Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cross-language speech perception: Swedish, English, and Spanish speakers' perception of front rounded vowels

Cross-language research on adult speech perception demonstrates a strong effect of linguistic experience on consonant perception but not on vowel perception. Our paper re-examines the effect of linguistic experience on adults' vowel perception. First, identification and goodness functions for the high front quadrant of the vowel space were mapped for speakers of Swedish, English and Spanish. Second, speakers performed a discrimination task for one vector in this vowel space. Stimuli along this vector were identified by Swedish speakers as belonging to the Swedish front-rounded vowel series /u/spl uml/:/-/o/spl uml/:/. However, English and Spanish speakers reported that the stimuli were not in their language. Significant differences in discriminability of these stimuli were observed across speakers of different languages. Our results show that linguistic experience plays a significant role in vowel discrimination.
Comparative evaluation of word composition distances for the recognition of SCOP relationships

MOTIVATION Alignment-free metrics were recently reviewed by the authors, but have not until now been object of a comparative study. This paper compares the classification accuracy of word composition metrics therein reviewed. It also presents a new distance definition between protein sequences, the W-metric, which bridges between alignment metrics, such as scores produced by the Smith-Waterman algorithm, and methods based solely in L-tuple composition, such as Euclidean distance and Information content. RESULTS The comparative study reported here used the SCOP/ASTRAL protein structure hierarchical database and accessed the discriminant value of alternative sequence dissimilarity measures by calculating areas under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curves. Although alignment methods resulted in very good classification accuracy at family and superfamily levels, alignment-free distances, in particular Standard Euclidean Distance, are as good as alignment algorithms when sequence similarity is smaller, such as for recognition of fold or class relationships. This observation justifies its advantageous use to pre-filter homologous proteins since word statistics techniques are computed much faster than the alignment methods. AVAILABILITY All MATLAB code used to generate the data is available upon request to the authors. Additional material available at http://bioinformatics.musc. edu/wmetric
NomLoc: Calibration-Free Indoor Localization with Nomadic Access Points

Newly popular indoor location-based services (ILBS), when integrated with commerce and public safety, offer a promising land for wireless indoor localization technologies. WLAN is suggested to be one of the most potential candidates owing to its prevalent infrastructure (i.e., access points (APs)) and low cost. However, the overall performance can be greatly degraded by the spatial localizability variance problem, i.e., the localization accuracy across various locations may have significant differences given any fixed AP deployment. As a result, it brings in user experience inconsistency which is unfavorable for ILBS. In this paper, we propose NomLoc - an indoor localization system using nomadic APs to address the performance variance problem. The key insight of NomLoc is to leverage the mobility of nomadic APs to dynamically adjust the WLAN network topology. A space partition (SP)-based localization algorithm is tailored for NomLoc to perform calibration-free positioning. Moreover, fine-grained channel state information (CSI) is employed to mitigate the performance degradation of the SP-based method due to multipath and none-line-of-sight (NLOS) effects. We have implemented the NomLoc system with off-the-shelf devices and evaluated the performance in two typical indoor environments. The results show that NomLoc can greatly mitigate spatial localizability variance and improve localization accuracy with the assistance of nomadic APs as compared with the corresponding static AP deployment. Moreover, it is robust to the position error of nomadic APs.
Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada . By Irene Bloemraad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 382p. $60 cloth, $23.95 paper.

of their own societies and polities). Even as the chapters agree on Islam’s diversity, they diverge regarding views of the future. Does diversity signal that voices of moderation will prevail, or, alternatively, that opportunities for extremism will endure? Neither starry-eyed romanticism nor prophecies of doom appear in this collection. Five chapters end with relative optimism (those of Mitri, Nielsen, Massignon, Anagnostou, and Amiraux), while one chapter stops at divisions (Bougarel) and two chapters conclude pessimistically (Cesari and Schiffauer). The framing Introduction and Afterword play good cop (“the potential for a happier future for Islam in Europe,” Fokas on p. 14) versus bad cop (“Clearly, Europe must look forward to turbulent times,” Al-Azmeh on p. 214). Apparently, even if Islam in Europe is manifold and nonviolent, challenges continue. It remains to be seen whether serious, detailed, and exemplary scholarship such as is offered in this volume can turn back waves of media coverage and redirect popular consciousness toward more positive or at least more accurate political visions of religious and cultural heterogeneity. Scholars of European politics, religion and politics, and the politics of Islam will certainly profit from a close reading of this volume. It deserves to influence research, teaching, and broader public discussion of the future of Europe and its increasingly heterogeneous societies.
On inserting program understanding technology into the software change process

Program understanding technologies can be applied effectively in the analysis phase of a software change process. The analysis phase naturally follows a goal driven metaprocess. Described are issues involved with inserting program understanding technology into existing practice and into such a metaprocess. The implied processes of program understanding and reverse engineering tools play an important role. These issues pose major problems for the acceptance of redocumentation tools such as Rigi, an evolvable reverse engineering tool. An example using Rigi and its analysis methodology for change impact analysis is considered.
Testing the Identifiable Victim Effect With Both Animal and Human Victims in Anti-Littering Messages

ABSTRACT The identifiable victim effect is when people are more willing to help identified individuals than those who are unidentified, or statistical, victims. It has primarily been tested in experiments with humans as the victims. A lack of research exists testing whether animal victims could elicit the same level of help, or reactions, as human victims. This study tests the identifiable victim effect with both human and animal stimulus messages focused on the consequences of littering. A total of 198 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to view one of three messages (i.e., an identifiable human victim message, identifiable animal victim message, or a nonvictim control message). While the animal message elicited greater distress and empathy than the human message, the three messages did not differ on behavioral intention outcomes. This study fills a gap in the identifiable victim literature, and it provides insight about responses to risk messages aimed at increasing a prosocial behavior.
Advanced Manufacturing Technology: Organizational Design and Strategic Flexibility

This paper explains how investments in flexible, advanced manufacturing tech nologies (AMT) have special properties that can transform organization design and the economic bases of strategic flexibility. Investments in AMT that pro vide significant economies of scope (i.e. low-volume/low-cost manufacturing) produce strategic options that allow the firm to place a 'call' on related markets that it may potentially enter. The value of AMT investments grow with the increasing changes in the environment. In addition, CAD/CAM networks, a vital component of most AMT systems, enable the firm to work selectively with external designers, suppliers, customers and other firms to rapidly com press the product development and commercialization process. Firms seeking to maximize economies of scope and the option value of AMT need to recon figure their organizations into loosely coupled systems with a modular, open systems perspective. Flexible AMT systems facilitate the pursuit of emergent, product-based strategies based on the selective exercise of the process techno logy's option value. Furthemiore, AMT helps firms develop more complex competitive strategies (e.g. integrated low cost and differentiation) necessary for strategic competitiveness in global markets. Finally, AMT can facilitate the development of a learning laboratory in organizations.
Concept Based Search Using LSI and Automatic Keyphrase Extraction

Classic information retrieval model might lead to poor retrieval due to unrelated documents that might be included in the answer set or missed relevant documents that do not contain at least one index term. Retrieval based on index terms is vague and noisy. The user information need is more related to concepts and ideas than to index terms. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) model is a concept-based retrieval method which overcomes many of the problems evident in today's popular word-based retrieval systems. Most retrieval systems match words in the user’s queries with words in the text of documents in the corpus, whereas LSI model performs the match based on the concepts. In order to perform concept mapping, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used. Also key phrases are an important means of document summarization, clustering and topic search. Key phrases give high level description of document contents that indeed makes it easy for perspective readers to decide whether or not it is relevant to them. In this paper, we first develop an automatic key phrase extraction model for extracting key phrases from documents and then use these key phrases as a corpus on which conceptual search will be performed using LSI.
Gender, extra‐firm mobility, and compensation attainment in the United States and Hong Kong

Using data from 739 U.S. managers and professionals and 593 Hong Kong Chinese managers and professionals we examined the moderating effects of gender on the relationship between changing employers and compensation attainment. While there were no gender-based compensation differences early in the careers of these individuals (in 1991), large pay differences favoring men were observed in 1999 only among those who had followed an external labor market strategy. These results demonstrate that this phenomenon is not isolated to labor markets of the United States and strengthen the view that much of the observed pay differential favoring men has its origins in extra-firm mobility, not intra-firm gender discrimination. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Explorer A Class III Semaphorin ( Sema 3 e ) Inhibits Mouse Osteoblast Migration and Decreases Osteoclast Formation In Vitro

Originally identified as axonal guidance cues, semaphorins are expressed throughout many different tissues and regulate numerous non-neuronal processes. We demonstrate that most class III semaphorins are expressed in mouse osteoblasts and are differentially regulated by cell growth and differentiation: Sema3d expression is increased and Sema3e expression decreased during proliferation in culture, while expression of Sema3a is unaffected by cell density but increases in cultures of mineralizing osteoblasts. Expression of Sema3a, -3e, and -3d is also differentially regulated by osteogenic stimuli; inhibition of GSK3b decreased expression of Sema3a and -3e, while 1,25-(OH)2D3 increased expression of Sema3e. Parathyroid hormone had no effect on expression of Sema3a, -3b, or -3d. Osteoblasts, macrophages, and osteoclasts express the Sema3e receptor PlexinD1, suggesting an autocrine and paracrine role for Sema3e. No effects of recombinant Sema3e on osteoblast proliferation, differentiation, or mineralization were observed; but Sema3e did inhibit the migration of osteoblasts in a wound-healing assay. The formation of multinucleated, tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase–positive osteoclasts was decreased by 81% in cultures of mouse bone marrow macrophages incubated with 200 ng/mL Sema3e. Correspondingly, decreased expression of osteoclast markers (Itgb3, Acp5, Cd51, Nfatc1, CalcR, and Ctsk) was observed by qPCR in macrophage cultures differentiated in the presence of Sema3e. Our results demonstrate that class III semaphorins are expressed by osteoblasts and differentially regulated by differentiation, mineralization, and osteogenic stimuli. Sema3e is a novel inhibitor of osteoclast formation in vitro and may play a role in maintaining local bone homeostasis, potentially acting as a coupling factor between osteoclasts and osteoblasts.
School processes mediate school compositional effects: model specification and estimation

School composition effects have been consistently verified, but few studies ever attempted to study how school composition affects school achievement. Based on prior research findings, we employed multilevel mediation modeling to examine whether school processes mediate the effect of school composition upon school outcomes based on the data of 28 OECD countries in PISA 2003. These school process factors include school resources, opportunity to learn, school climate and school management. We find that school composition effects are partially mediated by school climate factors.
A LTCC cross-coupled bandpass filter for millimeter-wave integrated module

This paper presents design and realization of a Ka-band stripline bandpass filter. A single pair of transmission zeros at lower and upper stopbands are achieved by introducing cross coupling. The whole filter is designed as a three-dimension structure in LTCC multi-layers. EM simulation is employed to estimate the performance of the filter and do optimization. The dimension of the fabricated LTCC filter is 8.3mm×4.4mm× 1.1mm. The measurement shows a bandwidth of 1.5 GHz with the center frequency of 35.65 GHz. The measured insertion loss is smaller than 6.5 dB and return loss is below −6.4 dB including the RF connectors in the passband. The proposed filter is suitable for the applications in millimeter-wave integrated module.
Dynamic provisioning in next-generation data centers with on-site power production

The critical need for clean and economical sources of energy is transforming data centers that are primarily energy consumers to also energy producers. We focus on minimizing the operating costs of next-generation data centers that can jointly optimize the energy supply from on-site generators and the power grid, and the energy demand from servers as well as power conditioning and cooling systems. We formulate the cost minimization problem and present an offline optimal algorithm. For "on-grid" data centers that use only the grid, we devise a deterministic online algorithm that achieves the best possible competitive ratio of 2α<sub><i>s</i></sub>, where α<sub><i>s</i></sub> is a normalized look-ahead window size. The competitive ratio of an online algorithm is defined as the maximum ratio (over all possible inputs) between the algorithm's cost (with no or limited look-ahead) and the offline optimal assuming complete future information. We remark that the results hold as long as the overall energy demand (including server, cooling, and power conditioning) is a convex and increasing function in the total number of active servers and also in the total server load. For "hybrid" data centers that have on-site power generation in addition to the grid, we develop an online algorithm that achieves a competitive ratio of at most <i>P</i>max(2--α<sub>s</sub>)/<i>c<sub>o</sub></i>+<i>c<sub>m</sub>/L</i> [1+2 <i>P</i>max--<i>c<sub>o</sub></i>/<i>P</i>max(1+α<sub><i>g</i></sub>], where α<sub><i>s</i></sub> and α<sub><i>g</i></sub> are normalized look-ahead window sizes, <i>P</i>max is the maximum grid power price, and <i>L</i>, <i>c<sub>o</sub></i>, and <i>c<sub>m</sub></i> are parameters of an on-site generator. Using extensive workload traces from Akamai with the corresponding grid power prices, we simulate our offline and online algorithms in a realistic setting. Our offline (resp., online) algorithm achieves a cost reduction of 25.8% (resp., 20.7%) for a hybrid data center and 12.3% (resp., 7.3%) for an on-grid data center. The cost reductions are quite significant and make a strong case for a joint optimization of energy supply and energy demand in a data center. A hybrid data center provides about 13% additional cost reduction over an on-grid data center representing the additional cost benefits that on-site power generation provides over using the grid alone.
Earthquakes as a self‐organized critical phenomenon

The Gutenberg-Richter power law distribution for energy released at earthquakes can be understood as a consequence of the earth crust being in a self-organized critical state. A simple cellular automaton stick-slip type model yields D(E) ≈ E−τ with τ≈1.0 and τ≈1.35 in two and three dimensions, respectively. The size of earthquakes is unpredictable since the evolution of an earthquake depends crucially on minor details of the crust.
Simplified alternating optimization for robust MMSE MIMO transceiver

We consider a worst-case robust transceiver design for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, under the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion, to combat against the imperfection of channel state information (CSI). The joint robust transceiver design is formulated as a minimax problem. We show that for a given precoder (equalizer), the optimal robust equalizer (precoder) is obtained in a semi-closed form by channel diagonalization. Thus, a joint robust transceiver can be efficiently achieved by alternately optimizing the equalizer and precoder, where in each iteration only a power allocation problem is to be solved. We also propose efficient algorithms to solve the power allocation problems in each iteration.
Muscle Damage and Its Relationship with Muscle Fatigue During a Half-Iron Triathlon

Background To investigate the cause/s of muscle fatigue experienced during a half-iron distance triathlon. Methodology/Principal Findings We recruited 25 trained triathletes (36±7 yr; 75.1±9.8 kg) for the study. Before and just after the race, jump height and leg muscle power output were measured during a countermovement jump on a force platform to determine leg muscle fatigue. Body weight, handgrip maximal force and blood and urine samples were also obtained before and after the race. Blood myoglobin and creatine kinase concentrations were determined as markers of muscle damage. Results Jump height (from 30.3±5.0 to 23.4±6.4 cm; P<0.05) and leg power output (from 25.6±2.9 to 20.7±4.6 W · kg−1; P<0.05) were significantly reduced after the race. However, handgrip maximal force was unaffected by the race (430±59 to 430±62 N). Mean dehydration after the race was 2.3±1.2% with high inter-individual variability in the responses. Blood myoglobin and creatine kinase concentration increased to 516±248 µg · L−1 and 442±204 U · L−1, respectively (P<0.05) after the race. Pre- to post-race jump change did not correlate with dehydration (r = 0.16; P>0.05) but significantly correlated with myoglobin concentration (r = 0.65; P<0.001) and creatine kinase concentration (r = 0.54; P<0.001). Conclusions/significance During a half-iron distance triathlon, the capacity of leg muscles to produce force was notably diminished while arm muscle force output remained unaffected. Leg muscle fatigue was correlated with blood markers of muscle damage suggesting that muscle breakdown is one of the most relevant sources of muscle fatigue during a triathlon.
On interpretation of graffiti digits and characters for eBooks: neural-fuzzy network and genetic algorithm approach

This paper presents the rule optimization, tuning of the membership functions, and optimization of the number of fuzzy rules, of a neural-fuzzy network (NFN) using a genetic algorithm (GA). The objectives are achieved by training a proposed NFN with rule switches. The proposed NFN and GA are employed to interpret graffiti number inputs and commands for electronic books (eBooks).
An Alienation Test

imprecise nature (e.g., Kenniston, 1966; Srole, 1956) or overly narrow and limited (e.g., Neal & Rettig, 1967). Our research’ aimed to develop an alienation test that is conceptually comprehensive. A large pool of questionnaire items was constructed to sample four types and five contexts of alienation. The following types were chosen to represent major themes in relevant theorizing: powerlessness (Elmore, 1962; Neal & Rettig, 1967; Seeman, 1959), or despair of any influence over social or personal affairs; adventurousness (Kenniston, 1966; Maddi, 1967), or the inability to experience vitality unless one is engaged in extreme and dangerous activities; nihilism (Levin, 1960; McDill & Ridley, 1962; Maddi, 1967), or the insistent attempt to discredit anything that appears to have meaning; and vegetativeness (Elmore, 1962; Horney, 1950; Maddi, 1967), or the inability to believe in the truth, importance, or interest value of anything one is doing. The contexts in which these types of alienation can be expressed are the person’s relationship to work (Blauner, 1964; Marx, 1963), social institutions (Kenniston, 1966; Merton, 1957), family (Horney, 1950; Kenniston, 1966), other persons (Horney, 1950; Maddi, 1970), and self (Fromm, 1941; Maddi, 1970). Each questionnaire item was intended to tap one type and one context of alienation.
Generating collision free reaching movements for redundant manipulators using dynamical systems

For autonomous robots to manipulate objects in unknown environments, they must be able to move their arms without colliding with nearby objects, other agents or humans. The simultaneous avoidance of multiple obstacles in real time by all link segments of a manipulator is still a hard task both in practice and in theory. We present a systematic scheme for the generation of collision free movements for redundant manipulators in scenes with arbitrarily many obstacles. Based on the dynamical systems approach to robotics, constraints are formulated as contributions to a dynamical system that erect attractors for targets and repellors for obstacles. These contributions are formulated in terms of variables relevant to each constraint and then transformed into vector fields over the manipulator joint velocity vector as an embedding space in which all constraints are simultaneously observed. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by implementing it on a real anthropomorphic 8-degrees-of-freedom redundant manipulator. In addition, performance is characterized by detecting failures in a systematic simulation experiment in randomized scenes with varying numbers of obstacles.