Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigating the acquisition of the German passive by adult learners with L1 English in a formal learning environment : a learner corpus approach

This cross-disciplinary study draws on theories of linguistics, second language acquisition and language pedagogy in order to investigate the acquisition of the German passive by learners in a formal learning environment whose first language is English. This construction has hitherto received little attention from researchers, possibly because of the complexity of the available means of expressing it. The study focuses on the two periphrastic syntactic alternatives, each of which has a different semantic interpretation. With the general aim of identifying patterns in the learners’ usage of the construction over time, both synchronically and diachronically-collected data are assembled in a learner corpus and examined in a multi-method, multi-level study which differs from the single case study approach to language acquisition investigations which has often prevailed in the past. A quantitative, electronically-driven analysis is followed by a qualitative, judgement-based commentary. A comparative analysis of data from native speakers of German adds a further dimension to the discussion. Results of the analyses indicate differences between the written production of the two research populations and variation in the sequence of development and usage of the two German passives in the formal learning context which, it is suggested, may in part be due to the role played by instruction.
Clinical utility of different lipid measures for prediction of coronary heart disease in men and women.

CONTEXT Evidence is conflicting regarding the performance of apolipoproteins vs traditional lipids for predicting coronary heart disease (CHD) risk. OBJECTIVES To compare performance of different lipid measures for CHD prediction using discrimination and calibration characteristics and reclassification of risk categories; to assess incremental utility of apolipoproteins over traditional lipids for CHD prediction. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Population-based, prospective cohort from, Framingham, Massachusetts. We evaluated serum total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), non-HDL-C, apolipoprotein (apo) A-I and apo B, and 3 lipid ratios (total cholesterol:HDL-C, LDL-C:HDL-C, and apo B:apo A-I) in 3322 middle-aged white participants who attended the fourth offspring examination cycle (1987-1991) and were without cardiovascular disease. Fifty-three percent of the participants were women. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Incidence of first CHD event (recognized or unrecognized myocardial infarction, angina pectoris, coronary insufficiency, or coronary heart disease death). RESULTS After a median follow-up of 15.0 years, 291 participants, 198 of whom were men, developed CHD. In multivariate models adjusting for nonlipid risk factors, the apo B:apo A-I ratio predicted CHD (hazard ratio [HR] per SD increment, 1.39; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.23-1.58 in men and HR, 1.40; 95% CI, 1.16-1.67 in women), but risk ratios were similar for total cholesterol:HDL-C (HR, 1.39; 95% CI, 1.22-1.58 in men and HR, 1.39; 95% CI, 1.17-1.66 in women) and for LDL-C:HDL-C (HR, 1.35; 95% CI, 1.18-1.54 in men and HR, 1.36; 95% CI 1.14-1.63 in women). In both sexes, models using the apo B:apo A-I ratio demonstrated performance characteristics comparable with but not better than that for other lipid ratios. The apo B:apo A-I ratio did not predict CHD risk in a model containing all components of the Framingham risk score including total cholesterol:HDL-C (P = .12 in men; P = .58 in women). CONCLUSIONS In this large, population-based cohort, the overall performance of apo B:apo A-I ratio for prediction of CHD was comparable with that of traditional lipid ratios but did not offer incremental utility over total cholesterol:HDL-C. These data do not support measurement of apo B or apo A-I in clinical practice when total cholesterol and HDL-C measurements are available.
Late risk of relapse and mortality among postmenopausal women with estrogen responsive early breast cancer after 5 years of tamoxifen.

BACKGROUND Letrozole after 5 years of adjuvant tamoxifen results in a significant reduction in risk of recurrence from estrogen receptor (ER) positive breast cancer. An individualized estimate of the risk of relapse and death after 5 years of tamoxifen could improve decisions regarding extended hormonal therapy. METHODS The British Columbia Breast Cancer Outcomes database was used to identify women aged 45 years or older at the time of diagnosis with early-stage (I-IIIA) breast cancer who received tamoxifen and were disease free 5 years after diagnosis. Ten-year breast cancer event rates and mortality were calculated as well as annualized hazard rates of recurrence. RESULTS A total of 1086 women were identified with a median age of 64 years and follow-up of 10.5 years. The relative risk (RR) of death was 3.1 (P=0.003) and for recurrence was 1.7 (P=0.037) for N1 (one to three positive nodes) versus N0 (zero nodes positive) disease. N2 (four to nine nodes positive) had a RR of 5.8 (P<0.001) for death and 3.0 (P=0.002) for recurrence. Low tumor grade and high ER level subgroups had a more favorable prognosis. Annual breast cancer risk between years 6 and 10 was, respectively, 2.2%, 3.5% and 7.6% for N0, N1 and N2 disease and 2.6% and 4.5% for T1 and T2 breast cancer. CONCLUSION T and N stages predicted late relapse and death from breast cancer in a population-based cohort of postmenopausal women. Risk estimates reported herein may be used to optimize decision making regarding adjuvant therapy after 5 years of tamoxifen.
Scalable and High Performance Betweenness Centrality on the GPU

Graphs that model social networks, numerical simulations, and the structure of the Internet are enormous and cannot be manually inspected. A popular metric used to analyze these networks is between ness centrality, which has applications in community detection, power grid contingency analysis, and the study of the human brain. However, these analyses come with a high computational cost that prevents the examination of large graphs of interest. Prior GPU implementations suffer from large local data structures and inefficient graph traversals that limit scalability and performance. Here we present several hybrid GPU implementations, providing good performance on graphs of arbitrary structure rather than just scale-free graphs as was done previously. We achieve up to 13x speedup on high-diameter graphs and an average of 2.71x speedup overall over the best existing GPU algorithm. We observe near linear speedup and performance exceeding tens of GTEPS when running between ness centrality on 192 GPUs.
Validation of the Medication Box Task Assessment

There are a limited number of validated occupation-based cognitive assessments that are feasible in clinical settings. For individuals with acquired brain injury (ABI), ecologically valid cognitive assessments are needed to understand how cognition influences functional performance. This study implemented a quantitative exploratory correlational design using a battery of gold standard tabletop cognitive assessments as criterion measurements against the Medication Box Task assessment, an occupationbased cognitive assessment. Eight participants completed the test battery. The student researchers used Pearson correlations to analyze each participant’s scores on the Medication Box Task assessment and the scores on the battery of gold standard assessments. Results indicated that no significant correlations existed between total scores of the battery of tabletop cognitive assessments and the Medication Box Task assessment. However significant correlations were found between scores of the total Type II errors made on the Tower of London and the total number of missing pills, extra pills, and total correct scores on the Medication Box Task assessment. Further findings indicated that seven out of eight participants made mistakes on the Medication Box Task assessment; six out of eight claimed that they managed their own medications.
NetFPGA SUME: Toward Research Commodity 100Gb/s

This work was jointly supported by EPSRC INTERNET Project EP/H040536/1, National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-0855268, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), under contract FA8750-11-C-0249.
The Evolution of XTP

The design of XTP has been a 3 year process so far with roots traceable to work in the 1970’s and 80’s. There have been roughly ten distinct revisions of the protocol. Since Revision 3.4 in June 1989 there has been an effort to stabilize the design. This has been accomplished. The most recent versions Revision 3.4 and 3.5 were about 14 months apart whereas earlier versions were 3 to 6 months apart. Fortunately the net effect of the change from Revision 3.4 to 3.5 was to remove mechanism from the design. There have been at least nine distinct software implementations of the protocol. Experience with these implementations has been fed back into the protocol specification. We believe that the functionality in the present design, Revision 3.5 plus Addendum 1a, is strengthened by the number of alternative mechanisms that have been tried and rejected. XTP history and evolution will be reviewed in this paper with a focus on some of the protocol mechanisms that have changed over time. Introduction The quantity of network and protocol research can be measured by observing the number of publications in the area. In the 1960’s and early 1970’s most of the papers published in the biennial ACM SIGOPS Proceedings were devoted to operating system topics like paging, process control, and file management. By the 1980’s the balance changed so that most of the papers presented some aspect of networking in the context of operating systems. The papers presented in the first workshop in a series dedicated to protocol research [9] reference much of the work of the 1980’s and suggest that the 1990’s may be a time of significant progress in this area. Contemporary protocol research is influenced by developments in other technical fields. For example VLSI techniques are commonly incorporated into the design of protocols, systems, and media something that was not possible when many standard protocols were designed. Improved media in the 100Mbit/sec to 2000Mbit/sec range limit the usefulness of protocols designed for slower media. As a result updated methods for flow, rate, and error control and new services receive attention. Applications such as advanced CAD and multimedia demand greater bandwidth and low latency interfaces. As a result protocol mechanisms for providing bulk and media services, transactions, multicast, and network resource allocation become important. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh † published in the Proceedings of the Third International Conference on High Speed Networking, North-Holland, 1991.
Reinventing agricultural extension to smallholders

In recent years, many countries have realized the need to revive agricultural extension services to promote pro-poor growth, reach poor marginalised smallholder farmers and address new challenges on sustainability, environmental degradation and climate change. This paper discusses evolving concepts and approaches in agricultural extension, past experiences of key countries, problems and failures, and future directions.
Managerial coping with organizational change: A dispositional perspective.

In a departure from the organizational development literature, this study hypothesized that managerial responses to organizational change are influenced by 7 dispositional traits (locus of control, generalized self-efficacy, self-esteem, positive affectivity, openness to experience, tolerance for ambiguity, and risk aversion). Data were collected from 6 organizations (N = 514) to test the hypotheses. The 7 traits were reduced to 2 factors: Positive Self-Concept and Risk Tolerance. Both of these trait factors significantly predicted self-reports and independent assessments of coping with change. Results also indicated that coping with organizational change was related to extrinsic (salary, job level, plateauing, job performance) and intrinsic (organizational commitment, job satisfaction) career outcomes and that coping mediated roughly half of the relationships between the dispositional factors and these career outcomes. In a recent review of the literature, Quinn, Kahn, and Mandl (1994) noted that research in the field of organizational change and development has evolved from four major paradigms: organizational development, strategic choice, resource dependence-institutional theory, and population ecology. That all four of these paradigms consider change at the organizational level is a telling depiction of the organizational change literature. Research dealing with organizational change has been largely dominated by a macro, systems-oriented focus. Some researchers have called for a more micro, person-oriented focus pertaining to issues important in change (Bray, 1994), yet micro-level research on organizational change remains limited. Studies of individual behavior in relation to organizational change typically have
A channel-aware adaptive control to the MAC protocol in rate adaptive wireless LANs

Due to the low efficiency of legacy IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, it has been the main bottleneck of wireless local area networks (WLANs). In this paper, we focus on multi-rate WLANs and propose an adaptive transmission control scheme, which adapts the transmission probability according to the number of active stations, transmission rates, and channel conditions. At first, an analytical model is built in terms of the proposed scheme to explore the throughput of the network. Then, by means of the characteristics of practical system, a heuristic algorithm is developed to approach the maximum throughput on-line. Extensive numerical calculations and simulations based on NS-2 are implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and the impact of inaccurate estimation of parameters. The results show that our algorithm outperforms the existing adaptive algorithms in imperfect channel, and insensitive to inaccurate estimation of parameters. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The cultural politics of English as a global language in Taiwan

This thesis explores how English is perceived in Taiwan and what impact it has on society and culture by drawing on three kinds of data: (i) analysis of policy and documents, (ii) critical discourse analysis of textual data, and (iii) interviews with respondents from different levels of the education system. It aims to provide an indepth study of the role and cultural politics of English in Taiwan. Rather than offering a general and quantitative picture of global English, this research concentrates on qualitative and contextual data. It focuses on issues which arise when English is given an important role in national policy and when English instruction is introduced into Taiwan's elementary education system. By analysing governmental documents, educational publications and media texts, this research identifies a number of ideological assumptions about English in Taiwan and argues that the ideology of English in Taiwan is based on a strong association between English, globalization and economic competitiveness. It also reflects, to an extent, the underlying uncertainty and anxiety regarding Taiwanese's politico-economic future. Furthermore, in the investigation of perceptions of English in Taiwan, informants' responses corresponded somewhat with ideological assumptions embedded in discourses on English. English is highly approved of in areas related to national and personal economic well-being, while the prevalence of English also leads to concern about local languages and cultures. This research suggests that the overall impact of English is considered more positive than negative. Moreover, since the necessity of English is assumed by Taiwanese society, the main concern is thus how to adapt global English effectively without undermining local languages and cultures. Taiwan can be regarded as a typical case among East Asian countries in terms of the socio-economic and educational impact ofEnglish, while the ideological assumptions and perceptions of global English reflect Taiwan's unique cultural, economic and political status in the world.
Bose-glass and Mott-insulator phase in the disordered boson Hubbard model

We study the Villain representation of the two-dimensional disordered boson Hubbard model via Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown that the probability distribution of the local susceptibility has a 1/\chi^2-tail in the Bose glass phase. This gives rise to a divergence although particles are completely localized here as we prove with the help of the participation ratio. We demonstrate the presence of an incompressible Mott lobe within the Bose glass phase and show that a direct Mott-insulator to superfluid transition happens at the tip of the lobe. Here we find critical exponents z=1, \nu~0.7$ and \eta~0.1, which are reminiscent of the pure three-dimensional classical XY model.
Performance analysis of new type grid-tied inverter-Aalborg Inverter

Aalborg Inverter is a grid-tied DC/AC inverter. In order to optimize the design, its power losses are analyzed in detail, combined with a description of the single-phase operating principle and the modulation strategy. A 2 kW / 220 V experimental prototype is constructed to verify the theoretical analysis. It is concluded that a minimize inductance in the power loop does help the inverter to achieve the high efficiency with the good dynamic performance.
Synaesthesia: mechanisms and broader traits

Synaesthesia is a condition in which perceptual or conceptual stimulation in one modality leads to additional experiences within the same or different modality. In grapheme-colour synaesthesia achromatic letters or numbers elicit secondary synaesthetic colour experiences while in mirror-touch synaesthesia observing touch to another person results in tactile sensations on a synaesthete’s own body. This thesis examines broader differences in personality and social perception associated with synaesthesia and investigates neural mechanisms underlying social perception in typical adults. Firstly, an association between grapheme-colour synaesthesia and personality traits was examined which revealed an altered personality profile in this group. Additionally grapheme-colour synaesthesia showed typical and (in some cases) superior social perception abilities relative to typical adults which most likely reflects wider perceptual differences related to sensitivity to high spatial frequency information previously found in this group. Secondly, an investigation into the wider consequences of mirror-touch synaesthesia revealed that the presence of this form of synaesthesia is linked with lower levels of alexithymia relative to typical adults and lower interoceptive sensitivity relative to grapheme-colour synaesthetes and controls. This thesis also explored the neural mechanisms underlying social perception in typical adults using non-invasive transcranial alternating current stimulation. This revealed that enhancing occipital gamma oscillations facilitates facial anger perception offering a new avenue to examine the neural mechanisms underlying social perception advantage in synaesthesia. Current findings are discussed in the context of existing literature on synaesthesia and social perception.
The TeV Energy Spectrum of Markarian 501 Measured with the Stereoscopic Telescope System of HEGRA during 1998 and 1999

During 1997, the BL Lac object Mrk 501 went into an extraordinary state of high X-ray and TeV gamma-ray activity, lasting more than 6 months. In this paper we report on the TeV emission characteristics of the source in the subsequent years of 1998 and 1999 as measured with the stereoscopic Cherenkov telescope system of the High-Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy (HEGRA; La Palma, Canary Islands). Our observations reveal a 1998-1999 mean emission level at 1 TeV of of the flux of the Crab Nebula, a factor of 10 lower than during the year of 1997. A data set of 122 observation hours with the HEGRA telescope system makes it possible to assess for the first time the Mrk 501 TeV energy spectrum for a mean flux level substantially below that of the Crab Nebula with reasonable statistical accuracy. Excluding the data of a strong flare, we find evidence that the 1998-1999 low-flux spectrum is substantially softer (by 0.44 ± 0.1stat in spectral index) than the 1997 time-averaged spectrum. The 500 GeV to ≃10 TeV energy spectrum can well be described by a power-law model with exponential cutoff: dN/dE ∝ E-α exp(-E/E0), with α = 2.31 ± 0.22stat and E0 = 5.1()stat TeV. Within statistical accuracy, a pure power-law model also gives an acceptable fit to the data: dN/dE ∝ E-Γ, with Γ = 2.76 ± 0.08stat. After presenting the 1998-1999 TeV characteristics of the source, we discuss the implications of the results.
Event detection in short duration audio using Gaussian Mixture Model and Random Forest Classifier

The amount of online multimedia files is increasing day by day with the ever increasing popularity of video sharing websites. This has led to a huge interest in content analysis of multimedia files. Audio being a major component of multimedia has the potential to help analyze different events occurring in a multimedia recording. In this paper we present an audio event detection mechanism based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and Random Forest Classifier. Experiments show that our proposed mechanism shows significant improvement in detection of specifically finer audio events in short duration recordings.
Extended contingency table: Performance metrics for satellite observations and climate model simulations

Validation of gridded satellite observations and climate model simulations are fundamental to future improvements in retrieval algorithms and model developments. Among the metrics, the contingency table, which includes a number of categorical indices, is extensively used in evaluation studies. While the categorical indices offer invaluable information, they do not provide any insight into the volume of the variable detected correctly/incorrectly. In this study, the contingency table categorical metrics are extended to volumetric indices for evaluation of gridded data. The suggested indices include (a) Volumetric Hit Index (VHI): volume of correctly detected simulations relative to the volume of the correctly detected simulations and missed observations; (b) Volumetric False Alarm Ratio (VFAR): volume of false simulations relative to the sum of simulations; (c) Volumetric Miss Index (VMI): volume of missed observations relative to the sum of missed observations and correctly detected simulations; and (d) the Volumetric Critical Success Index (VCSI). The latter provides an overall measure of volumetric performance including volumetric hits, false alarms, and misses. First, using two synthetic time series, the volumetric indices are evaluated against the contingency table categorical metrics. Then, the volumetric indices are used to evaluate a gridded data set at the continental scale. The results show that the volumetric indices provide additional information beyond the commonly used categorical metrics that can be useful in evaluating gridded data sets.