Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A practical approach to topic detection based on credible association rule mining

Topic detection is to develop automatic methods to identify topically related documents within a stream of data; many approaches have been developed to classify documents with predefined knowledge. This paper presents a new approach for topic detection and tracking based on credible association rule (CAR). This paper considers topic detection without any prior knowledge of category structure or possible categories. Topic features are selected primarily based on CAR. Results on the test set show a marginal improvement by using CAR and its maximal cliques mining algorithm. The CAR maximal cliques mining algorithm is now applied on real topic detection and tracking system which gives us a lot of experience in adjusting and refining the algorithm. This algorithm also presents many useful interface extensions for other modules of the system to use.
Predicting Chinese consumers' purchase intentions for imported soy‐based dietary supplements

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to model Chinese consumers' purchase intentions for imported soy‐based dietary supplements (DS) based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the health belief model (HBM). The central hypotheses for this study are that purchase intentions of Chinese DS consumers are a result of attitudes toward using DS, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. Health value and perceived susceptibility to illness, as well as product knowledge and marketer distrust, are integrated into the model.Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from 251 consumers in Shanghai, China. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.Findings – The TPB model is effective in predicting Chinese consumers' imported soy‐based DS purchase intentions. Attitudes toward using soy‐based DS, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control have significant influences on purchase intention. Perceived behavioral control also plays an important role in the formation of atti.
Performance Comparison of Node-Redundant Multicast-Distribution Trees in SDN-Based Networks

Some of the industrial processes with hard real-time constraints, such as those commonly found in the context of smart grids, require very reliable packet delivery and multicast. Solutions such as PRP [1] and iPRP [2] have been traditionally deployed over redundant (and often dedicated) networks. In this paper, we study how to construct node-redundant multicast trees that could be used in parallel over a shared network infrastructure. Our solution can be deployed over shared public networks, e.g., mobile carrier networks, hence it has an operating cost lower than traditional deployments of PRP and iPRP. We evaluate different algorithms proposed in the literature for providing node-redundant multicast-distribution-trees. We study specifically how to adapt these algorithms in an SDN network and compare them based on the number of forwarding rules that need to be installed on SDN switches, the number of hops between source-destination pairs given the installed forwarding rules, and the number of sources that can be placed in the network given the capacity constraints. In addition, we discuss the effects of topology changes (node failures, new source arrival and new destination arrival) on the activity of the SDN control plane.
Preliminary evaluation of the use of pharmacological treatment with convicted sexual offenders experiencing high levels of sexual preoccupation, hypersexuality and/or sexual compulsivity

The current study presents the preliminary evaluation of the impact of pharmacological treatment (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and anti-androgens) on hypersexuality, sexual preoccupation and sexual compulsivity. The participant pool comprised 64 convicted UK sexual offenders who had been voluntarily referred for pharmacological treatment to reduce their hypersexual arousal, 51 of whom agreed to take the medication (with a further five individuals on hold or under assessment at the time of data extraction). The preliminary findings were very encouraging; analysis on measures assessing sexual preoccupation, hypersexuality and sexual compulsivity indicated a significant reduction between pre- and post-medication, across both types of medication. Limitations of the current research are discussed.
Genetic and Functional Analyses of the mob Operon on Conjugative Transposon CTn341 from Bacteroides spp

ABSTRACT Bacteroides are Gram-negative anaerobes indigenous to the intestinal tract of humans, and they are important opportunistic pathogens. Mobile genetic elements, such as conjugative transposons (CTns), have contributed to an increase in antibiotic resistance in these organisms. CTns are self-transmissible elements that belong to the superfamily of integrative and conjugative elements (ICEs). CTn341 is 52 kb; it encodes tetracycline resistance and its transfer is induced by tetracycline. The mobilization region of CTn341 was shown to be comprised of a three-gene operon, mobABC, and the transfer origin, oriT. The three genes code for a nicking accessory protein, a relaxase, and a VirD4-like coupling protein, respectively. The Mob proteins were predicted to mediate the formation of the relaxosome complex, nick DNA at the oriT, and shuttle the DNA/protein complex to the mating-pore apparatus. The results of mutational studies indicated that the three genes are required for maximal transfer of CTn341. Mob gene transcription was induced by tetracycline, and this regulation was mediated through the two-component regulatory system, RteAB. The oriT region of CTn341 was located within 100 bp of mobA, and a putative Bacteroides consensus nicking site was observed within this region. Mutation of the putative nick site resulted in a loss of transfer. This study demonstrated a role of the mobilization region for transfer of Bacteroides CTns and that tetracycline induction occurs for the mob gene operon, as for the tra gene operon(s), as shown previously.
Effects of informant mental disorder on psychiatric family history data.

OBJECTIVE In family history interviews, mentally ill individuals ascribe their own disorders to relatives more frequently than informants who are not ill. Whether this reflects increased or decreased reporting accuracy remains unknown. This study addressed this issue by examining the sensitivity and specificity of diagnoses based on information from different types of informants classified by their own illness status. METHOD Both members of 2,193 pairs of individuals participating in a psychiatric family study were directly interviewed. One individual in each pair (the informant) also provided family history data about the other (the subject). Informant-subject pairs were grouped according to the illness status of the informant based on the direct interview. Patterns of ascription of mental illness to subjects by groups of ill and not-ill informants were then compared with the subjects' psychiatric status based on direct interview. RESULTS For depression, alcoholism, panic disorder, and "any diagnosis," ill informants demonstrated significantly increased sensitivity in family history reports when compared to never-mentally-ill informants; specificity, by contrast, was always significantly reduced. For each disorder, the aggregate disorder rate derived from family history reports was closer to the rate derived from direct interviews if information from ill informants as a group was used. CONCLUSIONS The sensitivity and specificity of family history information appears to vary systematically with informant mental illness status. This may introduce a serious bias into psychiatric family study data, leading to overestimation of the strength of the tendency for mental disorders to "run in families. " Family studies that rely on the informant method in their diagnostic evaluations should be aware of this problem.
An Unusual Developmental Profile of Salla Disease in a Patient with the SallaFIN Mutation

Salla disease (SD) is a disorder caused by defective storage of free sialic acid and results from mutations in the SLC17A5 gene. Early developmental delay of motor functions, and later cognitive skills, is typical. We describe a developmental profile of an unusual homozygous patient, who harboured the SallaFIN (p.R39C) mutation gene. The study involved neurological examination, neuropsychological investigation, and brain imaging. The neurocognitive findings were atypical in comparison with other patients with the SallaFIN mutation. Interestingly, there was no deterioration in the patient's neurological condition during adulthood. Her neurocognitive skills were remarkably higher than those of other patients with a conventional phenotype of SD. Our results suggest that the phenotype of SD is broad. Unidentified genetic or environmental variation might explain the unique SD type of this case.
The 1996 BBN BYBLOS HUB-4 Transcription System

In this paper, we describe the BBN Byblos system used for the 1996 Hub-4 Partitioned Evaluation (PE) and Unpartitioned Evaluation (UE) tests. For the PE, we chose to ignore the segment feature labels that were given to the system as side-information so that our approach would generalize trivially to the UE. Moreover, we chose not to model speci c channel conditions in the training because the observed gains were too small to warrant the additional system complexity required to support them. In the end, we estimated a single set of acoustic models from only 40 hours of broadcast news data. For the UE, the data was automatically segmented with a simple dual-gender phoneme recognizer that e ciently located pauses and changes in speakers' gender. After this preliminary stage of segmentation and gender-classi cation, our UE and PE systems were identical. We achieved a 30.2% word error rate on the PE test and 31.8% on the UE test only a 5% relative degradation from our PE result.
A novel method for 2D-to-3D video conversion using bi-directional motion estimation

In this paper, we proposed a novel semi-automatic 2D-to-3D video conversion method. Our method requires just a few user-scribbles to generate depth maps for key frames and propagates these depth maps to non-key frames automatically. For key frames, foreground objects and the corresponding depth maps can be obtained by an interactive method. Then, both forward and backward motion vectors are estimated and compared to decide the depth propagation strategy. For pixels that failed the motion vectors comparison, a compensation process is adopted to refine their depth propagation results. Finally, stereoscopic pairs are generated by the warping method based on the original frames and associated depth maps. Our method is validated by both subjective and objective quality assessments. The experimental results show that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art 2D-to-3D video conversion methods.
Towards high quality region-of-interest medical video over wireless networks using motion compensated temporal filtering

There is an increased need for high quality transmission of video over wireless networks for rapidly growing applications such as telehealth. In this paper, we propose a method for achieving high quality within a diagnostically important Region-of-Interest (ROI) using mathematically lossless (M-lossless) video coding of the ROI and Motion Compensated Temporal Filtering (MCTF) of the video. The remaining region (non-ROI) is coded in a lossy manner. MCTF as a prefilter addresses the issue of noise in video. With the correct values of filter parameters, it results in very good denoising for noisy video and improved quality for even near noiseless video. The key motivation to use MCTF in our application is that in both cases it results in significant reduction of the required total bitrate. This is crucial on data rate constrained wireless networks. We also show how MCTF is particularly advantageous for the ROI. We study the advantages of MCTF in terms of (i) quality improvement, and (ii) bitrate reduction. We apply a mean MCTF to filter Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN), and propose a new median MCTF to filter impulse noise. The results show that the applied techniques result in substantial improvement in quality and significant total bitrate reduction.
How Learners' Engagement in a Self-Regulated Learning Program Affected Their Listening Development Differently

This article reports a case study involving four college EFL students in mainland China over a six-month period of self-regulated learning (SRL) in independent settings. The study examined how the met cognition and listening performance of two high-achieving learners and two low-achieving learners may have been affected by the way they engaged with their SRL in extensive listening. It described the learners' engagement during four phases of self-regulated listening, namely task definition, goal setting and planning, strategy enactment, and metacognitive adaptation. Findings revealed differences in the self-regulatory behaviours of the two groups of learners in three SRL phases. Although all the learners defined each listening task in quite similar ways, the two groups differed substantially in their metacognitive engagement in the remaining three phases. The learners' mental representation of their listening process and development through the use of a descriptive metaphor further revealed such qualitative differences. The authors argue that the achievements of the respective learners in listening development were affected by these differences. Theoretical and pedagogical implications of applying a SRL approach for second language (L2) listening development are discussed.
Effects of First-Time Overnight CPAP Therapy for Increasing the Complexity of the Patient's Physiological System

Studies regarding the effects of short-term continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy are not sufficient. A total of 35 patients with moderate to severe untreated OSA were divided into 2 groups. Group 1 comprised 22 patients who underwent polysomnography (PSG) for one night, and Group 2 comprised 13 patients who received PSG combined with CPAP therapy. To evaluate the influence of receiving CPAP therapy for one night, we measured 5 min wrist pulse signals before and after the experiment to assess heart rate variability, as well as novel short time multiscale entropy (sMSE) indicator that examines complexity in physiological signals. The results show that the participants in Group 1 exhibited significant changes in normalized low-frequency power/normalized high-frequency power (nLF/nHF) (0.72 ± 0.09 versus 1.11 ± 0.11, P = 0.006) values before and after the PSG study. By contrast, the participants in Group 2 showed no significant changes in the 3 indicators. Regarding the sMSE indicator, Group 2 patients exhibited significant increases in the sMSE. CPAP therapy administered for one night can reduce the sympathovagal imbalance in patients with moderate to severe untreated OSA and increase the complexity of the patient's physiological system, thereby reflecting their overall improved health.
Mesopredator suppression by an apex predator alleviates the risk of predation perceived by small prey

Predators can impact their prey via consumptive effects that occur through direct killing, and via non-consumptive effects that arise when the behaviour and phenotypes of prey shift in response to the risk of predation. Although predators' consumptive effects can have cascading population-level effects on species at lower trophic levels there is less evidence that predators' non-consumptive effects propagate through ecosystems. Here we provide evidence that suppression of abundance and activity of a mesopredator (the feral cat) by an apex predator (the dingo) has positive effects on both abundance and foraging efficiency of a desert rodent. Then by manipulating predators' access to food patches we further the idea that apex predators provide small prey with refuge from predation by showing that rodents increased their habitat breadth and use of ‘risky′ food patches where an apex predator was common but mesopredators rare. Our study suggests that apex predators' suppressive effects on mesopredators extend to alleviate both mesopredators' consumptive and non-consumptive effects on prey.
Dignity and Deferral Narratives as Strategies in Facilitated Technology-Based Support Groups for People with Advanced Cancer

This paper examines the value of facilitated telephone and online support groups for palliative care. Telephone interviews were conducted with twenty people living with advanced cancer who had participated in either a telephone or online support group facilitated by the Cancer Council Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Two dominant participant narratives emerged: a focus on dying with dignity or an interest in deferring discussion of death and dying to focus on the present. Despite the different approaches, participants found the technology-based support groups to be accessible and safe environments in which to discuss difficult topics in privacy. Technology-based strategies provide opportunities for health professionals to provide social and emotional care to more people by moving beyond individualised care and facilitate peer-to-peer support at the end of life, especially to those with specific needs. Such options are feasible for palliative care services to set up and acceptable to a group of clients, especially for younger clients or those socially or geographically isolated.
Differences in Granule Morphology yet Equally Impaired Exocytosis among Cytotoxic T Cells and NK Cells from Chediak–Higashi Syndrome Patients

Chediak–Higashi syndrome (CHS) is caused by autosomal recessive mutations in LYST, resulting in enlarged lysosomal compartments in multiple cell types. CHS patients display oculocutaneous albinism and may develop life-threatening hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH). While NK cell-mediated cytotoxicity has been reported to be uniformly defective, variable defects in T cell-mediated cytotoxicity has been observed. The latter has been linked to the degree of HLH susceptibility. Since the discrepancies in NK cell- and T cell-mediated cellular cytotoxicity might result from differences in regulation of cytotoxic granule release, we here evaluated perforin-containing secretory lysosome size and number in freshly isolated lymphocytes from CHS patients and furthermore compared their exocytic capacities. Whereas NK cells from CHS patients generally contained a single, gigantic perforin-containing granule, cytotoxic T cells predominantly contained several smaller granules. Nonetheless, in a cohort of 21 CHS patients, cytotoxic T cell and NK cell granule exocytosis were similarly impaired upon activating receptor stimulation. Mechanistically, polarization of cytotoxic granules was defective in cytotoxic lymphocytes from CHS patients, with EEA1, a marker of early endosomes, mislocalizing to lysosomal structures. The results leads to the conclusion that lysosome enlargement corresponds to loss of distinct organelle identity in the endocytic pathway, which on a subcellular level more adversely affects NK cells than T cells. Hence, vesicular size or numbers do not per se dictate the impairment of lysosomal exocytosis in the two cell types studied.
The Contribution of Visual Sensitivity, Phonological Processing, and Nonverbal IQ to Children's Reading

It has been suggested that the differences observed for dyslexic readers compared to normal readers on tasks measuring visual sensitivity may simply be the result of differences between the two groups in general cognitive ability and/or attentional engagement. One common way to accommodate this proposal is to match normal and dyslexic readers on IQ. However, an explicit test of this suggestion is to take normal and dyslexic readers who differ on IQ—where IQ would be expected to explain reading ability—and determine if visual sensitivity can still account for reading skill, even when IQ is taken into account. In this study we explored the relative contributions of nonverbal IQ, visual sensitivity as measured by sensitivity to the frequency doubling illusion, and phonological and irregular word reading to reading ability. Visual sensitivity explained a significant amount of variance in reading ability, over and above nonverbal IQ, accounting for 6% of the unique variance in reading ability. Moreover, visual sensitivity was related primarily to irregular word reading rather than to nonsense word decoding. This study demonstrates that low-level visual sensitivity plays an intrinsic role in reading aptitude, even when IQ differences between normal and dyslexic readers are contrived to maximize the contribution of IQ to reading skill. These results challenge the suggestion that impaired visual sensitivity may be epiphenomenal to poor reading skills.
Human-autonomy sensor fusion for rapid object detection

Human-autonomy sensor fusion is an emerging technology with a wide range of applications, including object detection/recognition, surveillance, collaborative control, and prosthetics. For object detection, humans and computer-vision-based systems employ different strategies to locate targets, likely providing complementary information. However, little effort has been made in combining the outputs of multiple autonomous detectors and multiple human-generated responses. This paper presents a method for integrating several sources of human- and autonomy-generated information for rapid object detection tasks. Human electroencephalography (EEG) and button-press responses from rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) experiments are fused with outputs from trained object detection algorithms. Three fusion methods-Bayesian, Dempster-Shafer, and Dynamic Dempster-Shafer-are implemented for comparison. Results demonstrate that fusion of these human classifiers with computer-vision-based detectors improves object detection accuracy over purely computer-vision-based detection (5% relative increase in mean average precision) and the best individual computer vision algorithm (28% relative increase in mean average precision). Computer vision fused with button press response and/or the XDAWN + Bayesian Linear Discriminant Analysis neural classifier provides considerable improvement, while computer vision fused with other neural classifiers provides little or no improvement. Of the three fusion methods, Dynamic Dempster-Shafer Theory (DDST) Fusion exhibits the greatest performance in this application.
Comments on black holes in matrix theory

The recent suggestion that the entropy of Schwarzschild black holes can be computed in matrix theory using near-extremal D-brane thermodynamics is examined. It is found that the regime in which this approach is valid actually describes black strings stretched across the longitudinal direction, near the transition where black strings become unstable to the formation of black holes. It is argued that the appropriate dynamics on the other (black hole) side of the transition is that of the zero modes of the corresponding super Yang-Mills theory. A suggestive mean field theory argument is given for the entropy of black holes in all dimensions. Consequences of the analysis for matrix theory and the holographic principle are discussed. {copyright} {ital 1998} {ital The American Physical Society}