Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A logic for the natural language conditional

Ordinary speakers intuitively assign truth-values to conditional utterances in everyday conversation, but, despite the general ease with which this occurs, it is notoriously difficult to give an account of the implicit logic that is followed in making these truth-value assignments. I propose a twofold logic of the conditional – a relatively simple “factual” logic for conditionals interpreted with regard to what is actually the case, largely following the logic of the material conditional; combined with a variably strict possible-worlds counterfactual logic for conditionals interpreted with regard to with what may be (or may have been) the case, incorporating a ceteris paribus clause. This theory is able to deal with a number of challenges for other prominent views of the conditional, such as counter-intuitive truth-value ascriptions provided by notions of similarity or closeness, and difficulties adequately accounting for phenomena such as reverse Sobel sequences.
Breaking the Bonds of Submodularity: Empirical Estimation of Approximation Ratios for Monotone Non-Submodular Greedy Maximization

While greedy algorithms have long been observed to perform well on a wide variety of problems, up to now approximation ratios have only been known for their application to problems having submodular objective functions $f$. Since many practical problems have non-submodular $f$, there is a critical need to devise new techniques to bound the performance of greedy algorithms in the case of non-submodularity. Our primary contribution is the introduction of a novel technique for estimating the approximation ratio of the greedy algorithm for maximization of monotone non-decreasing functions based on the curvature of $f$ without relying on the submodularity constraint. We show that this technique reduces to the classical $(1 - 1/e)$ ratio for submodular functions. Furthermore, we develop an extension of this ratio to the adaptive greedy algorithm, which allows applications to non-submodular stochastic maximization problems. This notably extends support to applications modeling incomplete data with uncertainty. Finally we use this new technique to derive a $(1 - 1/\sqrt{e})$ ratio for a popular problem, Robust Influence Maximization, which is non-submodular and $1/2$ for Adaptive Max-Crawling, which is adaptive non-submodular.
Extracting fluid from a video for efficient post-production

We propose a method to extract fluids from a video that is captured outside a special studio. Since such a video usually has a complex background and the fluids overlap with much transparency, it is a difficult, time-consuming task for a designer to extract them. Our goal is to develop an efficient method to solve the problem: we estimate the background of an input video, and then compute the foreground and alpha matte at each frame. Our method estimates the background by observing only pixels that have little motion at each frame. Given the estimated background, we estimate an initial alpha matte based on the color difference at every pixel between each frame and the estimated background. Since the initial alpha matte usually includes many artifacts, we employ the gradient-domain image processing approach to refine it: our method attenuates unrequired gradients adequately, and then integrate them to recover the refined alpha matte. The foreground, which explains about the color and texture pattern of the fluid itself, is also estimated in a similar manner. We demonstrate that our method enables to extract the fluids from a video, which were difficult to achieve using the previous methods.
Interpolation-sequence based model checking

SAT-based model checking is the most widely used method for verifying industrial designs against their specification. This is due to its ability to handle designs with thousands of state elements and more. The main drawback of using SAT-based model checking is its orientation towards ”bug-hunting” rather than full verification of a given specification. Previous works demonstrated how Unbounded Model Checking can be achieved using a SAT solver. In this work we present a novel SAT-based approach to full verification. The approach combines BMC with interpolation-sequence in order to imitate BDD-based Symbolic Model Checking. We demonstrate the usefulness of our method by applying it to industrial-size hardware designs from Intel. Our method compares favorably with McMillan's interpolation based model checking algorithm.
A hybrid genetic algorithm-interior point method for optimal reactive power flow

By integrating a genetic algorithm (GA) with a nonlinear interior point method (IPM), a novel hybrid method for the optimal reactive power flow (ORPF) problem is proposed in this paper. The proposed method can be mainly divided into two parts. The first part is to solve the ORPF with the IPM by relaxing the discrete variables. The second part is to decompose the original ORPF into two sub-problems: continuous optimization and discrete optimization. The GA is used to solve the discrete optimization with the continuous variables being fixed, whereas the IPM solves the continuous optimization with the discrete variables being constant. The optimal solution can be obtained by solving the two sub-problems alternately. A dynamic adjustment strategy is also proposed to make the GA and the IPM to complement each other and to enhance the efficiency of the hybrid proposed method. Numerical simulations on the IEEE 30-bus, IEEE 118-bus and Chongqing 161-bus test systems illustrate that the proposed hybrid method is efficient for the ORPF problem
Trust-driven both-matched algorithm for grid task multi-objective scheduling

Job scheduling algorithm is the key technique in grid management. In order to meet the requirements of high quality QoS in job scheduling of OGSA grid, trust mechanism is added to make the job scheduling system work more effectively in this open, heterogeneous and dynamic grid environment. Utilizing the concept of trust, a trust-driven both-matched grid job scheduling algorithm(TD-BM) is presented, which takes four objective namely system security, system reliability, load balance and system throughput into consideration. Afterwards TD-BM is compared with the traditional TD-Min-min under the same hypothetical condition and the results illustrate that, under the grid environment of high heterogeneous jobs and machines, the scheduling effect of TD-BM is obviously better than TD-Min-min. While keeping almost the same trust value, TD-BM not only shortens the scheduling makespan, but also improves system load balance.
On Recombination-Induced Multiple and Simultaneous Coalescent Events

Coalescent theory deals with the dynamics of how sampled genetic material has spread through a population from a single ancestor over many generations and is ubiquitous in contemporary molecular population genetics. Inherent in most applications is a continuous-time approximation that is derived under the assumption that sample size is small relative to the actual population size. In effect, this precludes multiple and simultaneous coalescent events that take place in the history of large samples. If sequences do not recombine, the number of sequences ancestral to a large sample is reduced sufficiently after relatively few generations such that use of the continuous-time approximation is justified. However, in tracing the history of large chromosomal segments, a large recombination rate per generation will consistently maintain a large number of ancestors. This can create a major disparity between discrete-time and continuous-time models and we analyze its importance, illustrated with model parameters typical of the human genome. The presence of gene conversion exacerbates the disparity and could seriously undermine applications of coalescent theory to complete genomes. However, we show that multiple and simultaneous coalescent events influence global quantities, such as total number of ancestors, but have negligible effect on local quantities, such as linkage disequilibrium. Reassuringly, most applications of the coalescent model with recombination (including association mapping) focus on local quantities.
MPI and Java-MPI: Contrasts and Comparisons of Low-Level Communication Performance

Java is receiving increasing attention as the most popular platform for distributed and collaborative computing. However, it is still subject to significant performance drawbacks in comparison to other programming languages such as C and Fortran. This paper represents the current status of our ongoing project which intends to conduct a detailed experimental evaluation on the suitability of Java in these environments, with particular focus on its message-passing performance for one-to-one as well as one-to-many and many-to- many data exchange patterns. We also emphasize both methodology and evaluation guidelines in order to ensure reproducibility, sound interpretation, and comparative analysis of performance results. Some of the important parameters which characterize the communication performance of MPI and Java-MPI such as latency, asymptotic bandwidth and N-half are investigated. In addition, we introduce two different types of pipeline effects - intra-message and inter-message - that have significant influence on the message-passing performance. For this purpose we have developed a low-level message-passing benchmark suite, which we have used to evaluate and compare different message-passing environments on the IBM SP-2.
Gaining legitimacy: mentoring as an avenue to navigate the transition into a new academic workplace / Conseguir legitimidad: las mentorías como medio para gestionar la transición a un puesto académico distinto

Abstract This paper discusses the learning and development experiences of academics who make transitions between higher education institutions involving multiple communities. In these communities, they may act on the periphery as both newcomers and academics with established credentials that may have a significant impact on their participation. In acknowledging this, this paper uses Lave and Wenger’s concept of Community of Practice to better understand how these academics gain their legitimacy, and whether mentoring has a specific role to play in their development into full members of communities. Based on the analysis of the themes generated from 12 in-depth semi-structured interviews with academics who have experienced transitions between higher education institutions, this paper suggests that restricted access to a mentoring programme may lead these academics to question their status benefits and their development into full participants of communities. Referring to the examples of mentoring programmes used in other universities, this paper shows that among experienced academics, mentoring can contribute to their development and provide a range of psychosocial benefits from the increased level of support.
Attentional Bias to Briefly Presented Emotional Distractors Follows a Slow Time Course in Visual Cortex

A central controversy in the field of attention is how the brain deals with emotional distractors and to what extent they capture attentional processing resources reflexively due to their inherent significance for guidance of adaptive behavior and survival. Especially, the time course of competitive interactions in early visual areas and whether masking of briefly presented emotional stimuli can inhibit biasing of processing resources in these areas is currently unknown. We recorded frequency-tagged potentials evoked by a flickering target detection task in the foreground of briefly presented emotional or neutral pictures that were followed by a mask in human subjects. We observed greater competition for processing resources in early visual cortical areas with shortly presented emotional relative to neutral pictures ∼275 ms after picture offset. This was paralleled by a reduction of target detection rates in trials with emotional pictures ∼400 ms after picture offset. Our finding that briefly presented emotional distractors are able to bias attention well after their offset provides evidence for a rather slow feedback or reentrant neural competition mechanism for emotional distractors that continues after the offset of the emotional stimulus.
Chromosomal aberration frequency in lymphocytes predicts the risk of cancer: results from a pooled cohort study of 22 358 subjects in 11 countries

Mechanistic evidence linking chromosomal aberration (CA) to early stages of cancer has been recently supported by the results of epidemiological studies that associated CA frequency in peripheral lymphocytes of healthy individuals to future cancer incidence. To overcome the limitations of single studies and to evaluate the strength of this association, a pooled analysis was carried out. The pooled database included 11 national cohorts and a total of 22 358 cancer-free individuals who underwent genetic screening with CA for biomonitoring purposes during 1965–2002 and were followed up for cancer incidence and/or mortality for an average of 10.1 years; 368 cancer deaths and 675 incident cancer cases were observed. Subjects were classified within each laboratory according to tertiles of CA frequency. The relative risk (RR) of cancer was increased for subjects in the medium [RR = 1.31, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.07–1.60] and in the high (RR = 1.41; 95% CI = 1.16–1.72) tertiles when compared with the low tertile. This increase was mostly driven by chromosome-type aberrations. The presence of ring chromosomes increased the RR to 2.22 (95% CI = 1.34–3.68). The strongest association was found for stomach cancer [RRmedium = 1.17 (95% CI = 0.37–3.70), RRhigh = 3.13 (95% CI = 1.17–8.39)]. Exposure to carcinogens did not modify the effect of CA levels on overall cancer risk. These results reinforce the evidence of a link between CA frequency and cancer risk and provide novel information on the role of aberration subclass and cancer type.
Examining Multimodal Characteristics of Video to Understand User Engagement

Video content is being produced in ever increasing quantities and offers a potentially highly diverse source for personalizable content. A key characteristic of quality video content is the engaging experience it offers for end users. This paper explores how different characteristics of a video, e.g. face detection, paralinguistic features in the audio track, extracted from different modalities in the video can impact how users rate and thereby engage with the video. These characteristics can further be used to help segment videos in a personalized and contextually aware manner. Initial experimental results from the study presented in this paper provide encouraging results.
Topology-Guided Downsampling

We present a new downsampling method for structured volmue grids, which preserves much more of the topology of a scalar field than existing downsampling methods by preferable selecting scalar values of critical points. In particular, many critical points can be preserved which are lost by traditional downsampling methods. Our method is named 'topology-guided downsampling' as topology-preserving downsampling is impossible in general. However, we show that even an approximate preservation of topology is highly desirabel if isosurfaces are extracted from the downsampled volume grid, e.g. for interactive pre-viewing, because many topological features of the isosurfaces, e.g. the number of components, tunnels, and holes, are preserved. We illustrate the benefits of our method with examples from medical and technical applications of volume visualization.
Virtualization overhead findings of four hypervisors in the CloudStack with SIGAR

Virtualization increases the utilization of physical servers and enables portability of virtual servers between physical servers. Virtualization Technology plays an important role in the success of cloud computing as it optimizes hardware and software resources which in turn enables cloud model to deliver the services in a scalable manner. Hypervisor as a virtualization layer provides an infrastructural support to multiple virtual machines above it by virtualizing hardware resources such as CPU, Memory, Disk and NIC. Cloud computing model and virtualization technology both increases the scalability of IT infrastructure but with an overhead of the performance as Hypervisors may not give near native performance. It is encouraging to study how different Hypervisors perform in the Private Cloud as compared to the native system. Hypervisors do come in Para-virtualized [XenServer], Full Virtualized [ESXi] and Hybrid [KVM] flavors. Hyper-V uses microkernelized design. It is novel idea to compare them in the Private Cloud environment. In the experiment, we have created our private cloud using CloudStack. This paper uses SIGAR (System Information Gatherer and Reporter) framework to compare four hypervisors namely XenServer, ESXi, Hyper-V and KVM.
The contribution of morphological awareness to lexical inferencing in L2 Chinese: Comparing more-skilled and less-skilled learners

Learners’ ability to infer unknown words’ meanings (lexical inferencing) plays a key role in word knowledge development for second language (L2) learners. It has recently been acknowledged that learners’ sensitivity to word‐internal structures (morphological awareness) makes an important contribution to L2 lexical inferencing. However, it remains unclear whether the contribution of morphological awareness to lexical inferencing is affected by L2 learner‐related factors (e.g., language skills). Data obtained from five paper‐pencil tasks in Chinese for 73 L2 learners who studied Chinese for two semesters in China showed that (1) for more‐skilled learners, morphological awareness significantly contributed to lexical inferencing with and without contextual cues, whereas no significant relationships existed between morphological awareness and lexical inferencing for less‐skilled learners; and (2) L2 learners’ morphological awareness does not equally facilitate lexical inferencing due to a possible threshold of linguistic knowledge. The findings have implications for learners’ success in inferring the meanings of unknown words
An individual approach to monitoring locomotive training load in English Premier League academy soccer players

To account for the individual intensity of locomotion tasks, individualised speed thresholds have been proposed as an alternative to global speed thresholds. Methodologies to determine individual speed thresholds have typically been laboratory based, time consuming and expensive, rendering them inappropriate for applied practitioners working with large squads. The current investigation utilised easy-to-administer field tests to individualise speed thresholds. The aim was to investigate differences between high-speed locomotion measured using global and individual speed thresholds. Nineteen, male, professional soccer players completed maximum sprint and maximum aerobic speed protocols and were divided into groups dependent upon maximum aerobic speed performance (high, medium and low). Locomotion data were collected using portable Global Positioning System units and analysed using global and individual analysis methods to determine distances travelled performing high-speed running, very high-speed running and sprinting. In low athletes, the individual analysis method produced significantly higher percentages of high-speed running, very high-speed running and sprinting compared to global (mean differences 7.8%, 6.1% and 1.7%, respectively, all p < 0.001). In medium athletes, no significant differences were found between analysis methods for high-speed running and very high-speed running. In high athletes, the individual analysis method produced significantly lower high-speed running and very high-speed running percentages compared to global (mean differences 11.0% and 6.8%, p < 0.001). Results concluded that global thresholds produced high-speed locomotion percentages significantly higher or lower than individual thresholds for 47% of athletes. The current investigation recommends the use of field tests to individualise speed thresholds, allowing applied practitioners to accurately quantify individual athlete intensity.
“It was definitely a sexual kind of sensation”: sex, sexual identity, and gender in the phenomenology of psychosis

ABSTRACT Purpose: Over the past twenty years, few empirical studies have focused on manifestations of sex, sexual identity, and gender within the phenomenology of psychosis. The goal of the present analysis was to explore themes related to gender and sexuality among individuals diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. Methods: We conducted a qualitative analysis of 25 in-depth phenomenological interviews and a secondary analysis of two focus groups with an additional 24 participants (total N = 49), all of whom reported past or current treatment for a psychotic disorder. Results: Nearly three-quarters of interview participants and one quarter of focus group participants reported some kind of sex or gender-related content. Participants’ experiences were grouped under the following four themes: “shame and persecution,” “sexual or sexualized violence,” “power, agency, sexuality & gender,” and “positive experiences of the erotic. ” Some participants described sexual experiences or content as a primary facet of their experiences, while for others it occupied a more secondary place. Many participants reported some degree of shame associated with sexual aspects of their experience. Conclusions: We emphasize the clinical importance of validating and engaging with sex/sexual themes, and call for future research focused on implications vis-a-vis engagement, treatment, and social recovery.
Reliability of Contractile Properties of the Knee Extensor Muscles in Individuals with Post-Polio Syndrome

Objective To assess the reliability of contractile properties of the knee extensor muscles in 23 individuals with post-polio syndrome (PPS) and 18 age-matched healthy individuals. Methods Contractile properties of the knee extensors were assessed from repeated electrically evoked contractions on 2 separate days, with the use of a fixed dynamometer. Reliability was determined for fatigue resistance, rate of torque development (MRTD), and early and late relaxation time (RT50 and RT25), using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and standard error of measurement (SEM, expressed as % of the mean). Results In both groups, reliability for fatigue resistance was good, with high ICCs (>0.90) and small SEM values (PPS: 7.1%, healthy individuals: 7.0%). Reliability for contractile speed indices varied, with the best values found for RT50 (ICCs>0.82, SEM values <2.8%). We found no systematic differences between test and retest occasions, except for RT50 in healthy subjects (p = 0.016). Conclusions In PPS and healthy individuals, the reliability of fatigue resistance, as obtained from electrically evoked contractions is high. The reliability of contractile speed is only moderate, except for RT50 in PPS, demonstrating high reliability. Significance This was the first study to examine the reliability of electrically evoked contractile properties in individuals with PPS. Our results demonstrate its potential to study mechanisms underlying muscle fatigue in PPS and to evaluate changes in contractile properties over time in response to interventions or from natural course.