Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Writing Mentor

The title, How Long is the Present, lets us know immediately that the poet is investigating the nature of time and art, as did French philosopher Bergson, when he posited a notion of “durée,” the qualitative time of art (1889). Proust took up Bergson’s idea and embodied it in his great project, A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927). Like Proust, David Antin explores the experience of inner time. How long is the present in art? David Antin helps the reader probe this question of what is fleeting and what stays. In the Romantic tradition, the poet-speaker is a medium for languages and time zones that are happening through him. The dynamic, rhythmical impulse to Antin’s poems is the primary characteristic of their being. Open the book anywhere and you will find the coherent rhythmical pattern that rocks us readers and reassures us that there is a firm, probing mind within these poems that will not fail us. The pauses, the stuttering, are marks of reflection and character; they give the work breathing space and spine. In one segment, our poet narrates an inquiry into that peculiar sense of time that one experiences on an airplane. Here Antin uses “you” as subject; the subject has “gone into some time that’s anterior to your time. ” The poet leans into not-knowing what this particular time is, and “starts investigating in anything possible”:
Er–Yb Waveguide Amplifiers in Novel Silicate Glasses

A set of novel silicate glasses containing ZnO and co-doped with Er3+ and Yb3+ was designed as substrates for optical waveguide amplifiers. Characterized by exceptionally low up-conversion, minimum Er concentration quenching and high mechanical as well as chemical stability, the reported glasses can compete with phosphate-based materials typically used in the state-of-art active devices. Straight channel waveguides with propagation losses as low as 0.18 dB/cm were fabricated in these substrates using Ag+ hArr Na+ and K + hArr Na+ thermal ion exchange. Net on-chip gain values of 6.7 dB at 1537 nm were measured and a net fiber to-fiber gain of 5 dB was achieved when pumped at 976 nm. A six-level spatially resolved numerical model of an Er-Yb co-doped active waveguide was developed to analyze and optimize the amplifier performance. Modification of the rare-earth dopant concentration and the channel waveguide geometry was proposed to increase the gain figure and improve the overall amplifier efficiency.
The Argot of the Three-Shell Game

THERE ARE two distinct phases of argot indigenous to American circuses. The one, used by performers and employees, is really a sort of occupational jargon and has been frequently sampled by students of language. The other, comprising elements of several obscure criminal argots, is almost exclusively the property of the circus-grifters who keep themselves aloof from the other personnel, share their take with the management, and constitute a small, closely-knit social unit within most circuses. These men are specialists in many rackets, each of which has some individual argot of its own. Formerly, these grifters were standard equipment with all road shows; today some of the more progressive circuses have dispensed with the grift as being poor business policy. This study gives a sampling of the technical' argot of the three-shell man, which in turn is only a minor aspect of the large body of the argot of the circus-grifter now under observation by the writer. Everyone has seen the simple-looking little shell-game played at fairs, on circus lots, or on the backstretch at a big racetrack. In recent years, some magicians have studied it as a basis for parlor entertainment. It looks harmless enough-and usually is, except in the hands of specialized grifters, where it can take as much as several thousand dollars a day from a gullible public. It has in it many of the elements of the deadly big-con, and, so far as the psychological factors are concerned, is the great-grand-daddy of modern big-time confidence games. This relationship is borne out by the fact that a whole generation of first-rate big-con men, some of them unsurpassed, got their start on the circus grift and particularly on the three-shell game. Historically this game is very old. We got it from England, where it appears in the i8th century as thimble-rig, played with three thimbles weighted in the top with solder. Some old-timers in this country still refer to three-shell operators as thimble-riggers. However, it was in the United States, during the late g1th and early 2oth centuries that the game was fully developed as an adjunct to the very lucrative circus grift. Recently it
Speech enhancement for mobile phones based on the imparity of two-microphone signals

In this paper, we consider a speech enhancement system for mobile phones using pair microphones. The locations of the two microphones are arranged to facilitate the derivation of speech absence probability. The results are substituted into an MMSE estimator in loudness domain for speech purification. Compared with the conventional algorithms [1, 2], which estimate the speech absence probability based on a single microphone, the proposed method does not require many empirical parameters and is relatively robust under different types of noises. The performance of this method is evaluated under noisy environments with music and car noises.
Discourses of the North Atlantic

In the 21st century, historic relations of power continue to shape the epistemic status of nations. Epistemologies of the North Atlantic consistently constitute the bases of institutionally valued scholarship. Indeed, control over the narrative of science has been constitutive of the discourse of modernity and North Atlantic intellectual hegemony. The premise of this article rests on the assertion that to effectively study life in the 21st century, we must abandon all notions of epistemic innocence. This analysis begins with the broad considerations of coloniality, modernity, and epistemology and takes up the specific mandates of formalization and interpretation that define North Atlantic epistemologies. It then considers the importance of critical rationalities, social epistemologies, and the need to robustly de-center research paradigms originating in the North Atlantic.
Message-oriented middleware for edge computing applications

Edge computing is an emerging paradigm which aims to leverage the ever increasing amount of computational resources at the edge of the network to satisfy the stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements of many modern Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. This PhD thesis explores challenges and solutions of message-oriented middleware (MOM) for edge computing applications. In particular, we focus on QoS optimization and message delivery guarantees under the constraints of geographic dispersion, client mobility, dynamic resource availability, and privacy policies.
Self-tapping screws as reinforcement perpendicular to the grain in timber connections

The use of self-tapping screws with continuous threads as a reinforcement to avoid splitting of members in connections with dowel-type fasteners was studied in two projects carried out at the Universities of Nottingham and Karlsruhe. The reinforced specimens showed a very ductile failure mode whereas the non-reinforced specimens failed in a brittle way. Although the reinforced specimens also showed small cracks in the wood directly under the dowels, a complete splitting of the whole specimen, as regularly observed in the tests with the non-reinforced connections, did not occur. A model for calculating the load in the reinforcing screws was developed and its use is shown in some examples.
The 3′ Untranslated Region of Tobacco Necrosis Virus RNA Contains a Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus-Like Cap-Independent Translation Element

ABSTRACT RNAs of many viruses are translated efficiently in the absence of a 5′ cap structure. The tobacco necrosis virus (TNV) genome is an uncapped, nonpolyadenylated RNA whose translation mechanism has not been well investigated. Computational analysis predicted a cap-independent translation element (TE) within the 3′ untranslated region (3′ UTR) of TNV RNA that resembles the TE of barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV), a luteovirus. Here we report that such a TE does indeed exist in the 3′ UTR of TNV strain D. Like the BYDV TE, the TNV TE (i) functions both in vitro and in vivo, (ii) requires additional sequence for cap-independent translation in vivo, (iii) has a similar secondary structure and the conserved sequence CGGAUCCUGGGAAACAGG, (iv) is inactivated by a four-base duplication in this conserved sequence, (v) can function in the 5′ UTR, and (vi) when located in its natural 3′ location, may form long-distance base pairing with the viral 5′ UTR that is conserved and probably required. The TNV TE differs from the BYDV TE by having only three helical domains instead of four. Similar structures were found in all members of the Necrovirus genus of the Tombusviridae family, except satellite tobacco necrosis virus, which harbors a different 3′ cap-independent translation domain. The presence of the BYDV-like TE in select genera of different families indicates that phylogenetic distribution of TEs does not follow standard viral taxonomic relationships. We propose a new class of cap-independent TE called BYDV-like TE.
Weighted Optimization Framework for Large-scale Multi-objective Optimization

In this work we introduce a new method for solving multi-objective optimization problems that involve a large number of decision variables. The proposed Weighted Optimization Framework (WOF) relies on variable grouping and weighting to transform the original optimization problem and is designed as a generic method that can be used with any population-based algorithm. Our experiments use the WFG benchmark problems with 2 and 3 objectives and 1000 variables. Using WOF on two well-known algorithms (NSGA-II and SMPSO), we show that our method can significantly improve their performance on all of the test problems.
Microphone array speech recognition: experiments on overlapping speech in meetings

This paper investigates the use of microphone arrays to acquire and recognise speech in meetings. Meetings pose several interesting problems for speech processing, as they consist of multiple competing speakers within a small space, typically around a table. Due to their ability to provide hands-free acquisition and directional discrimination, microphone arrays present a potential alternative to close-talking microphones in such an application. We first propose an appropriate microphone array geometry and improved processing technique for this scenario, paying particular attention to speaker separation. during possible overlap segments. Data collection of a small vocabulary speech recognition corpus (Numbers) was performed in a real meeting room for a single speaker, and several overlapping speech scenarios. In speech recognition experiments on the acquired database, the performance of the microphone array system is compared to that of a close-talking lapel microphone, and a single table-top microphone.
Deinstitutionalization in California: Mortality of Persons with Developmental Disabilities after Transfer into Community Care, 1997-1999

More than 2,000 persons with developmental disability trans- ferred from California institutions into community care during 1993 to early 1996. Using data on 1,878 children and adults moved between April 1, 1993 and March 5, 1996, Strauss, Shavelle, Baumeister and Anderson (1998) found a corresponding increase in mortality rates by comparison with those who stayed behind. Shavelle and Strauss (1999) updated the study through 1996 and found similar results. The present study is a further update through 1999. There were 81 deaths, a 47% increase in risk-adjusted mor- tality over that expected in institutions ( p< 0.01). As in the two previous studies, we found that persons transferred later were at higher risk than those moving earlier, even after adjustment for differences in risk profiles. The difference cannot be explained by the short-term effects of the transfer, and therefore appear to reflect an increased mortality rate associated with the less intensive medical care and supervision available in the community.
Anti-Inflammatory Role of the cAMP Effectors Epac and PKA: Implications in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Cigarette smoke-induced release of pro-inflammatory cytokines including interleukin-8 (IL-8) from inflammatory as well as structural cells in the airways, including airway smooth muscle (ASM) cells, may contribute to the development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Despite the wide use of pharmacological treatment aimed at increasing intracellular levels of the endogenous suppressor cyclic AMP (cAMP), little is known about its exact mechanism of action. We report here that next to the β2-agonist fenoterol, direct and specific activation of either exchange protein directly activated by cAMP (Epac) or protein kinase A (PKA) reduced cigarette smoke extract (CSE)-induced IL-8 mRNA expression and protein release by human ASM cells. CSE-induced IκBα-degradation and p65 nuclear translocation, processes that were primarily reversed by Epac activation. Further, CSE increased extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) phosphorylation, which was selectively reduced by PKA activation. CSE decreased Epac1 expression, but did not affect Epac2 and PKA expression. Importantly, Epac1 expression was also reduced in lung tissue from COPD patients. In conclusion, Epac and PKA decrease CSE-induced IL-8 release by human ASM cells via inhibition of NF-κB and ERK, respectively, pointing at these cAMP effectors as potential targets for anti-inflammatory therapy in COPD. However, cigarette smoke exposure may reduce anti-inflammatory effects of cAMP elevating agents via down-regulation of Epac1.
Clinical Interventions in Aging Dovepress Effects of a Complex Intervention on Fall Risk in the General Practitioner Setting: a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial

Purpose: To study the feasibility of first, reaching functionally declined, but still independent older persons at risk of falls through their general practitioner (GP) and second, to reduce their physiological and psychological fall risk factors with a complex exercise intervention. We investigated the effects of a 16-week exercise intervention on physiological (function, strength, and balance) and psychological (fear of falling) outcomes in community-dwelling older persons in comparison with usual care. In addition, we obtained data on adherence of the participants to the exercise program. Methods: Tests on physical and psychological fall risk were conducted at study inclusion, and after the 16-week intervention period in the GP office setting. The 16-week intervention included progressive and challenging balance, gait, and strength exercise as well as changes to behavioral aspects. To account for the hierarchical structure in the chosen study design, with patients nested in GPs and measurements nested in patients, a three-level linear mixed effects model was determined for analysis. Results: In total, 33 GPs recruited 378 participants (75.4% females). The mean age of the participants was 78.1 years (standard deviation 5.9 years). Patients in the intervention group showed an improvement in the Timed-Up-and-Go-test (TUG) that was 1.5 seconds greater than that showed by the control group, equivalent to a small to moderate effect. For balance, a relative improvement of 0.8 seconds was accomplished, and anxiety about falls was reduced by 3.7 points in the Falls Efficacy Scale–International (FES-I), in the intervention group relative to control group. In total, 76.6% (N = 170) of the intervention group participated in more than 75% the supervised group sessions. Conclusion: The strategy to address older persons at high risk of falling in the GP setting with a complex exercise intervention was successful. In functionally declined, community-dwelling, older persons a complex intervention for reducing fall risks was effective compared with usual care.
The Identification of Mentally Gifted, "Disadvantaged" Students at the Eighth Grade Level

For as long as special funds have been provided for gifted programs, these funds have gone largely to affluent schools, rarely to inner-city schools. One reason for this must be sought in the method of defining the "mentally gifted" student. The criterion has generally been a score at or above the 98th percentile point on an individual intelligence test such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) or the Stanford-Binet (i.e., an IQ score of about 130+). Thus, all students were evaluated against the same kind of yardstick, a test standardized on a white population and subject to cultural influence. Few inner-city students qualified as mentally gifted. Moreover, since few were expected to qualify, programs for gifted students were rarely planned and counselor time and effort were directed elsewhere. The mentally gifted students in "ghetto" schools were ignored. Recently, however, concern for mentally gifted "disadvantaged" students has grown. In hearings on the gifted conducted by the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, answers were sought to the question "How can disadvantaged gifted children be identified? " In California a change in the State Code2 now allows up to 2 per cent of the "culturally disadvantaged" students in a school district to be designated mentally gifted under separate criteria which do not require a full-scale score above 130.
OMG UR Funny! Computer-Aided Humor with an Application to Chat

In this paper we explore Computer-Aided Humor (CAH), where a computer and a human collaborate to be humorous. CAH systems support people’s natural desire to be funny by helping them express their own idiosyncratic sense of humor. Artificial intelligence research has tried for years to create systems that are funny, but found the problem to be extremely hard. We show that by combining the strengths of a computer and a human, CAH can foster humor better than either alone. We present CAHOOTS, an online chat system that suggests humorous images to its users to include in the conversation. We compare CAHOOTS to a regular chat system, and to a system that automatically inserts funny images using an artificial humor-bot. Users report that CAHOOTS made their conversations more enjoyable and funny, and helped them to express their personal senses of humor. Computer-Aided Humor offers an example of how systems can algorithmically augment human intelligence to create rich, creative experiences.
A framework for using context to understand images of people

When we see other humans, we can quickly make judgements regarding many aspects, including their demographic description and identity if they are familiar to us. We can answer questions related to the activities of, emotional states of, and relationships between people in an image. We draw conclusions based not just on what we see, but also from a lifetime of experience of living and interacting with other people. In this dissertation, we propose contextual features and models for understanding images of people with the objective of providing computers with access to the same contextual information that humans use. We show through a series of visual experiments that humans can exploit contextual knowledge to understand images of people. Recognizing other people becomes easier when the full body is shown instead of just the face. Social context is exploited to assign faces to corresponding first names, and age and gender recognition is improved when subjects see a face from an image in context with the other faces from the image instead of only a single face. In this dissertation, we provide contextual features and probabilistic frameworks to allow the computer to interpret images of people with contextual information. We propose features related to clothing, groups of associated people, relative positions of people, first name popularity, anthropometric measurements, and social relationships. The contextual features are learned from image data and from publicly available data from research organizations. By considering the context, we show improvement in a number of understanding tasks related to images of people. When applied to collections of multiple people, we show that context improves the identification of others in the collection. When considering single images, we show that context allows us to improve estimates of demographic descriptions of age and gender, as well as allowing us to determine the most likely owner of a first name such as "Taylor". Finally, we show that context allows us to perform high-level tasks such as segmenting rows of people and identifying the horizon in a single image of a group of people. This work shows that people act in predictable ways, for example that human patterns of association contain regular structure that can be effectively modeled and learned. From a broad perspective, this work shows that by exploiting information that is learned about people (in any field of science) we can improve our understanding of images of people.
An incremental learning strategy for search results optimization

The traditional search engines rarely consider features of the document set, so the retrieval results are not so satisfactory after new documents are added into the retrieval system. In this paper we combine the features of document set with traditional retrieval models and propose an incremental learning strategy to optimize the retrieval results. We got a feature thesaurus by extracting the document set. Then we collected some new features from the newly added documents and refreshed the feature thesaurus. Finally, the search results were reordered according to how well they matched the feature thesaurus with a query. Several parts of experiments show that this method averagely rises by 9.4% in precision, 14.9% in MAP, 4.6% in DCG towards the top 10 results than traditional retrieval means, which means that it processes better while making a query, even better while querying to the newly added documents, and faster while locating the required information.
Investigating Impact of Quorum Construction on Data Processing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), since mobility of mobile hosts causes frequent network partitioning, consistency management of data operations on replicas becomes a crucial issue. In our previous work, we have defined several consistency levels for MANET applications and designed protocols to achieve these consistency levels. These protocols are mainly based on a dynamic quorum system to cope with network partitioning and node and network failures. In this paper, we further investigate the impact of quorum construction on the system performance through simulation studies. Specifically, we change the number of mobile hosts that replicate data items and which hosts replicate each data item in the simulations and examine the impact on the system performance in terms of data availability and traffic.