Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Within- and Between-Speaker Variability of Parameters Expressing Short-Term Voice Quality

This study focuses on short-term acoustic correlates of voice quality. It assesses the within-speaker stability (across different speaking styles) and between-speaker variability of measurements which compare the amplitudes of various spectral events – H1*-H2*, H2*-H4*, H1*-A1*, H1*-A2* and H1*-A3*. Although speakers do differ with regard to the compactness of the parameters in read and spontaneous speaking styles, the parameters H1*-H2*, H1*-A1* and H1*-A2* appear both considerably stable for one speaker in different speaking styles and efficient in between-speaker comparisons. Though not directly applicable in forensic settings, these glottal parameters outperformed vowel formants in classification using LDA.
Are Private Equity Investors Good or Evil?

The paper investigates the motives of activity (entry and exit) of Private Equity (PE) investors in European companies. Investment of a PE firm is not viewed unambiguously. First, it is claimed that PE investment is made for the sake of seeking short-term gains by taking control and utilizing the company's resources. Second, a PE firm invests because of prior identification of chances to add value to the company. We attempt to resolve these two conflicting conjectures. We use the Bureau van Dijk's Amadeus database of very large, large and medium-sized European companies. Our major results can be summarized as follows. First, PE firms are less willing to enter the firm if there is already a blocking majority, and they are more likely to leave the firm if control cannot be overtaken. Second, less mature firms are less able to lure a PE firm to invest, thus indicating a safe strategy of PE investors. Third, we do not find empirical evidence that a PE investor comes in to strip a firm of its equity. On the other hand, PE investors are likely to leave the company if it deteriorates in terms of returns and cash. Finally, when comparing the activity of PE and other financial investors, we find essential differences in choosing the field and environment of activity.
Laboratory Measurement of Two-Phase Flow Parameters in Rock Joints Based on High Pressure Triaxial Testing

The accurate flow measurement of each individual phase is important in unsaturated flow through rock joints, where both air and water phases flow together. An increase in the quantity of one fluid phase decreases the relative permeability of the other phase. The relative permeability is important in numerical models to analyze the risk of ground-water inundation and uncontrollable gas flows in underground excavations in jointed rock. A new apparatus, the High Pressure Two-Phase Triaxial Apparatus (HPTPTA), has been designed for examining the strength and coefficient of permeability characteristics of fractured and intact rocks under two-phase flows. In single-phase triaxial equipment, the rock specimen is subjected to a single fluid flow (either water, oil, or gas) through the fractures. In the HPTPTA, two fluids (e.g., water 1 air, water 1 oil, and oil 1 air) can be forced to flow through the specimen, and the flow rates of the fluids can be measured independently. The scope of tests that can be carried out in this apparatus is wide, including the evaluation of (1) stress-strain behavior subject to internal fluid flow; (2) relative permeability of each fluid phase under different degrees of saturation; and (3) the associated volume change of the specimen. In this paper, the design concepts of the HPTPTA and the results based on the testing of fractured rock specimens are discussed. The laboratory results are compared to a simplified mathematical model developed by the writers. Based on the laboratory results, it is shown that the well-known Darcy's law can be modified for estimating the two-phase flow rates using the relative permeability concept.
ESG and financial performance: aggregated evidence from more than 2000 empirical studies

The search for a relation between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria and corporate financial performance (CFP) can be traced back to the beginning of the 1970s. Scholars and investors have published more than 2000 empirical studies and several review studies on this relation since then. The largest previous review study analyzes just a fraction of existing primary studies, making findings difficult to generalize. Thus, knowledge on the financial effects of ESG criteria remains fragmented. To overcome this shortcoming, this study extracts all provided primary and secondary data of previous academic review studies. Through doing this, the study combines the findings of about 2200 individual studies. Hence, this study is by far the most exhaustive overview of academic research on this topic and allows for generalizable statements. The results show that the business case for ESG investing is empirically very well founded. Roughly 90% of studies find a nonnegative ESG–CFP relation. More importantly, the large majority of studies reports positive findings. We highlight that the positive ESG impact on CFP appears stable over time. Promising results are obtained when differentiating for portfolio and nonportfolio studies, regions, and young asset classes for ESG investing such as emerging markets, corporate bonds, and green real estate.
Word families

The idea of a word family is important for a systematic approach to vocabulary teaching and for deciding the vocabulary load of texts. Inclusion of a related form of a word within a word family depends on criteria involving frequency, regularity, productivity and predictability. These criteria are applied to English affixes so that the inflectional affixes and the most useful derivational affixes are arranged into a graded set of seven levels. This set of levels and others like it have value in guiding teaching and learning, in standardising vocabulary load and vocabulary size research, in investigating lexical development and lexical storage, and in guiding dictionary making. © 1993 Oxford University Press.
Intergeneric relationships of the new world Jays inferred from cytochrome b gene sequences

The six genera of corvids endemic to the Americas (i.e., Aphelocoma, Calocitta, Cyanocitta, Cyanocorax, Cyanolyca, and Gymnorhinus) form the assemblage that most ornithologists call the New World jays. The intergeneric relationships among these six genera are explored using complete sequences from the cytochrome b gene (1,143 bp) along with 29 morphological characters. A consistent phylogenetic hypothesis was obtained when the data sets were analyzed independently or in a total evidence approach. The phylogeny presented in this paper does not corroborate the existence of two evolutionary lineages as previously proposed by Hardy (1961, 1969). The most basal genus of the New World jays is Cyanolyca, which also is supported by independent evidence on cranial anatomy. The remainder of the genera are embedded within two major clades. The most derived is formed by Cyanocitta, Aphelocoma, and Gymnorhinus, being Cyanocitta the most basal genus within this clade. Calocitta and Cyanocorax constitute the other clade. A very close relationship between these two genera is supported by bootstrap values and branch support analysis. These results corroborate the hypothesis that the Pinon Jay (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus) is a true New World jay, and a putative relationship with nutcrackers is not supported. The phylogeny obtained is used to infer a biogeographic scenario, as well to explain the evolution of a very derived jaw articulation present only in the New World jays. The biogeographic scenario agrees with a relatively recent arrival of a corvine ancestor via Beringia, and a very rapid dispersal and radiation into the Americas.
Open reading frame structure analysis as a novel genotyping tool for hepatitis E virus and the subsequent discovery of an inter-genotype recombinant

Received 5 December 2008 Accepted 17 February 2009 Accurate viral genotyping is important. Here I investigate genotypes in hepatitis E virus (HEV) and find that the open reading frame (ORF) structure (the lengths of three ORFs and the overlapping relationships among the ORFs) can be a good criterion for genotyping HEV. An inter-genotype recombinant (GenBank accession no. DQ450072) was revealed by analysing the ORF structure and confirmed by phylogenetic analyses. This discovery of the inter-genotype recombinant indicates that genotyping in HEV should be based on full-length sequences. The Mexican strain which is currently classified as a genotype 2 strain also exhibited the mosaic sequence pattern, although without statistical support.
Autonomous Precision Pouring from Unknown Symmetric Containers

We autonomously pour from unknown symmetric containers found in a traditional wet-lab towards the development of a robot-assisted rapid experiment preparation system. The robot estimates the pouring container symmetric geometry, then leverages simulated pours as priors for a given fluid to pour precisely and quickly in a single attempt. The fluid is detected in the clear receiving container by combining weight and vision. The geometry of the pouring container is extracted and used to estimate the volume-angle profile and time delay of the fluid exiting the container. A trapezoidal volume trajectory algorithm prescribes the desired received volume velocity as a function of volume-angle profile estimation accuracy. The volume-angle profile and time delay are used in a hybrid control strategy to attenuate volumetric error. Three methods are compared for estimating the volume-angle profile, and it is shown that a combination of online system identification and leveraged model priors results in the overall best performance. The major contributions of this work are a system capable of pouring quickly and precisely from varying symmetric containers in a single attempt with limited priors, and a novel fluid detection method. This system is implemented on the Rethink Robotics Sawyer and KUKA LBR iiwa manipulators.
Molecular evidence for long-distance colonization in an Indo-Pacific seahorse lineage

Mitochondrial control region (mtDNA CR) diversity within and among 6 seahorse pop- ulations associated with the Indo-Pacific Hippocampus kuda complex (H. kuda from India, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, H. fuscus from the Red Sea and H. capensis from South Africa) was compared to determine whether there was support for the hypothesis that seahorses are able to colo- nize remote areas by means of rafting. Analyses performed on the data-set included phylogenetic re- constructions, estimation of relative population ages, tests for evidence of population expansion, pair- wise migration rates and divergence times, as well as relationships between genetic and geographic distances. The mtDNA data indicate that all populations have undergone recent expansions, but that the timing of these events differed. The H. kuda population from India was found to be the oldest, whereas the expansion of the H. fuscus population from the Red Sea took place most recently. The fact that all seahorse populations studied are characterized by a single ancestral mtDNA haplotype and migration rates are low in most cases, as well as the fact that no significant relationship between genetic and geographic distances was found, indicates that colonization of distant habitats by a small number of founding individuals may be common in seahorses associated with the H. kuda complex. As the level of subsequent gene flow among populations is low, this may result in rapid speciation.
Identification of a Prg 4-positive articular cartilage progenitor cell population

Objective—We generated knock-in mice that express a tamoxifen-inducible Cre recombinase from the Prg4 locus (Prg4GFPCreERt2), and used these animals to fate-map the progeny of Prg4positive articular cartilage cells at various ages. Methods—We crossed Prg4GFPCreERt2 mice to Rosa26floxlacZ or Rosa26mTmG reporter strains, administered tamoxifen to the double heterozygous offspring at different ages, and assayed Cremediated recombination by histochemistry and/or fluorescence microscopy. Results—In 1-month-old mice, the expression of the Prg4GFPCreERt2 allele mirrors expression of endogenous Prg4 and, when tamoxifen is given for 10 days, causes Cre-mediated recombination in ~70% of the superficial-most chondrocytes. Prg4GFPCreERt2 expressing cells are mostly confined to the top three cell layers of the articular cartilage in 1-month-old mice, but descendants of these cells are located in deeper regions of the articular cartilage in aged mice. At embryonic day 17.5, Prg4GFPCreERt2 expressing cells are largely restricted to the superficial-most cell layer of the forming joint, yet at approximately 1 year, progeny of these cells span the depth of the articular cartilage. Conclusions—Our results indicate that Prg4-expressing cells located at the joint surface in the embryo serve as a progenitor population for all deeper layers of the mature articular cartilage. Also, our data reveal that Prg4GFPCreERt2 is expressed by superficial chondrocytes in young mice, corresponding authors: tel. 617-432-3831, fax. 617-738-0516, andrew_lassar@hms.harvard. edu, tel. 617-919-2371, fax 617-730-0789, matthew.warman@childrens.harvard. edu. 5Present Address: Department of Developmental Biology, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, 188 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115 6Present Address: Department of Orthodontics & Pediatric Dentistry, University of Michigan School of Dentistry, 1011 N University Ave, Ann Arbor MI 48109, noriono@umich.edu HHS Public Access Author manuscript Arthritis Rheumatol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2016 May 01. Published in final edited form as: Arthritis Rheumatol. 2015 May ; 67(5): 1261–1273. doi:10.1002/art.39030. A uhor M anscript
A fast feature selection algorithm applied to automatic faults diagnosis of rotating machinery

This work presents a fast algorithm to reduce the number of features of a classification system increasing the performance without loss of quality. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the number of features quickly as well as increase the quality of the predictions simultaneously. Three features extractions were used to generate the initial pool of features of the system. Comparative results of the proposed algorithm with the classical sequential forward selection algorithm are shown. Keywords: feature selection, feature extraction, fault diagnosis, rotating machinery, supervised learning.
An Access-Pattern-Aware On-Chip Vector Memory System with Automatic Loading for SIMD Architectures

Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) architectures are widely used to accelerate applications involving Data-Level Parallelism (DLP); the on-chip memory system facilitates the communication between Processing Elements (PE) and on-chip vector memory. It is observed that inefficiency of the on-chip memory system is often a computational bottleneck. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of an efficient vector data memory system. The proposed memory system consists of two novel parts: an access-pattern-aware memory controller and an automatic loading mechanism. The memory controller reduces the data reorganization overheads. The automatic loading mechanism loads data automatically according to the access patterns without load instructions. This eliminates overhead of fetching and decoding. The proposed design is implemented and synthesized with Cadence tools. Experimental results demonstrate that our design improves the performance of 8 application kernels by 44% and reduces the energy consumption by 26%, on average.
Visual Analysis of Engineers ’ Biographies and Engineering Branches

The Prosopographic Database of German Engineers 1825–1970 contains a multitude of biographical information. Given a set of research interests by collaborating historians, this paper discusses the steps undertaken (1) to extract engineering subjects from unstructured text entries in the database accompanied with geospatial and temporal information, (2) to adapt existing visual representations to facilitate exploratory analyses, and (3) to design a visual interface to support the interactive composition of engineering branches from engineering subjects to enable the comparative analysis of geospatial-temporal developments in engineering. Usage scenarios outline the benefit of the proposed visualizations for modern prosopography research.
P2P Overlay Performance in Large-Scale MANETs

We explored how to deploy P2P overlays in ultimately large-scale Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs). We therefore studied the performance of P2P overlays such as Chord, creating a number of flat and hierarchical MANET networks. The hierarchical network consists of clusters, interconnected by a backbone. The subnetworks (cluster or the whole network) ran OLSR as network-layer routing protocol. Each cluster had a gateway, interconnected through a backbone that deployed flooding. As we increased the number of clusters, we kept the number of nodes in the Chord overlay constant. Using simulations in OMNeT++, we evaluated the P2P performance. Our results show that an unmodified P2P network does not perform well even for relatively small network sizes. The performance can be improved through the use of a cross-layered P2P solution, such as OneHopOverlay4MANET. However, such cross-layered approaches require complete information about overlay nodes from the routing layer and are therefore not suitable in hierarchical MANETs. For hierarchical underlays, the performance of the P2P overlay deteriorated as we increased the number of clusters. One of the main reasons is that the backbone quickly became a performance bottleneck.
Moving Mesh Method with Error-Estimator-Based Monitor and Its Applications to Static Obstacle Problem

1 School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People’s Republic of China. E-mail: rli@math.pku. edu.cn 2 Institute of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Xiangtan University, Hunan, People’s Republic of China. E-mail: W.B. Liu@ukc.ac. uk 3 Department of Mathematics, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200436, People’s Republic of China. E-mail: hpma@guomai.sh. cn Received May 27, 2003; accepted (in revised form) July 22, 2003
Dielectric Steering of a 3-D Printed Microwave Slot Array

A steerable, three-dimensional printed, traveling-wave microwave slot array is presented. Inserted dielectric bars change the guide wavelength in the array, adding a constant phase shift between radiating slots. This in turn achieves a tilt angle of the main lobe away from boresight. The ability to adjust the direction of a beam radiated or received by a high-gain slot array with fixed physical mounting has a practical advantage compared to physically rotating the array: It minimizes the volume required for the mounted array. Mounting volume scales as <italic>W</italic> tan <italic>θ</italic>, where <italic>W</italic> is the array width and <italic>θ</italic> is the steering angle. The work presented here has <italic>W</italic> = 186.2 mm and <italic>θ</italic> = 8.5°, so the change in mounting volume thickness is 27.9 mm. This array is 11.6 mm thick, so the mounting volume is reduced by a factor of 3.4. Opening the center line of the back side of the array waveguides allowed the insertion of dielectric bars along the center of each waveguide. The described device was both simulated and built, and the experimental device achieved 8.5° of continuously adjustable beam steering with a reduction in realized gain of 2.1 dB.
Bayesian Statistics and the Efficiency and Ethics of Clinical Trials

The Bayesian approach is being used increasingly in medical research. The flexibility of the Bayesian approach allows for building designs of clinical trials that have good properties of any desired sort. Examples include maximizing effective treatment of patients in the trial, maximizing information about the slope of a dose-response curve, minimizing costs, minimizing the number of patients treated, minimizing the length of the trial and combinations of these desiderata. They also include standard frequentist operating characteristics when these are important considerations. Posterior probabilities are updated via Bayes' theorem on the basis of accumulating data. These are used to effect modifications of the trial's course, including stopping accrual, extending accrual beyond that originally planned, dropping treatment arms, adding arms, etc. An important aspect of the approach I advocate is modeling the relationship between a trial's primary endpoint and early indications of patient performance-auxiliary endpoints. This has several highly desirable consequences. One is that it improves the efficiency of adaptive trials because information is available sooner than otherwise.
Genetic diversity in a moulting colony of southern elephant seals in comparison with breeding colonies

ABSTRACT: Southern elephant seals Mirounga leonina migrate seasonally between pelagic foraging areas in the Southern Ocean and breeding and moulting sites on subantarctic islands. Here we characterized genetic diversity of the elephant seal moulting colony from King George Island (KGI), South Shetlands Archipelago, in comparison with breeding colonies described in earlier studies. Although KGI serves as a breeding site, the numbers of elephant seals are up to 3 times higher during the moulting season, suggesting post-breeding immigration from other sites, or that large numbers of individuals skip the breeding season every year. High haplotype diversity and a high percentage of shared haplotypes is consistent with the hypothesis of immigration from other South Atlantic colonies, which is also supported by satellite tracking data from earlier studies. Estimates of effective population size at both mtDNA and microsatellite loci were unexpectedly high compared with the census size of the KGI colony, suggesting that they were elevated due to the presence of immigrants. However, we detected few immigrants and no genetic structure in the KGI colony, which could result from the genetic similarity between KGI and other breeding colonies from the South Atlantic, but could also be an effect of an insufficient sampling scheme. These results show the need for genetic monitoring of southern elephant seal colonies throughout their annual cycle to better understand the range of their seasonal movements and patterns of gene flow. The southern elephant seal serves as a model to study links between spatio-temporal environmental variability, population dynamics, and individual movements, physiology and reproductive behavior. Understanding the patterns of dispersal and gene flow in this species is essential to adequately address these general questions.