Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NOSOCOMIAL BACTEREMIA CAUSED BY PSEUDOMONAS AERUGINOSA : SENSITIVE TO ANTIBIOTICS AND RISK FACTORS

The present study through transversal analysis reveals the profile of patients’ infection in the ICUs of a Tertiary care hospital. It aims at categorizing patients with a focus on the prevalence rates of infection, sites and types of infection, most prevalent bacteria and its antimicrobial resistance patterns, as well as identifying the risk factors for ICU acquired infection. One of the 50 patients admitted to ICU showed bacteremia due to Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This isolate might not necessarily have represented the cause of infection nevertheless regarding the isolates reported. The predominance of Gram negative bacilli P. aeruginosa was identified. Previous report, showed the predominance of Gram positive cocci Staphylococcus aureus, and Gram negative organisms P. aeruginosa.
Treatment of Anorexia Nervosa in an Ultra-Orthodox Adolescent Male

Objective: This unique case presents an opportunity to deepen the understanding of the etiology of anorexia nervosa in an ultra-orthodox 14-year-old adolescent. The boy arrived at our countryside clinic after a 1.5-year history of severe self imposed diet restrictions to control his weight and appearance, and a year of partial and full hospitalizations in psychiatric wards. The main objectives of the intervention were: to achieve nutritional rehabilitation, develop normal eating and self-care habits, eliminate bed-wetting, as well as challenge developmental issues and cultural discourses. Method: 12-months of comprehensive intervention, which included: a weekly dietetic session, parental guidance or family therapy, interpersonal and narrative psychotherapy twice a week, and a clinical mentorship (two days per week). The boy’s progress was assessed via interview, using EDEQ-17 for the assessment of eating disorder symptoms, DASS-21 for the assessment of self-regulation, and the Rosenberg scale for the assessment of selfesteem. Results: After a year in our outpatient clinic, the boy regained normal eating habits and normal weight status. His EDEQ global score decreased from 4.1 to 0.9. His global DASS-21 score decreased from 38 (severe) to 7 (normal) indicating improvements in self-regulation and impulsiveness. Self-care and self-esteem were also significantly improved. Bed-wetting disappeared. He is currently fully functional in his community and attends a school that better accommodates him. The co-morbidity of eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), impulsiveness and anxieties as well as bed-wetting led to the decision to implement an intense and long-lasting intervention. Arch Clin Med Case Rep 2019; 3 (6): 472-480 DOI: 10.26502/acmcr.96550123 Archives of Clinical and Medical Case Reports 473 Discussion: The described case demonstrates the lack of suitability to function adequately in the ultra-orthodox community as a precursor for anorexia nervosa with compulsive features. The co-morbidity of eating disorders, OCD, depression, and bed-wetting worsened the course of his anorexia leading to an intensive and long-lasting intervention . As a result, the boy overcame his anxieties and developed skills, maturity, self-esteem and self-care in order to return to his community.
Symbolic approach to affordances in SGOMS , a paper for the Affordances in Vision for the Cognitive Robotics Workshop

This paper discusses the use of a symbolic cognitive architecture for symbolically representing affordances. Initial models of counter-steer affordances in which symbolically representing affordances facilitates context sensitivity are discussed. This paper proposes the use of geometric affordances in which body schema are matched against the geometric properties of the environment to facilitate action decisions. Keywords-symbolic; affordances; cognitive modeling; ACT-R;
Boosting Character-Based Chinese Speech Synthesis via Multi-Task Learning and Dictionary Tutoring

Recent character-based end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) systems have shown promising performance in natural speech generation, especially for English. However, for Chinese TTS, the character-based model is easy to generate speech with wrong pronunciation due to the label sparsity issue. To address this issue, we introduce an additional learning task of character-to-pinyin mapping to boost the pronunciation learning of characters, and leverage a pre-trained dictionary network to correct the pronunciation mistake through joint training. Speciﬁcally, our model predicts pinyin labels as an auxiliary task to assist learning better hidden representations of Chinese characters, where pinyin is a standard phonetic representation for Chinese characters. The dictionary network plays a role as a tutor to further help hidden representation learning. Experiments demonstrate that employing the pinyin auxiliary task and an external dictionary network clearly enhances the naturalness and intelligibility of the synthetic speech directly from the Chinese character sequences.
How Political Competition Can Increase Corruption : Electoral cycles in police extortion in West Africa ∗

Several studies have found a positive association between democratization and corruption. Few, however, posit a convincing mechanism. I explain why the relationship between political competition and corruption may be concave. In countries where bureaucracies are poorly insulated from political influence, the introduction of elections increases uncertainty about future leadership. By threatening future income, competitive elections raise the opportunity cost of remaining honest, incentivizing corruption. These dynamics do not exist in autocratic countries, where elections provoke no uncertainty about future leadership, or in consolidated democracies, where civil service legislation protects bureaucrats from political vicissitudes. Examining electoral cycles in over 300,000 bribes paid over a seven-year period by truck-drivers in five West African countries, I show that the average bribe extorted by bureaucrats increases by twentythree percent in the buildup to competitive elections. Consistent with the idea that political competition only increases extortion when it increases uncertainty, bribes in the post-election period return to the non-electoral average when incumbents win reelection, but remain high when challengers win. I find no evidence that such dynamics exist around elections in autocracies. The findings suggest that democratization can have adverse effects on corruption in the short-term, and highlight the importance of civil service insulation as an anti-corruption policy. ∗With sincere thanks to the West African Tradehub and the Borderless Alliance for providing the data and assistance with fieldwork, and to the Columbia University Center for the Study of Development Strategies for funding. Special thanks go to Macartan Humphreys, Miriam Golden, Donald Green and Kimuli Kasara for their in-depth feedback on the manuscript. The author thanks participants for their helpful comments at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), San Francisco, September 3, 2015 and at the Columbia University Mini-APSA workshop on December 9, 2016. †Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, Columbia University. jjc2247@columbia.edu. http://jasper-cooper.com Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. [. ] Actors know what winning or losing can mean to them, and they know how likely they are to win or lose, but they do not know if they will lose or win. Hence, democracy is a system of ruled open-endedness, or organized uncertainty. Adam Przeworski (1991, 10-13)
Development and Characterization of a Panel of Monoclonal Antibodies Against Pseudorabies Virus gE / gI Complex

gE/gI complex of pseudorabies virus was expressed in Baculovirus expression system. Female BALB/c mice were immunized with the purified gE/gI complex and 22 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) were achieved by hybridoma technique. A panel of monoclonal antibody was used in indirect immune fluorescence assay(IFA), immunoperoxidase monolayer assay(IPMA) and enzyme-linked immune sorbent assay (ELISA). Among these mAbs, 11H1 mAb specifically reacted with PRV gE/gI complex, as proven by western blot, IFA and IPMA. Determination of relative affinity results showed that 1G9, 11H1 and10D3mAbshad high relative affinity. Therefore, 1G9, 11H1 and 10D3 monoclonal antibodies may work as a useful tool for the development of differential diagnostic methods for PRV.
Implementing One-Click Caustics in Corona Renderer

This paper describes the implementation of a fully automatic caustics rendering solution in Corona Renderer. The main requirement is that the technique be completely transparent to the user, should not need any parameter setting at all, and be fully integrated into the interactive and progressive rendering workﬂow. We base our approach on an efﬁcient subset of the vertex connection and merging algorithm, speciﬁcally a multiple importance sampling combination of path tracing and photon mapping. We rely on Metropolis sampling to guide photon paths into the relevant parts of the scene. While these underlying ideas have appeared in existing research work, numerous previously unaddressed issues and edge cases arise when one applies these ideas in practice. These include unreliable convergence of the Metropolis sampler in scenes with many light sources of different sizes and intensities, the “caustic in a stadium” problem (i.e., efﬁcient rendering of small caustics in extremely large scenes), etc. We present the solutions we have developed to address such issues, yielding what we call “one-click caustics rendering”. User feedback suggests that our approach substantially improves usability over methods previously implemented in comercially available software, all requiring the user to set various technical parameters.
Conversational Emotion Analysis via Attention Mechanisms

Different from the emotion recognition in individual utterances, we propose a multimodal learning framework using relation and dependencies among the utterances for conversational emotion analysis. The attention mechanism is applied to the fusion of the acoustic and lexical features. Then these fusion representations are fed into the self-attention based bi-directional gated recurrent unit (GRU) layer to capture long-term contextual information. To imitate real interaction patterns of different speakers, speaker embeddings are also utilized as additional inputs to distinguish the speaker identities during conversational dialogs. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments on the IEMOCAP database. Experimental results demonstrate that our method shows absolute 2.42% performance improvement over the state-of-the-art strategies.
Identification , isolation and bioinformatic analysis of squalene sinthase-like cDNA fragments in Botryococcus terribilis AICB 870 strain Tiberiu Sz ő

Botryococcus terribilis is a freshwater colonial green microalga very similar to B. braunii, due to the hydrocarbon biosynthesis and accumulation of those biosynthetic products in the extracellular matrix. The hydrocarbon biosynthesis pathway was intensively studied, especially in differents strains of B. braunii. Recent studies revealed the presence of three squalene synthase-like (SSL) enzymes involved in the last steps of hydrocarbon biosynthesis from B. braunii. The aim of the study is to identify homologous SSL enzymes to B. terribilis AICB 870, a freshwater isolate from Bihor County (Romania), based on new isolated cDNA fragments and bioinformatics analysis of sequenced fragments. Light and fluorescence microscopy observation revealed that AICB 870 strain presents features similar to a B. terribilis species, especially simple or branched mucilaginous processes and a high number of lipids vesicles. PCR primers designed using SSL nucleotide sequences from B. braunii were successfully used to amplify homologous SSL cDNA fragment in the AICB 870 strain. Bioinformatic analysis of nucleotides and translated amino acid sequences including G+C content, nucleotide frequencies, amino acids frequencies, computed Mw/pI and transmembrane motif prediction showed a high degree of similarity between the SSL identified as pertaining to Botryococcus braunii and those generated in the present work. The results of the present study pointed out for the first time the presence of three squalene synthase-like enzymes in a strain of B. terribilis species.
A staircase signal in the warming of the mid-20 th century

The residual dynamics left after adjusting global surface temperature anomalies (1950-2014) for short-term variability from El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and volcanic eruptions have a staircase pattern. Linear trends for three quasi-stable periods 1950-1987, 1988-1997 and 1998-2014 are near zero with nearly all warming occurring during two step-like shifts in the years 1987/1988 and 1997/1998. We analysed several global datasets: HadCRUT v4.5 – land and sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies; ICOADS v2.5 – SST anomalies measured from ships; NCEP OI v2 – SST measured by satellite instruments; UAH MSU v5.6 and RSS MSU v3.3 – two satellite datasets measuring temperature of the lower troposphere (TLT). The ENSO signal was removed by EOF analysis, and gave comparable results for all datasets. A similar staircase behavior was found in global NCEP/NCAR reanalyses of 300mb meridional wind and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) in northern and southern midlatitudes. These many different sources confirm the reality of the regime-shift staircase structure of recent warming, which is masked by short-term ENSO variability and the effects of volcanic eruptions.
Untranscribed Web Audio for Low Resource Speech Recognition

Speech recognition models are highly susceptible to mismatch in the acoustic and language domains between the training and the evaluation data. For low resource languages, it is difficult to obtain transcribed speech for target domains, while untranscribed data can be collected with minimal effort. Recently, a method applying lattice-free maximum mutual information (LF-MMI) to untranscribed data has been found to be effective for semi-supervised training. However, weaker initial models and domain mismatch can result in high deletion rates for the semi-supervised model. Therefore, we propose a method to force the base model to overgenerate possible transcriptions, relying on the ability of LF-MMI to deal with uncertainty. On data from the IARPA MATERIAL programme, our new semi-supervised method outperforms the standard semisupervised method, yielding significant gains when adapting for mismatched bandwidth and domain.
ABDUCTED VOCAL FOLD STATES AND THE EPILARYNX: A NEW TAXONOMY FOR DISTINGUISHING BREATHINESS AND WHISPERINESS

Regarding phonatory settings associated with abducted glottal states, under which fall phenomena such as breath, breathiness, breathy voice, murmur, noisy voice, slack voice, whisper, whisperiness, and whispery voice, researchers assume that the primary (and often the sole) difference between these derives from different degrees of glottal opening. This picture emerges from our overview of foundational documents in phonetics, including introductory as well as advanced textbooks, linguistic dictionaries, seminal papers, and specialised monographs. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the treatment of these abducted glottal states in a theory of laryngeal articulation that demonstrates with articulatory evidence that the assumptions behind these phonetic texts do not adequately capture the articulatory reality, in particular, that they ignore the role of the epilarynx. Presenting a collection of novel research, we show that epilaryngeal function is essential in distinguishing the subtypes of abducted glottal states.
Stereological Volumetric Analysis of a Case of Bilateral Chronic Subdural Hematoma

Chronic subdural hematoma is a common entity encountered mainly in the elderly population. In this paper, we aimed to perform a stereological analysis of the computed tomography (CT) images of a case with bilateral frontotemporoparietal chronic subdural hematoma. A 77 year old male patient presented with bilateral frontotemporoparietal chronic subdural hematoma. His medical history was significant for anticoagulation. The hematoma and intracranial volumes were measured on the CT images using stereological morph metrical analysis on the case. Cranial CT scanning revealed bilateral frontotemporoparietal chronic subdural hematoma with a width of 2 cm. Stereological volumetrically data was obtained before surgery. The hematoma and total intracranial volume may be important tools to determine on brain volumetric changes and can be estimated using the stereological method before surgery.
ASSESSMENT OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN THAI CHILDREN AT RISK FOR LEARNING DISABILITIES

This paper describes rationale and initial stage of developing a tool for screening Thai children at risk for Learning Disabilities (LD), “Noo-Khor-Arn” ‘May I read? ’, by combining linguistics, mathematics, and memory criteria. Six main tests include Rapid naming, Decoding, Morphological awareness, Phonological awareness, Mathematics, and Memory. Phonological awareness is divided into five subtests: Initial phoneme deletion, Phoneme identification, Phoneme discrimination, Phoneme substitution, and Rhyme detection. Complete tests were administered to a pilot group of 10 Thai normally developed (ND) and five LD children (mean age 8.20 ± 0.68 SD). Children’s performance on the six tests showed a significant larger mean in ND. After minor data adjustment, Phonological awareness was ranked in the third place, following Decoding and Morphological awareness for separating LD from ND group and was proved to be a potentially good predictor (along with the use of ASR) for assessing LD in this sample.
Monaural Speech Enhancement with Dilated Convolutions

In this study, we propose a novel dilated convolutional neural network for enhancing speech in noisy and reverberant environments. The proposed model incorporates dilated convolutions for tracking a target speaker through context aggregations, skip connections, and residual learning for mapping-based monaural speech enhancement. The performance of our model was evaluated in a variety of simulated environments having different reverberation times and quantified using two objective measures. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms a long short-term memory (LSTM), a gated residual network (GRN) and convolutional recurrent network (CRN) model in terms of objective speech intelligibility and speech quality in noisy and reverberant environments. Compared to LSTM, CRN and GRN, our method has improved generalization to untrained speakers and noise, and has fewer training parameters resulting in greater computational efficiency.
A CROSSLINGUISTIC CORPUS STUDY OF SILENT AND FILLED PAUSES: WHEN DO SPEAKERS USE FILLED PAUSES TO FILL PAUSES?

During spontaneous speech production, speakers inevitably pause silently due to various causes. Often, speech resumes normally afterward without message interruption. But sometimes, silence is terminated with a filled pause (English uh/um, Japanese e:/e:to). The present study examines whether such filled pauses may be regarded as “pause fillers”: that is, if a speaker pauses longer than some (e.g., culturallydetermined) silence threshold, they are likely to fill the silence with a marker (here, a filled pause). Four questions are examined: (1) do speakers use filled pauses as pause fillers, (2) does this differ between native English and Japanese, (3) does Japanese speakers’ silence threshold differ between their first and second languages, and (4) are such differences modulated by second language proficiency? Results from a study of two monologic speech corpora suggest that the answer to all questions is “yes”, but only with utterance-internal rather than -boundary pauses.
StabilizingTube-BasedModelPredictiveControl for LPVSystems ?

This paper presents a stabilizing tube-based MPC synthesis for LPV systems. In contrast to existing tube MPC approaches, to guarantee recursive feasibility we employ terminal constraint sets which are required to be controlled periodically contractive. Periodically (or finite-step) contractive sets are somewhat easier to compute and can be of lower complexity than “true” contractive ones, lowering the required computational effort both off-line and on-line. Under certain assumptions on the tube parameterization, recursive feasibility of the scheme is proven. Subsequently, stability is guaranteed through the construction of a suitable terminal cost based on a novel Lyapunov-like metric for compact convex sets containing the origin. A periodic variant on the well-known homothetic tube parameterization is given and is shown to satisfy the necessary assumptions, yielding a tractable LPV MPC algorithm. It requires the on-line solution of a single linear program with linear complexity in the prediction horizon. The properties of the approach are demonstrated by a numerical example.
Program Synthesis 17-355 / 17-665 / 17-819 O : Program Analysis ( Spring 2018 )

That is, we seek a program P that satisfies some specification φ on all inputs. We take a liberal view of P in discussing synthesis, as a wide variety of artifact types have beeen successfully synthesized (anythign that reads inputs or produces outputs). Beyond (relatively small) program snippets of the expected variety, this includes protocols, interpreters, classifiers, compression algorithms or implementations, scheduling policies, cache coherence protocols for multicore processors. The specification φ is an expression of the user intent, and may be expressed in one of several ways: a formula, a reference implementation, input/output pairs, traces, demonstrations, or a syntactic sketch, among other options. Program synthesis can thus be considered along three dimensions:
Public Governance and Tax Avoidance : Evidence from the Anti-Corruption Campaign in China

Taking advantage of the China’s anti-corruption campaign initiated in 2012, this study investigates the effects of public governance on tax avoidance. The campaign successfully curtails excessive corporate spending and governs the employment of former government officials in firms. It increases the political risk of officials who provide firms with favorable tax treatment. Thus it is hypothesized that the campaign impairs the ability of firms to practice tax avoidance. Consistent with this hypothesis, we use a sample of listed companies from 2009 to 2015 in China and alternative measures of tax avoidance, and find that firms practice less tax avoidance after the initiation of the anti-corruption campaign. Further analysis reveals that both entertainment and travel costs and their impacts on tax avoidance are reduced after the launch of the campaign, thus indicating that the effects of bribery on tax avoidance are subsequently reduced. We also demonstrate that the contribution of tax avoidance to firm value decreases after the anti-corruption campaign. This study highlights the importance of public governance in restricting tax avoidance practice and hence has meaningful implications on the tax base erosion problem for policy-makers worldwide.