Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Morphology in Word Identification: A Word-Experience Model That Accounts for Morpheme Frequency Effects

In reading research, morphological processing and monomorphemic word identification have generally been treated separately. We describe a computational model that brings both kinds of reading together within a single framework. This model assumes that word knowledge-the orthography, phonology, and meaning of words-accumulates with experiences with individual words and that this knowledge is reflected in two functionally different aspects of word processing-familiarity and availability. We report simulations that demonstrate that the model accounts both for classical effects of frequency and consistency in simple word reading and for morphological effects in the reading of complex words. The morphology simulations naturally capture a distinction between inflectional and derivational morphology without defining this distinction a priori. We discuss the implications of our model for general issues in reading, including individual differences in reading ability.
Involvement of the Secretory Pathway and the Cytoskeleton in Intracellular Targeting and Tubule Assembly of Grapevine fanleaf virus Movement Protein in Tobacco BY-2 Cells Article, publication date, and citation information can be found at www.plantcell.org/cgi/doi/10.1105/tpc.013896.

Grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV) is one of a large class of plant viruses whose cell-to-cell transport involves the passage of virions through tubules composed of virus-encoded movement protein (MP). The tubules are embedded within modified plasmodesmata, but the mechanism of targeting of MP to these sites is unknown. To study intracellular GFLV MP trafficking, a green fluorescent protein–MP fusion (GFP:MP) was expressed in transgenic tobacco BY-2 suspension cells under the control of an inducible promoter. We show that GFP:MP is targeted preferentially to calreticulin-labeled foci within the youngest cross walls, where it assembles into tubules. During cell division, GFP:MP colocalizes in the cell plate with KNOLLE, a cytokinesis-specific syntaxin, and both proteins are linked physically, as shown by coimmunoprecipitation of the two proteins from the same microsomal fraction. In addition, treatment with various drugs has revealed that a functional secretory pathway, but not the cytoskeleton, is required for tubule formation. However, correct GFP:MP targeting to calreticulin-labeled foci seems to be cytoskeleton dependent. Finally, biochemical analyses have revealed that at least a fraction of the MP behaves as an intrinsic membrane protein. These findings support a model in which GFP:MP would be transported to specific sites via Golgi-derived vesicles along two different pathways: a microtubule-dependent pathway in normal cells and a microfilament-dependent default pathway when microtubules are depolymerized.
Mathematical Equivalence of Two Common Forms of Firing Rate Models of Neural Networks

We demonstrate the mathematical equivalence of two commonly used forms of firing rate model equations for neural networks. In addition, we show that what is commonly interpreted as the firing rate in one form of model may be better interpreted as a low-pass-filtered firing rate, and we point out a conductance-based firing rate model.
Corrosion Inhibitors for Reinforced Concrete

Reinforced concrete has been widely used in the last century, however, due to aggressive agents such as carbonic gas and chloride ions, it suffers premature deterioration. The concrete is a physical barrier that protects steel from corrosion, and the alkalinity of concrete leads to the formation of a passive layer around the reinforcement, which increases protection against corrosive processes. However, concrete is a porous material and has cracks that allow the entrance of aggressive agents, destabilizing the passive layer and corroding steel. The corrosion is the major cause of deterioration of concrete structures and several methods of protection and repair have been developed to increase the durability of such structures. Corrosion inhibitors, chemical substances that reduce the corrosion rate, have been widely used, both for prevention and correction. Inhibitors are classified according to their method of application, their mechanism of protection and chemical composition. In this chapter, through a literature review the main inhibitors used in reinforced concrete structures and their acting mechanisms are presented, as well as their efficiency and some side effects on concrete. It is very important to know the different types of inhibitors for correct use, thus increasing the life span of reinforced concrete structures.
Polar coding for the general wiretap channel

Information-theoretic work for wiretap channels is mostly based on random coding schemes. Designing practical coding schemes to achieve information-theoretic security is an important problem. By applying two recently developed techniques for polar codes, namely, universal polar coding and polar coding for asymmetric channels, we propose a polar coding scheme to achieve the secrecy capacity of the general wiretap channel.
A Conserved Domain Is Crucial for Acceptor Substrate Binding in a Family of Glucosyltransferases

ABSTRACT Serine-rich repeat glycoproteins (SRRPs) are highly conserved in streptococci and staphylococci. Glycosylation of SRRPs is important for bacterial adhesion and pathogenesis. Streptococcus agalactiae is the leading cause of bacterial sepsis and meningitis among newborns. Srr2, an SRRP from S. agalactiae strain COH1, has been implicated in bacterial virulence. Four genes (gtfA, gtfB, gtfC, and gtfD) located downstream of srr2 share significant homology with genes involved in glycosylation of other SRRPs. We have shown previously that gtfA and gtfB encode two glycosyltransferases, GtfA and GtfB, that catalyze the transfer of GlcNAc residues to the Srr2 polypeptide. However, the function of other glycosyltransferases in glycosylation of Srr2 is unknown. In this study, we determined that GtfC catalyzed the direct transfer of glucosyl residues to Srr2-GlcNAc. The GtfC crystal structure was solved at 2.7 Å by molecular replacement. Structural analysis revealed a loop region at the N terminus as a putative acceptor substrate binding domain. Deletion of this domain rendered GtfC unable to bind to its substrate Srr2-GlcNAc, concurrently abolished the glycosyltransferase activity of GtfC, and also altered glycosylation of Srr2. Furthermore, deletion of the corresponding regions from GtfC homologs also abolished their substrate binding and enzymatic activity, indicating that this region is functionally conserved. In summary, we have determined that GtfC is important for the glycosylation of Srr2 and identified a conserved loop region that is crucial for acceptor substrate binding from GtfC homologs in streptococci. These findings shed new mechanistic insight into this family of glycosyltransferases.
The Anillin-Related Region of Bud4 Is the Major Functional Determinant for Bud4's Function in Septin Organization during Bud Growth and Axial Bud Site Selection in Budding Yeast

ABSTRACT The anillin-related protein Bud4 of Saccharomyces cerevisiae is required for axial bud site selection by linking the axial landmark to the septins, which localize at the mother bud neck. Recent studies indicate that Bud4 plays a role in septin organization during cytokinesis. Here we show that Bud4 is also involved in septin organization during bud growth prior to cytokinesis, as bud4Δ shs1Δ cells displayed an elongated bud morphology and defective septin organization at 18°C. Bud4 overexpression also affected septin organization during bud growth in shs1Δ cells at 30°C. Bud4 was previously thought to associate with the septins via its central region, while the C-terminal anillin-related region was not involved in septin association. Surprisingly, we found that the central region of Bud4 alone targets to the bud neck throughout the cell cycle, unlike full-length Bud4, which localizes to the bud neck only during G2/M phase. We identified the anillin-related region to be a second targeting domain that cooperates with the central region for proper septin association. In addition, the anillin-related region could largely mediate Bud4's function in septin organization during bud growth and bud site selection. We show that this region interacts with the C terminus of Bud3 and the two segments depend on each other for association with the septins. Moreover, like the bud4Δ mutant, the bud3Δ mutant genetically interacts with shs1Δ and cdc12-6 mutants in septin organization, suggesting that Bud4 and Bud3 may cooperate in septin organization during bud growth. These observations provide new insights into the interaction of Bud4 with the septins and Bud3.
Applying Link Prediction to Recommendation Systems for Amazon Products CS224W Project

In this paper, we analyze various link prediction algorithms on the Amazon product co-purchasing dataset. We formulate the problem as an instance of information retrieval where we are given some query node q representing a product, and we want to retrieve a ranked list of the top products likely to be co-purchased with q. Although the Amazon dataset contains a lot of metadata relevant to machine learning for each product, this paper will focus primarily on recommendations based on inherent properties of the network structure. Furthermore, we will analyze how the performance of each approach degrades when less co-purchasing information is available.
Sequence segmentation for statistical machine translation

In the last decade, while statistical machine translation has advanced significantly, there is still much room for further improvements relating to many natural language processing tasks such as word segmentation, word alignment and parsing. Human language is composed of sequences of meaningful units. These sequences can be words, phrases, sentences or even articles serving as basic elements in communication and components for computational modeling. However, in monolingual text some sequences are not naturally separated by delimiters, and in bilingual text both sequence boundaries and their corresponding translations can be unlabeled. This work addresses solutions of sequence segmentation and alignment for statistical machine translation, including the following topics: Chinese word segmentation: Different from the explicit word segmentation in trivial approaches, I introduce integrated Chinese word segmentation, where segmentation and alignment of words are trained jointly, and the decoding is performed on the lattice composed of alternative word segmentations. I show that direct translation on Chinese characters can achieve even better translation performance than translation on Chinese words; Phrase training: Currently phrases are extracted in a heuristic way. I propose a mixture phrase pair model which is trained discriminatively allowing to combine multiple extraction processes and various resources, especially the underlying word alignment models discarded in the standard approach; Parallel sentence exploitation: Training corpus acquisition is crucial for a data-driven translation system. I propose a maximum-entropy model where document pairs are partitioned recursively into sentence pairs using ’binary segmentation’ without any requirement on sentence boundary markers; Domain adaptation: A hierarchical clustering algorithm is applied to classify the training data into distinct domains. Domain specific language models and translation models are then combined to build a domain dependent system, and domain priors are estimated with a minimum error rate training. Experimental results on state-of-the-art, large-scale Chinese-English tasks show that the training speed can be increased with a factor of four and each above mentioned method leads to an enhancement of the translation quality up to 6% relatively.
Application of a two‐pool model to soil carbon dynamics under elevated CO2

Elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase plant productivity and affect soil microbial communities, with possible consequences for the turnover rate of soil carbon (C) pools and feedbacks to the atmosphere. In a previous analysis (Van Groenigen et al., 2014), we used experimental data to inform a one‐pool model and showed that elevated CO2 increases the decomposition rate of soil organic C, negating the storage potential of soil. However, a two‐pool soil model can potentially explain patterns of soil C dynamics without invoking effects of CO2 on decomposition rates. To address this issue, we refit our data to a two‐pool soil C model. We found that CO2 enrichment increases decomposition rates of both fast and slow C pools. In addition, elevated CO2 decreased the carbon use efficiency of soil microbes (CUE), thereby further reducing soil C storage. These findings are consistent with numerous empirical studies and corroborate the results from our previous analysis. To facilitate understanding of C dynamics, we suggest that empirical and theoretical studies incorporate multiple soil C pools with potentially variable decomposition rates.
Improving revisitation in fisheye views with visit wear

The distortion caused by an interactive fisheye lens can make it difficult for people to remember items and locations in the data space. In this paper we introduce the idea of visit wear - a visual representation of the places that the user has previously visited - as a way to improve navigation in spaces affected by distortion. We outline the design dimensions of visit wear, and report on two studies. The first shows that increasing the distortion of a fisheye view does significantly reduce people's ability to remember object locations. The second study looks at the effects of visit wear on performance in revisitation tasks, and shows that both completion time and error rates are significantly improved when visit wear is present. Visit wear works by changing the revisitation problem from one of memory to one of visual search. Although there are limitations to the technique, visit wear has the potential to substantially improve the usability both of fisheye views and of graphical information spaces more generally.
Pure-tone audiometry outside a sound booth using earphone attentuation, integrated noise monitoring, and automation

Abstract Objective: Accessibility of audiometry is hindered by the cost of sound booths and shortage of hearing health personnel. This study investigated the validity of an automated mobile diagnostic audiometer with increased attenuation and real-time noise monitoring for clinical testing outside a sound booth. Design: Attenuation characteristics and reference ambient noise levels for the computer-based audiometer (KUDUwave) was evaluated alongside the validity of environmental noise monitoring. Clinical validity was determined by comparing air- and bone-conduction thresholds obtained inside and outside the sound booth (23 subjects). Study sample: Twenty-three normal-hearing subjects (age range, 20–75 years; average age 35.5) and a sub group of 11 subjects to establish test-retest reliability. Results: Improved passive attenuation and valid environmental noise monitoring was demonstrated. Clinically, air-conduction thresholds inside and outside the sound booth, corresponded within 5 dB or less > 90% of instances (mean absolute difference 3.3 ± 3.2 SD). Bone conduction thresholds corresponded within 5 dB or less in 80% of comparisons between test environments, with a mean absolute difference of 4.6 dB (3.7 SD). Threshold differences were not statistically significant. Mean absolute test-retest differences outside the sound booth was similar to those in the booth. Conclusion: Diagnostic pure-tone audiometry outside a sound booth, using automated testing, improved passive attenuation, and real-time environmental noise monitoring demonstrated reliable hearing assessments.
A Comparative Morphometric Analysis of Three Cranial Nerves in Two Phocids: The Hooded Seal (Cystophora cristata) and the Harbor Seal (Phoca vitulina)

While our knowledge about the senses of pinnipeds has increased over the last decades almost nothing is known about the organization of the neuroanatomical pathways. In a first approach to this field of research, we assessed the total number of myelinated axons of three cranial nerves (CNs) in the harbor (Phoca vitulina, Pv) and hooded seal (Cystophora cristata, Cc). Axons were counted in semithin sections of the nerves embedded in Epon and stained with toluidine blue. In both species, the highest axon number was found within the optic nerve (Pv 187,000 ± 8,000 axons, Cc 481,600 ± 1,300 axons). Generally, considering absolute axon numbers, far more axons were counted within the optic and trigmenial nerve (Pv 136,700 ± 2,500 axons, Cc 179,300 ± 6,900 axons) in hooded in comparison to harbor seals. The axon counts of the vestibulocochlear nerve are nearly identical for both species (Pv 87,100 ± 8,100 axons, Cc 86,600 ± 2,700 axons). However, when comparing cell density, the cell density is almost equal for all nerves for both species except for the optic nerve in which cell density was particularly higher than in the other nerves and higher in hooded in comparison to harbor seals. We here present the first comparative analysis of three CNs in two phocid seals. While the CNs of these closely related species share some general characteristics, pronounced differences in axon numbers/densities are apparent. These differences seem to reflect differences in e.g. size, habitat, and/or functional significance of the innervated sensory systems. Anat Rec, 299:370–378, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A Study on Adhesive Properties between GFRP Tube and Steel Tube

For the crucial issues of joints in the truss structure of pultruded GFRP tube, the double-sided shear adhesive test was performed on the steel tube joints and GFRP tube to explore the effect of different adhesive lengths on the distribution of adhesive stress, joint slip and bearing capacity, in order to provide the effective experimental basis and reference for the design of joint connection in the truss structure of GFRP tube. Keywords-pultruded GFRP tube; adhesive length; adhesive connection; distribution of adhesive stress; joint slip
Traffic sign classification using two-layer image representation

This paper makes use of locality-constrained linear coding (LLC) in a two-layer image representation framework for traffic sign recognition. As a multi-category classification problem with unbalanced frequencies and variations, many machine learning approaches have been adopted with some low level features for traffic sign recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method using coding features for traffic sign recognition. First, we extract features(dense SIFT features, HOG features and LBP features) and encode them with a k-means generated codebook and LLC. Second, each traffic sign image is represented by the features generated by spatial pyramid matching (SPM). Then, all the image representations from each kind of features are concatenated together as the final image representation. Finally, we show that a linear SVM classifier trained with this image representation can achieve the state-of-the-art recognition rate of 99.67% on the well-known German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark.
Second Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop In Association With

Collaborative communities are increasingly supported by systems of information and communication tools. Much current research and development focuses on the technical and semantic aspects of tool system interoperability. However, for developing effective tool systems, their pragmatic evaluation is also essential. This implies that the usage context of tools is taken into account. In this paper, we envision an approach to the pragmatic evaluation of tool system interoperability. Its main elements are a conceptualization of the tool system, its usage context, and an evaluation processs. With these basic elements, pragmatic evaluation can be operationalized in many different ways. We illustrate our approach with several real-world examples.
Securing sensor data storage and query based on k‐out‐of‐ n coding

With in‐network sensor data storage and query, sensed data are stored locally and further accessed by users on demand. Thus, without proper protection for sensor data and user queries, compromise of sensor nodes may reveal sensitive information about the sensed environment as well as users’ query patterns. Furthermore, the adversary can alter some stored data and prevent users from recovering information correctly. In this paper, we propose and analyze the use of maximum‐distance separable codes to address the problem. First, initial data is encoded in (n, k) maximum‐distance separable code and spread from a single data source to a set of storage nodes for higher survivability. Second, a blind signature‐based privacy scheme is explored to preserve user query, such that authorized user's identity and privacy interests are concealed from others. Finally, an efficient data retrieval scheme is carried out such that the redundancy symbols in the remaining nodes are accessed only if the user fails to decode the data, which reduces the communication and computation cost. Analysis and evaluation verify the efficiency of the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Distribution of body mass index among subjects with COPD in the Middle East and North Africa region: data from the BREATHE study

Background Data describing the potential relationship between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and body mass index (BMI) are limited within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Objective To evaluate the distribution of BMI among subjects with COPD in the general population of the MENA region. Methods This study was a subanalysis of the BREATHE study, a cross-sectional survey of COPD conducted in the general population of ten countries in the MENA region and Pakistan. The study population consisted of subjects screened for COPD who documented their weight and height. A COPD questionnaire was administered to subjects who screened positively for COPD in order to collect data on patient characteristics, symptom severity, management and burden of disease, comorbidities, and health care resource utilization and data allowing calculation of the BMI. The COPD Assessment Test (CAT) was administered to those screened positively for COPD to collect data on the impact of respiratory symptoms. Results Nine hundred and ninety-six subjects with COPD, who completed the detailed COPD questionnaire and documented their weight and height, were included in this analysis. The mean BMI was 27.7±5.7 kg/m2. The proportion of COPD patients with a BMI ≥25 kg/m2 is significantly higher than the proportion with a BMI <25 kg/m2 (64.6% [n=643] vs 35.4% [n=353], respectively; P<0.0001). There were no significant differences between the distribution of BMI, ages, sex, COPD symptoms, exacerbations, CAT scores, COPD-associated health care resource consumption, and GOLD severity groups. However, the occurrence of comorbidities such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases seemed to be significantly associated with obese or morbidly obese status (P=0.02). Conclusion In the MENA region, the majority of COPD subjects were overweight or obese, and comorbidities such as diabetes or cardiovascular diseases are likely to be associated with COPD when BMI is in the obese or morbidly obese ranges.
Real-time synchronization protocols for shared memory multiprocessors

A priority-based synchronization protocol that explicitly uses shared-memory primitives is defined and analyzed. A solution that has been proposed for bounding and minimizing synchronization delays in real-time systems is briefly reviewed. The waiting times introduced by synchronization requirements in multiple-processor environments are identified, and a set of goals for priority-based multiprocessor synchronization protocols is derived. The underlying priority consideration for a shared memory synchronization protocol are studied and priority assignments to be used by the protocol are derived. <<ETX>>