Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Collostructional nativisation in New Englishes: Verb-construction associations in the International Corpus of English

The present paper investigates the strength of verb-construction associations across various New Englishes on the basis of comparable corpora. In contrast to previous studies into verb complementation in New Englishes, we start off from three basic constructions in English — the intransitive, the monotransitive and the ditransitive construction — and analyse the co-occurrences of the three constructions and a wide range of verbs. The present study is based on the Hong Kong, the Indian, and the Singapore components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) because the three varieties represent markedly different stages in the process of the evolution of New Englishes with British English as the historical input variety. Our quantitative analysis includes multiple distinctive collexeme analyses for the different varieties. The results show, inter alia, that, firstly, processes of structural nativisation of New Englishes can also be observed at the level of verb-construction associations, which can be subsumed under the notion of “collostructional nativisation”, and that, secondly, there are identifiable intervarietal differences between British English and New Englishes as well as between individual New Englishes. In general, there is a correlation between the evolutionary stage of a New English variety and its collostructional nativisation: The more advanced a New English variety is in the developmental cycle, the more dissimilar its collostructional preferences are to British English.
Novel membrane‐bound reporter molecule for sorting high producer cells by flow cytometry

We developed a membrane bound reporter and selection molecule for sorting by fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) of cells producing a protein of interest. This molecule is composed of a transmembrane (TM) domain, fused on its extracellular end to a biotin mimetic peptide (BMP) and on its intracellular side to puromycin N‐acetyl transferase (PAC). In this format BMP is displayed on the cell membrane surface and PAC faces the cell cytoplasm. BMP was detected and quantified on the cell surface by fluorescently labelled streptavidin, allowing cell sorting by FACS, according to the reporter expression level. The reporter and a gene of interest (GOI) were connected on the same transcript via an internal ribosomal entry site (IRES). The reporter expression level was found to correlate with that of the GOI, enabling sorting of high producer cells by FACS. Thus, the highest fluorescent cells sorted had also the highest protein of interest (POI) productivity level. © 2013 International Society for Advancement of Cytometry
Lipid profile, obesity and bone mineral density: the Hertfordshire Cohort Study.

BACKGROUND Body mass index (BMI) and bone mineral density (BMD) are positively correlated in several studies, but few data relate bone density, lipid profile and anthropometric measures. AIM To investigate these relationships in a large, well-characterized cohort of men and women (The Hertfordshire Cohort Study). METHODS Men (n = 465) and women (n = 448) from Hertfordshire, UK were recruited. Information was available on demographic and lifestyle factors, anthropometric measurements, body fat percentage, fasting triglycerides, cholesterol (total, HDL, LDL), apolipoprotein (a) and apolipoprotein (b); bone mineral density (BMD) was recorded at the lumbar spine and total femur. RESULTS BMD at the lumbar spine (males r = 0.15, p = 0.001; females r = 0.14, p = 0.003) and total femoral region (males r = 0.18, p = 0.0001; females r = 0.16, p = 0.0008) was related to serum triglyceride level, even after adjustment for waist-hip ratio, age, social class and lifestyle factors, but not if body fat percentage was substituted for waist-hip ratio in the regression model. Fasting HDL cholesterol level was related to lumbar spine BMD in women (r = -0.15, p = 0.001) and total femoral BMD in both sexes (males r = -0.15, p = 0.002; females r = -0.23, p < 0.0001); these relationships were also attenuated by adjustment for body fat percentage but not waist-hip ratio. No relationships were seen between total or LDL cholesterol with BMD. DISCUSSION In this cohort, relationships between lipid profile and BMD were robust to adjustment for one measure of central obesity (waist-hip ratio), but not total body fat. This broadly supports the idea that adiposity may confound the relationship between lipids and bone mass.
Using Language Groundings for Context-Sensitive Text Prediction

In this paper, we present the concept of using language groundings for context-sensitive text prediction using a semantically informed, context-aware language model. We show initial ﬁndings from a preliminary study investigating how users react to a communication interface driven by context-based prediction using a simple language model. We suggest that the re-sults support further exploration using a more informed semantic model and more realistic context.
Der Effekt der Erwerbstätigkeit von Frauen auf die Fertilität: Kausalität oder Selbstselektion? / Female Labor Force Participation and Fertility: An Analysis of the Transition to Parenthood in West Germany

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag untersucht mit den Daten des Familiensurveys 2000, ob die Erwerbstätigkeit von Frauen in Westdeutschland einen kausalen Effekt auf den Übergang in die Mutterschaft hat. Es zeigt sich zunächst, dass erwerbstätige Frauen eine geringere Übergangsrate zur ersten Geburt haben als nicht erwerbstätige Frauen. Theoretische Überlegungen lassen es jedoch fraglich erscheinen, ob der Effekt tatsächlich kausal ist - ob also die Erwerbstätigkeit die Ursache für die geringere Übergangsrate erwerbstätiger Frauen ist. Vielmehr gibt es plausible Argumente dafür, dass der Zusammenhang auf Selbstselektion in Erwerbstätigkeit und Nichterwerbstätigkeit zurückzuführen ist, bzw. darauf, dass die Fertilitätsabsicht die Erwerbsbeteiligung bestimmt. Um die Kausalität des Effekts zu überprüfen, werden zwei indirekte Kausalitätstests durchgeführt. Diese liefern starke Hinweise darauf, dass der Effekt nicht oder zumindest nur teilweise kausal ist. Summary This paper addresses the question of whether labor force participation of women influences the transition to motherhood in West Germany. Multivariate event history analyses using the West-German Family Survey 2000 show that, compared with unemployed women, gainfully employed women have significantly lower transition rates to the first child. However, according to theoretical considerations it is debatable whether this effect is causal. There are plausible arguments that this is due to self-selection, i. e. women with low family orientation self-select into employment. To check this, two indirect testing strategies were developed. Results show that (at least part of) the effect of employment on fertility is not causal.
What Determines Learning Among Kinh and Ethnic Minority Students in Vietnam? An Analysis of the Round 2 Young Lives Data

An analysis of the Young Lives data collected in 2006, involving a younger cohort (aged 5) and an older cohort (aged 12), yields three important findings regarding the Kinh–ethnic minority gaps in mathematics and reading skills in Vietnam. First, large disparities exist even before children start primary school. Second, language may play an important role: Vietnamese-speaking ethnic minority children scored much higher than their non-Vietnamese-speaking counterparts, even though tests could be taken in any language the child chooses. Third, Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions indicate that higher parental education among Kinh children explains about one third of the gap for both cohorts. For the older cohort, Kinh households' higher income explains 0.2–0.3 standard deviations (SDs) of the gap (1.3–1.5 SDs). More time in school, less time spent working, and better nutritional status each explain about 0.1 SDs of the mathematics score gap; Kinh children's more years of schooling explains about 0.3 SDs of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test score gap.
Mining query-driven contexts for geographic and temporal search

The explosive growth of geographic and temporal data has attracted much attention in information retrieval (IR) field. Since geographic and temporal information are often available in unstructured text, the IR task becomes a non-straightforward process. In this article, we propose a novel geo-temporal context mining approach and a geo-temporal ranking model for improving the search performance. Queries target implicitly ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’ components. We model geographic and temporal query-dependent frequent patterns, called contexts. These contexts are derived based on extracting and ranking geographic and temporal entities found in pseudo-relevance feedback documents. Two methods are proposed for inferring the query-dependent contexts: (1) a frequency-based statistical approach and (2) a frequent pattern mining approach using a support threshold. The derived geographic and temporal query contexts are then exploited into a probabilistic ranking model. Finally, geographic, temporal and content-based scores are combined together for improving the geo-temporal search performance. We evaluate our approach on the New York Times news collection. The experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms significantly a well-known baseline search, namely the probabilistic BM25 ranking model and state-of-the-art approaches in the field as well.
ab 0 cd How deep is your trade ? Transition and international integration in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union

This paper investigates the extent of integration of the transition economies into the world economy. We find that south-eastern Europe (SEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) trade significantly less with the world economy than the accession countries. We use a gravity model to explain why this is the case and conclude that the low quality of economic institutions in the CIS, and hence the high risks associated with trade, explain a considerable proportion of the “trade gap” compared to trade levels in industrialised countries. Moreover, the landlocked nature of many CIS countries (and hence high costs of transport and transit) is another reason for the lack of integration. In SEE these factors play a lesser role and the gravity model is unable to fully explain the lack of integration, which we suggest is a legacy of the region’s recent turbulent past. The paper suggests that a combination of improved market access to western markets and efforts to reduce trade and transit barriers within the region provide the best hope to increase economic integration with the world economy in the future.
Mapping in dynamic environments using stereo vision

Next generation driver assistance systems demand a precise perception of the vicinity of the vehicle. Sensor readings are usually harnessed to gain knowledge of all moving and stationary obstacles. Commonly two paradigms are followed. Stationary environments are well modeled by non-parametric occupancy grids. Contrary, moving objects require a tracking and are not well suited for grid-based techniques. However, tracking objects requires some prior knowledge and parameterization which is inferior for unstructured cluttered obstacles. Herein we augment a grid-based mapping method designed for static environments with object tracking hence complementing both approaches. To this end we classify regions of stereo images into moving and stationary parts. The stationary part is fused in our static grid whereas moving parts are tracked yielding reliable motion estimates. The classifier used to distinguish moving from stationary parts is based on a Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT), a model selection method which blends well into the tracking architecture. Thereby we achieve real-time operability on modest computing hardware.
Temperature and Oxygen Dependent Metabolite Utilization by Salmonella enterica Serovars Derby and Mbandaka

Salmonella enterica is a zoonotic pathogen of clinical and veterinary significance, with over 2500 serovars. In previous work we compared two serovars displaying host associations inferred from isolation statistics. Here, to validate genome sequence data and to expand on the role of environmental metabolite constitution in host range determination we use a phenotypic microarray approach to assess the ability of these serovars to metabolise ~500 substrates at 25°C with oxygen (aerobic conditions) to represent the ex vivo environment and at 37°C with and without oxygen (aerobic/anaerobic conditions) to represent the in vivo environment. A total of 26 substrates elicited a significant difference in the rate of metabolism of which only one, D-galactonic acid-g-lactone, could be explained by the presence (S. Mbandaka) or the absence (S. Derby) of metabolic genes. We find that S. Mbandaka respires more efficiently at ambient temperatures and under aerobic conditions on 18 substrates including: glucosominic acid, saccharic acid, trehalose, fumaric acid, maltotriose, N-acetyl-D-glucosamine, N-acetyl-beta-D-mannosamine, fucose, L-serine and dihydroxy-acetone; whereas S. Derby is more metabolically competent anaerobically at 37°C for dipeptides, glutamine-glutamine, alanine-lysine, asparagine-glutamine and nitrogen sources glycine and nitrite. We conclude that the specific phenotype cannot be reliably predicted from the presence of metabolic genes directly relating to the metabolic pathways under study.
Parsing the Arabic Treebank: Analysis and Improvements

Previous work has demonstrated that the performance of current parsers on Arabic is far below their performance on English or even Chinese, which in turn harms performance on NLP tasks that use parsing as an input. This paper is an exploration of some of the issues involved in this difference. We focus on the Collins parsing model [3] as implemented in the Bikel parser [1]. The corpus used for the experiments is the Arabic Treebank [6] (ATB). We cluster these issues in three ways. First, it is important when comparing Arabic parsing performance to other languages that the comparison be a fair one; therefore we first discuss some issues around evaluation and show that current Arabic parsing performance is not quite as bad as previously thought. Second, we present some modifications to the parser which provide modest increases in performance. Finally, we explore deeper differences between the Arabic Treebank and the Penn Treebank and advance some speculations as to why parsers have difficulty with Arabic.
Choral Confidence: Some Effects of Choir Configuration, Cohesion and Collaboration

An exploration of confidence issues amongst adult amateur choral singers is an in-depth, qualitative study based on a series of focus groups and semi-structured interviews with active participants in organized amateur singing activities. The aim of the research is to explore the lived-in experience of choral singers; to identify some of the main influences on their perceptions of their voices and performance ability; to highlight some of the factors affecting their confidence as singers. Three initial focus groups, involving eighteen singers in total, have been completed, followed by sixteen individual interviews. The one-to-one sessions involved semi-structured interviews with an equal number of singers of each gender. Each singer had experience of a range of different types of choral singing. The majority of participants also had extensive experience of performing with a number of different conductors. The emergent themes and significant issues identified so far will be used to inform the next stage of the study. Some of the main themes include situational and environmental factors; family background; the influence of significant others, including parents, teachers, spouses, adult offspring and fellow singers; the impact of musical education, including school, further education and private tuition; and a number of significant issues related to choral direction. For the purposes of triangulation, the next stage of the project will include interviews with conductors of adult, amateur choral ensembles. It is hoped that this research will result in a set of useful recommendations for singers, teachers and conductors with an interest in confidence issues.
Multiple cell suction and supply system for automated cell manipulation on microfluidic channel

Advances in biology have clarified the details of many phenomena and their results have been applied to many fields. However, in these fields, applications require dexterous and skillful manipulation. Hence, realizing high productivity is still difficult. To solve this problem, assisted cell manipulation and automated systems have been researched and microfluidic channel technology has been used in these fields. Most research focuses on only one part of the cell manipulation process, such as the cutting or sorting of cells. In the meantime, less attention has been paid to methods of supplying the target cells to a microfluidic channel. We have developed a multiple cell supply system for the microfluidic channel to realize automated cell cloning. This system sucks bovine egg cells with a size of 100[µm] and sends them to the microfluidic channel, then finally sends them to the cell manipulation part. It consists of a microfluidic channel, a pump, solenoid valves, camera systems, and an automatic stage. The cell supply action can be realized by controlling these parts through a computer program.
The Maximum Variance Between Clusters Method of Image Segmentation Based on Particle Swarm Optimization

This essay proposes a maximum variance between clusters method of image segmentation (OTSU) based on PSO. The method in this paper makes use of particle swarm algorithm and achieves a great acceleration to the traditional OTSU. On that basis, we also applied the parallelism technology in particle-swarm algorithm and find an optimal threshold, so we can segment images with this threshold. The result proves that we not only raised the speed highly but also achieved a great efficiency, due to the discrete global searching algorithm we adopted
Periodic solutions of piecewise affine gene network models: the case of a negative feedback loop

In this paper the existence and unicity of a stable periodic orbit is proven, for a class of piecewise affine differential equations in dimension 3 or more, provided their interaction structure is a negative feedback loop. It is also shown that the same systems converge toward a unique stable equilibrium point in dimension 2. This extends a theorem of Snoussi, which showed the existence of these orbits only. The considered class of equations is usually studied as a model of gene regulatory networks. It is not assumed that all decay rates are identical, which is biologically irrelevant, but has been done in the vast majority of previous studies. Our work relies on classical results about fixed points of monotone, concave operators acting on positive variables. Moreover, the used techniques are very likely to apply in more general contexts, opening directions for future work.
Real-time human motion analysis for human-machine interface

This paper presents real-time human motion analysis for human-machine interface. In general, man-machine 'smart' interface requires real-time human motion capturing systems without special devices or markers. Although vision-based human motion capturing systems do not use such special devices and markers, they are essentially unstable and can only acquire partial information because of self-occlusion. When we analyze full-body motion, the problem becomes more severer. Therefore, we have to introduce a robust pose estimation strategy to deal with relatively poor results of image analysis. To solve this problem, we have developed a method to estimate full-body human postures, where an initial estimation is acquired by real-time inverse kinematics and, based on the estimation, more accurate estimation is searched for referring to the processed image. The key point is that our system can estimate full-body human postures from limited perceptual cues such as positions of a head, hands and feet, which can be stably acquired by silhouette contour analysis.
A new image matching method based on combining global and local features

This paper is mainly introduced a new approach which is based on combining global and local features. The cascade matching algorithm contains two stages: the first is fast matching regions using global region features extracted from the segmentation regions and the second is matching the Affine-SIFT descriptors from the matched region pairs. In the later stage, RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) is used to filter some false matches and can gain a large increase in speed. Experiments show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in comparing to SIFT and affine SIFT. The method is also fit for the cases of large scale and orientation changes.
Genetic studies of collagen types XV and XVIII : type XV collagen deficiency in mice results in skeletal myopathy and cardiovascular defects, while the homologous endostatin precursor type XVIII collagen is needed for normal development of the eye

Overlapping genomic clones coding for the α1 chain of mouse type XV collagen (Col15a1) were isolated. The gene was found to be 110 kb in length and to contain 40 exons. Analysis of the proximal 5'-flanking region showed properties characteristic of a housekeeping gene promoter, and functional analysis identified cis-acting elements for both positive and negative regulation of Col15a1 gene expression. The general exon-intron pattern of the mouse Col15a1 gene was found to be highly similar to that of its human homologue, and comparison of 5'-flanking sequences indicated four conserved domains. The genomic area encoding the end of the N-terminal non-collagenous domain nevertheless showed marked divergence from the human form. Due to the lack of two exons coding for the N-terminal collagenous domain and a codon divergence in one exon, the mouse α1(XV) chain contains seven collagenous domains whereas the human equivalent contains nine. In order to understand the biological role of this protein, a null mutation in the Col15a1 gene was introduced into the germ line of mice. Despite the wide tissue distribution of type XV collagen, the null mice developed and reproduced normally and were indistinguishable from their wild-type littermates. After three months of age, however, microscopic analysis revealed progressive histological changes characteristic of myopathic disorder, and treadmill exercise resulted in greater skeletal muscle injury than in the wild-type mice. Irrespective of potential anti-angiogenic properties of type XV collagen-derived endostatin, the number of vessels appeared normal. Nevertheless, ultrastructural analyses revealed markedly abnormal capillaries and endothelial cell degeneration in the heart and skeletal muscle. Perfused hearts showed a diminished inotropic response, and exercise resulted in cardiac injury, changes that mimic early or mild heart disease. Thus type XV collagen appears to function as a necessary structural component for stabilizing cells with surrounding connective tissue in skeletal muscle cells and microvessels. Mice lacking the type XV collagen homologue, type XVIII collagen, showed delayed regression of blood vessels in the vitreous body of the eye and abnormal outgrowth of the retinal vessels. This suggests that collagen XVIII plays a role in regulating vascular development in the eye. Moreover, type XVIII collagen was found to be important at the surface between the inner limiting membrane and the collagen fibrils of the vitreous body. Col18a1 deficient mice serve as an animal model for the recessively inherited Knobloch syndrome, characterized by various eye abnormalities and occipital encephalocele. The results presented in this thesis indicate diverse biological roles for the closely related collagen types XV and XVIII.