification. It does not need the above assumptions in principle. KSRC-UP can deal well with the small scale and high dimensional real world data sets. Experiments on the popular face databases show that our KSRC-UP method can perform better than other SRC methods.
Ferulic acid modulates nitric oxide synthase expression in focal cerebral ischemia

Nitric oxide (NO) is generated by three different NO synthase (NOS) isoforms, endothelial NOS (eNOS), inducible NOS (iNOS), and neuronal NOS (nNOS). It is known that eNOS produces NO, which exerts a protective effect, while iNOS produces NO with neurotoxic effects. Ferulic acid preserves neuronal cells against from cerebral ischemia and glutamate-induced excitotoxicity. This study confirmed the neuroprotective effect of ferulic acid and investigated the levels of three NOS isoforms in focal cerebral ischemia with or without ferulic acid. Rats were immediately treated with ferulic acid (100 mg/kg, i.v.) after middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO). Brains tissues were collected at 24 h after the onset of occlusion. The expressions of these three isoforms in cerebral ischemia with ferulic acid were analyzed using Western blot technique. Ferulic acid treatment significantly decreases the number of TUNEL-positive cells in the cerebral cortex against MCAO injury. The levels of eNOS decreased in MCAO-operated animals, while ferulic acid treatment attenuated the MCAO-induced decrease of eNOS. However, iNOS and nNOS expression levels increased during MCAO, and ferulic acid prevented injury-induced increase of these isoforms. Thus, these findings suggest that the up- and down modulation of three isoforms by ferulic acid is associated with a neuroprotective mechanism.
SHINOBI: A real-time code clone detection tool for software maintenance

Recent research describes how code clones in source code decrease reliability of the program and require more development cost. To solve the problem, several code clone detection methods and tools have been implemented. In this paper, we propose a novel code clone detection/modification tool to support the software maintenance process. The proposed tool, SHINOBI, indicates code clones in source code immediately by real-time clone detection. The results of an evaluation experiment showed the system had sufficient performance to support programmers in a large-scale maintenance project.
Sustainable future? Building and life-style assessment

Energy, both in terms of its production and its usage has occupied a prime place in research as well as politics and world economy for the past few years. The majority of nations are aiming to deliver severe carbon cuts in the next few years. However, achieving a carbon-free future needs more than infrastructure investment and novel efficient technologies for buildings, transportation and other large consumer domains. It needs a better understanding of people as consumers, as well as a better understanding of energy waste across the multitude of socio-techical systems around us. With regards to the built environment and particularly residential buildings, the authors propose that dual, quantitative and qualitative approaches to characterising, assessing and improving occupied buildings are necessary. Such approaches would synchronously cater for understanding i) buildings technical performance (fabric and building heating, cooling and ventilation systems) and ii) occupant's motivation, ability, knowledge and efficacy for adopting low carbon lifestyles. When deployed at scale, the above will enable cost effective, targeted interventions for both building fabric and systems improvement and towards empowering their occupants to live sustainably. The paper describes such a quantitative and qualitative approach and proposes assessment tools. Further, the authors comment on the potential benefits from monitoring campaigns when deployed at scale.
LSE centre for economic performance: immigration and the UK labour market

A new series of Election Analyses is now available from the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). The series will discuss the research evidence on some of the key policy battlegrounds of the 2010 General Election, including macroeconomic policy, immigration, health, education, crime, poverty and inequality, labour market policy, regional policy, energy and the environment, financial regulation and bankers’ bonuses, and foreign aid. The first CEP Election Analysis, by Jonathan Wadsworth, examines the research evidence on immigration and the UK labour market. The publication is summarised below and can be found in full on the CEP Election Analysis Site