Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chapter # Low-Level Annotations and Summary Representations of Opinions for Multi-Perspective Question Answering

While much recent progress has been made in research on fact-based question answering, our work aims to extend question-answering research in a different direction ─ to handle multiperspective question-answering tasks, i.e. question-answering tasks that require an ability to find and organize opinions in text. This paper proposes an approach to multi-perspective question answering that views the task as one of opinion-oriented information extraction. We describe an annotation scheme developed for the low-level representation of opinions, and present results of interannotator agreement studies. Next, we propose the use of opinion-oriented scenario templates to act as a summary representation of the opinions expressed in a document, a set of documents, or an arbitrary text segment. Finally, we outline an approach for the automatic construction of opinion-based summary representations.
Effects of recycling and bonding agent application on bond strength of stainless steel orthodontic brackets

Objectives: 1) to assess different methods of recycling orthodontic brackets, 2) to evaluate Shear Bond Strength (SBS) of (a) new, (b) recycled and (c) repeated recycled stainless steel brackets (i) with and (ii) without bracket base primer. Study Design: A total of 180 extracted human premolar teeth and 180 premolar stainless steel brackets were used. One hundred teeth and 100 brackets were divided into five groups of 20-teeth each. Four methods of recycling orthodontic brackets were used in each of the first four groups while the last one (group V) was used as the control. Groups (I-V) were subjected to shear force within half an hour until the brackets debond. SBS was measured and the method showing the highest SBS was selected. A New group (VI) was recycled twice with the selected method. Six subgroups (1-6) were established; the primer was applied for three sub-groups, and the composite was applied for all brackets. Brackets were subjected to the same shear force, and SBS was measured for all sub-groups. Results: There was a significant difference between the mean SBS of the sandblasting method and the means of SBS of each of the other three methods. There was however, no significant difference between the mean SBS of the new bracket and the mean SBS of recycled bracket using sandblasting. The mean SBS of all sub-groups were more than that recommended by Reynolds (17) in 1975. Brackets with primer showed slightly higher SBS compared to those of brackets without bonding agent. Conclusion: To decrease cost, sandblasted recycled orthodontic brackets can be used as an alternative to new brackets. It is recommended to apply a bonding agent on the bracket base to provide greater bond strength. Key words:Recycled bracket, shear bond strength, sandblasting, stainless steel orthodontic bracket.
Percolation Analysis of a Wiener Reconstruction of the IRAS 1.2 Jy Redshift Catalog

We present percolation analyses of Wiener reconstructions of the IRAS 1.2 Jy redshift survey. There are 10 reconstructions of galaxy density fields in real space spanning the range β = 0.1-1.0, where β = Ω0. 6/b, Ω is the present dimensionless density, and b is the bias factor. Our method uses the growth of the largest cluster statistic to characterize the topology of a density field, where Gaussian randomized versions of the reconstructions are used as standards for analysis. For the reconstruction volume of radius R ≈ 100 h-1 Mpc, percolation analysis reveals a slight “meatball” topology for the real space, galaxy distribution of the IRAS survey.
Finding closed frequent item sets by intersecting transactions

Most known frequent item set mining algorithms work by enumerating candidate item sets and pruning infrequent candidates. An alternative method, which works by intersecting transactions, is much less researched. To the best of our knowledge, there are only two basic algorithms: a cumulative scheme, which is based on a repository with which new transactions are intersected, and the Carpenter algorithm, which enumerates and intersects candidate transaction sets. These approaches yield the set of so-called closed frequent item sets, since any such item set can be represented as the intersection of some subset of the given transactions. In this paper we describe a considerably improved implementation scheme of the cumulative approach, which relies on a prefix tree representation of the already found intersections. In addition, we present an improved way of implementing the Carpenter algorithm. We demonstrate that on specific data sets, which occur particularly often in the area of gene expression analysis, our implementations significantly outperform enumeration approaches to frequent item set mining.
Learning image-to-class distance metric for image classification

Image-To-Class (I2C) distance is a novel distance used for image classification and has successfully handled datasets with large intra-class variances. However, it uses Euclidean distance for measuring the distance between local features in different classes, which may not be the optimal distance metric in real image classification problems. In this article, we propose a distance metric learning method to improve the performance of I2C distance by learning per-class Mahalanobis metrics in a large margin framework. Our I2C distance is adaptive to different classes by combining with the learned metric for each class. These multiple per-class metrics are learned simultaneously by forming a convex optimization problem with the constraints that the I2C distance from each training image to its belonging class should be less than the distances to other classes by a large margin. A subgradient descent method is applied to efficiently solve this optimization problem. For efficiency and scalability to large-scale problems, we also show how to simplify the method to learn a diagonal matrix for each class. We show in experiments that our learned Mahalanobis I2C distance can significantly outperform the original Euclidean I2C distance as well as other distance metric learning methods in several prevalent image datasets, and our simplified diagonal matrices can preserve the performance but significantly speed up the metric learning procedure for large-scale datasets. We also show in experiment that our method is able to correct the class imbalance problem, which usually leads the NN-based methods toward classes containing more training images.
Becoming part of the city: Influences on the career choice of an urban music educator

The purpose of this case study was to examine and describe the life experiences that influenced one music teacher’s career choice to teach music in an urban school. The primary research question is: What experiences influenced the participant to pursue urban music education as a career? Calling upon research into urban music education and career choice, the article used a “secondary analysis” of survey, journal, and interview data collected in a larger investigation of the teacher career cycle, as viewed through the lens of narrative research. Findings are presented in four categories, and indicate that the teacher’s career choice was influenced by three primary elements: (a) feeling a need to be of service to others; (b) experiencing cultural differences; and (c) curiosity about the city; all of which led to (d) being a part of the city. These elements combined to form not just a career choice, but a strong sense of commitment to teaching music in a specific city. Implications for both urban music education and music teacher education are discussed, as are suggestions for further research.
EAP Teacher Cognition: A Qualitative Study of Iranian In-Service EAP Teachers' Cognitions

Teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP) requires specific qualifications on the part of teachers for which reconstruction of cognitions on EAP is a prerequisite. Previous studies have largely taken the quality of teachers' EAP cognitions for granted and few studies, if any, have sought to examine in-service teachers' tacitly-held cognitions on EAP. This study aimed to examine in-service teachers' cognitions on key EAP issues including EAP goals, distinction between EAP and English for General Purposes (EGP), and EAP teacher qualifications as well as roles. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and life-history narratives from nine EAP practitioners at a state university in Iran. Results showed that the teachers' cognitions were mainly incongruent with the EAP principles. A close relationship was also found among individual teachers' cognitions on different key issues. It is concluded that despite their past practical experience, in-service EAP teachers' cognitions might be limited and in need of reconstruction. The findings may promise some implications for EAP teacher education and research.
Noninvasive Imaging of Quantitative Cerebral Blood Flow Changes during 100% Oxygen Inhalation Using Arterial Spin-Labeling MR Imaging

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Tracer studies have demonstrated that 100% oxygen inhalation causes a small cerebral blood flow (CBF) decrease. This study was performed to determine whether arterial spin-labeling (ASL), a noninvasive MR imaging technique, could image these changes with clinically reasonable imaging durations. Materials and METHODS: Continuous ASL imaging was performed in 7 healthy subjects before, during, and after 100% oxygen inhalation. ASL difference signal intensity (ΔM, control − label), CBF, and CBF percentage change were measured. A test-retest paradigm was used to calculate the variability of the initial and final room air CBF measurements. RESULTS: During oxygen inhalation, ΔM decreased significantly in all regions (eg, global ΔM decreased by 23 ± 11%, P < .01, all values mean ± SD). Accounting for the reduced T1 of hyperoxygenated blood, we found a smaller CBF decrease, which did not reach significance in any of the regions. Global CBF dropped from 50 ± 10 mL per 100 g/minute to 47 ± 10 mL per 100 g/minute following 100% oxygen inhalation, a decrease of 5 ± 14% (P > .17). The root-mean-square variability of the initial and final room air CBF measurements was 7–8 mL per 100 g/minute. CONCLUSIONS: The ΔM signal intensity decreased significantly with oxygen inhalation; however, after accounting for changes in blood T1 with oxygen, CBF decreases were small. Such measurements support the use of hyperoxia as an MR imaging contrast agent and may be helpful to interpret hyperoxia-based stroke trials.
Like Wine, the Ttest Procedure Improves with Age

PROC TTEST is an old reliable among SAS/STAT procedures, testing hypotheses about means of one and two normal samples. While this is a narrow class of analyses, it's an important class, with key applications in all areas of science, including clinical trials. Recent updates to the TTEST procedure make it an even more powerful tool for the statistician. The enhancements include: • Equivalence tests, which answer not " Are the samples significantly different? " but rather " Are they significantly the same? " • AB/BA crossover studies, a common repeated measures design for clinical trials Perhaps the most useful new feature is the new plotting capability of PROC TTEST. It now produces uni-variate and comparative versions of histograms, box plots, and densities. This paper describes these new features of PROC TTEST in SAS 9.2 and illustrates their use in a number of examples.
Comprehensive Facial Performance Capture

We present a system for recording a live dynamic facial performance, capturing highly detailed geometry and spatially varying diffuse and specular reflectance information for each frame of the performance. The result is a reproduction of the performance that can be rendered from novel viewpoints and novel lighting conditions, achieving photorealistic integration into any virtual environment. Dynamic performances are captured directly, without the need for any template geometry or static geometry scans, and processing is completely automatic, requiring no human input or guidance. Our key contributions are a heuristic for estimating facial reflectance information from gradient illumination photographs, and a geometry optimization framework that maximizes a principled likelihood function combining multi‐view stereo correspondence and photometric stereo, using multi‐resolution belief propagation. The output of our system is a sequence of geometries and reflectance maps, suitable for rendering in off‐the‐shelf software. We show results from our system rendered under novel viewpoints and lighting conditions, and validate our results by demonstrating a close match to ground truth photographs.
Studies of the Interaction between Isoimperatorin and Human Serum Albumin by Multispectroscopic Method: Identification of Possible Binding Site of the Compound Using Esterase Activity of the Protein

Isoimperatorin is one of the main components of Prangos ferulacea as a linear furanocoumarin and used as anti-inflammatory, analgesic, antispasmodic, and anticancer drug. Human serum albumin (HSA) is a principal extracellular protein with a high concentration in blood plasma and carrier for many drugs to different molecular targets. Since the carrying of drug by HSA may affect on its structure and action, we decided to investigate the interaction between HSA and isoimperatorin using fluorescence and UV spectroscopy. Fluorescence data indicated that isoimperatorin quenches the intrinsic fluorescence of the HSA via a static mechanism and hydrophobic interaction play the major role in the drug binding. The binding average distance between isoimperatorin and Trp 214 of HSA was estimated on the basis of the theory of Förster energy transfer. Decrease of protein surface hydrophobicity (PSH) was also documented upon isoimperatorin binding. Furthermore, the synchronous fluorescence spectra show that the microenvironment of the tryptophan residues does not have obvious changes. Site marker compettive and fluorescence experiments revealed that the binding of isoimperatorin to HSA occurred at or near site I. Finally, the binding details between isoimperatorin and HSA were further confirmed by molecular docking and esterase activity inhibition studies which revealed that drug was bound at subdomain IIA.
A recursive solution concept for multichoice games

We propose a new axiomatization of the Shapley value for cooperative games, where symmetry and efficiency can be discarded and replaced with new natural axioms. From any game, an excluded-player game is built by discarding all coalitions that contain a fixed player. Then it is shown that the Shapley value is the unique value satisfying the linearity axiom, the nullity axiom, the excluded-null-player axiom, and the equity axiom. In the second part, by generalizing the above material, the Shapley value for multichoice games is worked out.
Cross Validation in Compressed Sensing via the Johnson Lindenstrauss Lemma

Compressed Sensing decoding algorithms aim to reconstruct an unknown N dimensional vector x from m < N given measurements y = Φx, with an assumed sparsity constraint on x. All algorithms presently are iterative in nature, producing a sequence of approximations (s1, s2, .) until a certain algorithm-specific stopping criterion is reached at iteration j∗, at which point the estimate x̂ = sj∗ is returned as an approximation to x. In many algorithms, the error ||x−x̂||lN 2 of the approximation is bounded above by a function of the error between x and the best k-term approximation to x. However, as x is unknown, such estimates provide no numerical bounds on the error. In this paper, we demonstrate that tight numerical upper and lower bounds on the error ||x − sj ||lN 2 for j ≤ p iterations of a compressed sensing decoding algorithm are attainable with little effort. More precisely, we assume a maximum iteration length of p is pre-imposed; we reserve 4 log p of the original m measurements and compute the sj from the m − 4 log(p) remaining measurements; the errors ||x − sj ||lN 2 , for j = 1, . , p can then be bounded with high probability. As a consequence, a numerical upper bound on the error between x and the best k-term approximation to x can be estimated with almost no cost. Our observation has applications outside of Compressed Sensing as well.
Role of Emoticons as Structural Markers in Twitter Interactions

ABSTRACT Emoticons play a key role in digital written interactions. Since the 1980s research has highlighted their growing relevance, as they allow to convey increasingly rich emotional, social, and pragmatic information. This article contributes to this area of research by providing an analysis of emoticons as structural markers in Twitter interactions. Based on a large corpus of Italian tweets, mixed-effect models were used to investigate to what extent and how emoticons are used in this role and what variables most influence their use and their relationship with punctuation marks. Results indicate that emoticons often have the function of clause and sentence boundary marking, either replacing or integrating punctuation marks. Variables affecting their use included user’s age, emoticon type, and position within the tweets. In this role their use reveals the pursuit of coherent strategies in discourse organization.
Lmplicit and Explicit

I Individuals face a self-control problem when the attainment of their overriding long-term interests comes at the expense of short-term but influential outcomes. For example, the boredom that is often associated with studying long hours is a price students have to pay in order to attain academic success, and the discomfort that is often associated with diering or undergoing a medical checkup is a price people often have to pay in order to mainrain good health. In many cases, individuals fail to pursue their goals because those goals do not seem sufficiently important, or because they feel they lack the means thar are required to achieve those goals. Self-control problems represent a special type of motivational confl ict. Individuals may want to pursue their goals. They may also have the prerequisite knowledge, skil l , and opportunity. Nevertheless, hort-term outcomes may tempt those individuals to act against their long-term interests. For example, a dieter may want to lose weight and know Counteractive S lf-Gontrol
Gene expression pattern Expression of the Xvax2 gene demarcates presumptive ventral telencephalon and specific visual structures in Xenopus laevis

vax2 is a recently isolated homeobox gene, that plays an important role in controlling the dorso-ventral patterning of the retina. In this paper we present a thorough description of the Xvax2 expression pattern all along Xenopus embryogenesis, and compare this pattern in detail to that shown by Xvax1b and Xpax2, two genes also involved in ventral eye development. At early neurula stages, while Xpax2 starts to be expressed within the eye field, both Xvax2 and Xvax1b are exclusively activated in the presumptive ventral telencephalon. Since midneurula stages, Xvax2 and Xvax1b are also transcribed in the medial aspect of the eye field. At tailbud and tadpole stages, Xvax2, Xvax1b and Xpax2 expression overlaps in the optic stalk and nerve and in the optic disk, while Xvax2 and Xvax1b also display specific activation domains in the ventral retina as well as in the ventral telencephalon and diencephalon. Finally, during metamorphosis a high level of both Xvax2 and Xvax1b transcription is maintained in the optic chiasm. In addition, Xvax1b is transcribed in the ventral hypothalamus and in the hypophysis, whereas a strong Xvax2 expression is retained in the ventral portion of the mature retina. q 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
Modulation of visual stimulus discrimination by sustained focal attention: an MEG study.

PURPOSE Visual attention, normally focused on the center of the visual field, can be shifted to a location in the periphery. This process facilitates the recognition of objects in the attended region. The present experiment was designed to investigate the time course of sustained attention that is known to augment stimulus perception in normal subjects. METHODS Cortical activity of the human brain related to shifts of the attentional focus was examined with magnetoencephalography. Subjects had to identify a stimulus presented on a screen at one of two locations in the periphery of their visual fields. Sustained attention was either deployed toward the target by a preceding cue or not. RESULTS Results confirmed a reaction time advantage on recognizing objects in the part of the visual field where attention had been deployed. A stronger magnetic brain response was detected for noncued targets at a latency of 260 to 380 ms after target onset. Source localization revealed a neuronal generator of the attention-related component in the parietal cortex. CONCLUSIONS Sustained attention facilitates target detection. The component that is localized in the parieto-occipital cortex in the noncued condition is thought to reflect a transient shift of attention toward the target location.
Coordinate strip-mining and kernel fusion to lower power consumption on GPU

Although general purpose GPUs have relatively high computing capacity, they also introduce high power consumption compared with general purpose CPUs. Therefore low-power techniques targeted for GPUs will be one of the most hot topics in the future. On the other hand, in several application domains, users are unwilling to sacrifice performance to save power. In this paper, we propose an effective kernel fusion method to reduce the power consumption for GPUs without performance loss. Different from executing multiple kernels serially, the proposed method fuses several kernels into one larger kernel. Owing to the fact that most consecutive kernels in an application have data dependency and could not be fused directly, we split large kernel into multiple slices with strip-mining method, then fuse independent sliced kernels into one kernel. Based on the CUDA programming model, we propose three different kernel fusion implementations, with each one targeting for a special case. Based on the different strip-ming methods, we also propose two fusion mechanisms, which are called invariant-slice fusion and variant-slice fusion. The latter one could be better adapted to the requirements of the kernels to be fused. The experimental results validate that the proposed kernel fusion method could effectively reduce the power consumption for GPU.
KISS-Tree: smart latch-free in-memory indexing on modern architectures

Growing main memory capacities and an increasing number of hardware threads in modern server systems led to fundamental changes in database architectures. Most importantly, query processing is nowadays performed on data that is often completely stored in main memory. Despite of a high main memory scan performance, index structures are still important components, but they have to be designed from scratch to cope with the specific characteristics of main memory and to exploit the high degree of parallelism. Current research mainly focused on adapting block-optimized B+-Trees, but these data structures were designed for secondary memory and involve comprehensive structural maintenance for updates. In this paper, we present the KISS-Tree, a latch-free in-memory index that is optimized for a minimum number of memory accesses and a high number of concurrent updates. More specifically, we aim for the same performance as modern hash-based algorithms but keeping the order-preserving nature of trees. We achieve this by using a prefix tree that incorporates virtual memory management functionality and compression schemes. In our experiments, we evaluate the KISS-Tree on different workloads and hardware platforms and compare the results to existing in-memory indexes. The KISS-Tree offers the highest reported read performance on current architectures, a balanced read/write performance, and has a low memory footprint.