Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The relationship between the speech perception and the degree of satisfaction among adult users of cochlear implants

Summary Introduction: In recent years, the benefits associated with the use of cochlear implants (CIs), especially with regard to speech perception, have proven to surpass those produced by the use of hearing aids, making CIs a highly efficient resource for patients with severe/profound hearing loss. However, few studies so far have assessed the satisfaction of adult users of CIs. Objective: To analyze the relationship between the level of speech perception and degree of satisfaction of adult users of CI. Method: This was a prospective cross-sectional study conducted in the Audiological Research Center (CPA) of the Hospital of Craniofacial Anomalies, University of São Paulo (HRAC/USP), in Bauru, São Paulo, Brazil. A total of 12 users of CIs with pre-lingual or post-lingual hearing loss participated in this study. The following tools were used in the assessment: a questionnaire, “Satisfaction with Amplification in Daily Life” (SADL), culturally adapted to Brazilian Portuguese, as well as its relationship with the speech perception results; a speech perception test under quiet conditions; and the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT)Brazil under free field conditions. Results: The participants in the study were on the whole satisfied with their devices, and the degree of satisfaction correlated positively with the ability to perceive monosyllabic words under quiet conditions. The satisfaction did not correlate with the level of speech perception in noisy environments. Conclusion: Assessments of satisfaction may help professionals to predict what other factors, in addition to speech perception, may contribute to the satisfaction of CI users in order to reorganize the intervention process to improve the users' quality of life.
Hemodynamic Response Imaging: A Potential Tool for the Assessment of Angiogenesis in Brain Tumors

Blood oxygenation level dependence (BOLD) imaging under either hypercapnia or hyperoxia has been used to study neuronal activation and for assessment of various brain pathologies. We evaluated the benefit of a combined protocol of BOLD imaging during both hyperoxic and hypercapnic challenges (termed hemodynamic response imaging (HRI)). Nineteen healthy controls and seven patients with primary brain tumors were included: six with glioblastoma (two newly diagnosed and four with recurrent tumors) and one with atypical-meningioma. Maps of percent signal intensity changes (ΔS) during hyperoxia (carbogen; 95%O2+5%CO2) and hypercapnia (95%air+5%CO2) challenges and vascular reactivity mismatch maps (VRM; voxels that responded to carbogen with reduced/absent response to CO2) were calculated. VRM values were measured in white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) areas of healthy subjects and used as threshold values in patients. Significantly higher response to carbogen was detected in healthy subjects, compared to hypercapnia, with a GM/WM ratio of 3.8 during both challenges. In patients with newly diagnosed/treatment-naive tumors (n = 3), increased response to carbogen was detected with substantially increased VRM response (compared to threshold values) within and around the tumors. In patients with recurrent tumors, reduced/absent response during both challenges was demonstrated. An additional finding in 2 of 4 patients with recurrent glioblastoma was a negative response during carbogen, distant from tumor location, which may indicate steal effect. In conclusion, the HRI method enables the assessment of blood vessel functionality and reactivity. Reference values from healthy subjects are presented and preliminary results demonstrate the potential of this method to complement perfusion imaging for the detection and follow up of angiogenesis in patients with brain tumors.
Analysis and optimization of coaxial magnetic gears

Coaxial magnetic gears with permanent magnets have a very simple structure and performance comparable to that of mechanical gears. The paper describes an analytical simplified approach for the analysis and design procedure. The mathematical model is one-dimensional: only the variation of electromagnetic quantities as function of angular position is considered and the permanent magnets are modeled by means of constant currents located at their edges. The resulting magnetomotive force generated by the two rotors is modulated by the distribution of the variable permeance due to the stationary ferromagnetic pole-pieces. The influence of the ratio between the width of the magnet and the pole pitch on the air-gap flux density is also considered. The analytical results are verified by means of a FEM considering the power losses and the torque ripple in order to obtain minimum volumes of the magnets and high torque densities.
BUPTTeam Participation at TAC 2011 Recognizing Textual Entailment

This paper overviews BUPTTeam’s participation in the main task organized within the RTE7 Evaluation. In this paper we propose a method to calculate the similarity between text and hypothesis based on the TF/IDF values. Our system designed to recognize textual entailment typically employ lexical information. The evaluation results show that our method is effective for RTE task.
Social Bootstrapping : Developing Social Communities by Borrowing from Established Social Networks

How does one develop a new online community that is highly engaging to each user and promotes social interaction? A number of websites offer friend-finding features that help users bootstrap social networks on the website by copying links from an established network like Facebook or Twitter. This paper quantifies the extent to which such social bootstrapping is effective in enhancing a social experience of the website. First, we develop a stylised analytical model that suggests that copying tends to produce a giant connected component (i.e., a connected community) quickly and preserves properties such as reciprocity and clustering, up to a linear multiplicative factor. Second, we use data from two websites, Pinterest and Last.fm, to empirically compare the subgraph of links copied from Facebook to links created natively. We find that the copied subgraph has a giant component, higher reciprocity and clustering, and confirm that the copied connections see higher social interactions. However, the need for copying diminishes as users become more active and influential. Such users tend to create links natively on the website, to users who are more similar to them than their Facebook friends. Our findings give new insights into understanding how bootstrapping from established social networks can help engage new users by enhancing social interactivity.
Towards Comprehensive Traffic Forecasting in Cloud Computing: Design and Application

In this paper, we present our effort towards comprehensive traffic forecasting for big data applications using external, light-weighted file system monitoring. Our idea is motivated by the key observations that rich traffic demand information already exists in the log and meta-data files of many big data applications, and that such information can be readily extracted through run-time file system monitoring. As the first step, we use Hadoop as a concrete example to explore our methodology and develop a system called HadoopWatch to predict traffic demands of Hadoop applications. We further implement HadoopWatch in a small-scale testbed with 10 physical servers and 30 virtual machines. Our experiments over a series of MapReduce applications demonstrate that HadoopWatch can forecast the traffic demand with almost 100% accuracy and time advance. Furthermore, it makes no modification on the Hadoop framework, and introduces little overhead to the application performance. Finally, to showcase the utility of accurate traffic prediction made by HadoopWatch, we design and implement a simple HadoopWatch-enabled network optimization module into the HadoopWatch controller, and with realistic Hadoop job benchmarks we find that even a simple algorithm can leverage the forecasting results provided by HadoopWatch to significantly improve the Hadoop job completion time by up to 14.72%.
Enhances U-Type Inactivation of N-Type ( CaV 2 . 2 ) Calcium Current in Rat Sympathetic Neurons

Goo, Yong Sook, Wonil Lim, and Keith S. Elmslie. Ca enhances U-type inactivation of N-type (CaV2.2) calcium current in rat sympathetic neurons. J Neurophysiol 96: 1075–1083, 2006. First published June 7, 2006; doi:10.1152/jn.01294. 2005. Ca -dependent inactivation (CDI) has recently been shown in heterologously expressed N-type calcium channels (CaV2.2), but CDI has been inconsistently observed in native N-current. We examined the effect of Ca on N-channel inactivation in rat sympathetic neurons to determine the role of CDI on mammalian N-channels. N-current inactivated with fast ( 150 ms) and slow ( 3 s) components in Ba . Ca differentially affected these components by accelerating the slow component (slow inactivation) and enhancing the amplitude of the fast component (fast inactivation). Lowering intracellular BAPTA concentration from 20 to 0.1 mM accelerated slow inactivation, but only in Ca as expected from CDI. However, low BAPTA accelerated fast inactivation in either Ca or Ba , which was unexpected. Fast inactivation was abolished with monovalent cations as the charge carrier, but slow inactivation was similar to that in Ba . Increased Ca , but not Ba , concentration (5–30 mM) enhanced the amplitude of fast inactivation and accelerated slow inactivation. However, the enhancement of fast inactivation was independent of Ca influx, which indicates the relevant site is exposed to the extracellular solution and is inconsistent with CDI. Fast inactivation showed U-shaped voltage dependence in both Ba and Ca , which appears to result from preferential inactivation from intermediate closed states (U-type inactivation). Taken together, the data support a role for extracellular divalent cations in modulating U-type inactivation. CDI appears to play a role in N-channel inactivation, but on a slower (sec) time scale.
A Constrained Latent Variable Model for Coreference Resolution

Coreference resolution is a well known clustering task in Natural Language Processing. In this paper, we describe the Latent Left Linking model (L 3 M), a novel, principled, and linguistically motivated latent structured prediction approach to coreference resolution. We show that L 3 M admits efficient inference and can be augmented with knowledge-based constraints; we also present a fast stochastic gradient based learning. Experiments on ACE and Ontonotes data show that L 3 M and its constrained version, CL 3 M, are more accurate than several state-of-the-art approaches as well as some structured prediction models proposed in the literature.
Automated system for the detection of hypertensive retinopathy

Retinal abnormality associated with high blood pressure is known as hypertensive retinopathy (HR). This disease leads to permanent blindness so timely diagnosis and treatment of the disease is very important. Fundus image analysis is used to diagnose HR. An automated system for the early detection of HR proves to be useful for ophthalmologists and patients. In this paper, we propose an automated system for the detection of HR using arteriovenous (AV) ratio. The proposed system consists of novel method for classification of vessels as arteries and veins using new feature vector and hybrid classifier. This paper also presents a new method to calculate vessel width which is useful to measure AV ratio. The system detects whether fundus image contains HR or not using already calculated AV ratio. Two publicly available digital fundus image databases i.e. VICAVR and DRIVE are used for the testing of our proposed algorithm. Experimental results show the validity of our proposed algorithm.
Mass and Spin of GRS 1915+105 Based on a Resonance Model of QPOs

We demonstrate that the four high-frequency QPOs observed in GRS 1915+105 can be interpreted as the oscillation modes on disks that non-linearly and resonantly interact with a warp. The warp is assumed to be a lowfrequency global pattern on the disk. This identification suggests that the relevant mass, M, and spin parameter, a,
Cosmological Measurements with Forthcoming Radio Continuum Surveys

We present forecasts for constraints on cosmological models which can be obtained by forthcoming radio continuum surveys: the wide surveys with the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR), Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and th e Westerbork Observations of the Deep APERTIF Northern sky (WODAN). We use simulated catalogues appropriate to the planned surveys to predict measurements obtained with the source auto-correlation, the crosscorrelation between radio sources and CMB maps (the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect), the cross-correlation of radio sources with foreground object s due to cosmic magnification, and a joint analysis together with the CMB power spectrum and supernovae. We show that near future radio surveys will bring complementary measurements to other experiments, probing different cosmological volumes, and having different systematics. Our results show that the unprecedented sky coverage of these surveys combined should provide the most significant measurement yet of the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. In addition, we show that using the ISW effect will significantly tighten constraints on modifie d gravity parameters, while the best measurements of dark energy models will come from galaxy auto-correlation function analyses. Using the combination of EMU and WODAN to provide a full sky survey, it will be possible to measure the dark energy parameters with an uncertainty of {σ(w0) = 0.05, σ(wa) = 0.12} and the modified gravity parameters {σ(η0) = 0.10, σ(µ0) = 0.05}, assuming Planck CMB+SN(current data) priors. Finally, we show that radio surveys would detect a primordial non-Gaussianity of fNL = 8 at 1-σ and we briefly discuss other promising probes.
Mortality in hospitalized older adults associated with Clostridium difficile infection at a district hospital

Clostridium difficile is the most common cause of hospital acquired infectious diarrhea in the developed world and has re-emerged in recent years with apparent greater morbidity and mortality. Despite this, there is little recent published data from the UK concerning associated mortality. We performed a case control study at a UK district general hospital of 66 hospitalized patients over the age of 65 years with C. difficile infection compared to 3–5 controls matched for age, sex and minimum length of stay. We found a significant excess mortality of 11.5% at seven days, 26.2% at 30 days, 38.1% at 90 days and 41.4% at 180 days. C. difficile infection in hospitalized elderly patients may contribute to long-term mortality or be a marker of poor prognosis and cases may require more intensive long-term follow up to improve mortality.
Draft Genome Sequence of Kluyveromyces marxianus Strain DMB1, Isolated from Sugarcane Bagasse Hydrolysate

ABSTRACT We determined the genome sequence of a thermotolerant yeast, Kluyveromyces marxianus strain DMB1, isolated from sugarcane bagasse hydrolysate, and the sequence provides further insights into the genomic differences between this strain and other reported K. marxianus strains. The genome described here is composed of 11,165,408 bases and has 4,943 protein-coding genes.
Proton: multitouch gestures as regular expressions

Current multitouch frameworks require application developers to write recognition code for custom gestures; this code is split across multiple event-handling callbacks. As the number of custom gestures grows it becomes increasingly difficult to 1) know if new gestures will conflict with existing gestures, and 2) know how to extend existing code to reliably recognize the complete gesture set. Proton is a novel framework that addresses both of these problems. Using Proton, the application developer declaratively specifies each gesture as a regular expression over a stream of touch events. Proton statically analyzes the set of gestures to report conflicts, and it automatically creates gesture recognizers for the entire set. To simplify the creation of complex multitouch gestures, Proton introduces gesture tablature, a graphical notation that concisely describes the sequencing of multiple interleaved touch actions over time. Proton contributes a graphical editor for authoring tablatures and automatically compiles tablatures into regular expressions. We present the architecture and implementation of Proton, along with three proof-of-concept applications. These applications demonstrate the expressiveness of the framework and show how Proton simplifies gesture definition and conflict resolution.
Shock wave therapy associated with eccentric strengthening versus isolated eccentric strengthening for Achilles insertional tendinopathy treatment: a double-blinded randomised clinical trial protocol

Background There is no consensus regarding the treatment of Achilles insertional tendinopathies. Eccentric training remains the main choice in the conservative treatment of this illness; however, the good results in the management of non-insertional Achilles tendinopathy were not replicated in the insertional condition. Low energy shock wave therapy has been described as an alternative to these patients, but has yet to be empirically tested. Hypothesis Shock wave therapy, adjunctive to the eccentric strengthening protocol, will improve measures of pain and function. Design Double blind, placebo-controlled, parallel groups, randomised clinical trial. Materials and methods 93 patients with a diagnosis of chronic insertional tendinopathy, referred from primary or secondary healthcare services, will be assessed and enrolled in this study. They will be divided into two groups (randomised by sequentially numbered identical envelopes, which will be administered serially to participants), one containing the combination of low energy shock wave and eccentric exercises, as treatment and the other comprehending the exercises and the placebo treatment (an apparatus placed in the therapeutic head). The assessments will occur in 2, 4, 6, 12 and 24 weeks. Patients will be evaluated primarily by the Victorian Institute of Sport Assessment-Achilles questionnaire and secondarily by the visual analogue scale, Algometry, the American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society scale, the Foot and Ankle Outcome Score and the 12-item Short Form Health Survey. We will use comparison of two proportions via relative frequency analysis, the Pearson Correlation the χ2 test and the analysis of variance for statistical analyses. Discussion This study intends to demonstrate if the association of the eccentric exercise programme with the shock wave therapy can produce good results regarding the treatment of the Achilles insertional tendinopathy. In an attempt to prevent the high costs and complications associated with the surgical intervention, we will try to prove this combination as a viable therapeutic option in the conservative management of this prevalent condition. The strengths of the study are the design and the novelty of the combination of methods. The main limitation is the short follow-up course. Ethics and dissemination The study is registered in the Clinical Trials database (protocol number: 8094833648737701) and was approved by the University Ethics Committee (number: 1373481). Trial registration number 8094833648737701 (NCT02757664); Pre-results.
A Comparison of Additivity Axioms in Timed Transition Systems.

This paper discusses some axioms from the literature which have been used to define properties of timed transition systems. The additivity axiom proposed by (amongst others) Wang, and Nicollin and Sifakis is compared with the trajectory axiom of Lynch and Vaandrager. Some condi- tions for an additive transition system to be trajectoried are discussed. These are proved sufficient by using some simple terminology from category theory to show how this problem about timed transi- tion systems can be turned into an equivalent problem about monotone functions on partially ordered sets. We also discuss trajectory (bi)simulation, which is a variant of Ho-Stuart's path bisimulation, and use similar techniques to discuss when (bi)simulation is equivalent to trajectory (bi)simulation.
Renewable Energy Data Sources in the Semantic Web with OpenWatt

Although the sector of renewable energies has gained a significant role, companies still encounter considerable barriers to scale up their business. This is partly due to the way data and information are (wrongly) managed. Often, data is: partially available, noisy, inconsistent, sparse in heterogeneous sources, unstructured, represented through nonstandard and proprietary formats. As a result, energy planning tasks are semi-automatic or, in the worst cases, even manual. As a result, the process that uses such data is exceedingly complex and results to be error-prone and ineffective.OpenWattaims at establishing an ideal scenario in the renewable energy sector where di↵erent categories of data are fully integrated and can synergically complement each other. In particular,OpenWattovercomes existing drawbacks by introducing the paradigm of Linked Open Data to represent renewable energy data on the (Semantic) Web. WithOpenWatt, data increases in quality, tools become interoperable with each other and the process gains in usability, productivity and eciency. Moreover,OpenWatt enables and favours the development of new applications and services.
Investigation of Colorless WDM-PON using a Broadband ASE-Source

The use of fiber optic solutions increases every year in access networks to enlarge the bandwidth for each user. However, FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) networks and time division access that they use have technological limitations. WDM-PON technology is the best solution to satisfy future demand for the increasing of bandwidth. This paper contains an overview of investigation of 4,8 and 16-channel system based on the use of the spectrally-sliced ASE-source and an external modulation. The realizations with AWG-multiplexer and thin-film filters at different bit rates are also considered in this paper. The investigation of the system characteristics and their conformance to the requirements of standards and real networks is executed using OptSim simulation software. As a result of the investigation, several potential physical issues that can arise during maintenance of a real system are defined, recommendations are given to solve these issues. Ill. 7, bibl. 8 (in English; summaries in English, Russian and Lithuanian).