Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A typological study of stress ‘deafness’

Previous research has shown that native speakers of French, as opposed to those of Spanish, exhibit stress 'deafness', i.e. have difficulties distinguishing stress contrasts. In French, stress is non-contrastive, while in Spanish, stress is used to make lexical distinctions. We examine three other languages with non-contrastive stress, Finnish, Hungarian and Polish. In two experiments with a short-term memory sequence repetition task, we find that speakers of Finnish and Hungarian are like French speakers (i.e. exhibit stress 'deafness'), but not those of Polish. We interpret these findings in the light of an acquisition framework, that states that infants decide whether or not to keep stress in their phonological representation during the first two years of life, based on information extractable from utterance edges. In particular, we argue that Polish infants, unlike French, Finnish and Hungarian ones, cannot extract the stress regularity of their language on the basis of what they have already learned. As a consequence, they keep stress in their phonological representation, and as adults, they do not have difficulties in distinguishing stress contrasts. 1. Introduction It has long been known that speech perception is influenced by phonological properties of the listener's native language (Sapir 1921; Polivanov 1974). Much experimental evidence has been gathered concerning this influence, suggesting that listeners use a set of language-specific phoneme categories during speech perception. For instance, Goto (1971) has documented that Japanese listeners map American [l] and [r] onto their own, single, [ä] category, and, as a result, have a lot of difficulties in discriminating between them. Similarly, the contrast between the retroflex and dental stops [ÿ] – [t° ] is very difficult for the English, but not for the Hindi speaker (Werker & Tees 1984b). This contrast is, in fact, phonemic in Hindi, whereas neither of the stop consonants involved occurs in English; rather, English uses the alveolar stop [t]. The influence of suprasegmental properties of the native language has also been investigated. found that French subjects exhibit great difficulties in discriminating non-words that differ only in the location of stress. In French, stress does not carry lexical information, but predictably falls on the word's final vowel. Speakers of French, then, do not need to process stress to identify lexical items; given its fixed position, stress may instead be used as a cue to word segmentation (Rietveld 1980). The term 'deafness' is meant to designate the effect of listeners having difficulties in discriminating …
Expression, regulation and activity of a B2-type cyclin in mitotic and endoreduplicating maize endosperm

Cyclin-dependent kinases, the master regulators of the eukaryotic cell cycle, are complexes comprised of a catalytic serine/threonine protein kinase and an essential regulatory cyclin. The maize genome encodes over 50 cyclins grouped in different types, but they have been little investigated. We characterized a type B2 cyclin (CYCB2;2) during maize endosperm development, which comprises a cell proliferation phase based on the standard mitotic cell cycle, followed by an endoreduplication phase in which DNA replication is reiterated in the absence of mitosis or cytokinesis. CYCB2;2 RNA was present throughout the period of endosperm development studied, but its level declined as the endosperm transitioned from a mitotic to an endoreduplication cell cycle. However, the level of CYCB2;2 protein remained relatively constant during both stages of endosperm development. CYCB2;2 was recalcitrant to degradation by the 26S proteasome in endoreduplicating endosperm extracts, which could explain its sustained accumulation during endosperm development. In addition, although CYCB2;2 was generally localized to the nucleus of endosperm cells, a lower molecular weight form of the protein accumulated specifically in the cytosol of endoreduplicating endosperm cells. In dividing cells, CYCB2;2 appeared to be localized to the phragmoplast and may be involved in cytokinesis and cell wall formation. Kinase activity was associated with CYCB2;2 in mitotic endosperm, but was absent or greatly reduced in immature ear and endoreduplicating endosperm. CYCB2;2-associated kinase phosphorylated maize E2F1 and the “pocket” domains of RBR1 and RBR3. CYCB2;2 interacted with both maize CDKA;1 and CDKA;3 in insect cells. These results suggest CYCB2;2 functions primarily during the mitotic cell cycle, and they are discussed in the context of the roles of cyclins, CDKs and proteasome activity in the regulation of the cell cycle during endosperm development.
Longitudinal Study of Contents and Elements in the Scientific Web environment

The aim of this work is the longitudinal study of the evolution and the state of 738 web sites in two different points in time (1997 and 2004). It tries to establish the rate of growth and decay of the Web and all the web elements. To this end, the structure and the contents of these web sites are extracted through a crawler and compared at the two different moments in time. The main results confirm a growth of web contents and elements in the web, although there is also a high degree of web content decay. The results suggest that in the seven year period covered by this study the web is characterized by both strong dynamism and instability.
Stabilization of trajectories for systems with nonholonomic constraints

A technique for stabilizing nonholonomic systems to trajectories is presented. It is well known that such systems cannot be stabilized to a point using smooth static-state feedback. The authors suggest the use of control laws for stabilizing a system about a trajectory, instead of a point. Given a nonlinear system and a desired nominal feasible trajectory, an explicit control law which will locally exponentially stabilize the system to the desired trajectory is given. The theory is applied to several examples, including a car-like robot. <<ETX>>
Commonsense Knowledge Extraction Using Concepts Properties

This paper presents a semantically grounded method for extracting commonsense knowledge. First, commonsense rules are identified, e.g., one cannot see imaginary objects. Second, those rules are combined with a basic semantic representation in order to infer commonsense knowledge facts, e.g. one cannot see a flying carpet. Further combinations of semantic relations with inferred commonsense facts are proposed and analyzed. Results show that this novel method is able to extract thousands of commonsense facts with little human interaction and high accuracy.
A novel non-homologous recombination-mediated mechanism for Escherichia coli unilateral flagellar phase variation

Flagella contribute to the virulence of bacteria through chemotaxis, adhesion to and invasion of host surfaces. Flagellar phase variation is believed to facilitate bacterial evasion of the host immune response. In this study, the flnA gene that encodes Escherichia coli H17 flagellin was examined by whole genome sequencing and genetic deletion analysis. Unilateral flagellar phase variation has been reported in E. coli H3, H47 and H17 strains, although the mechanism for phase variation in the H17 strain has not been previously understood. Analysis of phase variants indicated that the flagellar phase variation in the H17 strain was caused by the deletion of an ∼35 kb DNA region containing the flnA gene from diverse excision sites. The presence of covalently closed extrachromosomal circular forms of this excised 35 kb region was confirmed by the two-step polymerase chain reaction. The deletion and complementation test revealed that the Int1157 integrase, a tyrosine recombinase, mediates the excision of this region. Unlike most tyrosine recombinases, Int1157 is suggested to recognize diverse sites and mediate recombination between non-homologous DNA sequences. This is the first report of non-homologous recombination mediating flagellar phase variation.
Externalization improvement in a real-time binaural sound image rendering system

In binaural sound image rendering applications, it is very important to display virtual sound source out-of-head. However, the traditional methods depending only on the Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) always result in a feeling that virtual sound source is located inside the listener's head. In this paper, a real-time binaural sound image rendering system is built, which involves several important factors related to sound propagation, such as image-based early reflection and artificial late reverberation, etc. We also use head-tracker to dynamically determine the relative direction of virtual sound source. The necessary order of early reflection and the effect of late reverberation are studied as well. The subjective listening tests show that the 2nd-order early reflections are more helpful than late reverberation. When combining both early and late reflections, the externalization performance is significantly improved. The sound direction determination is preserved as well.
Bayesian Integration of Face and Low-Level Cues for Foveated Video Coding

We present a Bayesian model that allows to automatically generate flxations/foveations and that can be suitably exploited for compression purposes. The twofold aim of this work is to investigate how the exploitation of high-level perceptual cues provided by human faces occurring in the video can enhance the compression process without reducing the perceived quality of the video and to validate such assumption with an extensive and principled experimental protocol. To such end, the model integrates top-down and bottom-up cues to choose the fixation point on a video frame: at the highest level, a fixation is driven by prior information and by relevant objects, namely human faces, within the scene; at the same time, local saliency together with novel and abrupt visual events contribute by triggering lower level control. The performance of the resulting video compression system has been evaluated with respect to both the perceived quality of foveated video clips and the compression gain with an extensive evaluation campaign, which has eventually involved 200 subjects.
Prediction of Protein Binding Regions in Disordered Proteins

Many disordered proteins function via binding to a structured partner and undergo a disorder-to-order transition. The coupled folding and binding can confer several functional advantages such as the precise control of binding specificity without increased affinity. Additionally, the inherent flexibility allows the binding site to adopt various conformations and to bind to multiple partners. These features explain the prevalence of such binding elements in signaling and regulatory processes. In this work, we report ANCHOR, a method for the prediction of disordered binding regions. ANCHOR relies on the pairwise energy estimation approach that is the basis of IUPred, a previous general disorder prediction method. In order to predict disordered binding regions, we seek to identify segments that are in disordered regions, cannot form enough favorable intrachain interactions to fold on their own, and are likely to gain stabilizing energy by interacting with a globular protein partner. The performance of ANCHOR was found to be largely independent from the amino acid composition and adopted secondary structure. Longer binding sites generally were predicted to be segmented, in agreement with available experimentally characterized examples. Scanning several hundred proteomes showed that the occurrence of disordered binding sites increased with the complexity of the organisms even compared to disordered regions in general. Furthermore, the length distribution of binding sites was different from disordered protein regions in general and was dominated by shorter segments. These results underline the importance of disordered proteins and protein segments in establishing new binding regions. Due to their specific biophysical properties, disordered binding sites generally carry a robust sequence signal, and this signal is efficiently captured by our method. Through its generality, ANCHOR opens new ways to study the essential functional sites of disordered proteins.
Increased Gray Matter Diffusion Anisotropy in Patients with Persistent Post-Concussive Symptoms following Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

A significant percentage of individuals diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) experience persistent post-concussive symptoms (PPCS). Little is known about the pathology of these symptoms and there is often no radiological evidence based on conventional clinical imaging. We aimed to utilize methods to evaluate microstructural tissue changes and to determine whether or not a link with PPCS was present. A novel analysis method was developed to identify abnormalities in high-resolution diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) when the location of brain injury is heterogeneous across subjects. A normative atlas with 145 brain regions of interest (ROI) was built from 47 normal controls. Comparing each subject’s diffusion measures to the atlas generated subject-specific profiles of injury. Abnormal ROIs were defined by absolute z-score values above a given threshold. The method was applied to 11 PPCS patients following mTBI and 11 matched controls. Z-score information for each individual was summarized with two location-independent measures: “load” (number of abnormal regions) and “severity” (largest absolute z-score). Group differences were then computed using Wilcoxon rank sum tests. Results showed statistically significantly higher load (p = 0.018) and severity (p = 0.006) for fractional anisotropy (FA) in patients compared with controls. Subject-specific profiles of injury evinced abnormally high FA regions in gray matter (30 occurrences over 11 patients), and abnormally low FA in white matter (3 occurrences over 11 subjects). Subject-specific profiles provide important information regarding the pathology associated with PPCS. Increased gray matter (GM) anisotropy is a novel in-vivo finding, which is consistent with an animal model of brain trauma that associates increased FA in GM with pathologies such as gliosis. In addition, the individualized analysis shows promise for enhancing the clinical care of PPCS patients as it could play a role in the diagnosis of brain injury not revealed using conventional imaging.
Assigning types to processes

In wide area distributed systems it is now common for higher-order code to be transferred from one domain to another; the receiving host may initialise parameters and then execute the code in its local environment. We propose a fine-grained typing system for a higher-order /spl pi/-calculus which can be used to control the effect of such migrating code on local environments. Processes may be assigned different types depending on their intended use. This is in contrast to most of the previous work on typing processes where all processes are typed by a unique constant type, indicating essentially that they are well-typed relative to a particular environment. Our process type takes a form of an interface limiting the resources to which it has access, and the types at which they may be used. Allowing resource names to appear both in process types and process terms, as interaction ports, complicates the typing system considerably. For the development of a coherent typing system, we use a kinding technique, similar to that used by the subtyping of the system F, and order-theoretic properties of our subtyping relation. Various examples illustrate the use of our fine-grained typing system for distributed systems. As a specific application we define a new typed behavioural equivalence for the higher-order /spl pi/-calculus. The expressiveness of our types enables us to state and prove interesting identities between typed processes.
Ringers lactate or normal saline for children with severe dehydration: change from baseline analysis vs "conventional" ANCOVA.

REFERENCES 1. Shubha AM, Das K. Trachiobranchial foreign bodies in infants. International J Pediatric Otorhinolaryngol. 2009;73:1385-9. 2. Taksande A, Vilhekar K, Tyagi V. Uncommon foreign body aspiration in infant. Calicut Med J. 2010; 8:e8. Available from: www.calicutmedicaljournal. org/2010/1/ e8.pdf. Accessed on 1 April, 2013. 3. Mu LC, Sun DQ, He P. Radiological diagnosis of aspirated foreign bodies in children: review of 343 cases, J Laryngol Otol. 1990;104:778-82. 4. Byard RW. Mechanism of unexpected death in infants and young children following foreign body ingestion. J Forensic Sciences JFSCA. 1996;41:438-41. 5. Walvekar RR. “Live Fish” in the throat – an unusual foreign body. BHJ. 2003;45:496-7.
A fully scalable online pre-processing algorithm for short oligonucleotide microarray atlases

Rapid accumulation of large and standardized microarray data collections is opening up novel opportunities for holistic characterization of genome function. The limited scalability of current preprocessing techniques has, however, formed a bottleneck for full utilization of these data resources. Although short oligonucleotide arrays constitute a major source of genome-wide profiling data, scalable probe-level techniques have been available only for few platforms based on pre-calculated probe effects from restricted reference training sets. To overcome these key limitations, we introduce a fully scalable online-learning algorithm for probe-level analysis and pre-processing of large microarray atlases involving tens of thousands of arrays. In contrast to the alternatives, our algorithm scales up linearly with respect to sample size and is applicable to all short oligonucleotide platforms. The model can use the most comprehensive data collections available to date to pinpoint individual probes affected by noise and biases, providing tools to guide array design and quality control. This is the only available algorithm that can learn probe-level parameters based on sequential hyperparameter updates at small consecutive batches of data, thus circumventing the extensive memory requirements of the standard approaches and opening up novel opportunities to take full advantage of contemporary microarray collections.
Benchmarking for Power and Performance

There has been a tremendous increase in focus on power consumption and cooling of computer systems from both the design and management perspectives. Managing power has significant implications for system performance, and has drawn the attention of the computer architecture and systems research communities. Researchers rely on benchmarks to develop models of system behavior and experimentally evaluate new ideas. But benchmarking for combined power and performance analysis has unique features distinct from traditional performance benchmarking. In this extended abstract, we present our experiences with adapting performance benchmarks for use in power/performance research. We focus on two areas: the problem of variability and its effect on system power management and that of collecting correlated power and performance data. For the first, we have learned that benchmarks should capture the two sources of workload variability intensity and nature of activity and the benchmarking process should take into account the inherent variation in component power. Benchmarks not only have to test across all of these forms of variability, but they also must capture the dynamic nature of real workloads and real systems. The workload and the system’s response to it change across time, and how fast and well the system responds to change is an important consideration in evaluating its power management capabilities. In the second area, we have developed tools for collecting correlated power and performance data, and we briefly discuss our experience with them.
Consciosusness in Cognitive Architectures. A Principled Analysis of RCS, Soar and ACT-R

This report analyses the aplicability of the principles of consciousness developed in the ASys project to three of the most relevant cognitive architectures. This is done in relation to their aplicability to build integrated control systems and studying their support for general mechanisms of real-time consciousness. To analyse these architectures the ASys Framework is employed. This is a conceptual framework based on an extension for cognitive autonomous systems of the General Systems Theory (GST). A general qualitative evaluation criteria for cognitive architectures is established based upon: a) requirements for a cognitive architecture, b) the theoretical framework based on the GST and c) core design principles for integrated cognitive conscious control systems.
Syntactically Salient Storybook Intervention Model and Language Development of Children who use AAC

Clocked half-rail differential logic circuits with single-rail logic and sense amplifier of the invention do not include complementary logic elements. According to the invention, the complementary logic function of the prior art is replaced by a single transistor appropriately sized to provide the complementary output. In addition, the clocked half-rail differential logic circuits are activated by a delayed clock and include a sense amplifier circuit that is triggered by a second delayed clock. The addition of the sense amplifier circuit, and second delayed clock signal, allows the sense amplifier circuit to act as the driver and therefore there is no need for increasing the size of the differential logic block to provide a driver function.
The puppet and the probe

Visualization of a program typically entails low level views of the program execution state showing, for example, method invocations or relations amongst heap objects. In most cases, this would imply visualization of the executable program. However there is a certain genre of programs that analyze or transform other programs. These programs could be compilers, static bug detectors, test suite analyzers, model to model transformers etc. In such cases, very often, it helps to visualize what is happening to the input program rather than the analyzer program. It is for such programs that we describe a configurable, analysis framework. For ease of exposition, we call the analyzer program the "manipulate" program, and the input program the "puppet" program. Using out visualization scheme, we are able to (1) gain insight into the manipulate program; (2) collect useful information / statistics about the puppet program. We have implemented the visualizer in a tool called "INSIGHT". We ran INSIGHT on a static debugging tool (the manipulate program) called XYLEM. XYLEM applies static analysis to find potential null pointer exceptions in a puppet program, as for example, the Apache Ant program. We report the insights gained by running XYLEM through INSIGHT on ANT and other puppet programs. Further, to visualize the concept of a visualizing a puppet program by a manipulate program, we present the "the puppet and the probe".