Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Outcome of Cochlear Implantation at Different Ages from 0 to 6 Years

Objective To evaluate the outcome of cochlear implantation in young children in relation to the age at implantation. Study Design A retrospective longitudinal and cross-sectional analysis of pediatric cochlear implant patients. Patients All children with congenital deafness who underwent implantation before the age of 6 years (n = 48 for the longitudinal analysis and n = 70 for the cross-sectional analysis) Interventions All children received a multichannel cochlear implant. Main Outcome Measures Categories of Auditory Performance (CAP) score and integration into the mainstream school system. Results For all children, the CAP score increased after implantation. Implantation beyond the age of 4 years hardly ever resulted in normal CAP scores or in integration into the mainstream primary school (20 to 30% of cases). Implantation between the age of 2 and 4 years always resulted in normal CAP scores after 3 years with a 66% probability of integration into the primary school. Implantation before the age of 2 years always resulted in immediate normalization of the CAP scores, with a 90% probability of integration into the mainstream kindergarten, well before entrance into the primary school. Conclusion All children with congenital deafness who underwent implantation before the age of 6 years appeared to benefit from the implant. However, these data add evidence to the importance of early implantation (before the age of 2 years). Intervention before the age of 4 years seemed to be critical to avoid irreversible auditory performance losses, and intervention before the age of 2 years seemed to be critical to achieve optimal results.
Handling Indonesian Clitics: A Dataset Comparison for an Indonesian-English Statistical Machine Translation System

In this paper, we study the effect of incorporating morphological information on an Indonesian (id) to English (en) Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system as part of a preprocessing module. The linguistic phenomenon that is being addressed here is Indonesian cliticized words. The approach is to transform the text by separating the correct clitics from a cliticized word to simplify the word alignment. We also study the effect of applying the preprocessing on different SMT systems trained on different kinds of text, such as spoken language text. The system is built using the state-of-the-art SMT tool, MOSES. The Indonesian morphological information is provided by MorphInd. Overall the preprocessing improves the translation quality, especially for the Indonesian spoken language text, where it gains 1.78 BLEU score points of increase.
''Can I Drop It This Time?'' Gender and Collaborative Group Dynamics in an Engineering Design-Based Afterschool Program.

The 21st century has brought an increasing demand for expertise in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Although strides have been made towards increasing gender diversity in several of these disciplines, engineering remains primarily male dominated. In response, the U.S. educational system has attempted to make engineering curriculum more engaging, informative, and welcoming to girls. Specifically, project-based and design-based learning pedagogies promise to make engineering interesting and accessible for girls while enculturating them into the world of engineering and scientific inquiry. Outcomes for girls learning in these contexts have been mixed. The purpose of this study was to explore how cultural gender norms are navigated within informal K-12 engineering contexts. We analyzed video of singleand mixed-gender collaborative groups participating in Studio STEM, a design-based, environmentally themed afterschool program that took place in a rural community. Discourse analysis was used to interpret interactional styles within and across groups. Discrepancies were found regarding functional and cultural characteristics of groups based on gender composition. Single-gender groups adhered more closely to social gender norms. For example, the boys group was characterized by overt hierarchies, whereas the girls group outwardly displayed solidarity and collaboration. In contrast, characteristics of interactional styles within mixed gender groups strayed from social gender norms, and stylistic differences across group types were greater for girls than for boys. Learning outcomes indicated that girls learned more in mixed-gender groups. Our results support the use of mixed-gender collaborative learning groups in engineering education yet uncover several challenges. We close with a discussion of implications for practitioners.
Perceptron Learning of Modified Quadratic Discriminant Function

Modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) is the state-of-the-art classifier in handwritten character recognition. Discriminative learning of MQDF can further improve its performance. Recent advances justify the efficacy of minimum classification error criteria in learning MQDF (MCE-MQDF). We provide an alternative choice to MCE-MQDF based on the Perceptron learning (PL-MQDF). For better generalization performance, we propose a new dynamic margin regularization. To relieve the heavy burden in training process, active set technique is employed, which can save most of the computation with negligible loss in accuracy. In experiments on handwritten digit datasets and a large-scale Chinese handwritten character database, the proposed PL-MQDF was demonstrated superior in both error reduction and training speedup.
Unraveling the Function of Glycosyltransferases in Streptococcus thermophilus Sfi6

ABSTRACT Streptococcus thermophilus Sfi6 produces a texturizing exopolysaccharide (EPS) consisting of a →3)[α-d-Galp-(1→6)]-β-d-Glcp-(1→3)-α-d-GalpNAc-(1→3)-β-d-Galp-(1→ repeating unit. We previously identified and analyzed a 14.5-kb gene cluster fromS. thermophilus Sfi6 consisting of 13 genes responsible for its EPS production. Within this gene cluster, we found a central region of genes (epsE, epsF, epsG, andepsI) that showed similarity to glycosyltransferases. In this study, we investigated the sugar specificity of these enzymes. EpsE catalyzes the first step in the biosynthesis of the EPS repeating unit. It exhibits phosphogalactosyltransferase activity and transfers galactose onto the lipophilic carrier. The second step is fulfilled by EpsG, which transfers an α-N-acetylgalactosamine onto the first β-galactoside. The activity of EpsF was determined by characterizing the EPS produced by an S. thermophilus epsFdeletion mutant. This EPS consisted of the monosaccharides Gal, Glc, and GalNAc in an approximately equimolar ratio, thus suggesting thatepsF codes for the branching galactosyltransferase.epsI probably codes for the β-1,3-glucosyltransferase, since it is the only glycosyltransferase to which no gene has been assigned and it exhibits similarity to other β-glycosyltransferases. EpsE shows the conserved features of phosphoglycosyltransferases, whereas EpsF and EpsG exhibit the primary structure of α-glycosyltransferases, belonging to glycosyltransferase family 4, whose members are conserved in all major phylogenetic lineages, including the Archaea and Eukaryota.
Video-rate Recognition and Localization for Wearable Cameras

Using simultaneous localization and mapping to determine the 3D surroundings and pose of a wearable or hand-held camera provides the geometrical foundation for several capabilities of value to an autonomous wearable vision system. The one explored here is the ability to incorporate recognized objects into t he map of the surroundings and refer to them. Established methods for feature cluster r ecognition are used to identify and localize known planar objects, and their geometry is incorporated into the map of the surrounds using a minimalist representation. Continued measurement of these mapped objects improves both the accuracy of estimated maps and the robustness of the tracking system. In the context of wearable (or hand-held) vision, the system’s ability to enhance generated maps with known objec ts increases the map’s value to human operators, and also enables meaningful automatic annotation of the user’s surroundings.
Eurographics Symposium on Point-based Graphics (2005) High-quality Surface Splatting on Today's Gpus

Because of their conceptual simplicity and superior flexibility, point-based geometries evolved into a valuable alternative to surface representations based on polygonal meshes. Elliptical surface splats were shown to allow for high-quality anti-aliased rendering by sophisticated EWA filtering. Since the publication of the original software-based EWA splatting, several authors tried to map this technique to the GPU in order to exploit hardware acceleration. Due to the lacking support for splat primitives, these methods always have to find a trade-off between rendering quality and rendering performance. In this paper, we discuss the capabilities of today's GPUs for hardware-accelerated surface splatting. We present an approach that achieves a quality comparable to the original EWA splatting at a rate of more than 20M elliptical splats per second. In contrast to previous GPU renderers, our method provides per-pixel Phong shading even for dynamically changing geometries and high-quality anti-aliasing by employing a screen-space pre-filter in addition to the object-space reconstruction filter. The use of deferred shading techniques effectively avoids unnecessary shader computations and additionally provides a clear separation between the rasterization and the shading of elliptical splats, which considerably simplifies the development of custom shaders. We demonstrate quality, efficiency, and flexibility of our approach by showing several shaders on a range of models.
High Speed radix256 algorithm using parallel prefix adder

A finite impulse response (FIR) filter computes its output using multiply and accumulate operations. In the present work, a FIR filter based on novel higher radix-256 and RB arithmetic is implemented. The use of radix-256 booth encoding reduces the number of partial product rows in any multiplication by 8 fold. In the present work inputs and coefficients are considered of 16-bit. Hence, only two partial product rows are obtained in RB form for each input and coefficient multiplications. These two partial product rows are added using carry free RB addition. Finally the RB output is converted back to natural binary (NB) form using RB to NB converter. The performance of proposed multiplier architecture for FIR filter is compared with computation sharing multiplier (CSHM)
Population Dynamics of Antibiotic Treatment: a Mathematical Model and Hypotheses for Time-Kill and Continuous-Culture Experiments

ABSTRACT The objectives of the study were to develop a quantitative framework for generating hypotheses for and interpreting the results of time-kill and continuous-culture experiments designed to evaluate the efficacy of antibiotics and to relate the results of these experiments to MIC data. A mathematical model combining the pharmacodynamics (PD) of antibiotics with the population dynamics of bacteria exposed to these drugs in batch and continuous cultures was developed, and its properties were analyzed numerically (using computer simulations). These models incorporate details of (i) the functional form of the relationship between the concentrations of the antibiotics and rates of kill, (ii) the density of the target population of bacteria, (iii) the growth rate of the bacteria, (iv) byproduct resources generated from dead bacteria, (v) antibiotic-refractory subpopulations, persistence, and wall growth (biofilms), and (vi) density-independent and -dependent decay in antibiotic concentrations. Each of the factors noted above can profoundly affect the efficacy of antibiotics. Consequently, if the traditional (CLSI) MICs represent the sole pharmacodynamic parameter, PK/PD indices can fail to predict the efficacy of antibiotic treatment protocols. More comprehensive pharmacodynamic data obtained with time-kill and continuous-culture experiments would improve the predictive value of these indices. The mathematical model developed here can facilitate the design and interpretation of these experiments. The validity of the assumptions behind the construction of these models and the predictions (hypotheses) generated from the analysis of their properties can be tested experimentally. These hypotheses are presented, suggestions are made about how they can be tested, and the existing statuses of these tests are briefly discussed.
Teachers’ professional selves and motivation for continuous professional learning amid education reforms

ABSTRACT Promoting in-service teachers’ continuous professional learning is indispensable to educational reforms that demand knowledge acquisition and practice innovation. Addressing this issue, this mixed-method study examined the relationship between teachers’ professional selves and continuous professional learning. Two hundred and nighty-one practicing teachers completed a questionnaire that assessed their current and future professional selves, learning motives, strategy use, self-efficacy, control beliefs, learning interests and intentions. Cluster analyses found that strongly-committed teachers who held strong professional selves had the most engaged patterns of learning followed by teachers who had moderate and weak levels of professional selves. Study two was a follow-up interview study with eight selected teachers who held contrasting professional selves. Strongly-committed teachers discussed their hoped-for selves while weakly-committed teachers expressed concerns about heavy workload and the selves that they feared. These two groups of interviewees differed in the strategies they employed to complete course assignments.
Cyclosporine Inhibits a Direct Interaction between Cyclophilins and Hepatitis C NS5A

Background Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) infection is a leading indication for liver transplantation. HCV infection reoccurs almost universally post transplant, decreasing both graft longevity and patient survival. The immunosuppressant, cyclosporine A (CsA) has potent anti-HCV activity towards both HCV replicons and the genotype 2a cell culture infectious virus. Previously, we isolated mutations in the 1bN replicon with less sensitivity to CsA that mapped to both NS5A and NS5B regions of the virus. Mutations in NS5A alone conferred decreased CsA susceptibility regardless of NS5B mutations. Methodology/Principal Findings We examined the mechanisms by which NS5A mutations contribute to CsA resistance and if they are strain dependent. Using in vitro mutagenesis, the amino acid position 321 mutation of NS5A was restored to the wild-type tyrosine residue conferring partial CsA susceptibility on the mutant replicon. The 321 mutation also alters CsA susceptibility of the JFH cell culture virus. Additionally, we demonstrated a novel CsA-sensitive interaction between NS5A and both cyclophilin A and B. Both the mutant NS5A and wild type NS5A bind cyclophilin in vitro. The NS5A: cyclophilin interaction requires both the NS5A region identified by the resistance mutants and cyclophilin catalytic residues. In cell culture, NS5A from CsA resistant mutant has an enhanced interaction with cyclophilin B. Additionally; NS5B facilitates a stronger binding of mutant NS5A to endogenous cyclophilin B than wild-type in cell culture. Conclusions/Significance Collectively, this data suggests direct interactions between cyclophilins and NS5A are critical to understand for optimal use of cyclophilin inhibitors in anti-HCV therapy.
Exploring the “Blesser and Blessee” Phenomenon: Young Women, Transactional Sex, and HIV in Rural South Africa

The “blesser and blessee” phenomenon has been prominent in South African media since the year 2016. This is a form of transactional sex in which older rich men (“blessers”) tend to entice young women (“blessees”) with money and expensive gifts in exchange for sexual favors. In most cases, these older men are married men who secretly engage in extramarital affairs with these young women. In this light, there have been many debates on whether transactional sex should be equated to prostitution or sex work. However, many researchers argue that both practices at the end of the day are proven to be equally high-risk sexual behaviors for HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa. In this regard, the purpose of this study was to explore and describe perceptions and experiences of young women regarding factors that influence their susceptibility to transactional sex and the risk of HIV infection in rural South Africa. Twelve young women aged 18 to 30 years participated in two focus group discussions and 12 individual in-depth interviews. The findings of the study revealed that there are sociobehavioral, sociocultural, and socioeconomic factors that influence the susceptibility of young women to transactional sex and HIV risk. The study concluded that it was imperative for researchers to explore the context and motivation for transactional sex among young women in sub-Saharan Africa to be able to develop and implement appropriate and relevant HIV prevention interventions for this vulnerable population.
East Asian Monsoon controls on the inter-annual variability in precipitation isotope ratio in Japan

Abstract. To elucidate the mechanism for how the East Asian Monsoon (EAM) variability have influenced the isotope proxy records in Japan, we explore the primary driver of variations of precipitation isotopes at multiple temporal scales (event, seasonal and inter-annual scales). Using a new 1-year record of the isotopic composition of event-based precipitation and continuous near-surface water vapor at Nagoya in central Japan, we identify the key atmospheric processes controlling the storm-to-storm isotopic variations through an analysis of air mass sources and rainout history during the transport of moisture to the site, and then apply the identified processes to explain the inter-annual isotopic variability related to the EAM variability in the historical 17-year long Tokyo station record in the Global Network of Isotopes in Precipitation (GNIP). In the summer, southerly flows transport moisture with higher isotopic values from subtropical marine regions and bring warm rainfall enriched with heavy isotopes. The weak monsoon summer corresponds to enriched isotopic values in precipitation, reflecting higher contribution of warm rainfall to the total summer precipitation. In the strong monsoon summer, the sustaining Baiu rainband along the southern coast of Japan prevents moisture transport across Japan, so that the contribution of warm rainfall is reduced. In the winter, storm tracks are the dominant driver of storm-to-storm isotopic variation and relatively low isotopic values occur when a cold frontal rainband associated with extratropical cyclones passes off to the south of the Japan coast. The weak monsoon winter is characterized by lower isotopes in precipitation, due to the distribution of the cyclone tracks away from the southern coast of Japan. In contrast, the northward shift of the cyclone tracks and stronger development of cyclones during the strong monsoon winters decrease the contribution of cold frontal precipitation, resulting in higher isotopic values in winter precipitation. Therefore, year-to-year isotopic variability in summer and winter Japanese precipitation correlates significantly with changes in the East Asian summer and winter monsoon intensity (R=-0.47 for summer, R=0.42 for winter), and thus we conclude that the isotope proxy records in Japan should reflect past changes in the East Asian Monsoon. Since our study identifies the climate drivers controlling isotopic variations in summer and winter precipitation, we highlight the retrieval of a record with seasonal resolution from paleoarchives as an important priority.
Mental practice in music memorization - an ecological-empirical study

The present study aims to systematically describe mental practice (MP) in music memorization, with regard to individual differences in the use of different MP strategies and their performance outcomes. Sixteen pianists were studied while they memorized piano pieces. Each subject memorized two pieces, either via MP or physical practice (PP). In order to keep the setting as ecologically valid as possible within the experimental setup, we allowed subjects to freely apply their preferred MP strategies with the exception of physically playing a real piano. Practice and performances were video documented and expert rated; practice strategies were reported in researcher-developed questionnaires. The use of MP alone led to successful music learning. MP combined with PP produced results that were indistinguishable from those following PP alone. Pitch imagery and structural analysis were associated with better post-MP performance. Results are discussed in the frame of expert memory theory (Chase & Simon, 1973; Chaffin, Logan, & Begosh, 2009) and practical implications for musicians are provided.
Dehumanization in Workplace : Counselling Approach to Gender-Based Violence

This paper looks at dehumanization in workplace and the implication of counselling approach to gender based violence. Dehumanizing attitudes and behaviours frequently occur in workplace, this often led to devastating psychological, health, and economic consequences on employees and the organization. One of the benefits of workplace counselling is having a professional and an impartial person who is mindful of the context in which the employees work and have a crucial understanding of the environment to which the employees will be returning. Major activities of a counsellor are listening, supporting, empathizing, exploring client potentials, and empowering client to self-help. The paper concludes that negative interaction in the workplace will negatively impact on employees’ productivity, whereas with availability of counselling services, employees’ moral and potentiality will be fully utilized which will improve the organizational performance. To enhance trust in counselling service in workplace, counsellors need to diligently observe the code of ethics.
An approach to summarizing Bengali news documents

This paper describes a system that produces extractive summaries of Bengali news documents. The ultimate objective of produced summaries is defined as helping readers to determine whether they would be interested in reading a particular document. To this end, the summary aims to provide a reader with an idea about the theme of a document without revealing the in-depth detail. The approach presented here has four major steps (1) preprocessing (2) extraction of candidate summary sentences (3) ranking the candidate summary sentences (4) summary generation. The proposed approach defines TF*IDF, position and sentence length feature in more effective way that helps in improving the summarization performance. The experimental results show that the proposed text summarization approach outperforms the lead baseline and a more sophisticated baseline that uses TF*IDF and position features both.
A Steklov-Poincaré approach to solve the inverse problem in electrocardiography

In the cardiac electrophysiology imaging community the most widely used approach to solve the inverse problem is the least square formulation with different Thikhonov regularizations. Clinicians are not yet fully satisfied by the technology that solves the inverse problem. Reformulating the inverse problem could bring new techniques to solve it. In this paper we use the Steklov-Poincaré formulation of the Cauchy problem in order to solve the inverse problem in electrocardiography imaging. We present in this work the technique and an algorithm of gradient descent. We also show numerical results based on simulated synthetical data.