Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Progressive audio scrambling via complete binary tree's traversal and wavelet transform

In this paper, we firstly propose an effective audio scrambling method based on the pre-order traversal of a complete binary tree in time domain. The proposed method is fast, simple and has good scrambling effect. Then, with the aim of strengthening the anti-decryption capability, we present a wavelet-domain based scheme by considering not only the pre-order but also the in-/post-order based scrambling methods. First, an audio signal is wavelet-decomposed and retrieves the layers of wavelet coefficients. Then, the coefficients in each layer are scrambled by randomly chosen one out of the three methods. Anyone without knowledge of the correct wavelet decomposition parameters and the scrambling method used for each layer will never be able to descramble the signal successfully. Moreover, the new scheme also achieves progressive scrambling that enables to generate the audio outputs with different quality levels by controlling the scrambling degree as required.
On defining real consumption

Theory can and should be used to better define real consumption. Bad definitions could very well be the reason for the low growth in consumption. I base this statement on the observation that since 1982 the deflators of the a priori badly defined components of consumption have been increasing much more rapidly than the better defined components. If the price of the badly defined components had increased at the same rate as other consumption components, per capita real consumption growth after 1982 would have been in line with historical experiences. Before suggesting how to better define the consumption commodities and, in the case of owner-occupied housing, how to better define its imputed rental price, I want to emphasize that there is no true concept of real consumption. Real consumption is what it is defined to be— nothing more and nothing less. Saying that any concept is a biased measure of true real consumption makes no sense. Biases can occur, of course, in estimates of the value of the defined concept. However, that is a different matter and cannot even be discussed until real consumption has been defined.
Differential DNA Methylation in Relation to Age and Health Risks of Obesity

The aim of this study was to evaluate whether genome-wide levels of DNA methylation are associated with age and the health risks of obesity (HRO); defined according to BMI categories as “Low HRO” (overweight and class 1 obesity) versus “High HRO” (class 2 and class 3 obesity). Anthropometric measurements were assessed in a subsample of 48 volunteers from the Metabolic Syndrome Reduction in Navarra (RESMENA) study and 24 women from another independent study, Effects of Lipoic Acid and Eicosapentaenoic Acid in Human Obesity (OBEPALIP study). In the pooled population; the methylation levels of 55 CpG sites were significantly associated with age after Benjamini-Hochberg correction. In addition, DNA methylation of three CpG sites located in ELOVL2; HOXC4 and PI4KB were further negatively associated with their mRNA levels. Although no differentially methylated CpG sites were identified in relation to HRO after multiple testing correction; several nominally significant CpG sites were identified in genes related to insulin signaling; energy and lipid metabolism. Moreover, statistically significant associations between BMI or mRNA levels and two HRO-related CpG sites located in GPR133 and ITGB5 are reported. As a conclusion, these findings from two Spanish cohorts add knowledge about the important role of DNA methylation in the age-related regulation of gene expression. In addition; a relevant influence of age on DNA methylation in white blood cells was found, as well as, on a trend level, novel associations between DNA methylation and obesity.
Seasonal exchange of CO 2 and D 18 O-CO 2 varies with postfire succession in boreal forest ecosystems

[ 1 ] Seasonal cycles of atmospheric CO 2 and d 18 O-CO 2 at high northern latitudes have the potential to serve as indicators of ecological change in response to climate changes. Effective interpretation of these observations requires an understanding of how different species and ecosystems contribute to biosphere-atmosphere exchange. Here we examined the effect of postfire stand age in boreal forest ecosystems on the seasonal distribution of CO 2 and d 18 O-CO 2 fluxes. We measured net CO 2 fluxes in a 3-year burn scar, a 15-year trembling aspen stand, and an 80-year black spruce stand in interior Alaska using eddy covariance. By combining measurements of the oxygen isotopic composition of ecosystem water pools at each stand with measured CO 2 fluxes, we predicted half-hourly d 18 O-CO 2 fluxes and used a one-box atmosphere model to make relative comparisons of the effect of stand age on the shape and amplitude of the seasonal cycle of CO 2 and d 18 O-CO 2 . A shorter growing season and higher rates of net ecosystem uptake during midsummer at the 15-year stand resulted in a larger seasonal CO 2 amplitude and a delay in the drawdown of atmospheric CO 2 as compared with the 80-year stand. Reduced levels of gross primary production isoforcing from the 15-year stand during spring and early summer caused atmospheric d 18 O-CO 2 to increase more gradually between April and June as compared with fluxes from the 80-year stand. Our analysis suggests that increased boreal forest disturbance would delay the phase of CO 2 drawdown at high northern latitudes, but would advance the phase of d 18 O-CO 2 drawdown.
Factors That Affect the Successful Implementation of a Data Warehouse

The growth of the Internet and the expansion of global markets have transformed the economies of industrial societies. Services provided by these economies are based on knowledge and information management, implying a changing role for information systems. Information systems provide companies with the communication and the analytical tools to manage business on a global scale. They are the backbone for the new products and services that are provided by economies that are knowledge based. Information systems permit businesses to adopt more flexible and decentralized structures [8]. Corporate organizations have implemented data warehouse projects to improve their ability to assess, understand and analyze their business operations [11]. A data warehouse recovers data from multiple operational or transactional systems; data is integrated and stored, allowing the creation of a new product (information). This study builds on previous research that will help to identify the important elements that permit a better understanding of data warehouse implementation. The research will also discuss previous data warehouse models that were successfully implemented and determine their application in a Puerto Rican corporation. This research empirically confirms that organizational and operational factors affect the successful implementation of a Data Warehouse. It concludes that the high level of correlation between the success factors of the implementation and the success factors of the system does not exist according to the criteria established by Hinkle [6].
Current Availability and Use of ICT Among Secondary EFL Teachers in Saudi Arabia: Possibilities and Reality

The purpose of this study was to examine the current availability of ICT facilities to teachers of English as a foreign language. A questionnaire was administered in order to ascertain the differences between teachers in their report of available ICT resources and their use of such resources. Findings indicate the most frequently utilized resources included the use of the internet to review updates in teaching English. However, teachers reported feeling as if they did not have adequate experience in using the computer and did not feel the education directorate provides adequate support, equipment, and learning opportunities for English language teachers in ICT. Factors found to have an impact on whether or not computers are being integrated into classroom instruction include the use of a home PC, access to computer labs in school, and computer training. In conclusion, the study suggests greater availability of new teaching technologies, such as computer labs and training programs, will better ensure the integration of ICT resources into the lesson plans of EFL teachers.
Behavior of double-tee flange connectors subjected to in-plane monotonic and reversed cyclic loads

The results of an experimental investigation to study the behavior of seven mechanical connectors used in 2 and 4 in. (51 and 102 mm) thick double-tee flanges are presented. The study included five connectors commonly used in practice and two new or modified designs. A total of 95 connector tests were conducted under a variety of loading and support conditions with both monotonic and cyclic reversing in-plane shear. The data show that the strength, stiffness, and deformation capacity of connectors vary widely depending on the constraint and loading conditions, which makes analytical prediction of behavior very difficult. Based on the measured response and observed behavior, the performance of each connector is discussed based on serviceability, failure mode, and deformation capacity. Two connectors, a bent wing made of a bent strap of steel and a Vector®, provided the most dependable behavior in terms of strength and deformation capacity.
Improvement of Lecture Speech Recognition by Using Unsupervised Adaptation

The aim of this work is to improve the recognition performance of spontaneous speech. In order to achieve the purpose, the authors of this chapter propose new approaches of unsupervised adaptation for spontaneous speech and evaluate the methods by using diagonal-covariance and full-covariance hidden Markov models. In the adaptation procedure, both methods of language model (LM) adaptation and acoustic model (AM) adaptation are used iteratively. Several combination methods are tested to find the optimal approach. In the LM adaptation, a word trigram model and a part-of-speech (POS) trigram model are combined to build a more task-specific LM. In addition, the authors propose an unsupervised speaker adaptation technique based on adaptation data weighting. The weighting is performed depending on POS class. In Japan, a large-scale spontaneous speech database “Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ)” has been used as the common evaluation database for spontaneous speech and the authors used it for their recognition experiments. From the results, the proposed methods demonstrated a significant advantage in that task.
Inpatient Care of Parkinson’s Disease in Germany: A Study of Costs and Length of Stay With Particular Reference to an Interdisciplinary Approach

This article describes outcomes of the complex therapy of Parkinson’s disease according to Operation and Procedure Code 8-97d, an interdisciplinary approach to the treatment of Morbus Parkinson established in Germany. The code defines mandatory minimum requirements for the organizational structures and processes of hospital treatment. The aim of the study was to analyze profession-related treatment costs, accompanying diseases and hospitalization times for inpatient Parkinson therapy and to compare these for interdisciplinary versus conventional approaches. A structured procedure analysis was carried out. Indication-based cost calculations and an analysis of secondary diagnoses were performed. In addition to the primary diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, all patients surveyed are suffering from further diseases in Major Diagnostic Category (MDC) 1, 5, 6, 10, 11, and 23. Among the patients surveyed who were receiving complex therapy, secondary diagnoses falling into MDC 8 dominated. The average hospitalization time for those patients receiving interdisciplinary treatment for Parkinson’s disease was 18.16 days, significantly longer than the 12.01 days for the comparison group. Analysis of the costs revealed significant differences in the total costs of medical service and in the personnel and operating costs of nonmedical infrastructure. The high standards demanded of the hospital structure for the provision of interdisciplinary services, together with a prescribed therapy density including quality assurance assessments, result in patients being hospitalized for longer; this is reflected in higher costs. Treatment of Parkinson’s patients should not only include the primary disease but also any accompanying diseases. For this, appropriate reimbursement higher than for the conventional Parkinson’s diagnosis-related group (DRG) is needed.
Soft-tissue sarcoma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma clusters around a municipal solid waste incinerator with high dioxin emission levels.

Overall evidence from epidemiologic studies in the workplace suggests that dioxin is a human carcinogen, but whether low doses affect the general population remains to be determined. The authors examined the spatial distribution of soft-tissue sarcomas and non-Hodgkin's lymphomas around a French municipal solid waste incinerator with high emission levels of dioxin (16.3 ng international toxic equivalency factor/m3). Not consistently associated with dioxin exposure,-Hodgkin's disease served as the control cancer category. Clusters were identified from 1980 to 1995 in the area ("département') of Doubs by applying a spatial scan statistic to 26 electoral wards. The most likely and highly significant clusters found were identical for soft-tissue sarcomas and non-Hodgkin's lymphomas and included the area around the municipal solid waste incinerator; standardized incidence ratios were 1.44 (observed number of cases = 45, focused test p value = 0.004) and 1.27 (observed number of cases = 286, focused test p value = 0.00003), respectively. Conversely, Hodgkin's disease exhibited no specific spatial distribution. Confounding by socioeconomic status, urbanization, or patterns of medical referral seemed unlikely to explain the clusters. Although consistent, these findings should be confirmed by further investigation (e.g., a case-control study in which dioxins are measured in biologic tissues) before clusters of soft-tissue sarcoma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma are ascribed to dioxin released by the municipal solid waste incinerator.
LSIS at TREC 2012 Medical Track - Experiments With Conceptualization, a DFR Model and a Semantic Measure

Abstract : In this paper, we present our participation in the Medical Records Track of TREC2012. We focus on the impact of combining the word space and the concept space in the information retrieval process. For this track, we submitted a baseline run by employing the In_expC2 weighting model implemented in the Terrier platform, which achieved fair results (0.304 MAP, 0.51P@10). Then, we expanded the documents by performing automatic text conceptualization using UMLS(registered trademark) and the MetaMap software on medical records. These textual and conceptual representations, still using the DFR model, led to precision (0.29 MAP, 0.47 P@10). We also automatically extended the topics with UMLS concepts. This led to a lower precision (0.27 MAP, 0.46 P@10) Lastly, we experimented the usage of semantic IR measures only (0.21 MAP, 0.41 P@10).
Folksonomy-Based Indexing for Location-Aware Retrieval of Learning Contents

With the fast development of wireless communication and sensor technologies, ubiquitous learning has become a promising learning paradigm. In context-aware ubiquitous learning environments, it is desirable that learning content is retrieved according to environmental contexts, such as learners' location. However, traditional information retrieval schemes are not designed for content retrieval in ubiquitous learning environments. Recently, folksonomies have emerged as a successful kind of applications for categorizing web resources in a collaborative manner. This paper focuses on the index creation problem for location-aware learning content retrieval. First, we propose a bottom-up approach to constructing the index according to the similarity between tags, which considers metadata and structural information of the teaching materials annotated by the tags. Then, a maintenance mechanism is designed to efficiently update the index. The index creation method has been implemented, and a synthetic learning object repository has been built to evaluate the proposed approach. Experimental results show that this method can increase precision of retrieval. In addition, impacts of different similarity functions on precision are discussed.
Phase diagram of the spin-1 XXZ Heisenberg ferromagnet with a single-ion anisotropy

Phase diagram of the spin-1 quantum Heisenberg model with both exchange as well as single-ion anisotropy is constructed within the framework of pair approximation formulated as a variational procedure based on the Gibbs-Bogoliubov inequality. In this form adapted variational approach is used to obtain the results equivalent with the Oguchi's pair approximation. It is shown that the single-ion anisotropy induces a tricritical behaviour in the considered model system and a location of tricritical points is found in dependence on the exchange anisotropy strength.
SPECIES INTERACTIONS IN A SUCCESSIONAL GRASSLAND. II. COLONIZATION OF VEGETATED SITES

SUMMARY (1) The colonization and inhibition abilities of species were identified as two essential and distinct components of competitive ability. These components can be quantified to evaluate species interactions and predict population and community change in a community where changes in abundance depend on colonization processes. (2) Colonization and inhibition abilities were quantified and compared in a patchy Californian grassland community. This was accomplished with an experimental study of the colonization of vegetated sites, using natural seed-rain densities. (3) The four most abundant perennial species, Anthoxanthum odoratum, Holcus lanatus, Deschampsia holciformis and Rytidosperma pilosum, differed greatly in colonizing ability, as measured by survival, growth and reproduction. All perennial species effectively inhibited colonization of their stands, but annual vegetation could be colonized by Anthoxanthum, and to a lesser degree by Holcus. (4) Species differences in colonizing ability depended in part on their different densities of seed rain, but there were major differences in intrinsic, per-seed colonizing ability as well. (5) In contrast, species differences in inhibition ability could be explained by aboveground biomass alone; intrinsic differences among species in their per-unit biomass inhibition effects were not important. (6) The findings led to definite predictions about successional change in undisturbed sites. These methods and results may have some quite general application to the analysis of population and community dynamics.
Cooling of neutron stars and superfluidity in their cores

We study the heat capacity and neutrino emission reactions (direct and modified Urca processes, nucleon–nucleon bremsstrahlung, Cooper pairing of nucleons) in the supranuclear density matter of neutron star cores with superfluid neutrons and protons. Various superfluidity types are analysed (singlet-state pairing and two types of triplet-state pairing, without and with gap nodes at the nucleon Fermi surface). The results are used for cooling simulations of isolated neutron stars. Both the standard cooling and the cooling enhanced by the direct Urca process are strongly affected by nucleon superfluidity. Comparison of the cooling theory of isolated neutron stars with observations of their thermal radiation may give stringent constraints on the critical temperatures of the neutron and proton superfluidities in the neutron star cores.
ESL Teachers' Perceptions and Factors Influencing Their Use of Classroom-Based Reading Assessment

Abstract This paper reports on a qualitative study that examined English as a second language (ESL) teachers' perceptions of classroom-based reading assessments. ESL teachers' use of classroom-based reading assessments, their understanding about the function and effectiveness of this assessment method, and the factors influencing this assessment process are presented. Six middle school and 7 elementary school ESL teachers participated in this study. Data consisted of interviews with ESL teachers, classroom observations, and assessment materials teachers used in the classrooms. Constant comparative method was used for data analysis. Findings of this study include that ESL teachers highly value classroom-based reading assessments, considered them accurate and valuable and thought these assessments could provide great help to the daily teaching of reading. Teachers viewed state-mandated standardized testing negatively and of little value for English language learners. Student characteristics, statewide mandated tests, and district policies were three major forces influencing and controlling the kind of reading assessment used by teachers. The teachers' perceptions, beliefs, and uses of assessment have implications for teacher education programs and policymakers.
Detecting Stratigraphic Discontinuities using Wavelet and S- Transform Analysis of Well Log Data

Summary Detecting stratigraphic discontinuities using well log data is a fundamental task in petroleum geosciences projects. Wavelet transforms (WT) and S-transform (ST) of well log data can provide objective identification of lithological interfaces to aid in this effort. The continuous wavelet transform (CWT) of a time series gives the wavelet correlation coefficients (i.e. similarity) between the given time series and the wavelet at different spatial scales. In comparison, S-transform (ST) is a hybrid form of short-time Fourier transform and wavelet transform that provides a measure of the local Fourier frequency spectrum of the time series (in this case well log data). We applied Haar continuous wavelet (HCWT) and S-transform on five types of well log data (Gamma Ray (GR), Spontaneous Potential (SP), Deep Resistivity (RD), Bulk Density (RHOB) and Neutron Porosity (NPHI) logs) from an oil sands evaluation well in the Cold Lake area of Alberta to evaluate autonomous detection of lithological interfaces. The wavelet analysis of well log data delivered two-dimensional output (i.e. depth vs. scale) of the given one-dimensional (depth only) well log record. The results of HCWT are presented in terms of wavelet coefficients at different scales whereas the results of ST are shown at different frequencies. The Haar wavelet with its rectangular shape is able to identify the abrupt change in the well log signal encountered at bed boundaries, and therefore it is effective in extracting lithological discontinuities from the well log data analysis. S- transform was applied to median filtered data in order to suppress signal noise. It was observed that in the HCWT of noisy data, there was no appearance of high values of wavelet coefficients (i.e. the HCWT fails to identify change in the noisy log data even after filtering), whereas ST is able to identify the changes in the data. Both, CWT and ST show good depth-frequency resolution in detecting interfaces, however they produce different outputs. These transformation methods are additional and efficient approaches to identify stratigraphic interface boundaries using well log data and useful in the quantitative division of geological layers in the petroleum reservoir characterization.
Open Source Software Production: Climbing on the Shoulders of Giants

: Open source software production is a successful new production model in which a public good is voluntarily provided. We argue that by studying this new production model we gain valuable insight for organization theory beyond software production. Under specific conditions this model can be generalized, contingent on the interplay of motivational, situational, and institutional factors. It is argued that a production model building on the shoulders of predecessors and peers depends on a well balanced portfolio of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, low costs for contributors and governance mechanisms that do not crowd out intrinsic motivation.