Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vector-space models for PPDB paraphrase ranking in context

The PPDB is an automatically built database which contains millions of paraphrases in different languages. Paraphrases in this resource are associated with features that serve to their ranking and reﬂect paraphrase quality. This context-unaware ranking captures the semantic similarity of paraphrases but cannot serve to estimate their adequacy in speciﬁc contexts. We propose to use vector-space semantic models for selecting PPDB paraphrases that preserve the meaning of speciﬁc text fragments. This is the ﬁrst work that addresses the substitutability of PPDB paraphrases in context. We show that vector-space models of meaning can be successfully applied to this task and increase the beneﬁt brought by the use of the PPDB resource in applications.
Development of Force Adaptation During Childhood

Abstract Humans learn to make reaching movements in novel dynamic environments by acquiring an internal motor model of their limb dynamics. Here, the authors investigated how 4- to 11-year-old children (N = 39) and adults (N = 7) adapted to changes in arm dynamics, and they examined whether those data support the view that the human brain acquires inverse dynamics models (IDM) during development. While external damping forces were applied, the children learned to perform goal-directed forearm flexion movements. After changes in damping, all children showed kinematic aftereffects indicative of a neural controller that still attempted to compensate the no longer existing damping force. With increasing age, the number of trials toward complete adaptation decreased. When damping was present, forearm paths were most perturbed and most variable in the youngest children but were improved in the older children. The findings indicate that the neural representations of limb dynamics are less precise in children and less stable in time than those of adults. Such controller instability might be a primary cause of the high kinematic variability observed in many motor tasks during childhood. Finally, the young children were not able to update those models at the same rate as the older children, who, in turn, adapted more slowly than adults. In conclusion, the ability to adapt to unknown forces is a developmental achievement. The present results are consistent with the view that the acquisition and modification of internal models of the limb dynamics form the basis of that adaptive process.
ESTIMATION OF AGRICULTURAL ASSISTANCE USING PRODUCER AND CONSUMER SUBSIDY EQUIVALENTS : THEORY AND PRACTICE

II . The measurement of PSEs and CSEs . 21 A . Policy coverage . 22 B . Commodity and country coverage . 22 C . Choice of reference price . 24 1 . Homogeneity . 25 2 . Point of measurement . 26 D . Choice of domestic price . 26 E . Consistency and comparability .
Sensory motor cortex: correlation of presurgical mapping with functional MR imaging and invasive cortical mapping.

PURPOSE To describe a clinically useful application of functional magnetic resonance (MR) imaging--presurgical mapping of the sensory motor cortex--and to validate the results with established physiologic techniques. MATERIALS AND METHODS Functional MR mapping of the sensory motor cortex was performed in two women, aged 24 and 38 years. Both had intractable, simple partial motor seizures due to tumors located in or near the sensory motor cortex. They subsequently underwent invasive cortical mapping--direct cortical stimulation and/or sensory-evoked-potential recording--to localize the affected sensory motor area prior to tumor resection. RESULTS In both patients, the functional MR study demonstrated task activation of the sensory motor cortex. In both cases, results of cortical functional mapping with invasive techniques matched those obtained with functional MR imaging. CONCLUSION Presurgical mapping of the sensory motor cortex is a potentially useful clinical application of functional MR imaging.
Multipath-assisted single-anchor indoor localization in an office environment

Multipath propagation is one of the key problems for indoor localization systems. Strong multipath components can cause range estimates to anchor nodes to be severely biased. If a floor plan is available, reflected signal paths can be used effectively by mapping them to virtual anchors. We show how to make use of the rich localization information provided by just one anchor node. Using tracking algorithms both with and without data association, we achieve accurate and robust localization, which is verified in an indoor environment using measured data at ultra-wide bandwidths. With an extended Kalman filter and data association, a position error of 22 cm is obtained for 90% of the estimates at a bandwidth of 2GHz.
A Particle Swarm Intelligence Based Fuzzy Time Series Forecasting Model

In this paper, we have presented a new particle swarm optimization based multivariate fuzzy time series forecasting method. This method assumes five-factors with one main factor of interest. History of past three years is used for making new forecasts. This new method is applied in forecasting total number of car accidents in Belgium using four secondary factors. We also make comparison of our proposed method with existing methods of fuzzy time series forecasting. Experimentally, it is proved that our proposed method perform better than many existing fuzzy time series forecasting methods. The interest of this paper centers in applying swarm intelligence approaches in forecasting related problems. The dataset is taken from National Institute of Statistics, Belgium.
Neural Basis of the Time Window for Subjective Motor-Auditory Integration

Temporal contiguity between an action and corresponding auditory feedback is crucial to the perception of self-generated sound. However, the neural mechanisms underlying motor–auditory temporal integration are unclear. Here, we conducted four experiments with an oddball paradigm to examine the specific event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by delayed auditory feedback for a self-generated action. The first experiment confirmed that a pitch-deviant auditory stimulus elicits mismatch negativity (MMN) and P300, both when it is generated passively and by the participant’s action. In our second and third experiments, we investigated the ERP components elicited by delayed auditory feedback for a self-generated action. We found that delayed auditory feedback elicited an enhancement of P2 (enhanced-P2) and a N300 component, which were apparently different from the MMN and P300 components observed in the first experiment. We further investigated the sensitivity of the enhanced-P2 and N300 to delay length in our fourth experiment. Strikingly, the amplitude of the N300 increased as a function of the delay length. Additionally, the N300 amplitude was significantly correlated with the conscious detection of the delay (the 50% detection point was around 200 ms), and hence reduction in the feeling of authorship of the sound (the sense of agency). In contrast, the enhanced-P2 was most prominent in short-delay (≤200 ms) conditions and diminished in long-delay conditions. Our results suggest that different neural mechanisms are employed for the processing of temporally deviant and pitch-deviant auditory feedback. Additionally, the temporal window for subjective motor–auditory integration is likely about 200 ms, as indicated by these auditory ERP components.
Dissociation between airway responsiveness to methacholine and responsiveness to antigen

Repeated aerosolized antigen challenges to brown Norway (BN) rats generate nonspecific airway hyperresponsiveness (AHR). On the other hand, some studies have demonstrated that repeated antigen challenge could attenuate antigen-specific AHR in BN rats. The authors questioned whether such dissociation in airway responses actually occurs when assessed in a single study in the same animals. The authors simultaneously measured AHR to methacholine and antigen-specific AHR in rats that were repeatedly exposed to aerosolized ovalbumin (OA) for 1 or 3 months after sensitization. Four days after the last challenge, airway responses to methacholine and OA, morphometry of the airways, the cell profile in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, and cytokine messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) expression in the lungs were evaluated. The two types of AHR were modulated in opposite directions by repeated antigen challenges. The AHR to methacholine was significantly increased in the rats receiving antigen challenges compared with the control rats receiving saline challenges after sensitization; whereas, the antigen-specific AHR was significantly decreased. The number of alveolar macrophages in lavaged fluid and the expression of transforming growth factor-β1 mRNA in lung tissue was significantly different between the antigen-challenged rats and the control rats. In conclusion, dissociation between nonspecific airway hyperresponsiveness and antigen-specific airway hyperresponsiveness in brown Norway rats after repeated antigen challenges was demonstrated. Sustained airway inflammation with macrophages and/or upregulation of transforming growth factor-β1 messenger ribonucleic acid in the lung tissue may be responsible for this dissociation.
A new approach for computing the bandwidth statistics of avalanche photodiodes

A new approach for characterizing the avalanche-buildup-time-limited bandwidth of avalanche photodiodes (APD's) is introduced which relies on the direct knowledge of the statistics of the random response time. The random response time is the actual duration of the APD's finite buildup limited random impulse response function. A theory is developed characterizing the probability distribution function (PDF) of the random response time. Recurrence equations are derived and numerically solved to yield the PDF of the random response time. The PDF is then used to compute the mean and the standard deviation of the bandwidth. The dependence of the mean and the standard deviation of the bandwidth on the APD mean gain and the ionization coefficient ratio is investigated. Exact asymptotics of the tail of the PDF of the response time are also developed to aid the computation efficiency. The technique can be readily applied to multiplication models which incorporate dead space and can be extended to cases for which the carrier ionization coefficient is position dependent.
Vehicular Communications in the V-Charge Project ( Extended Abstract )

Future requirements for drastic reduction of CO2 production and energy consumption will lead to significant changes in the way we see mobility in the years to come. However, the automotive industry has identified significant barriers to the adoption of electric vehicles, including reduced driving range and greatly increased refueling times. The V-Charge Project, funded by the European Commission, seeks to address these problems simultaneously by developing an electric automated car, outfitted with close-to-market sensors, which is able to automate valet parking and recharging for integration into a future transportation system. In this paper, we describe the research challenges associated with providing a wireless Vehicleto-X (V2X) communication infrastructure for V-Charge-enabled parking areas.
Descriptive statistics of measured variables .

introDuction Transportation plays a critical role in improving the livability of communities, because it is so closely tied to our daily activities. Public transit is particularly important because transit use improves community health by reducing negative environmental impacts such as air, water, and land pollution; it also reduces congestion resulting from extensive use of private automobiles for workor non-work-related trips across both long and short distances (Stokes et al. 2008; Lachapelle and Frank 2009). Travel demand studies have revealed that travel by personal vehicles is lower in neighborhoods with higher rates of walking (Ewing et al. 1994). Walkable neighborhoods also help increase the use of transit for all trips (Cervero and Radisch 1996). Since all transit trips involve some amount of walking, improving the built environment around transit facilities will help increase walking and eventually the activity level of the community. While the nature of the causal relationship between the built environment and physical activity is still being debated (Cervero 2002; Handy 2005), it is clear that there is an association between the built environment and transportation destinations at walkable distances (TRB 2005). Recent studies have investigated the influence of the built environment on walking to transit and recommend various environmental interventions to increase walking (Schlossberg and Brown 2004; Besser and Dannenberg 2005; Brown and Werner 2007). However, it remains to be investigated whether the interventions should vary at different distances. This is important for two reasons. First, a distance-based analysis can provide in-depth knowledge about the specific interventions that can be retrofitted or designed to support walking for up to a mile, versus interventions that influence walking only up to a certain distance, say a quarter-mile. This can help transportation planners propose effective transportation improvement programs within the limits of available funds and avoid overspending on interventions that may not be effective in improving pedestrian accessibility to stations. Second, when locations for new transit stations are being determined, the catchment area of the transit users plays a critical role. Estimates of the number of transit users who walk to a transit station will be more accurate if there is better understanding of the existing built environment in the catchment area. Therefore, this study examines the built environment of communities situated within quartermile and half-mile distances from Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) stations (Dallas County, Texas, USA) and investigates the role of the built environment on walking to transit stations. Such studies can help propose interventions and policies sensitive to the distance of walking to and from transit stations.
DESIGN of a TIQ COMPARATOR for HIGH SPEED and LOW POWER 4 BIT FLASH ADC

The area of low power and high speed designing of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) has been a challenging issue over the last decade. The speed enhancement of serial links and the emerging communication technologies has inclined many researchers towards improvement of power and speed specifications. The major building block governing these specifications is the comparator. This paper deals with a new design for comparator with threshold inverter quantization (TIQ) technique. The TIQ technique uses two cascaded CMOS inverters as a voltage comparator. In this design the threshold voltage is used as a reference for comparing the input voltage. The proposed paper introduces TIQ comparator for a flash A/D converter. The TIQ based flash ADC requires 2-1 comparators. The proposed comparator design provides high speed, low power consumption and smaller area. The simulation is performed on Tanner tool with 0. 25μm technology.
RDF with regular expressions

RDF is a knowledge representation language dedicated to the annotation of resources within the framework of the semantic web. Among the query languages for querying an RDF knowledge base, some, such as SPARQL, are based on the formal semantics of RDF and the concept of consequence semantic, others, inspired by the work in data bases, uses regular expressions making it possible to search the paths in the graph associated with the knowledge base. In order to combine the expressivity of these two approaches, we define a mixed language, called PRDF (for "Paths RDF") in which the arcs of a graph can be labeled by regular expressions. We define the syntax and the semantics of these objects, and propose a correct and complete algorithm which, by a kind of homomorphism, calculates the semantic consequence between an RDF graph and a PRDF graph. This algorithm is the coeur of the extension of the SPARQL query language which we propose and implemented: a PSPARQL query allows to query an RDF knowledge base using graph patterns whose predicates are regular expressions.
Regions of interest detection with edge and depth information

Traditional saliency map based regions of interest (ROI) detection often has the problems of not able to locate ROI accurately as human visual attention should be, and its ROI shifting usually exists similar problems. In this paper, two kinds of visual features which are edge and depth information are introduced during feature extraction to access more fitable saliency map to human vision perception, and the dilation operation is used to the binary saliency map to connect parts of one object together. Experimental results show that the modified method is more similar to human vision perception, and works better.
Qualitative experiments in psychology: The case of Frederic Bartlett's methodology

In diesem Beitrag beschaftige ich mich mit psychologischen Experimenten zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts mit einem Schwerpunkt auf der qualitativ-experimentellen Methodologie des Psychologen Frederic BARTLETT. Zunachst kontextualisiere ich BARTLETTs Experimente in der kontinentalen Forschungstradition seiner Zeit, in der ein Ubergang stattfand von einem Fokus auf Elemente (das Interesse der Psychophysik) hin zu einem Fokus auf Ganzheit (das Interesse der Gestalt-Psychologie). Die definitorische Grundlage in BARTLETTs fruhen Experimenten war seine holistische Behandlung menschlicher Reaktionsweisen, d.h. Ausgangspunkt seiner Analyse war ein aktives Subjekt, das sich zu Material innerhalb spezifischer sozialer und physikalischer Bedingungen in Beziehung setzt. Hiermit gehen methodologische Prinzipien einher, die zeitgenossischen Konzepten des Experiments in der Psychologie zuwiderlaufen. Diese Diskrepanz wird weiter beleuchtet mit Blick auf die Geschichte der Replikationen und Erweiterungen seiner Experimente, wobei ich zeige, in welcher Weise seine Methodologie uber die Zeit verandert und missverstanden wurde. Ich schliese mit der Forderung zur (Wieder-) Nutzung einer offenen, qualitativen und idiografischen experimentellen Methodik ahnlich der von BARTLETT konzipierten. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1503239
How to improve local optima of optical flow energies using discrete matches

We propose a large displacement optical flow method that introduces a new strategy to compute a good local minimum of any optical flow energy functional. The method requires a given set of discrete matches, which can be extremely sparse, and an energy functional which locally guides the interpolation from those matches. In particular, the matches are used to guide a structured coordinate-descent of the energy functional around these keypoints. It results in a two-step minimization method at the finest scale which is very robust to the inevitable outliers of the sparse matcher and able to capture large displacements of small objects. Its benefits over other variational methods that also rely on a set of sparse matches are its robustness against very few matches, high levels of noise and outliers. We validate our proposal using several optical flow variational models. The results consistently outperform the coarse-to-fine approaches and achieve good qualitative and quantitative performance on the standard optical flow benchmarks.
Issues in Testing Dependable Event-Based Systems at a Systems Integration Company

Testing of dependable event-based systems is very important to ensure that all requirements (including nonfunctional requirements such as reliability, availability, safety and security) are met and the relevant standards are considered. Siemens Program and Systems Engineering is a company that builds dependable event-based systems in multiple domains. A special unit at PSE, the Support Center Test, focuses on testing issues. In this paper we provide an overview of the state-of-the-practice in testing dependable event-based systems and identify the challenges that have to be addressed in the future. We illustrate our findings by two case studies, one for a transportation system and one for telecommunications. The top three topics for improvement are: testability and requirements tracing, generation of test cases, and verification and validation
Neonatal and adult myosin heavy chains form homodimers during avian skeletal muscle development

Myosin isoforms contribute to the heterogeneity and adaptability of skeletal muscle fibers. Besides the well-characterized slow and fast muscle myosins, there are those isoforms that appear transiently during the course of muscle development. At a stage of development when two different myosins are coexpressed, the possibility arises for the existence of heterodimers, molecules containing two different heavy chains, or homodimers, molecules with two identical heavy chains. The question of whether neonatal and adult myosin isoforms can associate to form a stable heterodimer was addressed by using stage-specific monoclonal antibodies in conjunction with immunological and electron microscopic techniques. We find that independent of the ratio of adult to neonatal myosin, depending on the age of the animal, the myosin heavy chains form predominantly homodimeric molecules. The small amount of hybrid species present suggests that either the rod portion of the two heavy chain isoforms differs too much in sequence to form a stable alpha-helical coiled coil, or that the biosynthesis of the heavy chains precludes the formation of heterodimeric molecules.
Layer- and Column-Specific Knockout of NMDA Receptors in Pyramidal Neurons of the Mouse Barrel Cortex

Viral vectors injected into the mouse brain offer the possibility for localized genetic modifications in a highly controlled manner. Lentivector injection into mouse neocortex transduces cells within a diameter of approximately 200μm, which closely matches the lateral scale of a column in barrel cortex. The depth and volume of the injection determines which cortical layer is transduced. Furthermore, transduced gene expression from the lentivector can be limited to predominantly pyramidal neurons by using a 1.3kb fragment of the αCaMKII promoter. This technique therefore allows genetic manipulation of a specific cell type in defined columns and layers of the neocortex. By expressing Cre recombinase from such a lentivector in gene-targeted mice carrying a floxed gene, highly specific genetic lesions can be induced. Here, we demonstrate the utility of this approach by specifically knocking out NMDA receptors (NMDARs) in pyramidal neurons in the somatosensory barrel cortex of gene-targeted mice carrying floxed NMDAR 1 genes. Neurons transduced with lentivector encoding GFP and Cre recombinase exhibit not only reductions in NMDAR 1 mRNA levels, but reduced NMDAR-dependent currents and pairing-induced synaptic potentiation. This technique for knockout of NMDARs in a cell type, column- and layer-specific manner in the mouse somatosensory cortex may help further our understanding of the functional roles of NMDARs in vivo during sensory perception and learning.
The Spin-Foam Approach to Quantum Gravity

This article reviews the present status of the spin-foam approach to the quantization of gravity. Special attention is payed to the pedagogical presentation of the recently-introduced new models for four-dimensional quantum gravity. The models are motivated by a suitable implementation of the path integral quantization of the Plebanski formulation of gravity on a simplicial regularization. The article also includes a self-contained treatment of 2+1 gravity. The simple nature of the latter provides the basis and a perspective for the analysis of both conceptual and technical issues that remain open in four dimensions.