Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deep vs. wide: depth on a budget for robust speech recognition

It has now been established that incorporating neural networks can be useful for speech recognition, and that machine learning methods can make it practical to incorporate a larger number of hidden layers in a “deep” structure. Here we incorporate the constraint of freezing the number of parameters for a given task, which in many applications corresponds to practical limitations on storage or computation. Given this constraint, we vary the size of each hidden layer as we change the number of layers so as to keep the total number of parameters constant. In this way we have determined, for a common task of noisy speech recognition (Aurora2), that a large number of layers is not always optimum; for each noise level there is an optimum number of layers. We also use state-of-the-art optimization algorithms to further understand the effect of initialization and convergence properties of such networks, and to have an efﬁcient implementation that allows us to run more experiments with a standard desktop machine with a single GPU.
Hole trapping effect on methodology for DC and AC negative bias temperature instability measurements in PMOS transistors

This works presents a thorough study of adequate methodology to be used in order to characterize the NBTI degradation by taking into account the transient effects. The hole trapping/detrapping effect on previously existent traps is the dominant origin of the transient effect and not the interface traps passivation by hydrogen atoms diffusing back to the interface.
Modélisation des réponses calciques de réseaux d'astrocytes : Relations entre topologie et dynamiques

Pendant les 20 dernieres annees, les astrocytes, un type de cellules cerebrales ayant ete jusque la relativement ignore des neuroscientifiques, ont peu a peu gagne en notoriete grâce a de multiples decouvertes. Contrairement aux neurones, ces cellules ne transmettent pas de signaux electriques mais communiquent par des changements intracellulaires de leurs concentrations en calcium. Des decouvertes recentes semblent indiquer que, loin d'agir en autarcie, les astrocytes repondent a l'activite neuronale et sembleraient, bien que cela soit plus debattu, moduler la transmission synaptique par le relargage de molecules specifiques appelees `gliotransmetteurs' (en reference aux neurotransmetteurs). Comme les neurones, les astrocytes forment des reseaux et communiquent leur activite calcique par diffusion d'un astrocyte a l'autre, formant ainsi de veritables vagues de calcium intercellulaires. Deux reseaux, de neuronnes et d'astrocytes, cohabitent ainsi dans le cerveau ; mais, alors que les reseaux de neuronnes ont fait l'objet de recherches experimentales et theoriques, les reseaux d'astrocytes restent encore mal connus. Ainsi, il n'a ete decouvert que tres recement que la topologie de ces reseaux pourrait s'averer plus complexe que la vision qui dominait jusqu'alors : celle d'un syncitium astrocytaire depourvu de specificites topologiques. Les travaux presentes dans cette these portent principalement sur l'effet que ces differentes topologies pourraient avoir sur la signalisation calcique astrocytaire. En effet, autant au niveau subcellulaire qu'inter-cellulaire, les mecanismes gouvernant l'activite calcique des astrocytes restent mals connus. Meme dans le cas le plus documente de la reponse somatique des astrocytes a une stimulation neuronale, les caracteristiques precises que la stimulation doit avoir pour evoquer une reponse des astrocytes sont inconnues. Il en est de meme pour la transmission de vagues de calcium dans des reseaux d'astrocytes : on ignore encore les possibles effets de la complexite recemment documentee des reseaux d'astrocytes sur la propagation de ces vagues. Enfin, au niveau subcelulaire, les astrocytes possedent une morphologie ramifiee extremement complexe qui possede elle-meme une activite calcique. Les travaux presentes dans cette these utilisent des outils de modelisation et de simulation afin de determiner les repercussions que l'organisation en reseaux des astrocytes pourrait avoir sur leurs dynamiques calciques. En resume, nous proposons que la topologie des reseaux d'astrocytes a (1) des repercussion au niveau cellulaire, modulant la reponse des astrocytes a des stimulations neuronales ; (2) controle la propagation de vagues de calcium inter-astrocytaire en la favorisant lorsque les reseau sont peu couples ; (3) joue un role important dans l’apparition de phenomenes de resonance stochastique.
A Preclinical Evaluation of Minnelide as a Therapeutic Agent Against Pancreatic Cancer

Minnelide prevents tumor formation, causes tumor regression, and increases survival in multiple models of pancreatic cancer. Vegetation Is Good for You Your mom always told you to eat your vegetables, but what she probably didn’t tell you is that other plants can be good for you as well. Tripterygium wilfordii, sometimes known as the Thunder God vine, has various uses in traditional Chinese medicine. To better understand and improve upon the healing properties of this vine, the active ingredients have been isolated and characterized. One component of T. wilfordii, triptolide, has shown promising effects against pancreatic cancer cells. New therapies for pancreatic cancer—which is one of the most lethal human malignancies—are desperately needed, but triptolide is poorly soluble in water and thus has limited clinical use. Now, Chugh et al. synthesize a water-soluble form of triptolide, Minnelide, and demonstrate efficacy against pancreatic cancer in multiple animal models. The authors tested Minnelide both in vitro and in multiple preclinical models of pancreatic cancer. Each model has distinct advantages and limitations: Well-studied cancer cell lines and translationally relevant patient tumors were transplanted into mice that lack immune systems, whereas a spontaneous model in immunosufficient mice was, by necessity, a mouse tumor. By combining these approaches, the authors addressed many caveats that frequently plague preclinical studies. Indeed, Minnelide was highly effective in treating pancreatic cancer in all of these complementary models. The next step is to take Minnelide into early clinical trials to see if these results can be reproduced in human patients with pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal human malignancies with an all-stage 5-year survival frequency of <5%, which highlights the urgent need for more effective therapeutic strategies. We have previously shown that triptolide, a diterpenoid, is effective against pancreatic cancer cells in vitro as well as in vivo. However, triptolide is poorly soluble in water, limiting its clinical use. We therefore synthesized a water-soluble analog of triptolide, named Minnelide. The efficacy of Minnelide was tested both in vitro and in multiple independent yet complementary in vivo models of pancreatic cancer: an orthotopic model of pancreatic cancer using human pancreatic cancer cell lines in athymic nude mice, a xenograft model where human pancreatic tumors were transplanted into severe combined immunodeficient mice, and a spontaneous pancreatic cancer mouse model (KRasG12D; Trp53R172H; Pdx-1Cre). In these multiple complementary models of pancreatic cancer, Minnelide was highly effective in reducing pancreatic tumor growth and spread, and improving survival. Together, our results suggest that Minnelide shows promise as a potent chemotherapeutic agent against pancreatic cancer, and support the evaluation of Minnelide in clinical trials against this deadly disease.
Novel Approach to Design of a Class-EJ Power Amplifier Using High Power Technology

— This article proposes a new method for application in communication circuit systems that increase efficiency, PAE, output power and gain in the circuit. The proposed method is based on a combination of switching class-E and class-J and has been termed class-EJ. This method was investigated using both theory and simulation to confirm ∼ 72% PAE and output power of >39dBm. The combination and design of the proposed power amplifier accrues gain of over 15dB in the 2.9 to 3.5GHz frequency bandwidth. This circuit was designed using MOSFET and high power transistors. The load- and source-pull method achieved the best input and output networks using lumped elements. The proposed technique was investigated for fundamental and second harmonics having desirable amplitudes for the output signal.
Incrementally updating the discovered sequential patterns based on pre-large concept

Mining useful information from large databases has become an important research area in recent years. Among the classes of knowledge derived, sequential pattern can be applied in many domains, such as market analysis, web click streams, and biological data. The fast updated sequential pattern tree (FUSP-tree) algorithm was proposed to update discovered sequential patterns in incremental mining. However, it must rescan the original database for maintaining discovered sequential patterns. This study proposes the PreFUSP-TREE-INS algorithm based on the pre-large concept for maintaining discovered sequential patterns without rescanning the original database until the cumulative number of newly added customer sequences exceeds a safety bound. The execution time for reconstructing the tree when old or new customer sequences are added into the original database is reduced by using pre-large sequences. The pre-large sequences are defined by lower and upper support thresholds that prevent the movement of sequences directly from large to small and vice versa. Experiments are conducted to show the performance of the proposed algorithm for various minimum support thresholds and ratios of inserted sequences.
The Concept of Employability

The concept of 'employability' plays a crucial role in informing labour market policy in the UK, the EU and beyond. This paper analyses current and previous applications of the term and discusses its value as an exploratory concept and a framework for policy analysis. It then traces the development of the concept, discusses its role in current labour market and training strategies (with particular reference to the UK) and seeks to identify an approach to defining employability that can better inform labour market policy, by transcending explanations of employment and unemployment that focus solely on either supply-side or demand-side factors. Although the literature offers a range of definitions of 'employability', many policy-makers have recently used the term as shorthand for 'the individual's employability skills and attributes'. It is argued that this 'narrow' usage can lead to a 'hollowing out' of the concept of employability. The paper concludes by presenting a broad framework for analysing employability built around individual factors, personal circumstances and external factors, which acknowledges the importance of both supply- and demand-side factors.
Discovering novel pharmacogenomic biomarkers by imputing drug response in cancer patients from large genomics studies

Obtaining accurate drug response data in large cohorts of cancer patients is very challenging; thus, most cancer pharmacogenomics discovery is conducted in preclinical studies, typically using cell lines and mouse models. However, these platforms suffer from serious limitations, including small sample sizes. Here, we have developed a novel computational method that allows us to impute drug response in very large clinical cancer genomics data sets, such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The approach works by creating statistical models relating gene expression to drug response in large panels of cancer cell lines and applying these models to tumor gene expression data in the clinical data sets (e.g., TCGA). This yields an imputed drug response for every drug in each patient. These imputed drug response data are then associated with somatic genetic variants measured in the clinical cohort, such as copy number changes or mutations in protein coding genes. These analyses recapitulated drug associations for known clinically actionable somatic genetic alterations and identified new predictive biomarkers for existing drugs.
Sentiment classification for Chinese reviews: a comparison between SVM and semantic approaches

Web content mining is intended to help people to discover valuable information from large amount of unstructured data on the Web. Sentiment classification aims to mining the Web content of product reviews by classifying the reviews into positive or negative opinions. Such kind of classification approaches could help both consumers and sellers in making their decisions. But it is also a complicated task with great challenge. This paper conducted a comparison between the SVM approach and semantic approach for sentiment classification of Chinese reviews and also proposed some improvement for sentiment classification approaches. Experimental result indicated that, compared with previous researches for English reviews, the performance of both approaches for Chinese reviews sentiment classification are acceptable, while the support vector machine approach has better performance than the semantic orientation approach.
Family Systems Nursing

In Hong Kong, mental health care has traditionally focused on the individual and the concept of considering the family as the unit of care is relatively new. The purpose of this article is to describe the process of planning, implementing, and evaluating a family systems nursing project in a psychiatric setting in Hong Kong. Psychiatric nurses (N = 110) participated in seminars focusing on family systems nursing concepts and individuals and families suffering from mental illness. The Calgary Family Assessment Model and the Calgary Family Intervention Model formed the framework for practice. Significant changes were found both in the nurses' critical appraisal of their clinical practice related to family systems nursing and in their reflections on the reciprocity in their nurse/family relationships. In addition, hospital-wide systems outcomes were noted. This project appears to demonstrate that a family systems nursing approach is relevant for psychiatric nurses caring for Chinese individuals and their families suffering from mental illness.
A genetic screen to isolate genes regulated by the yeast CCAAT‐box binding protein Hap2p

We have developed a screening method to isolate yeast genes regulated by a specific transcription activator. The screen is based on the use of expression libraries in which the lacZ reporter gene is placed under control of yeast regulatory elements. Two partially representative libraries, constructed by different methods, were used to isolate genes regulated by the yeast CCAAT‐box binding protein Hap2p. Among 26 fusions shown to be regulated by Hap2p only CYT1 was known to be regulated by this activator. Sequence analysis revealed that most of the remaining regulated fusions are in new yeast genes, while some are in previously characterized yeast genes (PTP1, RPM2, SDH1). Optimal expression of these three genes also requires Hap3p and Hap4p and is regulated by carbon source. Hap2p was known to regulate expression of genes involved in Krebs cycle, electron transport and heme biosynthesis. Our results suggest that Hap2p could play a more general role by regulating other mitochondrial processes such as protein import and phosphate transport (PTP1) or maturation of mitochondrial tRNAs (RPM2). Among the remaining regulated fusions, two of them correspond to open reading frames (ORFs) on chromosomes III and XI whose nucleotide sequences have been entirely determined. The use of this approach to functionally analyse ORFs of unknown function is discussed.
Towards a Less Orthodox History of Hausaland

The historiography of Hausaland has laboured under a strong tradition of orthodoxy which recent secondary works have inherited from the more-or-less primary oral-cum-written sources. General cultural evidence (linguistic, ethnographic and archaeological) has been regarded as subsidiary, so that its potential for reconceptualization and for critical reevaluation of the conventional sources and orthodox interpretations has been missed. Instead, antiquarian approaches have been encouraged. Thus the view has persisted that Hausa as a cultural and linguistic entity has an antiquity running to several millennia, and also that it originated in the Sahara or around Aïr, whence it was pushed southward by desiccation or by Tuareg nomads. Contrarily, the clear message of linguistic geography and of Hausa's place within the Chadic family is that Hausa. expanded from east to west across the savanna belt of northern Nigeria. And the relative homogeneity of the language and culture within this vast zone indicates that the spread is quite recent (within the present millennium, say). It would have involved some assimilation, of previously settled peoples of the northern Nigerian plains, most of whom wouldl have spoken languages of the ‘Plateau’ division of Greenberg's Benue–Congo subfamily, of Niger-Congo. This Hausaization, as it proceeded from its old bases in eastern Hausaland, would have been both a cultural and an ecological process, through which woodland would have been converted into more open and continuous savanna to support grain-cultivation and a denser peasant population. This process would have reached western Hausaland (Zamfara and Kebbi) around the middle of this millennium. Cattle – and Fulani herdsmen – would in time have played an important role in this cultural ecology (and in restricting the tsetse zones). The old theory of a northern origin for the Hausa is bound up with the problem of Gobir in north-western Hausaland. Gobir's claim to be one of the original seven kingdoms (Hausa bakwai) is probably a late invention. Moreover, the common assumption that Gobirawa Hausa migrated from Aïr seems to derive from a misinterpretation of the written sources. Finally the bakwai legends are reconsidered. Despite the scepticism of some modern critics, the legends appear to reflect, albeit in idealized form, a real historical development. They represent a foundation charter for the Hausa as a multi-state ethnicity, and enshrine the vague memory of how Hausaland and ‘Hausaness’ began from a series of small centres and hill-bases on its eastern side. Thus the interesting argument of Abdullahi Smith, that the Hausa people emerged long before state systems arose among them, is disputed. Rather, these should be seen as two facets of a single process during the present millennium.
Three novel antibiotic marker cassettes for gene disruption and marker switching in Schizosaccharomyces pombe

The ease of construction of multiple mutant strains in Schizosaccharomyces pombe is limited by the number of available genetic markers. We describe here three new cassettes for PCR‐mediated gene disruption that can be used in combination with commonly used fission yeast markers to make multiple gene deletions. The natMX6, hphMX6 and bleMX6 markers give rise to resistance towards the antibiotics nourseothricin (NAT), hygromycin B and phleomycin, respectively. The cassettes are composed of exogenous sequences to increase the frequency of integration at targeted loci, and have a structure similar to the commonly used pFA6a–kanMX6 modular plasmid system. This allows a simple exchange of the kanMX6 marker in existing strains with any of the three new cassettes. Alternatively, oligonucleotide primers designed for the modular kanMX6 cassettes can be used to make the transforming PCR fragments for gene disruption. We illustrate the construction of a mutant strain with six independent gene disruptions, using the novel antibiotic cassettes in combination with existing genetic markers. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Evaluation of Whole Tree Growth Increment Derived from Tree-Ring Series for Use in Assessments of Changes in Forest Productivity across Various Spatial Scales

The inherent predictability of inter-annual variation in forest productivity remains unknown. Available field-based data sources for understanding this variability differ in their spatial resolution, temporal resolution, and typical units of measure. Nearly all other tree and forest characteristics are in practice derived from measurements of diameter at breast height (DBH). Therefore, diameter increment reconstructed annually from tree-ring data can be used to estimate annual growth increments of wood volume, but the accuracy and precision of these estimates requires assessment. Annual growth estimates for n = 170 trees sampled for whole stem analysis from five tree species (jack pine, lodgepole pine, black spruce, white spruce, and trembling aspen) in Western Canada were compared against increments derived from breast height measurements only. Inter-annual variability of breast height and whole tree growth increments was highly correlated for most trees. Relative errors varied by species, diameter class, and the equation used to estimate volume (regional vs. national). A simple example of the possible effect of this error when propagated to the stand level is provided.
Strong convergence theorems of common fixed points for a pair of quasi-nonexpansive and asymptotically quasi-nonexpansive mappings

The purpose of this paper is to give necessary and sufficient condition of modified three-step iteration scheme with errors to converge to common fixed points for a pair of quasi-nonexpansive and asymptotically quasi-nonexpansive mappings in Banach spaces. The results presented in this paper generalize, improve and unify the corresponding results in [1, 3, 4, 8, 9]. 2010 AMS Subject Classification: 47H09, 47H10.
A RISC architecture extended by an efficient tightly coupled reconfigurable unit

In this paper, the architecture of an embedded processor extended with a tightly-coupled coarse-grain reconfigurable functional unit (RFU) is proposed. The efficient integration of the RFU with the control unit and the datapath of the processor eliminate the communication overhead between them. To speed up execution, the RFU exploits instruction level parallelism (ILP) and spatial computation. Also, the proposed integration of the RFU efficiently exploits the pipeline structure of the processor, leading to further performance improvements. Furthermore, a development framework for the introduced architecture is presented. The framework is fully automated, hiding all reconfigurable hardware related issues from the user. The hardware model of the architecture was synthesized in a 0.13 µm process and all information regarding area and delay were estimated and presented. A set of benchmarks is used to evaluate the architecture and the development framework. Experimental results prove performance improvements in addition to potential energy reduction.
An ABC Transporter Is Involved in the Silicon-Induced Formation of Casparian Bands in the Exodermis of Rice

Silicon (Si) promotes the formation of Casparian bands (CB) in rice and reduces radial oxygen loss (ROL). Further transcriptomic approaches revealed several candidate genes involved in the Si-induced formation of CB such as ATP binding cassette (ABC) transporter, Class III peroxidases, ligases and transferases. Investigation of these genes by means of overexpression (OE) and knockout (KO) mutants revealed the contribution of the ABC transporter (OsABCG25) to CB formation in the exodermis, which was also reflected in the expression of other OsABCG25 in the Si-promoted formation of CB genes related to the phenylpropanoid pathway, such as phenylalanine-ammonia-lyase, diacylglycerol O-acyltransferase and 4-coumarate-CoA ligase. Differential CB development in mutants and Si supply also affected the barrier function of the exodermis. OE of the ABC transporter and Si supply reduced the ROL from roots and Fe uptake. No effect on ROL and Fe uptake could be observed for the KO mutant. The presented research confirms the impact of the OsABCG25 in the Si-promoted formation of CB and its barrier functions.