Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analytical solution of the voter model on uncorrelated networks

We present a mathematical description of the voter model dynamics on uncorrelated networks. When the average degree of the graph is μ⩽2 the system reaches complete order exponentially fast. For μ>2, a finite system falls, before it fully orders, in a quasi-stationary state in which the average density of active links (links between opposite-state nodes) in surviving runs is constant and equal to , while an infinitely large system stays ad infinitum in a partially ordered stationary active state. The mean lifetime of the quasi-stationary state is proportional to the mean time to reach the fully ordered state T, which scales as , where N is the number of nodes of the network, and μ2 is the second moment of the degree distribution. We find good agreement between these analytical results and numerical simulations on random networks with various degree distributions.
Molecular analysis of the yeast VPS3 gene and the role of its product in vacuolar protein sorting and vacuolar segregation during the cell cycle

vps3 mutants of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae are impaired in the sorting of newly synthesized soluble vacuolar proteins and in the acidification of the vacuole (Rothman, J. H., and T. H. Stevens. Cell. 47:1041-1051; Rothman, J. H., C. T. Yamashiro, C. K. Raymond, P. M. Kane, and T. H. Stevens. 1989. J. Cell Biol. 109:93-100). The VPS3 gene, which was cloned using a novel selection procedure, encodes a low abundance, hydrophilic protein of 117 kD that most likely resides in the cytoplasm. Yeast strains bearing a deletion of the VPS3 gene (vps3- delta 1) are viable, yet their growth rate is significantly reduced relative to wild-type cells. Temperature shift experiments with strains carrying a temperature conditional vps3 allele demonstrate that cells rapidly lose the capacity to sort the vacuolar protein carboxypeptidase Y upon loss of VPS3 function. Vacuolar morphology was examined in wild- type and vps3-delta 1 yeast strains by fluorescence microscopy. The vacuoles in wild-type yeast cells are morphologically complex, and they appear to be actively partitioned between mother cells and buds during an early phase of bud growth. Vacuolar morphology in vps3-delta 1 mutants is significantly altered from the wild-type pattern, and the vacuolar segregation process seen in wild-type strains is defective in these mutants. With the exception of a vacuolar acidification defect, the phenotypes of vps3-delta 1 strains are significantly different from those of mutants lacking the vacuolar proton-translocating ATPase. These data demonstrate that the acidification defect in vps3-delta 1 cells is not the primary cause of the pleiotropic defects in vacuolar function observed in these mutants.
Morphological Analysis of Ill-Formed Arabic Verbs in Intelligent Language Tutoring Framework

Arabic is a language of rich and complex morphology. The nature and peculiarity of Arabic make its morphological and phonological rules confusing for second language learners (SLLs). The conjugation of Arabic verbs is central to the formulation of an Arabic sentence because of its richness of form and meaning. In this paper, we address issues related to the morphological analysis of ill formed Arabic verbs in order to identify the source of errors and provide an in formative feedback to SLLs of Arabic. The edit distance and constraint relaxation techniques are used to demonstrate the capability of the proposed approach in generating all possible analyses of erroneous Arabic verbs written by SLLs. Filtering mechanisms are applied to exclude the irrelevant constructions and determine the target stem. A morphological analyzer has been developed and effectively evaluated using real test data. It achieved satisfactory results in terms of the recall rate.
Avoiding Weight Gain in Cardiometabolic Disease: A Systematic Review

Patients with cardiometabolic disease are at higher risk for obesity-related adverse effects. Even without weight loss, weight maintenance may be beneficial. We performed a systematic review to identify the effect of nonweight loss-focused lifestyle interventions in adults with cardiometabolic disease. We searched MEDLINE, Embase, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials to identify comparative studies of lifestyle interventions (self-management, diet, exercise, or their combination) without a weight loss focus in adults with or at risk for diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Weight, BMI, and waist circumference at ≥12 months were the primary outcomes. Of 24,870 citations, we included 12 trials (self-management, n = 2; diet, n = 2; exercise, n = 2; combination, n = 6) studying 4,206 participants. Self-management plus physical activity ± diet versus minimal/no intervention avoided meaningful weight (−0.65 to −1.3 kg) and BMI (−0.4 to −0.7 kg/m2) increases. Self-management and/or physical activity prevented meaningful waist circumference increases versus control (−2 to −4 cm). In patients with cardiometabolic disease, self-management plus exercise may prevent weight and BMI increases and self-management and/or exercise may prevent waist circumference increases versus minimal/no intervention. Future studies should confirm these findings and evaluate additional risk factors and clinical outcomes.
Preparing a corpus of dutch spontaneous dialogues for automatic phonetic analysis

This paper presents the steps needed to make a corpus of Dutch spontaneous dialogues accessible for automatic phonetic research aimed at increasing our understanding of reduction phenomena and the role of fine phonetic detail. Since the corpus was not created with automatic processing in mind, it needed to be reshaped. The first part of this paper describes the actions needed for this reshaping in some detail. The second part reports the results of a preliminary analysis of the reduction phenomena in the corpus. For this purpose a phonemic transcription of the corpus was created by means of a forced alignment, first with a lexicon of canonical pronunciations and then with multiple pronunciation variants per word. In this study pronunciation variants were generated by applying a large set of phonetic processes that have been implicated in reduction to the canonical pronunciations of the words. This relatively straightforward procedure allows us to produce plausible pronunciation variants and to verify and extend the results of previous reduction studies reported in the literature.
Extrinsic information transfer analysis of finite field spreading

Finite field spreading scheme is proposed for a synchronous multiple-access channel with Gaussian noise and equal-power users. For each user, s information bits are spread jointly into a length-sL vector by L multiplications on GF(2s). Thus, each information bit is dispersed into sL transmitted symbols, and the finite field despreading (FF-DES) of each bit can take advantage of sL independent receiving observations. To show the performance gain of joint spreading during iterative decoding, an extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) function analysis of the FF-DES is given. It shows that the asymptotic slope of this EXIT function increases as s increases. Simulations show that a larger absolute slope of the bit error rate (BER) curve is achieved by joint spreading during the iterative decoding. For s ≥ 2, the BER curve of the finite field spreading has a larger absolute slope than that of the single-user transmission with BPSK modulation.
Automatic labeling of prosody in Swedish using duration features

There is a constant need for larger prosodically labeled speech databases. Such databases are important to reach a better understanding of prosodic phenomena, and essential for various applications of prosody in the area of speech technology. In this work, efforts to develop procedures for automatic labeling of prosody in Swedish are presented. The main focus is an exploration of the usefulness of duration cues for the signaling of prosodic prominences and phrase breaks in Swedish. A speech material consisting of about 3 hours and 40 minutes of read speech produced by one female and one male was used as training data. The material was manually labeled for prominences and boundaries. Three levels of prominence, and three levels of prosodic phrase breaks were distinguished in these annotations. A number of duration features were extracted; including the means of the z-score normalized segment durations across the word, across the stressed and word-final syllables, and the difference between the word-final syllable onsets and rhymes. A decision tree algorithm (CART) was used to classify the prosodic features into the different prominence and prosodic phrase break levels. The results show that duration cues are indeed important for distinguishing the different levels of prominence as well as of prosodic phrase breaks. The classification of prominence reached a mean recall of 69% and a mean precision of 64% for speaker independent recognition with equal weights given to the three labels. When the hand labeled phrase breaks were used as additional cues to prominence the recall and precision increased to 76% and 78%, respectively. The mean recall and precision for the three phrase break labels reached 50% and 63%, respectively, and when information about prominence label was included the recall and precision increased to 59% and 66%, respectively. However, the results indicate that it would probably be advantageous to try to include additional features, and especially for the automatic labeling of prosodic phrase breaks. In order to improve the results of the automatic labeling of prominence in Swedish, one would probably need to incorporate other kinds of phonetic information, such as F 0 features, and perhaps also other linguistic information, for example part-of-speech tags.
Network Fidelity: A Metric to Quantify the Similarity and Realism of Complex Networks

The analysis of complex networks revolves around the common fundamental properties found in most natural and synthetic networks that surround us. Each such network is commonly described through a standard set of graph metrics, yet there is no unified and efficient method of quantitatively compare networks to each other. This paper introduces the network fidelity metric delta (δ) which is aimed at offering the possibility to compare networks to each other based on individual metric measurements. Depending on the nature of the comparison, it can offer insight on network model similarity or synthetic model realism compared to a real world network. We apply the metric in a social network modeling scenario and also compare it to another metric - the fractal dimension - highlighting the superior analytic power of our metric.
Pioneer communities: collective actors in deep mediatisation

The aim of this article is to draw attention to the phenomenon of media-related pioneer communities. The maker, quantified-self and open data movements have made clear how much an analysis of such pioneer communities can contribute to our understanding of changes in media and communication, together with related social and cultural changes. Pioneer communities do not only possess a marked sense of mission; they also develop ideas of media-related change that can provide orientation for broader social discourses. Studying pioneer communities as intermediaries between the development and the appropriation of new media technologies permits us to grasp current mediatisation processes from the actor’s point of view without the need to first ascribe to them any unifying media logic. Pioneer communities are significant collective actors in the process of ‘deep mediatisation’ – the far-reaching entanglement of media technologies with the everyday practices of our social world.
Estimation of Absorbing Boundary Parameters for Near Surface Seismic Modeling

Artificial boundaries are necessary in seismic numerical modeling to constrain the computational limits. Special treatment is necessary to reduce spurious reflections from these artificial boundaries. For near-surface seismic modeling, boundary processing is particularly important due to the presence of surface waves. The Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) method is an efficient way of attenuating boundary reflections of body waves and surface waves. This approach is widely used by modern seismic modeling programs. PML attenuation parameters are critical to the effectiveness of boundary absorbing. However, choosing the appropriate values for these parameters remains a challenge. In many cases, they are determined by experience or trial and error calculation. For a specific implementation of the PML absorbing method, the attenuation effectiveness varies with different sets of PML parameters. Through analysis on PML attenuation processes and numerical testing, we established an empirical relationship between the PML parameters and attenuation effectiveness, thereby providing a practical approach for determining the proper PML parameters for near-surface seismic modeling.
Halbwachs’ studies in collective memory: A founding text for contemporary ‘memory studies’?

In the past few years, an increasing number of scholars have begun working to develop an integrated field introduced as a new discipline. From now on, these ‘memory studies’ have their own scientific journals, academic departments and international conferences. Now the scholars involved in this institutionalization situate themselves in an intellectual genealogy headed by the French sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs. Going back to Halbwachs’s original writing, this article argues that this genealogy rests upon a misreading. For the author of Collective memory, ‘memory’ was not a specific topic of research, but rather should be studied within and with the help of the ordinary tools and methods of general sociology. This article pleads the cause of this alternate route and, in doing so, hopes to introduce the reader to Halbwachs’s original theory and to its promising developments for contemporary studies in collective memory.
Chunks in PLAN: Language Support for Programs as Packets

Chunks are a programming construct in PLAN, the Packet Language for Active Networks, comprised of a code segment and a suspended function call. In PLAN, chunks provide support for encapsulation and other packet programming techniques. This paper begins by explaining the semantics and implementation of chunks. We proceed, using several PLAN source code examples, to demonstrate the usefulness of chunks for micro-protocols, asynchronous adaptations, and as units of authentication granularity.
An efficient spectrum sensing using compressive measurements in Cognitive Radio

Cognitive Radio (CR) is an intelligent wireless communication system to solve spectral clogging problem and increasing bandwidth utilization for next generation wireless communication applications. Computationally and energy efficient spectrum sensing for detecting spectrum holes in wideband radio spectrum still remains a challenge. The cognitive nodes which are far away from primary user (PU) may not be able to detect the PU due to severe fading in channel. Here we proposed system is used to improve the efficiency of spectrum sensing in cooperative communication system based on cognitive relay using compressive measurement algorithms. Using this proposed method, the bit error rate (BER) reduces due to increase in the probability of detection. Employing more number of relay nodes reduces the sensing time, improves the quality of communication and increases throughput of system at reasonable complexity using compressive signal processing (CSP).
Discriminatively-guided Deliberative Perception for Pose Estimation of Multiple 3D Object Instances

We introduce a novel paradigm for model-based multi-object recognition and 3 DoF pose estimation from 3D sensor data that integrates exhaustive global reasoning with discriminatively-trained algorithms in a principled fashion. Typical approaches for this task are based on scene-to-model feature matching or regression by statistical learners trained on a large database of annotated scenes. These approaches are fast but sensitive to occlusions, features, and/or training data. Generative approaches, on the other hand, e.g., methods based on rendering and verification, are robust to occlusions and require no training, but are slow at test time. We conjecture that robust and efficient perception can be achieved through a combination of generative methods and discriminatively-trained approaches. To this end, we introduce the Discriminatively-guided Deliberative Perception (D2P) paradigm that has the following desirable properties: a) D2P is a single search algorithm that looks for the ‘best’ rendering of the scene that matches the input, b) can be guided by any and multiple discriminative algorithms, and c) generates a solution that is provably bounded suboptimal with respect to the chosen cost function. In addition, we introduce the notions of completeness and resolution completeness for multi-object pose estimation problems, and show that D2P is resolution complete. We conduct extensive evaluations on a benchmark dataset to study various aspects of D2P in relation to existing approaches.
A Bayesian approach for natural image denoising

This article presents a new method for estimating the latent noiseless version of an observed image corrupted by additive noise. This method stems from classical models in parametric denoising and extends them by modeling the likelihood term, estimating adaptive image priors and automatically choosing an adaptive equivalent to the typically hand-tuned regularization constant. The proposed method introduces a possible path to overcome the limitations of current parametric denoising algorithms and provides a competitive alternative to powerful non-parametric ones. The experimental results show how our method adapts better to different noise types than state-of-the-art parametric and non-parametric algorithms.
TOPOGRAPHIC INDEPENDENT COMPONENT ANALYSIS: VISUALIZING THE DEPENDENCE STRUCTURE

In ordinary independent component analysis, the components are assumed to be completely independent, and they do not necessarily have any meaningful order relationships. In practice, however, the estimated independentt components are often not at all independent. We propose that this residual dependence structure could be used to deene a topographic order for the components. In particular, a distance between two components could be deened using their higher-order correlations, and this distance could be used to create a topographic representation. Thus we obtain a linear decomposition into approximately independent components, where the dependence of two components is approximated by the proximity of the components in the topographic representation.
Emotional intelligence: A practical review of models, measures, and applications.

The concept of emotional intelligence (EQ) was introduced about 25 years ago, and over that time has evolved from a new scientific construct, to a popular fad, to a mainstay concept in leadership and team development. It is a unique concept in that it is both respected in the scientific community and understood by the general public. This article is focused on common practical questions about applying EQ in consulting psychology. First, it examines 3 of the most widely accepted models of EQ and compares and contrasts them. Next, it describes and evaluates the assessment tools used to measure each model. Finally, the article presents sample applications of EQ assessment in executive coaching and team development to demonstrate both the utility of EQ and ways to go about applying it in practice.
Effect of Salmonella enteric Serovar Typhimurium in Pregnant Mice: A Biochemical and Histopathological Study

Background Food borne infections caused by Salmonella enterica species are increasing globally and pregnancy poses a significant threat in developing countries, where sanitation facilities are inadequate. Thus, the present study was designed to delineate the effect of Salmonella infection during pregnancy. Method Pregnant, BALB/c mice were challenged orally with Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium on gestational day 10 and were monitored for bacterial load, hepatic injury, histopathological alterations vis-a-vis oxidant and antioxidant levels. Results Pregnant-Salmonella-infected mice had higher bacterial translocation in the liver, spleen as well as liver enzymes mainly aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase and alkaline phosphatase compared with Salmonella-infected mice. The levels of lipid peroxidation were significantly higher in all the organs of both pregnant-Salmonella-infected and Salmonella-infected mice compared with control mice. However, the activities of antioxidant enzymes (reduced glutathione, superoxide dismutase and catalase) were lower in the liver, spleen and placenta of pregnant, pregnant-Salmonella-infected and Salmonella-infected mice compared with control mice, but the decrease was more in pregnant-Salmonella-infected mice indicating depression of antioxidant defense system. Histopathologically, pregnant-Salmonella-infected mice had more architectural damage in the liver, spleen and placenta compared with other groups. Conclusion Pregnancy makes the host more vulnerable to typhoid fever by affecting the physiology of pivotal organs and highlighting the importance of early and prompts diagnosis so as to avoid the further materno-fetal complications.
Diverse Effects of a Seven-Year Experimental Grassland Fragmentation on Major Invertebrate Groups

Habitat fragmentation is a major driver of biodiversity loss, but observed effects vary and may depend on the group examined. Time since fragmentation may explain some differences between taxonomical groups, as some species and thus species composition respond with a delay to changes in their environment. Impacts of drivers of global change may thus be underestimated in short-term studies. In our study we experimentally fragmented nutrient-poor dry calcareous grasslands and studied the response of species richness, individual density and species composition of various groups of invertebrates (gastropods, ants, ground beetles, rove beetles, orthoptera, spiders, woodlice) in 12 small (1.5 m * 1.5 m) and 12 large (4.5 m * 4.5 m) fragments and their corresponding control plots after 7 years. We further examined responses to fragmentation in relation to body size and habitat preferences. Responses to fragmentation varied between taxonomical groups. While spider species richness and individual density were lower in fragments, the opposite was true for an orthopteran species and woodlice. Species composition and β-diversity differed between fragments and control plots for some groups. However, the interaction treatment*plot size was rarely significant. Species with high occupancy rates in undisturbed control plots responded more negatively to the fragmentation, while species with large body size were relatively more abundant in fragments in some groups. No effect of the fragmentation was found for ants, which may have the longest lag times because of long-lived colonies. However, relationships between abundance and the species’ preferences for environmental factors affected by edge effects indicate that ant diversity too may be affected in the longer-term. Our results show the importance of considering different groups in conservation management in times of widespread fragmentation of landscapes. While species richness may respond slowly, changes in abundance related to habitat preferences or morphology may allow insights into likely long-term changes.