Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Shock induces a deficit in the recovery of function after a contusion injury: identifying the relative contributions of the brain and spinal cord

Shock Induces a Deficit in the Recovery of Function after a Contusion Injury: Identifying the Relative Contributions of the Brain and Spinal Cord. (August 2005) Anne Caroline Bopp, B. S. , Indiana State University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. James W. Grau Prior studies have shown that exposure to uncontrollable stimulation can have a variety of adverse consequences on plasticity. For example, as little as 30 min of uncontrollable shock to the tail disrupts both the capacity for instrumental learning and the recovery of locomotor function following spinal cord injury (SCI). Whereas evidence suggests that the disruption of instrumental learning depends on maladaptive plasticity within spinal cord neurons, it is still unknown whether the disruptive effects of shock on locomotor recovery following SCI reflects a brain or spinally-mediated effect. The present experiments address this research question by determining whether shock exposure induces an alteration within the spinal cord of contused rats and testing the effects of disrupting communication between the spinal cord and brain during shock exposure to see if this manipulation protects animals from the effects of shock on locomotor recovery. Experiment 1 found that contused rats transected prior to shock exposure failed to acquire the instrumental response when tested 24 hours later. In addition, contused animals transected after shock exposure also failed to learn when tested, though this effect was less robust. Given the results of Experiment 1, it is plausible that impaired spinal function is sufficient to explain the effects of shock on locomotor recovery. Experiments 2 and 3 addressed this possibility by manipulating
Title: Developing a Test of Prosodic Ability for Speakers of Iberian Spanish Accepted Manuscript

In the absence of a Spanish prosody assessment procedure, an English one (Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems Children: PEPS-C) has been adapted for use with Iberian Spanish speakers. The paper describes the scope, principles and methods of the test and the modifications other than lexical translation that were required to produce a Spanish procedure. Findings from the first studies of data collected using the Spanish test are briefly considered: these suggest crosslinguistic parallels and English/Spanish differences in adult prosodic ability. Lengthier consideration is given to prosodic data from Spanish children and the use of prefinal contrastive accent in the two languages. We conclude that the test is a feasible and valid instrument for assessing Spanish prosodic ability and indicate possible directions for further research.
A comparison of large-scale atmospheric sulphate aerosol models (COSAM): overview and highlights

The comparison of large-scale sulphate aerosol models study (COSAM) compared the performance of atmospheric models with each other and observations. It involved: (i) design of a standard model experiment for the world wide web, (ii) 10 model simulations of the cycles of sulphur and 222Rn/210Pb conforming to the experimental design, (iii) assemblage of the best available observations of atmospheric SO=4, SO2 and MSA and (iv) a workshop in Halifax, Canada to analyze model performance and future model development needs. The analysis presented in this paper and two companion papers by Roelofs, and Lohmann and co-workers examines the variance between models and observations, discusses the sources of that variance and suggests ways to improve models. Variations between models in the export of SOx from Europe or North America are not sufficient to explain an order of magnitude variation in spatial distributions of SOx downwind in the northern hemisphere. On average, models predicted surface level seasonal mean SO=4 aerosol mixing ratios better (most within 20%) than SO2 mixing ratios (over-prediction by factors of 2 or more). Results suggest that vertical mixing from the planetary boundary layer into the free troposphere in source regions is a major source of uncertainty in predicting the global distribution of SO=4 aerosols in climate models today. For improvement, it is essential that globally coordinated research efforts continue to address emissions of all atmospheric species that affect the distribution and optical properties of ambient aerosols in models and that a global network of observations be established that will ultimately produce a world aerosol chemistry climatology.
Incorporating discontinuity preserving approach for optical flow estimation

In this paper, we consider a modified variational energy functional for estimating optical flow from a sequence of images. The given functional incorporates the global variational model of Horn and Schunck(1981) and the classical model of Nagel and Enkelmann(1986) as a new regularisation functional, which efficiently preserve discontinuity in optical flow. In particular, the other significance of this work is in two aspects: (i) It uses a new diffusion model to estimate average velocities, which reflects the effect of the intensity difference. (ii) It uses a more efficient compensating iterative numerical scheme to achieve higher computational efficiency in order to solve the related Euler-Lagrange equations. Experimental evaluation on a given data sets (synthetic and real) present the robustness and accuracy of method and also validate the effect on discontinuity preserving.
Creating a manually error-tagged and shallow-parsed learner corpus

The availability of learner corpora, especially those which have been manually error-tagged or shallow-parsed, is still limited. This means that researchers do not have a common development and test set for natural language processing of learner English such as for grammatical error detection. Given this background, we created a novel learner corpus that was manually error-tagged and shallow-parsed. This corpus is available for research and educational purposes on the web. In this paper, we describe it in detail together with its data-collection method and annotation schemes. Another contribution of this paper is that we take the first step toward evaluating the performance of existing POS-tagging/chunking techniques on learner corpora using the created corpus. These contributions will facilitate further research in related areas such as grammatical error detection and automated essay scoring.
La investigación actual sobre el desarrollo de la fonología del español como lengua materna

el estudio del desarrollo del lenguaje1, en el caso del español, cuenta con un buen número de trabajos centrados en la adquisición2 de la sintaxis o del léxico, y algunos otros –no tantos– dedicados a la morfología. Sin embargo, en el caso del estudio del desarrollo de la fonología los trabajos son mucho más escasos, quizás debido a dificultades metodológicas o las propias de la materia en sí. Se podría decir que esta disciplina es la gran olvidada en los estudios ontogénicos del español, ya que los pocos trabajos que se conocen surgen hace apenas unas décadas3. en este sentido, el ámbito de la adquisición en fonología presenta varios problemas teóricos sobre los que los investigadores no se ponen de acuerdo. Reflexionar sobre ellos es el objetivo de estas páginas, además de ofrecer una visión actualizada del estado actual de los estudios sobre el desarrollo de la fonología del español como lengua materna. dichos problemas se pueden agrupar en tres grandes bloques. el primero de ellos es el marco teórico fonológico en el que se insertan las investigaciones. el segundo es el viejo debate sobre la naturaleza innata o emergente del lenguaje en general y de la fonología en particular. Y el tercero, se refiere a las cuestiones extra-gramaticales
Direct Policy Iteration with Demonstrations

We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy of an unknown Markov decision process (MDP) when expert demonstrations are available along with interaction samples. We build on classification-based policy iteration to perform a seamless integration of interaction and expert data, thus obtaining an algorithm which can benefit from both sources of information at the same time. Furthermore, we provide a full theoretical analysis of the performance across iterations providing insights on how the algorithm works. Finally, we report an empirical evaluation of the algorithm and a comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Advertising a Particularly Precarious Occupation: Nanny Ads on Craigslist

ABSTRACT Domestic work has long been a particularly precarious occupation in that it is subject to certain risks and vulnerabilities that make it a highly insecure, unstable, uncertain form of work that often provides very limited economic and social benefits to those who engage in it. In this article we explore whether employers are willing to advertise the particularly precarious aspects of domestic work in job advertisements for nannies. Based on a content analysis of nanny ads posted on the Craigslist pages for San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Chicago, we find that nearly half (45%) of the ads in our population contained an actual and/or potential indicator of one or more particularly precarious aspects of domestic work. While these indicators came in many specific forms, they can be grouped into two general categories: (1) ads that are actually or potentially discriminatory and (2) ads that indicate an employer may not see being a nanny as a “real” job.
Research on Lightweight Material of FrontalBumper for Midsize Coach

To estimate the aluminum-alloy bumper compared to steel bumper in lightweight and crash safety of midsize coach, a numerical simulation model of coach 100% overlap frontal crash with rigid wall was established by using three dimensional explicit finite element analysis software LS-DYNA 3D, based on China's regulation GB11551-2014 "The protection of the occupants in the event of a frontal collision for passenger car". Three testing parameters were studied, included the reactive force of crash-box, the drive cab integrity and the acceleration of the coach mass center. The results show that: comparing steel bumper, the mass of aluminum-alloy bumper system is decreased 60%, while the system has better absorption crash force curves and crashworthiness of coach body, but the drive cab integrity has become worse.
Reconciling Strong Stabilizing Selection with the Maintenance of Genetic Variation in a Natural Population of Black Field Crickets (Teleogryllus commodus)

Genetic variation in single traits, including those closely related to fitness, is pervasive and generally high. By contrast, theory predicts that several forms of selection, including stabilizing selection, will eliminate genetic variation. Stabilizing selection in natural populations tends to be stronger than that assumed in theoretical models of the maintenance of genetic variation. The widespread presence of genetic variation in the presence of strong stabilizing selection is a persistent problem in evolutionary genetics that currently has no compelling explanation. The recent insight that stabilizing selection often acts most strongly on trait combinations via correlational selection may reconcile this problem. Here we show that for a set of male call properties in the cricket Teleogryllus commodus, the pattern of multivariate stabilizing sexual selection is closely associated with the degree of additive genetic variance. The multivariate trait combinations experiencing the strongest stabilizing selection harbored very little genetic variation while combinations under weak selection contained most of the genetic variation. Our experiment provides empirical support for the prediction that a small number of trait combinations experiencing strong stabilizing selection will have reduced genetic variance and that genetically independent trait combinations experiencing weak selection can simultaneously harbor much higher levels of genetic variance.
Clone identification in Japanese flowering cherry (Prunus subgenus Cerasus) cultivars using nuclear SSR markers

Numerous cultivars of Japanese flowering cherry (Prunus subgenus Cerasus) are recognized, but in many cases they are difficult to distinguish morphologically. Therefore, we evaluated the clonal status of 215 designated cultivars using 17 SSR markers. More than half the cultivars were morphologically distinct and had unique genotypes. However, 22 cultivars were found to consist of multiple clones, which probably originate from the chance seedlings, suggesting that their unique characteristics have not been maintained through propagation by grafting alone. We also identified 23 groups consisting of two or more cultivars with identical genotypes. Most members of these groups were putatively synonymously related and morphologically identical. However, some of them were probably derived from bud sport mutants and had distinct morphologies. SSR marker analysis provided useful insights into the clonal status of the examined Japanese flowering cherry cultivars and proved to be a useful tool for cultivar characterization.
International Conference on Information Systems ( ICIS ) 1-1-2010 MATRIX KAPPA : A PROPOSAL FOR A CARD SORT STATISTIC FOR IS SURVEY INSTRUMENT DEVELOPMENT

The card sort is a key scale development tool that is frequently used in IS survey instrument development. Cohen's Kappa is a recommended measure of inter-rater agreement in this process, however one of its underlying statistical assumptions is violated when it is used in open card sorts. To address this issue, Matrix Kappa is proposed as a complement to other card sort analysis techniques, reframing constructs in terms of item relationships and representing inter-rater agreement in terms of matrices. Matrix Kappa has the benefit of meeting Cohen’s Kappa assumptions for open card sorts and can be used to differentiate both open and closed card sort results that Cohen’s Kappa cannot.
Context-dependent blstm models. Application to offline handwriting recognition

The BLSTM model has been recently introduced for sequence labeling tasks and provides state-of-the-art performance for handwriting recognition. Its recurrent connections integrate the context at the feature level over a long range. Nevertheless, this context is not explicitly modeled at the label level. Explicit context-modeling strategies have been applied to HMMs with improvement of the recognition rate. In this paper, we study the effect of context modeling on the performance of the BLSTM model. The baseline BLSTM, with context-independent character label, is compared with two context-dependent BLSTM, one modeling the left context and the other the right context. The results show that context-dependent models provide an improvement of the recognition rate, and demonstrate the ability of the BLSTM model to deal with a large number of models, without clustering. We tested our models on the RIMES database of Latin script documents.
Peer feedback on academic writing: undergraduate students’ peer feedback role, peer feedback perceptions and essay performance

Abstract Within the higher education context, peer feedback is frequently applied as an instructional method. Research on the learning mechanisms involved in the peer feedback process has covered aspects of both providing and receiving feedback. However, a direct comparison of the impact that providing and receiving peer feedback has on students’ writing performance is still lacking. The current study compared the writing performance of undergraduate students (N = 83) who either provided or received anonymous written peer feedback in the context of an authentic academic writing task. In addition, we investigated whether students’ peer feedback perceptions were related to the nature of the peer feedback they received and to writing performance. Results showed that both providing and receiving feedback led to similar improvements of writing performance. The presence of explanatory comments positively related both to how adequate students perceived the peer feedback to be, as well as to students’ willingness to improve based upon it. However, no direct relation was found between these peer feedback perceptions and students’ writing performance increase.
Line segments detection with scale analysis: A principal component analysis based approach

Hough transform and its revised versions are popular and powerful methods for line detection. However, most of them need edge images as input, and do not consider the scale selection. Besides, it is difficult for Hough-based methods to eliminate spurious peaks caused by noise points. This paper proposes a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based approach for line segment detection. In the proposed algorithm, PCA is introduced for two purposes: to estimate the existence of line segment in a local region, and to extract line segment. The proposed approach mainly contains four steps: First, we give a multi-scale representation for the original image, thus a set of images with different scale is obtained; second, for each scale image, the gradient magnitude image is calculated by performing gradient operator. Then each gradient magnitude image is divided into overlapped windows respectively; third, for each window, we choose several representative points according to the gradient magnitude, and then perform PCA on these points; fourth, line segments are grouped according to PCA results and multi-scale analysis.
Cordyceps militaris Enhances MHC-restricted Antigen Presentation via the Induced Expression of MHC Molecules and Production of Cytokines

Background Cordyceps militarys water extract (CME) has been reported to exert antitumor and immunomodulatory activities in vivo and in vitro. However, the therapeutic mechanism has not yet been elucidated. In this study, we examined the effects of CME on the antigen presenting function of antigen presenting cells (APCs). Methods Dendritic cells (DCs) were cultured in the presence of CME, and then allowed to phagocytose microspheres containing ovalbumin (OVA). After washing and fixing the efficacy of OVA, peptide presentation by DCs were evaluated using CD8 and CD4 T cells. Also, we confirmed the protein levels of proinflammatory cytokines through western blot analysis. Results CME enhanced both MHC class I and class II-restricted presentation of OVA in DCs. In addition, the expression of both MHC class I and II molecules was enhanced, but there was no changes in the phagocytic activity of exogenous OVA. Furthermore, CME induced the protein levels of iNOS, COX-2, proinflammatory cytokines, and nuclear p65 in a concentration-dependent manner, as determined by western blot. Conclusion These results provide an understanding of the mechanism of the immuno-enhancing activity of CME on the induction of MHC-restricted antigen presentation in relation to their actions on APCs.
A TCP offload engine emulator for estimating the impact of removing protocol processing from a host running Apache HTTP server

This article focuses on an emulator used for validating a model for TCP offload. The TCP Offload Engine Emulator (TOE-Em) is a full TCP offload program that emulates the behavior of a TOE device using another PC as a front-end. Its purpose is to study the impact of full offload in a real environment. We tested Apache 2.2 with and without the support of the TOE-Em by requesting different file sets. The CPU utilization and the delay of the system was obtained and analyzed. In our context, full TCP offload was beneficial for files greater than 10 KB.
NEURAL NETWORKS , MACHINE LEARNING THE EFFECT OF INTRODUCTION OF THE NON-LINEAR CALIBRATION FUNCTION AT THE INPUT OF THE NEURAL NETWORK

First, a process of building of the neural network for events forecasting is presented, that is the selection of networks’ architecture and parameters. Next, the effect of adding data calibrated by nonlinear input function to input data calibrated linearly is described. The nonlinear input function hyperbolic tangent was accepted. Hyperbolic tangent sigmoid transfer function and log sigmoid transfer function are commonly used as transfer functions in neural networks.
Redundancy and the choice of hydrologic indices for characterizing streamflow regimes

The utility of hydrologic indices for describing various aspects of streamflow regimes has resulted in their increased application in riverine research. Consequently, researchers are now confronted with the task of having to choose among a large number of competing hydrologic indices to reduce computational effort and variable redundancy prior to statistical analyses, while still adequately representing the major facets of the flow regime. The present study addresses this concern by providing a comprehensive review of 171 currently available hydrologic indices (including the commonly used Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration) using long‐term flow records from 420 sites from across the continental USA. We highlight patterns of redundancy among these hydrologic indices and provide a number of statistically and ecologically based recommendations for the selection of a reduced set of indices that can simultaneously (1) explain a dominant proportion of statistical variation in the complete set of hydrologic indices and (2) minimize multicollinearity while still adequately representing recognized, critical attributes of the flow regime. In addition, we examine the transferability of hydrologic indices across ‘stream types’ by identifying indices that consistently explain dominant patterns of variance across streams in varying climatic and geologic environments. Together, our results provide a framework from which researchers can identify hydrologic indices that adequately characterize flow regimes in a non‐redundant manner. In combination with ecological knowledge, this framework can guide researchers in the parsimonious selection of hydrologic indices for future hydroecological studies. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An Error Recovery Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the importance of transporting data correctly with reliability is increasing gradually along with the need to support communications between the nodes and sink. Data flow from the sink to the nodes requires reliability for control or management that is very sensitive and intolerant of error; however, data flow from the nodes to the sink is relatively tolerant. In this paper, with emphasis on the data flow from the sink to the nodes, we propose a mechanism that considers accurate transport with reliability hop-by-hop. During the process of sending the data, if errors occur or data is missing, the proposed mechanism supports error recovery using a fixed window with selective acknowledgment. In addition, this mechanism supports congestion control depending on the buffer condition. Through the simulation, we show that this mechanism is accurate, reliable, and proper for transport in wireless sensor networks.
Multi-objective Scatter Search Algorithm for Combinatorial Optimisation

In this paper we propose a new meta-heuristic algorithm for solving combinatorial optimization problems. The proposed algorithm follows the scatter search structure developed earlier for single objective combinatorial optimisation, but uses crossover operator borrowed from the field of evolutionary algorithms. The resulting hybrid algorithm is built with typical features like Pareto dominance, density estimation, and an external archive to store the non-dominated solutions in order to handle multiple objectives. The performance of the proposed multi-objective scatter search algorithm is demonstrated by solving a laminate composite cylindrical shell subjected to both combinatorial as well as design constraints. Further, the proposed algorithm is compared with four state-of-the-art multi-objective optimizers: Non-dominated sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II), Pareto archived evolutionary strategy (PAES) and Micro GA. The studies presented in this paper indicate that proposed algorithm produces very competitive Pareto fronts according to the applied convergence metric and it clearly outperforms the other three algorithms.