Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Experimental Study of the Effects of Listening on Speaking for College Students.

As China enters WTO, more college graduates with higher oral English proficiency are required. However, we learned that even students in some distinguished universities are lack of this ability. Based on her teaching experiences and the theory proposed by Krashen and some other well-know foreign languages teaching researchers, the author of this thesis formulated two hypotheses: 1) Students’ listening ability and their oral English production ability are correlated. 2) Teachers who bring listening and audio-visual materials into oral English class are likely to have better teaching results.Krashen’s Comprehensive Input Hypothesis is the theoretical foundation of the author’s research. The author studies the nature of listening and speaking, by doing so she points out the effects of listening on improving students’ oral English from two broad aspects.This thesis aims at making a quantitative analysis on the effects of listening on speaking for college students. With the help of SPSS 11.5 software, a quantitative computerized analysis on this research hypothesis is made. Moreover, a quantitative analysis on correlation between listening and speaking is also made.The result shows that listening and speaking ability are closely related, and listening does have positive effects on improving college students’ oral English.
Fuzziness in Action: What Consequences Has the Linguistic Ambiguity of the Core Competence Concept for Organizational Usage?

Linguistic ambiguity is one of the most prominent characteristics of management fashions. Using the example of one of the most popular management concepts in the 1990s, the core competence approach, we analyse the consequences of linguistic ambiguity on the level of organizational usage. We pursue an in-depth case study of a German corporation which can be seen as a ‘heavy adopter’ of the core competence concept. A central implication of our study is that the term ‘ambiguity’ itself has several meanings depending on the level of analysis. On a general level the managers interpreted the core competence concept relatively homogeneously. They simplified and generalized it to an organizational principle and perceived it as guiding action. At the same time, each manager defined his or her own set of core competences. Thus, underneath a seeming consensus, a large variety of practices may hide. This novel kind of ‘contextual ambiguity’ does not originate from the linguistic ambiguity of the management fashion but from the plurality of local contexts in which the concept is interpreted. The managers' pragmatic attitude to the core competence ‘principle’ contributed to the high contextual ambiguity and the – compared to the media discourse – high longevity of the fashion within the case company. Our findings urge management fashion scholars to pay more attention to the distributed and polyphonic character of organizations and the organizational nature of the ‘consumption’ of ambiguous management knowledge.
Cardiac extracellular matrix: a dynamic entity.

sium and around arteries. Fibrillin increased in the interstitium and accumulated in microscopic scars after the induction of cardiac fibrosis by angiotensin II or deoxycorticosterone acetate. Furthermore, angiotensin II and transforming growth factor-1 enhanced the synthesis of fibrillin by cardiac fibroblasts. These results strongly suggest that fibrillin is an important component of the extracellular matrix of the myocardium that is upregulated during the development of cardiac fibrosis. This study has used rodents to suggest potentially important changes in human disease. Are these findings unique to the rodent heart and thus not relevant to the human heart, especially in chronic cardiovascular disease? Of course this can only be answered by appropriate studies on human myocardium, especially in patients with chronic hypertension or heart failure. However, previous studies showing that angiotensinconverting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors prevented or reversed cardiac fibrosis in angiotensin II-infused or deoxycorticosterone acetate-treated rats (4, 19) have been confirmed by elegant studies in patients treated with lisinopril (3). This strongly suggests that the human heart will show similar responses in the extracellular matrix to the rodent heart. The demonstration of fibrillin throughout the normal myocardium suggests a unique role for this component of the matrix, possibly to transmit force from myocytes to the extracellular matrix. One potential role would be the regulation of the stiffness or compliance of the heart. Collagen is a wellknown regulator of myocardial stiffness, and cross-linking of the collagen strands is a key determinant (16). Bioengineering research could provide the necessary insights into the role of fibrillin as it has with the role of collagen in the mechanical function of the heart (8, 10, 12). These studies have developed three-dimensional representations of cardiac muscular architecture to investigate issues such as force development, electrical activation throughout the myocardium, and shear properties. Although these studies have emphasized the role of the collagen network, the techniques would also be useful to define the role of fibrillin in cardiac function in both normal function as well as in pathophysiological states such as cardiac fibrosis. The definition of perivascular fibrillin deposition suggests that vascular function may also be regulated by changes in fibrillin deposition, possibly changing vascular stiffness and endothelial function.
Acquiring Noun Plurals in Palestinian Arabic: Morphology, Familiarity, and Pattern Frequency.

The study examined the acquisition of two morphological procedures of noun pluralization in Palestinian Arabic: Sound Feminine Plural (SFP) and Broken Plural (BP). We tested if noun pluralization was affected by (1) the type of morphological procedure, (2) the degree of familiarity with the singular noun stem, and (3) the frequency of plural patterns. Thirty-six native Arabic-speaking children in three age groups were tested on three experimental tasks: a repetition task, a structured production task, and a seminatural production task. In line with earlier research, the results showed that SFP pluralization was acquired earlier and had a shorter developmental trajectory than BP plurals. Also, the errors of children showed that SFP was a dominant default procedure. However, despite its early consolidation, SFP formation was affected by familiarity with the singular noun stem. BP nouns also appeared rather early in the production of children and were affected by both familiarity with the noun stem and frequency of the plural pattern. Yet, they took longer to acquire and did not reach comparable levels to SFP in the age groups tested. The implications of the results for models of language acquisition and the acquisition of Arabic morphology are discussed.
Performance of MRC Diversity Receivers over Correlated Nakagami-m Fading Channels

We present exact closed-form expressions for the statistics of the sum of non-identical squared Nakagamim random variables and it is shown that it can be written as a weighted sum of Erlang distributions. The analysis includes both independent and correlated cases with distinct average powers and integer-order fading parameters. The proposed formulation significantly improves previously published results which are in the form of infinite sums or higher order derivatives. The obtained formulae can be applied on the performance analysis of maximal-ratio combining diversity receivers operating over Nakagami-m fading channels.
Sopra: a new social personalized ranking function for improving web search

We present in this paper a contribution to IR modeling by proposing a new ranking function called SoPRa that considers the social dimension of the Web. This social dimension is any social information that surrounds documents along with the social context of users. Currently, our approach relies on folksonomies for extracting these social contexts, but it can be extended to use any social meta-data, e.g. comments, ratings, tweets, etc. The evaluation performed on our approach shows its benefits for personalized search.
DIP : Final project report Image segmentation based on the normalized cut framework

Yu-Ning Liu Chung-Han Huang Wei-Lun Chao R98942125 R98942117 R98942073 Motivation Image segmentation is an important image processing, and it seems everywhere if we want to analyze what inside the image. For example, if we seek to find if there is a chair or person inside an indoor image, we may need image segmentation to separate objects and analyze each object individually to check what it is. Image segmentation usually serves as the pre-processing before image pattern recognition, image feature extraction and image compression. Researches of it started around 1970, while there is still no robust solution, so we want to find the reason and see what we can do to improve it.
Prevalence of erm gene classes in erythromycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated between 1959 and 1988

The epidemiology of the two common erythromycin resistance methylase (erm) genes ermA and ermC was analyzed by Southern blotting in 428 erythromycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated from blood between 1959 and 1988 in Denmark. ermA and/or ermC was present in 98% of the erythromycin-resistant strains tested. ermA was found only as a chromosomal insert and was solely responsible for erythromycin resistance in these strains until about 1971. ermA was the only erm gene found in 337 strains and was a single insert in 61% of these strains, two inserts were seen in 37%, and three inserts were found in 2%. Thirteen different ermA EcoRI restriction fragment length polymorphisms were identified. ermA was not found in strains of phage type patterns group II and type 95, which are very common today. ermC was found on a plasmid in 77 strains. ermC was first seen in 1971 and spread rapidly in the S. aureus population, with a 5- to 10-fold increase every 5 years, and in 1984 to 1988, it was responsible for erythromycin resistance in 72% of the strains. The predominant plasmid carrying ermC was 2.5 kb, while four plasmids were smaller and three were larger. ermC has been found in all phage type patterns. Eight strains contained combinations of ermA and ermC, and no erm gene was detected in six strains.
Risk Factor of Pancreatic Fistula after Pancreatoduodenectomy in Patients with Soft Pancreas

Background: Pancreatic fistula (PF) is a potentially life-threatening postoperative complication after pancreatoduodenectomy (PD). Soft pancreatic texture is known to be a risk factor of PF. The study tried to elucidate risk factors of PF, especially in patients with soft pancreas. Methods: One hundred-nine patients underwent PD between 2010 and 2014, excluding cases of PD with major hepatectomy. The diagnoses were: pancreatic carcinoma in 44, cholangiocarcinoma in 23, and carcinoma of the Vater’s papilla in 14 and others in 28 patients. Principally, pancreatic duct stent was placed through the duct-to-mucosal pancreatojejunostomy only in patients with soft pancreas and small diameter of the pancreatic duct. PF was defined and scored based on the criteria of the International Study Group on Pancreatic Fistula. Factors influencing development of PF Grade B/C were analyzed. As potential risk factors, age, sex, diagnosis, pancreatic texture, diameter of pancreatic duct, use of pancreatic duct stent, device of dividing the pancreas, blood loss, operation time, and preoperative biliary drainage were included for univariate and multivariate analyses. Results: PF Grades B and C developed in 8 and 2 patients, respectively. Eight of these patients had soft pancreas. No significant risk factors were determined in the analysis of all patients (n=109). However, small pancreatic duct (≦3mm; p=0.026), non-pancreatic carcinoma patients (p=0.0114), and smaller amount of blood loss (<1000ml; p<0.0001) were independent risk factors of PF Grade B/C in patients with soft pancreas (n=68). Conclusions: Soft pancreas was not a risk factor of PF, probably because of standard use of pancreatic duct stent. Small pancreatic duct, non-pancreatic carcinoma, and the amount of blood loss were significant risk factors of PF in patients with soft pancreas.
Inverting Random Functions II: Explicit Bounds for Discrete Maximum Likelihood Estimation, with Applications

In this paper we study inverting random functions under the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) criterion in the discrete setting. In particular, we consider how many independent evaluations of the random function at a particular element of the domain are needed for reliable reconstruction of that element. We provide explicit upper and lower bounds for MLE, both in the nonparametric and parametric setting, and give applications to coin-tossing and phylogenetic tree reconstruction.
Reading Pages of a Consumer Product Manual Text and Warnings

This study evaluated whether high or low salience product manual warning formats resulted in different frequencies of both reading and warning recall accuracy. Both experimental conditions constituted an amalgamation of warning and product manual format features. The low salience condition was comprised of a capitalized signal word, paragraph prose-style warning text, warnings integrated with page content with low salience visual cues whereas the high salience condition included an icon, signal word panel, bulleted warning text, warnings placed separately at the page bottom with high salience visual cues. Eye movements were recorded while participants read pages from product manuals followed by a warning recall test. No significant difference in the number of warnings read was found but visual cues in the high salience condition shifted foveal vision to the warnings significantly more often than the cues in the low salience condition. Warning recall was higher in the low salience condition than in the high salience condition, probably because of the particular task and formatting used. Caveats and study implications are discussed.
Development of a dynamic conversion technique of cell culture surface using alginate thin film

This paper presents a novel technique that can dynamically convert cell-non-adhesiveness of the culture surface to cell-adhesiveness. The alginate thin film is used as a material that inhibits adhesion of cells. It is formed on the glass plate by spin-coating of the sodium alginate solution and dipping into the calcium chloride (CaCl2) solution. Also, it can be removed by ethylenediaminetetraacetate (EDTA), which is calcium chelator, at arbitrary timing during cell culture. This technique permits the observation of cellular responses to conversion of culture surface in real time by optical microscope. Thus, the effect of a culture surface condition on cells may be clarified by real-time cellular response observation when the culture surface is dynamically converted. We demonstrated the validity of the coating method of alginate thin film. As a result, thickness of the alginate thin film was controlled by rotating speed of spin-coating. Also, we evaluated the performance of the alginate thin film as cell-non-adhesiveness material and the availability of the dynamic conversion of the cell culture surface. As a result of cell cultivation test, the alginate thin film inhibited completely the adhesion of cultured cells to the culture surface irrespective of the thickness. When the alginate thin film was removed from culture surface by injecting EDTA, the cultured cells adhered to the culture surface and changed its morphology. Moreover, we fabricated a microdevice with dynamic conversion culture surface. In the near future, the authors will evaluate the effect of culture surface conversion on cells by using the fabricated microdevice in real time.
Metrical priming in speech production

In this paper we report on four experiments in which we attempted to prime the stress position of Dutch bisyllabic target nouns. These nouns, picture names, had stress on either the first or the second syllable. Auditory prime words had either the same stress as the target or a different stress (e.g., WORtel - MOtor vs. koSTUUM - MOtor; capital letters indicate stressed syllables in prime - target pairs). Furthermore, half of the prime words were semantically related, the other half were unrelated. In none of the experiments a stress priming effect was found. This could mean that stress is not stored in the lexicon. An additional finding was that targets with initial stress had a faster response than targets with a final stress. We hypothesize that bisyllabic words with final stress take longer to be encoded because this stress pattern is irregular with respect to the lexical distribution of bisyllabic stress patterns, even though it can be regular in terms of the metrical stress rules of Dutch.
Demography, Technology and Fluctuations in Dividend/Price

The dynamic dividend growth model (CampbellS dividendyield. The empirical validity of such hypothesis has been challenged in recent literature (Lettau&Van Nieuwerburgh, 2007) with strong evidence on a time varying mean, due to breaks, in this …nancial ratio. In this paper, we show that demography along with technology performs well in the explanation of the breaks in the dividend price ratio and that demographics and technology capture a slowly evolving mean toward which the dividend price ratio is reverting. We show that a forecasting model based on technology, demographics and demand factor as captured by excess consumption in the sense of Lettau and Ludvigson(2004) overperforms virtually all alternative model proposed in the empirical literature in the framework of the dynamic dividend growth model. On the basis of these results, we exploit the predictability of demographic factors to project the equity risk premium up to 2050. No substantial decline of the equity risk premium for the next 40 years is generated by the explicit consideration of demographic variables in our model.
Decomposition and virtualization of eigenface for face recognition under various lighting conditions

It is intended in this paper to construct a recognition method that is more robust against changes of lighting conditions than the conventional method. The method applies orthogonal decomposition and virtualization to the eigenface within the framework of the subspace method. The eigenface is derived by applying principal component analysis (eigenvalue decomposition) to the set of face images for each person under various lighting conditions. In the proposed method, the standard face eigenspace (canonical space) is used, and the face image is orthogonally decomposed into the projection component, which is affected mostly by the lighting variation, and the residual component, which contains other aspects of personality and noise. By analyzing the residual component, the noise component in the input image is eliminated. By the above approach, the eigenspace (eigen-projection) containing the standard face information, and the eigenspace (eigen-residual) containing the individuality, are constructed. To the eigen-projection, the concept of the virtual subspace is applied, and the virtual eigen-projection is constructed. With this procedure, stable recognition is realized using the subspace method, even if only a small number of images (as few as one) are registered. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 36(1): 25–34, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10638
Telling Our Stories: Using Autoethnography to Construct Identities at the Intersections

Abstract Scholarly inquiry into identity development is a foundation of the student affairs field; typically, such scholarship examines domains of student development as discrete entities. This paper explains the process an autoethnographic research group employed to explore how multiple identities have been shaped during coresearchers’ lifetimes. Findings highlight how this methodology can contribute to new understandings of the intersection of student affairs research and practice.
Large Margin Discriminative Semi-Markov Model for Phonetic Recognition

This paper considers a large margin discriminative semi-Markov model (LMSMM) for phonetic recognition. The hidden Markov model (HMM) framework that is often used for phonetic recognition assumes only local statistical dependencies between adjacent observations, and it is used to predict a label for each observation without explicit phone segmentation. On the other hand, the semi-Markov model (SMM) framework allows simultaneous segmentation and labeling of sequential data based on a segment-based Markovian structure that assumes statistical dependencies among all the observations within a phone segment. For phonetic recognition which is inherently a joint segmentation and labeling problem, the SMM framework has the potential to perform better than the HMM framework at the expense of slight increase in computational complexity. The SMM framework considered in this paper is based on a non-probabilistic discriminant function that is linear in the joint feature map which attempts to capture long-range statistical dependencies among observations. The parameters of the discriminant function are estimated by a large margin learning framework for structured prediction. The parameter estimation problem in hand leads to an optimization problem with many margin constraints, and this constrained optimization problem is solved using a stochastic gradient descent algorithm. The proposed LMSMM outperformed the large margin discriminative HMM in the TIMIT phonetic recognition task.
Comparison of high efficiency video coding (HEVC) performance with H.264 advanced video coding (AVC)

High Efficient video coding (HEVC) will be replacing the current standard, H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC). The main goal for HEVC standardization is to deliver equal video quality for half the bit-rate of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. Other objective of HEVC is to support higher resolution than the current high definition (HD) of 1920 × 1080. Nevertheless, HEVC standard has similar structure design of previous standard but with new enhancement and improvement. This paper will briefly highlight new technical features in HEVC standard. Main focus in HEVC investigation will be enhancement, changes and improvement compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. In addition, test is performed by using HEVC reference software (HM 12.0) comparing with H.264/MPEG-4 AVC reference software (JM 18.5). Moreover, different configuration of HEVC encoder will be tested, exclusively in intra/inter-picture configuration, entropy coding setting, de-blocking filters and sample adaptive offset (SAO), comparing its performances with H.264/MPEG4 AVC. Test sequences used in the experiment consist of different resolution and frame rate. The experiment objective is to examine the capabilities of HEVC in delivering equal or higher quality videos by using objective quality measurement peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). All of data collected will be fitted using rate-distortion (RD) curves.
An Exploration of Graduate Students' Career Transition Experiences

The researchers explored the possible relationships between six specific influencing factors and the timing of a small group of graduate students’ movement through their program, using a short researcher-designed qualitative survey administered once to students at three points in their programs: entrance, mid-point, and exit. While the experience of moving through graduate school does not appear to be well addressed in the research literature, this study points to the relevance of these specific factors for this small group of graduate students. Suggestions for further research are given.