Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Microbial consumption of nitric and sulfuric acids in acidified north temperate lakes1

Rates of sulfate reduction and denitrification were measured in the sediments of unacidified, experimentally acidified, and atmospherically acidified lakes in North America and Norway. These data, plus profiles of porewater and sediment chemistry, demonstrated that in all of the lakes Hb was being actively consumed by both sulfate reducers and denitrifiers. Both of these microbial activities were assayed in sediments overlaid by oxygenated water, demonstrating that anoxic hypolimnia are not required for in situ alkalinity production. Neither short term experimental acidification nor long term atmospheric acidification had detectably inhibited the activity of these two types of bacteria. Both processes were active at pH 4.5. In lakes that were receiving significant quantities of both nitric and sulfuric acids, short term H b consumption from denitrification was 1.5-2 times faster than H-’ consumption by sulfate reduction. However on an annual basis, because of loss of reduced sulfur during fall and winter, long term H+ consumption by denitrification was estimated to be 4-5 times as large as H+ consumption by sulfate reduction.
Identifying and Visualizing the Similarities Between Course Content at a Learning Object, Module and Program Level

As an educational institute grows an increase in the number of programs each with individual modules and learning objects can be seen. Learning environments provide a structured environment that can provide an additional level of insight into the relationship between content. This paper outlines the identification of similarities at a Learning Object, Module and Program Level utilizing these inherent structures. Once generated, these results are then visualized in graph form providing an insight into the overlap between course material.
Survival on Home Dialysis in New Zealand

Background New Zealand (NZ) has a high prevalence of both peritoneal dialysis (PD) and home haemodialysis (HD) relative to other countries, and probably less selection bias. We aimed to determine if home dialysis associates with better survival than facility HD by simultaneous comparisons of the three modalities. Methods We analysed survival by time-varying dialysis modality in New Zealanders over a 15-year period to 31-Dec-2011, adjusting for patient co-morbidity by Cox proportional hazards multivariate regression. Results We modelled 6,419 patients with 3,254 deaths over 20,042 patient-years of follow-up. Patients treated with PD and facility HD are similar; those on home HD are younger and healthier. Compared to facility HD, home dialysis (as a unified category) associates with an overall 13% lower mortality risk. Home HD associates with a 52% lower mortality risk. PD associates with a 20% lower mortality risk in the early period (<3 years) that is offset by a 33% greater mortality risk in the late period (>3 years), with no overall net effect. There was effect modification and less observable benefit associated with PD in those with diabetes mellitus, co-morbidity, and in NZ Maori and Pacific People. There was no effect modification by age or by era. Conclusion Our study supports the culture of home dialysis in NZ, and suggests that the extent and duration of survival benefit associated with early PD may be greater than appreciated. We are planning further analyses to exclude residual confounding from unmeasured co-morbidity and other sociodemographic factors using database linkage to NZ government datasets. Finally, our results suggest further research into the practice of PD in NZ Maori and Pacific People, as well as definitive study to determine the best timing for switching from PD in the late phase.
IDENTIFICATION AND VALIDATION OF A MULTIPHYSICS MACROMODEL FOR THE LIFETIME PREDICTION OF SELF-HEALING CERAMIC MATRIX COMPOSITES

The objective of this paper is to present the identification strategy and the validation of a model used to predict the behavior and lifetime of self-healing ceramic matrix composites. This model is divided into three parts: a mechanical part which describes the evolution of the cracks, a physicochemical part which describes the degradation of the fibers and the healing process, and a crack opening indicator which links these two parts. The identification and the validation of the mechanical part are carried out on the macroscale using stress/strain curves from tensile tests. The crack opening indicator is identified using a micromodel which is identified and compared to macroscopic experimental results. The physicochemical part is identified from tests and observations on the microscale, then updated according to lifetimes obtained from creep tests on composites. This model shows good agreement with thermomechanical loading experiments in a medium range of temperatures.
Exploiting cognitive cyclostationary noise subspace for noncognitive spectrum sensing

This paper addresses the problem of spectrum sensing performed by a silent non intended cognitive receiver in the presence of an active cognitive transmitter. Because the silent receiver does not decode the information, the transmitted signal acts as strong interference to the spectrum sensing process. We propose a method that exploits the statistical features of cyclostationarity manifested in the cognitive signal. The silent cognitive user is able to identify a noise subspace where the noncognitive spectrum sensing is performed free of interference. We employ deflection as a theoretical performance indicator, while numerical results are employed as benchmarking and to corroborate the theoretical results.
What the pulmonary specialist should know about the new inhalation therapies

A collaboration of multidisciplinary experts on the delivery of pharmaceutical aerosols was facilitated by the European Respiratory Society (ERS) and the International Society for Aerosols in Medicine (ISAM), in order to draw up a consensus statement with clear, up-to-date recommendations that enable the pulmonary physician to choose the type of aerosol delivery device that is most suitable for their patient. The focus of the consensus statement is the patient-use aspect of the aerosol delivery devices that are currently available. The subject was divided into different topics, which were in turn assigned to at least two experts. The authors searched the literature according to their own strategies, with no central literature review being performed. To achieve consensus, draft reports and recommendations were reviewed and voted on by the entire panel. Specific recommendations for use of the devices can be found throughout the statement. Healthcare providers should ensure that their patients can and will use these devices correctly. This requires that the clinician: is aware of the devices that are currently available to deliver the prescribed drugs; knows the various techniques that are appropriate for each device; is able to evaluate the patient's inhalation technique to be sure they are using the devices properly; and ensures that the inhalation method is appropriate for each patient.
ESTIMATING HAND-RIM FORCE OF WHEELCHAIR PROPULSION USING PORTABLE SENSORS

Shoulder pain and injury are highly prevalent among manual wheelchair users with spinal cord injury (SCI) [18]. The consequences of upper extremity (UE) pain are significant because manual wheelchair users rely on their arms for mobility and independence. Specific biomechanical parameters of wheelchair propulsion such as cadence, magnitude of force, and pattern of the hand during the no propulsive part of the stroke have been associated with risk of upper extremity injury. People who push with greater force have higher risk of developing nerve dysfunction and UE pain. Therefore, forces experienced at the shoulder during wheelchair propulsion should be reduced [9]. This paper presents a study where three tri-axis accelerometers placed on the upper arm, and under the wheelchair’s seat together with a wheelchair rotation monitor (WRM) were used to estimate the force applied during propulsion. Twenty six participants with SCI were asked to push their chair equipped with a SmartWheel (SMW) on level and sloped surfaces. The estimated force obtained by using a regression model based on bagging decision trees was compared with the force collected from the SMW. Mean absolute errors (MAE) and mean absolute percentage of error (MAPE) were calculated between the estimated and criterion values. Pearson’s Correlation Coefficients (R) and R were also calculated between the criterion and the estimated force. Results showed reasonable accuracy in determine force trend with a correlation coefficients ranging from 86 to 88%, but limited accuracy in determining the force value with mean absolute percentage of error ranging from 20 to 22.4%.
Cost-Aware Design of a Discrimination Strategy for Unexploded Ordnance Cleanup

Abstract : The objective of this project was to conduct a preliminary investigation into the potential benefit of awareness of the specific performance criterion (100% UXO detection) in each stage of the UXO discrimination processing strategy. This project consisted of several large-scale classification studies to carefully analyze the performance of different classification algorithms and the effects of training data when operating at 100% UXO detection. The various classification algorithms included in this study provide a diverse representation of the different theoretical approaches to pattern classification, and allow for comparison of the effect of different classifier properties on performance at the 100% detection operating point. This study provides evidence that the desire to operate at 100% detection may lead to a preference for certain algorithms in the different stages of the discrimination strategy. Careful consideration and selection of methods used in each stage of discrimination strategy may greatly impact performance at the 100% detection goal.
Appendix B : Resampling Algorithms

A common problem of all particle filters is the degeneracy of weights, which consists of the unbounded increase of the variance of the importance weights ω [ ] i of the particles with time. The term " variance of the weights " must be understood as the potential variability of the weights among the possible different executions of the particle filter. In order to prevent this growth of variance, which entails a loss of particle diversity, one of a set of resampling methods must be employed, as it was explained in chapter 7. The aim of resampling is to replace an old set of N particles by a new one, typically with the same population size, but where particles have been duplicated or removed according to their weights. More specifically, the expected duplication count of the i th − particle, denoted by N i , must tend to N i ω [ ]. After resampling, all the weights become equal to preserve the importance sampling of the target pdf. Deciding whether to perform resampling or not is most commonly done by monitoring the Effective Sample Size (ESS). As mentioned in chapter 7, the ESS provides a measure of the variance of the particle weights, e.g. the ESS tends to 1 when one single particle carries the largest weight and the rest have negligible weights in comparison. In the following we review the most common resampling algorithms. This section describes four different strategies for resampling a set of particles whose normalized weights are given by ω [ ] i , for i N = 1, . ,. All the methods will be explained using a visual analogy with a " wheel " whose perimeter is assigned to the different particles in such a way that the length of the perimeter associated to each particle is proportional to its weight. Therefore, picking a random direction in this " wheel " implies choosing a particle with a probability proportional to its weight. For a more formal description of the methods, please refer to the excellent () implementations, that is, their execution times can be made to be linear with the number of particles Multinomial resampling: It is the most straightforward resampling method, where N independent random numbers are generated to pick a particle from the old set. In the " wheel " analogy, illustrated in Figure 1, this method consists of picking N independent …
Low-Rank Representation of Both Singing Voice and Music Accompaniment Via Learned Dictionaries

Recent research work has shown that the magnitude spectrogram of a song can be considered as a superposition of a low-rank component and a sparse component, which appear to correspond to the instrumental part and the vocal part of the song, respectively. Based on this observation, one can separate singing voice from the background music. However, the quality of such separation might be limited, because the vocal part of a song can sometimes be lowrank as well. Therefore, we propose to learn the subspace structures of vocal and instrumental sounds from a collection of clean signals first, and then compute the low-rank representations of both the vocal and instrumental parts of a song based on the learned subspaces. Specifically, we use online dictionary learning to learn the subspaces, and propose a new algorithm called multiple low-rank representation (MLRR) to decompose a magnitude spectrogram into two low-rank matrices. Our approach is flexible in that the subspaces of singing voice and music accompaniment are both learned from data. Evaluation on the MIR-1K dataset shows that the approach improves the source-to-distortion ratio (SDR) and the source-to-interference ratio (SIR), but not the source-to-artifact ratio (SAR).
Selecting Query Term Alternations for Web Search by Exploiting Query Contexts

Query expansion by word alterations (alternative forms of a word) is often used in Web search to replace word stemming. This allows users to specify particular word forms in a query. However, if many alterations are added, query traffic will be greatly increased. In this paper, we propose methods to select only a few useful word alterations for query expansion. The selection is made according to the appropriateness of the alteration to the query context (using a bigram language model), or according to its expected impact on the retrieval effectiveness (using a regression model). Our experiments on two TREC collections will show that both methods only select a few expansion terms, but the retrieval effectiveness can be improved significantly.
Ambivalent sexism in the United Arab Emirates: Quantifying gender attitudes in a rapidly modernizing society

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has prioritized increasing equality between men and women. This research investigates whether equality initiatives are reflected in residents’ attitudes toward women. Five hundred eighty-four Arab participants completed measures of ambivalent sexism, religiosity, and political conservatism, and reported stereotypes about women. Results suggest that Arab participants score similarly on measures of hostile and benevolent sexism to participants from other countries high in economic and political gender inequality; and measures of hostility and benevolence correlate with social attitudes as they do elsewhere around the globe. However, unlike in other datasets exploring contexts of high gender inequality, Arab women score significantly lower on benevolent sexism than men. We explore these findings in light of political and legal policies that have different implications for women’s empowerment in the public and private spheres.
IAGO: Interactive Arbitration Guide Online (Demonstration)

Automated negotiation between two agents has been the subject of much research focused on optimization and efficiency. However, human-agent negotiation represents a field in which real-world considerations can be more fully explored. Furthermore, teaching negotiation and other interpersonal skills requires long periods of practice with open-ended dialogues and partners. The API presented in this paper represents a novel platform on which to conduct human-agent research and facilitate teaching negotiation tactics in a longitudinal way. We present a prototype demonstration that is real-time, rapidly distributable, and allows more actions than current platforms of negotiation.
An Adaptive Edge Enhancement Method Based on Histogram Matching for Ultrasound Images

This paper presents an adaptive edge enhancement method based on histogram matching for ultrasound images. Because of the speckle noises of ultrasound images, traditional edge enhancement methods do not work well for ultrasound images. The proposed method is to seek the regions whose edges needs to be enhanced and ruling out the error edges caused either by speckle noises or the reverberation artifacts. A region covered an edge in original image has been selected as the match template first. Then the similar values between pending image block and the match template are calculated according to local histogram matching. And the local image block is enhanced when its similar value reached on a certain level. Furthermore, the ultimately enhanced result is achieved by the method of multiple images weighted average. The experiments results show the proposed method can leave speckle unchanged and enhance tissue boundaries.
Modeling the seasonal distribution of planktonic foraminifera during the Last Glacial Maximum

[1] We studied the seasonality of planktonic foraminifera during the Last Glacial Maximum using a foraminifera model coupled to an ecosystem model. The model suggests that the timing of the maximum seasonal production of planktonic foraminifera during the Last Glacial Maximum occurred at a different time of the year from present day. The assumption of “stable” seasonality through time, one of the underlying assumptions in paleoceanographical studies that utilize monospecific samples of planktic foraminifera, is thus mistaken. This finding entails implications for foraminifera-based paleotemperature reconstructions. The change in the timing of maximum foraminiferal production could lead to a bias in estimated paleotemperature if the change in seasonality is not taken into account. The existence of the potential seasonal bias is not a new concept in paleoceanography, but here we assess this bias for the first time from a comprehensive modeling approach. In tropical waters, where temperature seasonality has a relatively small amplitude, the estimated sea surface temperature is close to the annual mean. Thus, variations in foraminiferal seasonality do not cause a significant change in the recorded temperature. By contrast, changes in seasonality have the largest influence on the temperature signal at high latitudes and midlatitudes. Our model prediction suggests that because of the temperature sensitivity of the considered species, during the Last Glacial Maximum, the largest production of foraminifera occurred during a warmer season of the year. In some regions, the maximum foraminiferal production month shifted by up to 6 months. Our findings may help to reconcile low glacial planktonic δ18O values with proxy evidence for deep-water formation in the Nordic Seas.
Generation of 3D templates of active sites of proteins with rigid prosthetic groups

MOTIVATION With the increasing availability of protein structures, the generation of biologically meaningful 3D patterns from the simultaneous alignment of several protein structures is an exciting prospect: active sites could be better understood, protein functions and protein 3D structures could be predicted more accurately. Although patterns can already be generated at the fold and topological levels, no system produces high-resolution 3D patterns including atom and cavity positions. To address this challenge, our research focuses on generating patterns from proteins with rigid prosthetic groups. Since these groups are key elements of protein active sites, the generated 3D patterns are expected to be biologically meaningful. RESULTS In this paper, we present a new approach which allows the generation of 3D patterns from proteins with rigid prosthetic groups. Using 237 protein chains representing proteins containing porphyrin rings, our method was validated by comparing 3D templates generated from homologues with the 3D structure of the proteins they model. Atom positions were predicted reliably: 93% of them had an accuracy of 1.00 A or less. Moreover, similar results were obtained regarding chemical group and cavity positions. Results also suggested our system could contribute to the validation of 3D protein models. Finally, a 3D template was generated for the active site of human cytochrome P450 CYP17, the 3D structure of which is unknown. Its analysis showed that it is biologically meaningful: our method detected the main patterns of the cytochrome P450 superfamily and the motifs linked to catalytic reactions. The 3D template also suggested the position of a residue, which could be involved in a hydrogen bond with CYP17 substrates and the shape and location of a cavity. Comparisons with independently generated 3D models comforted these hypotheses. AVAILABILITY Alignment software (Nestor3D) is available at http://www.kingston. ac.uk/~ku33185/Nestor3D.html
Timed Somatic Deletion of p53 in Mice Reveals Age-Associated Differences in Tumor Progression

Inactivating mutations in the p53 tumor suppressor gene occur often in the progression of human cancers. p53 inhibits the outgrowth of nascent cancer cells through anti-proliferative actions (including induction of apoptosis or senescence). To test p53 tumor suppressor functions in a novel experimental context, we somatically deleted both p53 alleles in multiple tissues of mice at various ages. Mice homozygously deleted for p53 at 3 months of age showed a longer tumor latency compared to mice deleted for p53 at 6 and 12 months of age. These results are consistent with a model in which tissues accumulate oncogenically activated cells with age and these are held in check by wildtype p53. We also deleted p53 before, concurrent with, and after treatment of mice with ionizing radiation (IR). The absence or presence of p53 during IR treatment had no effect on radiation-induced lymphoma latency, confirming that the immediate p53 damage response was irrelevant for cancer prevention. Even the presence of wildtype p53 for up to four weeks post-IR provided no protection against early lymphoma incidence, indicating that long term maintenance of functional p53 is critical for preventing the emergence of a cancer. These experiments indicate that sustained p53 anti-oncogenic function acts as a final or near final line of defense preventing progression of oncogenically activated cells to malignant tumors.
Ogmios: The UPC Text-to-Speech synthesis system for Spoken Translation

This paper presents the baseline text-to-speech system developed at UPC (Ogmios) plus our recent work on speech prosody generation and the procedures to create high quality language resources for speech synthesis. These contributions have been evaluated within the TC-STAR European project, which is focused on speech-to-speech translation. Several presented contributions have been developed in order to adapt the TTS component to the speech-to-speech translation framework. In this application, the input text is not writtenstyle text but transcriptions of talks. Moreover, we have to cope with errors coming from the speech recognition and speech translation engines. However, in speech-to-speech translation, the source speech can be used as a valuable source of information to generate the target prosody. The general framework and rst results are presented in the paper.