Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neuroleptics and operant behavior: The anhedonia hypothesis

Abstract Neuroleptic drugs disrupt the learning and performance of operant habits motivated by a variety of positive reinforcers, including food, water, brain stimulation, intravenous opiates, stimulants, and barbiturates. This disruption has been demonstrated in several kinds of experiments with doses that do not significantly limit normal response capacity. With continuous reinforcement neuroleptics gradually cause responding to cease, as in extinction or satiation. This pattern is not due to satiation, however, because it also occurs with nonsatiating reinforcement (such as saccharin or brain stimulation). Repeated tests with neuroleptics result in earlier and earlier response cessation reminiscent of the kind of decreased resistance to extinction caused by repeated tests without the expected reward. Indeed, withholding reward can have the same effect on responding under later neuroleptic treatment as prior experience with neuroleptics themselves; this suggests that there is a transfer of learning (really unlearning) from nonreward to neuroleptic conditions. These tests under continuous reinforcement schedules suggest that neuroleptics blunt the ability of reinforcers to sustain responding at doses which largely spare the ability of the animal to initiate responding. Animals trained under partial reinforcement, however, do not respond as well during neuroleptic testing as animals trained under continuous reinforcement. Thus, neuroleptics can also impair responding (though not response capacity) that is normally sustained by environmental stimuli (and associated expectancies) in the absence of the primary reinforcer. Neuroleptics also blunt the euphoric impact of amphetamine in humans. These data suggest that the most subtle and interesting effect of neuroleptics is a selective attenuation of motivational arousal which is (a) critical for goal-directed behavior, (b) normally induced by reinforcers and associated environmental stimuli, and (c) normally accompanied by the subjective experience of pleasure. Because these drugs are used to treat schizophrenia and because they cause parkinsonian-like side effects, this action has implications for a better understanding of human pathology as well as normal motivational processes.
Three-dimensional propagation algorithm for depth image-based rendering

Depth image based rendering (DIBR) is the process of synthesizing new “virtual” views from a set of “real” views which include color and depth images. Because of its photorealism and less stringent computational requirement, DIBR has many applications such as 3D TV, remote reality, and video conferencing, and has become one of the hot research areas in visual computing in recent years. Since the general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) is an ideal computing platform for image rendering, we consciously develop a novel and necessary image processing algorithm suitable for GPGPU by exploiting massive parallelism. The proposed 3D propagation algorithm for DIBR combines images from multiple color and depth cameras at arbitrary positions in 3D space and efficiently renders novel images at arbitrary virtual views by propagating all available depth information from depth cameras to color cameras, and then all available depth and color information from the color cameras to the virtual views. Furthermore, we consider the case when only low resolution depth images are obtained. A novel depth filling and enhancement technique for enhancing depth image quality using high resolution color images is proposed and significantly improves the rendering quality. Finally, the paper also describes the abundant but irregular parallelism of our algorithm and outlines a mapping onto massively parallel architectures such as GPGPUs.
Lexical allocation in interlingua-based machine translation of spatial expressions

Given a spatial expression, or its computational semantic form, how is the expression’s spatial semantics to be allocated lexically, i.e., among entries in the lexicon? In interlingua-based machine translation (MT) research, lexical allocation is the problem of allocating or subdividing a linguistic expression’s full interlingual (IL) structure into the substructures that are lexical IL forms, i.e., in the lexicon. Here we present our work developing IL forms and an IL lexicon for translating English spatial expressions into Turkish. We examine several co-occurrence patterns between motion verbs (spatial placement and displacement) and directional adpositions (particles in English, postpositions in Turkish) and the lexical allocation of spatial vectors in these patterns.
SAXOPHONE ACOUSTICS: INTRODUCING A COMPENDIUM OF IMPEDANCE AND SOUND SPECTRA

We introduce a web-based database that gives details of the acoustics of soprano and tenor saxophones for all standard fingerings and some others. It has impedance spectra measured at the mouthpiece and sound files for each standard fingering. We use these experimental impedance spectra to explain some features of saxophone acoustics, including the linear effects of the bell, mouthpiece, reed, register keys and tone holes. We also contrast measurements of flute, clarinet and saxophone, to give practical examples of the different behaviour of waveguides with open-open cylindrical, closed-open cylindrical and closed-open conical geometries respectively.
A technique for matching projective views with application to color image mosaicing

This paper presents an original coarse-to-fine technique for creating mosaics of color images related by projective transformations. The actual projective transformation is first approximated with an affine transformation whose parameters are estimated by means of an algorithm operating in the frequency domain. The projective transformation is then computed with an algorithm based on feature matching; the computational complexity of this operation is substantially reduced by the preliminary affine approximation which reduces the search area for corresponding points. A practical example of mosaicing of two color images of a planar fresco is reported and discussed. Some experimental results are also reported in order to assess the practical performance of our technique.
Clinical activity of bortezomib in relapsed/refractory MALT lymphomas: results of a phase II study of the International Extranodal Lymphoma Study Group (IELSG).

BACKGROUND The nuclear factor-kappa B activation in mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma pathogenesis provided the rationale for the evaluation of bortezomib in this malignancy. PATIENTS AND METHODS Thirty-two patients with relapsed/refractory MALT lymphoma were enrolled. Thirty-one patients received bortezomib 1.3 mg/m(2) i.v. , on days 1, 4, 8, and 11, for up to six 21-day cycles. RESULTS Median age was 63 years (range, 37-82 years). Median number of prior therapies was 2 (range, 1-4). Nine patients had Ann Arbor stage I, 7 patients had stage II, and 16 patients had stage IV. Primary lymphoma localization was the stomach in 14 patients; multiple extranodal sites were present in 10 patients. Among the 29 patients assessable for response, the overall response rate was 48% [95% confidence interval (CI) 29% to 67%], with 9 complete and 5 partial responses. Nine patients experienced stable disease and six had disease progression during therapy. The most relevant adverse events were fatigue, thrombocytopenia, neutropenia, and peripheral neuropathy. After a median follow-up of 24 months, the median duration of response was not reached yet. Five deaths were reported, in two patients due to disease progression. CONCLUSION Bortezomib is active in relapsed MALT lymphomas. Further investigations to identify optimal bortezomib dose, schedule, and combination regimens are needed since the frequent detection of dose-limiting peripheral neuropathy.
Enhanced performance in traveling-wave electroabsorption Modulators based on undercut-etching the active-region

A novel traveling-wave electroabsorption modulator (TWEAM) based on undercut-etching-active-region waveguide (UEAW) is proposed and demonstrated. By selectively wet-etching the InGaAsP from InP to reduce InGaAsP active region, the waveguide can reduce parasitic capacitance with high conductivity in n-InP and p-InP cladding layers. In comparison with conventional ridge-waveguide (RW) TWEAM, 3 dB lower optical-insertion-loss, at least 6 dB higher in radio-frequency-link gain (dc to 40 GHz), and faster electrooptical response (3-dB bandwidth of 25 GHz at 50 /spl Omega/-termination for UEAW and 15 GHz for RW) are obtained in UEAW-TWEAM. A 10-Gbs/s operation with low swing voltage of 0.6 V has been achieved in UEAW-TWEAM, a 3.2-dB enhancement over RW-TWEAM. It indicates the tradeoff in designing electroabsorption modulators can be greatly released.
Adolescent Victimization and Violent Self-Help

A generation of criminological research demonstrates considerable overlap between victim and offender populations. Although there is compelling theoretical and empirical evidence that criminal offenders live a high-risk lifestyle that exposes them to a higher likelihood of becoming victims of crime themselves, we take as a point of departure the possibility that an individual’s experiences as a crime victim might also motivate them to engage in certain forms of violent behavior as a form of ‘‘self-help. ’’ In this study, violent self-help is conceptualized to encompass gang membership, handgun carrying, and aggravated assault. An analysis of data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents (12 years of age at the initial interview) provides support for the proposition that experienced and vicarious victimization are precursors to later violent behavior, even among youth with no history of violent behavior.
Cost-Aware Cloud Service Request Scheduling for SaaS Providers

As cloud computing becomes widely deployed, more and more cloud services are offered to end users in a pay-as-you-go manner. Today’s increasing number of end user-oriented cloud services are generally operated by Software as a Service (SaaS) providers using rental virtual resources from third-party infrastructure vendors. As far as SaaS providers are concerned, how to process the dynamic user service requests more cost-effectively without any SLA violation is an intractable problem. To deal with this challenge, we first establish a cloud service request model with SLA constraints, and then present a cost-aware service request scheduling approach based on genetic algorithm. According to the personalized features of user requests and the current system load, our approach can not only lease and reuse virtual resources on demand to achieve optimal scheduling of dynamic cloud service requests in reasonable time, but can also minimize the rental cost of the overall infrastructure for maximizing SaaS providers’ profits while meeting SLA constraints. The comparison of simulation experiments indicates that our proposed approach outperforms other revenue-aware algorithms in terms of virtual resource utilization, rate of return on investment and operation profit and provides a cost-effective solution for service request scheduling in cloud computing environments.
School Characteristics Related to High School Dropout Rates

A B S T R A C T Dropping out of high school culminates a long-term process of disengagement from school and has profound social and economic consequences for students, their families, and their communities. Students who drop out of high school are more likely to be unemployed, to earn less than those who graduate, to be on public assistance, and to end up in prison. The present study examined dropout rates in Kentucky high schools (N = 196), using both quantitative and qualitative procedures. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were computed to identify those school-level variables that showed strong relationships to dropout rates. A sample of 20 schools with the highest dropout rates was compared to a sample of 20 schools with the lowest dropout rates using a multivariate analysis of variance. Furthermore, 4 schools from each group were selected as case examples. Information gathered from administrator surveys, staff interviews, and on-site observations provided detailed descriptions of the characteristics of schools with high and low dropout rates. The findings of this study demonstrated that a number of school variables are differentially related to dropout rate. Implications of these findings for school reform are discussed.
Instrumental Variable Identification of Dynamic Variance Decompositions

Macroeconomists increasingly use external sources of exogenous variation for causal inference. However, unless such external instruments (proxies) capture the underlying shock without measurement error, existing methods are silent on the importance of that shock for macroeconomic fluctuations. We show that, in a general moving-average model with external instruments, variance decompositions for the instrumented shock are interval-identified, with informative bounds. Various additional restrictions guarantee point identification of both variance and historical decompositions. Unlike structural vector autoregression analysis, our methods do not require invertibility. Applied to US data, they give a tight upper bound on the importance of monetary shocks for inflation dynamics.
Exploiting novelty, coverage and balance for topic-focused multi-document summarization

Novelty, coverage and balance are important requirements in topic-focused summarization, which to a large extent determine the quality of a summary. In this paper, we propose a novel method that incorporates these requirements into a sentence ranking probability model. It differs from the existing methods in that the novelty, coverage and balance requirements are all modeled w.r. t. a given topic, so that summaries are highly relevant to the topic and at the same time comply with topic-aware novelty, coverage and balance. Experimental results on the DUC 2005, 2006 and 2007 benchmark data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Selecting the Gain of Hearing Aids for Persons with Sensorineural Hearing Impairments

A procedure is described for determining the gain requirements as a function of frequency for persons who have sensorineural hearing impairments. It is based on delivering sounds at preferred listening levels which are estimated from hearing threshold levels. Adjustments are incorporated in the procedure so that all frequency components of a speech signal will be presented with approximately equal loudness, thus enabling the maximum amount of speech signal to be delivered without exceeding comfort level in any frequency region. Special advantages of the procedure are that it is more widely applicable than many others and that the final selection is in terms of real-ear gain measured with the selected hearing aid being wom by the individual.
Skype Forensics in Android Devices

The discipline of smartphone forensics has recently got more attention because of the tremendous growth in the smartphones market. Smartphones, to some extent, have similar capabilities to that of PCs. They can store large amount of data and divergent categories of information. Among other mobile platforms, Android-based devices are getting more popularity. Variety of mobile Applications (Apps) are increasingly developed to mainly extend the functionally of the phones. The usage of Voice over IP (VoIP) Apps has explosively increased for their wide availability and cheap prices. As Skype is one of the most popular VoIP Apps, in this paper we investigate the artifacts of Skype calls and chats in the Android devices. We inspect both the RAM and NAND flash memories in different scenarios and time durations. Even though Skype provides secure communications over the Internet, this paper shows that Skype call and chat evidences can be truly found in the devices. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate Skype in the Android devices. General Terms Digital Forensics, Cyber Security
Integration of Heteroscedastic Linear Discriminant Analysis (HLDA) Into Adaptive Training

The paper investigates the integration of heteroscedastic linear discriminant analysis (HLDA) into adaptively trained speech recognizers. Two different approaches are compared: the first is a variant of CMLLR-SAT, the second is based on our previously introduced method constrained maximum-likelihood speaker normalization (CMLSN). For the latter both HLDA projection and speaker-specific transformations for normalization are estimated w.r. t. a set of simple target-models. It is investigated if additional robustness can be achieved by estimating HLDA on normalized data. Experimental results are provided for a broadcast news task and a collection of parliamentary speeches. We show that the proposed methods lead to relative reductions in word error rate (WER) of 8% over an adapted baseline system that already includes an HLDA transform. The best performance for both tasks is achieved for the algorithm that is based on CMLSN. When compared to the combination of HLDA and CMLLR-SAT, this method leads to a considerable reduction in computational effort and to a significantly lower WER
Measures of central tendency: The mean

Journal of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapeutics | April-June 2011 | Vol 2 | Issue 2 In any research, enormous data is collected and, to describe it meaningfully, one needs to summarise the same. The bulkiness of the data can be reduced by organising it into a frequency table or histogram. [1] Frequency distribution organises the heap of data into a few meaningful categories. Collected data can also be summarised as a single index/value, which represents the entire data. These measures may also help in the comparison of data.
A Tracer Analysis Study on the Redistribution and Oxidization of Endogenous Carbon Monoxide in the Human Body

Past studies have suggested that some carbon monoxide (CO) moves from blood haemoglobin to tissue cells and that mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase oxidizes CO to carbon dioxide (CO2). However, no study has demonstrated this redistribution and oxidization of CO under physiological conditions. The objective of this study was to trace the redistribution and oxidization of CO in the human body by detecting 13CO2 production after the inhalation of 13CO. In Experiment 1, we asked a healthy subject to inhale 50 ppm 13CO gas. In Experiment 2, we circulated heparinized human blood in a cardio-pulmonary bypass circuit and supplied 50 ppm 13CO gas to the oxygenator. We sequentially sampled exhaled and output gases and measured the 13CO2/12CO2 ratios. In Experiment 1, the exhaled 13CO2/12CO2 ratio increased significantly between 4 to 31 h of 13CO inhalation. In Experiment 2, the output 13CO2/12CO2 ratio showed no significant increase within 36 h of 13CO input. Experiment 1 demonstrated the oxidization of CO in the human body under physiological conditions. Experiment 2 confirmed that oxidization does not occur in the circulating blood and indicated the redistribution of CO from blood carboxyhaemoglobin to tissue cells.
Electro-acupuncture versus sham electro-acupuncture for auditory hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia: a randomized controlled trial

Objective: To compare the efficacy of electro-acupuncture with that of sham electro-acupuncture for auditory hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia partially responsive or non-responsive to risperidone. Design: Patient- and assessor-blinded randomized controlled trial. Setting: Hospital-based practice. Participants: Schizophrenia patients with auditory hallucinations who are partially responsive or non-responsive to risperidone monotherapy (n = 60). Interventions: All patients were randomly allocated to a real electro-acupuncture group or a sham electro-acupuncture group and treated for 30 sessions within six weeks. Main outcome measures: The primary outcome measure was the Psychotic Symptom Rating Scales Auditory Hallucination Subscale. Secondary outcomes included the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and side-effects. A clinical response was defined as >20% reduction score (from baseline) on the total score of the Psychotic Symptom Rating Scales Auditory Hallucination Subscale. Results: Sixty patients were selected for randomized real electro-acupuncture treatment (n = 30) or sham electro-acupuncture treatment (n = 30). Patients in the real electro-acupuncture group experienced greater improvement in the Psychotic Symptom Rating Scales Auditory Hallucination Subscale total score, physical characteristics factor score and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale positive symptom score than the sham electro-acupuncture group at both week 4 and week 6. The clinical response rates in the real electro-acupuncture group and sham electro-acupuncture group were 43.3% (n = 30) and 13.3% (n = 30), respectively (χ2 = 6.648, P =0.027). There was no significance between-group difference in side-effects. Conclusion: Electro-acupuncture might provide improvement in auditory hallucinations and positive symptom for patients with schizophrenia partially responsive or non-responsive to risperidone monotherapy.
Effects of nitrogen dioxide exposure on bronchoalveolar lavage proteins in humans.

Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is a pollutant of both outdoor and indoor atmospheres that has the potential to alter alveolar epithelial permeability. In order to assess alterations in the protein content of alveolar lining fluid induced by brief (3-h) exposures to low-level NO2, normal volunteers were exposed sequentially to air and NO2, separated by at least 2 wk, in an environmental chamber. Bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) was performed after exposure. Four experimental protocols were used: (1) continuous 0.60 ppm NO2 with BAL performed 3.5 h after exposure (n = 8), (2) background 0.05 ppm NO2 with three 15-min peaks of 2.0 ppm followed by BAL 3.5 h after exposure (n = 15), (3) continuous 0.60 ppm NO2 with BAL performed 18 h after exposure (n = 8), and (4) continuous 1.5 ppm NO2 with BAL 3.5 h after exposure (n = 15). No changes in lavage fluid levels of total protein or albumin were observed in response to NO2. However, exposure to continuous 0.60 ppm NO2 was associated with increases in lavage fluid levels of the antiprotease alpha-2-macroglobulin (alpha 2M) when assessed 3.5 h after exposure (air versus NO2: 20 +/- 1 versus 29 +/- 2 ng/ml, P = 0.01). No significant changes in levels of alpha 2M in BAL fluid were observed in the other exposure protocols. Lavaged cell numbers, differential counts, and viability were not altered by exposure to the pollutant. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Une formalisation plus précise pour une annotation moins confuse: la relation d'Élaboration d'entité

ABSTRACT Les théories cherchant à capturer la cohérence discursive (Mann & Thompson, 1987; Asher & Lascarides, 2003) offrent des cadres théoriques stimulants pour analyser de nombreux phénomènes discursifs. Ils peinent parfois cependant à fournir des définitions de relations combinant précision et robustesse pour des travaux d'annotation à grande échelle permettant, par exemple, de constituer des corpus annotés en relations discursives. Le cas des relations d'Élaboration et d'Arrière-plan constitue une parfaite illustration de ce problème. La plupart des théories discursives les incluent, parfois sous des noms différents, et l'on pourrait penser que leur définition et la manière de les reconnaître est maintenant établie. Cependant, en dépit du fait que ce sont les relations les plus courantes dans les corpus, c'est à leur sujet que les annotateurs ont le plus de problèmes. Elles sont souvent prises l'une pour l'autre. Dans cet article nous examinons la source de ces problèmes et nous proposons une solution basée sur la distinction d'une relation d'Élaboration d'entité, que nous formalisons en SDRT.