Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Robust speech dereverberation based on non-negativity and sparse nature of speech spectrograms

This paper presents a blind dereverberation method designed to recover the subband envelope of an original speech signal from its reverberant version. The problem is formulated as a blind deconvolution problem with non-negative constraints, regularized by the sparse nature of speech spectrograms. We derive an iterative algorithm for its optimization, which can be seen as a special case of the non-negative matrix factor deconvolution. We confirmed through experiments that the algorithm is fast and robust to speaker movement.
Combined Fountain Code with Network Coding for Error-Tolerant Transmission Network

Network coding can achieve the maximum possible rate defined by the max-flow min-cut theorem through encoding of the input streams at the correlative nodes under the ideal channel condition. When error happens, encoding will bring in error propagation. By introducing redundancies in space domain, network error correction is proposed, however, with the high encoding and decoding complexity. Specifically, fountain code is a rateless code, since the rate varies according to the instant channel state information contrast to the typical fixed-rate code. Based on the fountain code, the error-tolerant network coding scheme is proposed by means of integrating fountain code with network coding at the correlative nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can obtain the lower block error rate (BLER) in butterfly and wireless network, compared with detect and forward scheme. Furthermore, it also reduces the energy consumption at the same time.
Fault location in underground systems through optimum-path forest

In this paper we propose an accurate method for fault location in underground distribution systems by means of an Optimum-Path Forest (OPF) classifier. We applied the Time Domains Reflectometry method for signal acquisition, which was further analyzed by OPF and several other well known pattern recognition techniques. The results indicated that OPF and Support Vector Machines outperformed Artificial Neural Networks classifier. However, OPF has been much more efficient than all classifiers for training, and the second one faster for classification.
Understanding Parental Self-efficacy in Fathers

i Acknowledgements iii Dedication iv Table of contents v List of Tables ix List of Figures x List of Appendices xi 1.0 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Self-Efficacy and PSE 2 1.2 The importance of PSE 4 1.3 Measurement of PSE 7 1.3. 1 Domain-general PSE investigations 9 1.3. 2 Task-specific PSE investigations 10 1.3. 3 Domain-specific measurement of PSE 11 1.4. PSE Measurement Limitations 14 1.5 Father’s and Mother’s PSE 18 1.6 Conceptual Concerns of Generalizing From Mothers to Fathers 21 1.6. 1 The gendered nature of fathering 23 1.7 The evolving role of the father 25 1.7. 1 The nurturing father 28 1.8 Understanding the Current Roles of Fathers and the Links to PSE 31 1.9 Scale Development 35 1.9. 1 Substantive validity phase 36
The role of soil microbes in the global carbon cycle: tracking the below-ground microbial processing of plant-derived carbon for manipulating carbon dynamics in agricultural systems

It is well known that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) (and other greenhouse gases) have increased markedly as a result of human activity since the industrial revolution. It is perhaps less appreciated that natural and managed soils are an important source and sink for atmospheric CO2 and that, primarily as a result of the activities of soil microorganisms, there is a soil-derived respiratory flux of CO2 to the atmosphere that overshadows by tenfold the annual CO2 flux from fossil fuel emissions. Therefore small changes in the soil carbon cycle could have large impacts on atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Here we discuss the role of soil microbes in the global carbon cycle and review the main methods that have been used to identify the microorganisms responsible for the processing of plant photosynthetic carbon inputs to soil. We discuss whether application of these techniques can provide the information required to underpin the management of agro-ecosystems for carbon sequestration and increased agricultural sustainability. We conclude that, although crucial in enabling the identification of plant-derived carbon-utilising microbes, current technologies lack the high-throughput ability to quantitatively apportion carbon use by phylogentic groups and its use efficiency and destination within the microbial metabolome. It is this information that is required to inform rational manipulation of the plant–soil system to favour organisms or physiologies most important for promoting soil carbon storage in agricultural soil.
Classifying bug severity using dictionary based approach

Bug tracking system allows user to report bugs that they encounter while operating the software. These bugs are then received by developers and they resolve these bugs according to their severity level. This task of assigning severity level is manual task that need expertise of assessing the severity level of reported bug. But if these reported bugs are large in number then manual process to assess severity level of bugs becomes very hectic. So there should be an automatic process to classify it so that bugs that need immediate fixation get resolved early. A few attempts have been made by researchers to automate the task. The approach followed in this paper has made an attempt to automate the bug severity classification using text mining technique and Naïve Bayes Multinomial classifier. This paper further proposes an approach of making this task more efficient using dictionary of bug terms.
tRNA evolution from the proto-tRNA minihelix world

ABSTRACT Multiple models have been advanced for the evolution of cloverleaf tRNA. Here, the conserved archaeal tRNA core (75-nt) is posited to have evolved from ligation of three proto-tRNA minihelices (31-nt) and two-symmetrical 9-nt deletions within joined acceptor stems (93 – 18 = 75-nt). The primary evidence for this conclusion is that the 5-nt stem 7-nt anticodon loop and the 5-nt stem 7-nt T loop are structurally homologous and related by coding sequence. We posit that the D loop was generated from a third minihelix (31-nt) in which the stem and loop became rearranged after 9-nt acceptor stem deletions and cloverleaf folding. The most 3´-5-nt segment of the D loop and the 5-nt V loop are apparent remnants of the joined acceptor stems (14 – 9 = 5-nt). Before refolding in the tRNA cloverleaf, we posit that the 3′-5-nt segment of the D loop and the 5-nt V loop were paired, and, in the tRNA cloverleaf, frequent pairing of positions 29 (D loop) and 47 (V loop) remains (numbered on a 75-nt tRNA cloverleaf core). Amazingly, after >3.5 billion years of evolutionary pressure on the tRNA cloverleaf structure, a model can be constructed that convincingly describes the genesis of 75/75-nt conserved archaeal tRNA core positions. Judging from the tRNA structure, cloverleaf tRNA appears to represent at least a second-generation scheme (and possibly a third-generation scheme) that replaced a robust 31-nt minihelix protein-coding system, evidence for which is preserved in the cloverleaf structure. Understanding tRNA evolution provides insights into ribosome and rRNA evolution.
Stroke Disparities in Older Americans: Is Wealth a More Powerful Indicator of Risk Than Income and Education?

Background and Purpose— This study examines the independent effect of wealth, income, and education on stroke and how these disparities evolve throughout middle and old age in a representative cohort of older Americans. Methods— Stroke-free participants in the Health and Retirement Study (n=19 565) were followed for an average of 8.5 years. Total wealth, income, and education assessed at baseline were used in Cox proportional hazards models to predict time to stroke. Separate models were estimated for 3 age-strata (50 to 64, 65 to 74, and ≥75), and incorporating risk factor measures (smoking, physical activity, body mass index, hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease). Results— 1542 subjects developed incident stroke. Higher education predicted reduced stroke risk at ages 50 to 64, but not after adjustment for wealth and income. Wealth and income were independent risk factors for stroke at ages 50 to 64. Adjusted hazard ratios comparing the lowest decile with the 75th-90th percentiles were 2.3 (95% CI 1.6, 3.4) for wealth and 1.8 (95% CI 1.3, 2.6) for income. Risk factor adjustment attenuated these effects by 30% to 50%, but coefficients for both wealth (HR=1.7, 95% CI 1.2, 2.5) and income (HR=1.6, 95% CI 1.2, 2.3) remained significant. Wealth, income, and education did not consistently predict stroke beyond age 65. Conclusions— Wealth and income are independent predictors of stroke at ages 50 to 64 but do not predict stroke among the elderly. This age patterning might reflect buffering of the negative effect of low socioeconomic status by improved access to social and health care programs at old ages, but may also be an artifact of selective survival.
Transport control protocol in optical burst switched networks: issues, solutions, and challenges

Since its advent in 1981, TCP has been subject to a tremendous amount of research effort and enhancements for achieving better performance over various network environments and application scenarios. Due to the transmission characteristics of optical burst switched networks, such as random burst dropping, retro-blocking (i.e., bursts proceeding or delayed from their actual reservation time slot), burstification delay, and burst signaling delay, TCP could be significantly affected if no corresponding countermeasure and enhancement are developed. In this review article we provide a comprehensive survey on reported studies for TCP enhancements over OBS networks in order to mitigate the numerous side effects due to the buffer- less characteristic of burst transmission. Furthermore, we closely analyze TCP behavior over OBS networks with various burst transmission characteristics while highlighting the open challenges that have not yet been extensively tackled or solved.
Lifting 3D Manhattan Lines from a Single Image

We propose a novel and an efficient method for reconstructing the 3D arrangement of lines extracted from a single image, using vanishing points, orthogonal structure, and an optimization procedure that considers all plausible connectivity constraints between lines. Line detection identifies a large number of salient lines that intersect or nearly intersect in an image, but relatively a few of these apparent junctions correspond to real intersections in the 3D scene. We use linear programming (LP) to identify a minimal set of least-violated connectivity constraints that are sufficient to unambiguously reconstruct the 3D lines. In contrast to prior solutions that primarily focused on well-behaved synthetic line drawings with severely restricting assumptions, we develop an algorithm that can work on real images. The algorithm produces line reconstruction by identifying 95% correct connectivity constraints in York Urban database, with a total computation time of 1 second per image.
Ordering Depth First Search to Improve AFD Mining

This paper describes a new search algorithm, bottom-up attribute keyness depth-first search (BU-AKD), for mining powerset lattices with the use of a monotonic approximation measure; characteristics present in many problem domains. The research reported here focuses on one of these problem domains, the discovery of Approximate Functional Dependencies (AFDs). AFDs are measured versions of functional dependencies, which have received attention from the relational database and machine learning communities. Bottomup depth-first search, BU-DFS, algorithms in general can improve efficiency over the traditional bottom-up breadth first search algorithm by doing a better job of avoiding the calculation of the approximation measure based on information learned as the search space is explored. The goal of BU-AKD is to resolve one important drawback of BU-DFS algorithms which makes their use in practice problematic their inconsistent runtime performance as search parameters vary. The approach that BU-AKD takes is to use a heuristic to guide the exploration of a lattice which adapts to the search parameters, thus, providing consistent performance comparable to best-performing BU-DFS algorithms. This paper reports a variety of experiments which evaluate BUAKD and other algorithms using an algorithmic, machineindependent cost measure, as well as traditional runtime tests. Experimental results show that BU-AKD performs consistently well and validates a number of insights used in its design.
DESIGN AND MODELING OF MB-OFDM UWB WITH DIGITAL DOWN CONVERTER AND DIGITAL UP CONVERTER FOR POWER LINE COMMUNICATION IN THE FREQUENCY BAND OF 50 MHZ TO 578 MHZ

Over the last few years Power Line Communication has gained importance for high speed data communication. One of the major concerns in PLC is noise and high data rate, several schemes have been adopted to minimize noise over PLCs and improve data rate. One of the promising approach is the use of Multi Band (MB) – Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) Ultra Wide Band (UWB) to achieve date rates over 200 Mbps. One of the approaches is to integrate MBOFDM UWB with Digital Down Converter (DDC) for power line communication. In this work, MBOFDM UWB system is integrated with DDC on the transmitter and DUC is integrated at the receiver to achieve higher data rate. The integrated system modeled using Matlab and Simulink achieves BER of10 -3 and THD of 1.2. Rate 2/3 Convolutional encoder, scrambler, bit interleave, GMSK modulator and IFFT have been used generate MBOFDM, time-frequency kernel with frequency translation achieves UWB. DDC consisting of CIC and CFIR are used to downlink the UWB signal as compatible with PLC.
Top Accuracy and Fast Dependency Parsing is not a Contradiction

In addition to a high accuracy, short parsing and training times are the most important properties of a parser. However, parsing and training times are still relatively long. To determine why, we analyzed the time usage of a dependency parser. We illustrate that the mapping of the features onto their weights in the support vector machine is the major factor in time complexity. To resolve this problem, we implemented the passive-aggressive perceptron algorithm as a Hash Kernel. The Hash Kernel substantially improves the parsing times and takes into account the features of negative examples built during the training. This has lead to a higher accuracy. We could further increase the parsing and training speed with a parallel feature extraction and a parallel parsing algorithm. We are convinced that the Hash Kernel and the parallelization can be applied successful to other NLP applications as well such as transition based dependency parsers, phrase structrue parsers, and machine translation.
Reconfigurable fully integrated inductance for high-speed transient stability emulation

This paper presents a fully integrated, recon- figurable inductance, developed for high-speed power system transient stability emulation. Known active induct- ance topologies are not suitable for this application for two main reasons. Firstly, most active inductors are used at very high frequencies, due to their RF applications, and secondly, the DC characteristics of active inductors lead to a saturation problem, as a result of offset currents that occur when connecting them in series. Based on a gyrator- C topology, an inductance was realized in a CMOS 0.35 μm technology and is detailed in this paper. We were careful to take into account imperfection, calibration, mismatching and process variation. Finally, all requirements were ful- filled to use this inductance in power system AC emulation.
Supplier selection in the construction material purchasing function

Construction materials occupy a significant part of the construction’s value contributing nearly 50%. Thus when selecting construction materials, it is very important that painstaking decisions should be made. Past literature and anecdotal evidences show that the main issue with building materials purchasing comes with supplier selection, and depend on careful examination of supplier economics among other criteria. Supplier selection is the purchasing function that forms the foundation for the success or failure of projects. Therefore supplier selection criteria should be well defined. Supplier selection is a multi-criteria decision making problem which includes both qualitative and quantitative considerations. A trade-off between tangible and intangible criteria is important in selecting the best supplier. This paper presents a review of supplier selection processes and decision making methods reported in academic and other literature related to the construction industry. The study is a part of an on-going doctoral research study on construction material purchasing decisions aimed at determining how small to medium scale (SME) construction contractors could secure ‘best prices’ for their key material inputs in New Zealand construction industry. This is a first step towards a comprehensive empirical study of securing best construction material prices.
A conformational RNA zipper promotes intron ejection during non‐conventional XBP1 mRNA splicing

The kinase/endonuclease IRE1 is the most conserved signal transducer of the unfolded protein response (UPR), an intracellular signaling network that monitors and regulates the protein folding capacity of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Upon sensing protein folding perturbations in the ER, IRE1 initiates the unconventional splicing of XBP1 mRNA culminating in the production of the transcription factor XBP1s, which expands the ER's protein folding capacity. We show that an RNA‐intrinsic conformational change causes the intron of XBP1 mRNA to be ejected and the exons to zipper up into an extended stem, juxtaposing the RNA ends for ligation. These conformational rearrangements are important for XBP1 mRNA splicing in vivo. The features that point to such active participation of XBP1 mRNA in the splicing reaction are highly conserved throughout metazoan evolution, supporting their importance in orchestrating XBP1 mRNA processing with efficiency and fidelity.
Investigating the Intelligibility of Synthetic Sign Language Visualization Methods on Mobile Phones

Sign Language (SASL), face difficulty in communicating with hearing people on a daily basis, despite the pressing need to do so. The SASL project at the University of the Western Cape is in the process of designing a Machine Translation system on mobile phones to automate the translation between SASL and English as a supplement to the use of highly skilled interpreters that are scarce and expensive. This research investigated the intelligibility of the sign language rendered by four methods of displaying SASL to be integrated into the SASL MT system on mobile phones. Three of these methods make use of 3D humanoid Avatars and the fourth method makes use of videos of SASL-speaking humans. We found that on average, a recognition rate of 65% was achieved across all methods, clearly demonstrating that synthetic sign language rendered on mobile phones can be intelligible. However, we also found that most of the recognition errors were caused by SASL dialect differences amongst test subjects. We showed that eliminating this factor increased the average accuracy to 85% across all methods.
Perceptions of active ageing in Britain: divergences between minority ethnic and whole population samples

Objective: to identify perceptions of, and associations with, active ageing among ethnically diverse and homogeneous samples of older people in Britain. Design and setting: cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys of older people living at home in Britain. Measures: active ageing, health, psych-social, socio-economic circumstances, and indicators of quality of life. Results: respondents defined active ageing as having health, fitness, and exercise; psychological factors; social roles and activities; independence, neighbourhood and enablers. The ethnically diverse sample respondents were less likely to define active ageing as having physical health and fitness, and were less likely to rate themselves as ageing actively, than more homogeneous sample respondents. The lay-based measure of quality of life used was independently and consistently associated with self-rated active ageing in each sample Conclusion: Policy models of active ageing were reflected in lay views, although the latter had a more multidimensional focus. Lay definitions of active ageing were also more dynamic, compared with definitions of quality of life and successful ageing. Differences in self-rated active ageing and perceptions of this concept by ethnic group need further exploration.
The Voluntary Adoption

IVJLy aim in this paper is to privilege the realm of the personal and the emotional subcontinent of Islamic collective identity formation and the ways in which Islamic identity occurs through verbal communication and is transcribed in bodily practices and management of public space. I use the concept of stigma to the extent that it articulates the private corporeal realm to the public domain of perception, social interaction, and communication. Of course, reflection on definitions of private and public spheres from the vantage point of an Islamic self inevitably leads to a critical reading of the hegemonic narratives of secular modernity and liberal definitions of self. Islamic stigma appears as a puzzling notion; one is more accustomed to speak of the stigmatization of persons or social groups. Indeed, one can speak more easily, for example, about the stigmatization of Muslim girl students who claim the right to wear a headscarf and who have faced exclusion from schools and universities during the last two decades because of the actions of secularist politicians in France, a country undergoing Muslim immigration, and also in Turkey, a Muslim-majority country. But one can also speak of stigmatization of secular women by compulsory veiling in a hegemonic Islamic public sphere, such as Iran since the 1979 revolution. Today the term stigma is applied more to the feelings of humiliation provoked by social exclusion and social oppression; it is applied more to the disgrace itself rather than the bodily evidence of it. This is why it is easier to speak of the ways in which Muslims are stigmatized or the ways in which
Automatic exposure in computer graphics based on the minimum information loss principle

The available contrast of common display devices is much lower than image data often demand. Usually a variant of an average of the field of view is used to normalize the image. An alternative approach is introduced to define the mapping of rendered values to the displayable intensity range. The luminance range is chosen such that a minimum amount of information is lost thereby preserving the contrast ratio of all correctly displayed parts. The loss of information can be regulated by different error functions. If the loss is too large, the luminance range can be increased, but the original contrast is not presented any more. In this case the method represents an improvement of Schlick's (1994) mapping technique. The newly introduced method can be applied on color and gray scale images, rendered in absolute or fictitious units.
Perspectives and Problems of Amerindian Comparative Linguistics

Were vocabularies formed of all the languages spoken in North and South America, preserving their appelation of the most common objects in nature, of those which must be present to every nation, barbarians or civilized, with the inflections of their names and verbs, their principles of regimen and concord, and these deposited in all the public libraries, it would furnish opportunities to those skilled in the languages of the old world to compare them with the new, now or at any future time, and hence to construct the best evidence of the derivation of this part of the human race. —Thomas Jefferson (in Notes on the State of Virginia)