Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using Syllable Boundary Information for Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection

Technology has enabled the rapid creation and easy storage of vast amounts of digital spoken content. In this context, a reliable and fast way to search through spoken content has become a hot topic of research in speech technology. Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection (QbE-STD) is a framework for searching a speech database using spoken queries. The aim of this work is to develop an improved dynamic time warping (DTW) based QbE-STD by exploiting syllable boundary information. Within this scope, novel contributions are made within two research themes, i.e., locating the syllable nuclei and thus subsequently locating the syllable boundaries and, using these syllable boundaries to improve the accuracy of the DTW based QbE-STD system. Speech can be segmented into syllables by identifying the syllable nuclei, which are points of high sonority. The excitation peaks in the linear prediction (LP) residual and the formant peaks can be interpreted as perceptually significant point features which contribute to the loudness of speech. In this paper, the use of these two point features is described for the use of detecting syllable nuclei. Each of these evidences contain information about different aspects of speech production, namely the glottal vibrations and the time varying vocal tract system. Thus it is possible that they contain complementary information about the syllable nuclei. Performance of the proposed syllable nuclei detection algorithm is evaluated for the TIMIT, Switchboard and the NTIMIT corpus. The proposed method performs comparably against two other state of the art syllable nuclei detection methods, and it is very fast requiring no training. Important acoustic events in speech occur at the transition boundaries between two sounds. These acoustic events carry sufficient information so as to be useful for QbE-STD. The syllable boundaries and the transition boundaries within the syllable are anchor points where major acoustic events occur. In this work, the use of these two types of anchor points are explored for feature selection. This initial feature selection method serves as a way to prune the search space for QbE-STD for later re-ranking. Results are demonstrated for the MediaEval2012 Spoken Web Search database. The performance after re-ranking the pruned results are on par or better than the standard results returned by the DTW technique.
Açık Mekanlardaki Oturma Donatılarının ve Yerlerinin Tasarımına İlişkin Faktörler

Kentsel acik alanlarda gerceklesen sosyal hayatin kent yasamina ve kentlilere katkisi yasam kalitesini dogrudan etkilemektedir. Kentsel acik mekanlarin toplum olma duygusunu gelistirmek, sosyallesmeyi tesvik etmek, kimligin gelisimine katkida bulunmak, demokratik disavurumlara sahne olusturmak, gecmisten gunumuze surekliligi saglamak vb. gibi pek cok faydalar sagladigi belirtilmistir. Arastirmalar bekleme, oturma, yaslanma, dinlenme gibi duragan etkinliklerin varliginin sosyallesmeye yonelik etkinliklere zemin hazirladigini, bu etkinliklerin varliginin bir alanin kullanimini ve canliligini ortaya koydugunu belirtir. Ozellikle oturma ve beraberinde gerceklesen etkinlikler kentsel kamusal alanlarin basarisinda onemlidir. Cunku ancak oturmaya iliskin firsatlarin oldugu yerlerde insanlarin belirli bir sureyle durmasi ve diger etkinliklere katilmasi mumkun olur. Sosyal hayatin olusumunda bu denli onemli olan oturma yerlerinin tasarimi nasil olmalidir? Bu calismada kentsel acik mekanlardaki oturma yerlerinin tasarimina iliskin hususlar detaylica ele alinmis, farkli acilardan tartisilmis ve mevcut literaturle orneklendirilmistir. Oturma yerlerinin tasarimina yonelik olarak davranissal/islevsel, konfor ve algisal/psikolojik basliklari altinda cok sayida faktor tartisilmistir. Sonuc olarak sosyallesmeyi tesvik edecek oturma yerlerinin tasariminin cok sayida faktorun degerlendirilmesi ve goz onunde bulundurulmasini gerektirdigi ortaya koyulmustur.
THE EFFECTS OF PEDAL RATES ON PEDAL REACTION FORCES DURING ELLIPTICAL EXERCISE

Despite the growing popularity in recent years of elliptical exercise (EE), little is known regarding the loadings applied to the body during EE. Since overloading to the body may lead to early fatigue of the muscles and increase the incidence of overuse injuries, such information is necessary for safe use of the elliptical trainer (ET) as a fitness tool. The current study aimed to determine the typical patterns and loading rates of the measured pedal reaction forces (PRF), and to quantify their differences from those during level walking, and the effects of pedaling rate. Fifteen male adults performed level walking and EE while 3D marker data, right PRFs and ground reaction forces (GRF) were measured. The parameters of the ET were set for two different pedal rates: 50 rpm and 70 rpm. For each pedal rate, the parameters were set to match the variables measured during level walking, with a mean step length of 55% leg length and no workload. During early stance the vertical PRF was smaller than the GRF, while the medial and posterior PRF were greater. PRFs also occurred during swing. Loading rates around heelstrike during EE were all smaller than those during walking. The medial, anterior and posterior PRF, as well as the medial and vertial loading rates increased with increasing pedal rates. The basic force patterns of EE and the effects of pedal rate were established in order to determine the true potential for such instrumentation in locomotion analysis. The results will be helpful for future related studies.
A test of fundamental questions in mimicry theory using long-term datasets

© 2015 The Linnean Society of London. Since the phenomenon of mimicry was first described by Bates in 1862 it has become one of the foundational examples of adaptive evolution. Numerous subcategories of mimicry and dozens of hypotheses pertaining to its evolution and maintenance have been proposed. Many of these hypotheses, however, are difficult to test in experimental settings, and data from natural observations are often inadequate. Here we use data from a long-term survey of butterfly presence and abundance to test several hypotheses pertaining to Batesian and female-limited polymorphic mimicry (FPM; a special case of Batesian mimicry). We found strong evidence that models outnumber mimics in both mimicry systems, but no evidence for an increase in relative abundance of FPM mimics to their Batesian counterparts. Tests of the early-emergence/model first hypothesis showed strong evidence that the Batesian mimic routinely emerges after the model, while emergence timing in the FPM system was site specific, suggesting that other ecological factors are at play. These results demonstrate the importance of long-term field observations for testing evolutionary and ecological hypotheses.
O (10 )M ☉ primordial black holes and string axion dark matter

LIGO-Virgo collaboration has found black holes as heavy as M∼30M⊙ through the detections of the gravitational waves emitted during their mergers. Primordial black holes (PBHs) produced by inflation could be an origin of such BHs. While it is tempting to presume that these PBHs constitute all dark matter (DM), there exist a number of constraints for PBHs with O(10)M⊙ which contradict with the idea of PBHs as all DM. Also, it is known that weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) that is a common DM candidate is almost impossible to coexist with PBHs. These observations motivate us to pursue another candidate of DM. In this paper, we assume that the string axion solving the strong CP problem makes up all DM, and discuss the coexistence of string axion DM and inflationary PBHs for LIGO events.
Application of Box-Behnken Design in Optimization of Glucose Production from Oil Palm Empty Fruit Bunch Cellulose

Oil palm empty fruit bunch fiber (OPEFB) is a lignocellulosic waste from palm oil mills. It contains mainly cellulose from which glucose can be derived to serve as raw materials for valuable chemicals such as succinic acid. A three-level Box-Behnken design combined with the canonical and ridge analysis was employed to optimize the process parameters for glucose production from OPEFB cellulose using enzymatic hydrolysis. Organosolv pretreatment was used to extract cellulose from OPEFB using ethanol and water as the solvents. The extracted cellulose was characterized by thermogravimetric analysis, FTIR spectroscopy, and field emission scanning electron microscopy. Hydrolysis parameters including amount of enzyme, amount of cellulose, and reaction time were investigated. The experimental results were fitted with a second-order polynomial equation by a multiple regression analysis and found that more than 97% of the variations could be predicted by the models. Using the ridge analysis, the optimal conditions reaction time found for the production of glucose was 76 hours and 30 min, whereas the optimum amount of enzyme and cellulose was 0.5 mL and 0.9 g, respectively. Under these optimal conditions, the corresponding response value predicted for glucose concentration was 169.34 g/L, which was confirmed by validation experiments.
Marzano Taksonomisi’ne Göre İlkokul Programlarındaki Kazanımların Değerlendirilmesi: Bir Durum Çalışması

Bu arastirmanin amaci, ilkokul programlarindaki kazanimlarin Marzano’nun bilissel alan siniflamasindan yararlanarak bilissel beceri basamaklari acisindan siniflandirip degerlendirmek ve programlarin ust duzey bilissel becerilerin gelisimine katki saglama potansiyeline sahip olup olmadigini ortaya koymaktir. Betimsel bir nitelik tasiyan bu arastirmada verilerinin toplanmasi, cozumlenmesi ve yorumlanmasinda nitel arastirma yonteminden durum calismasi deseni kullanilmistir. Arastirma verilerinin toplanmasinda nitel veri toplama tekniklerinden biri olan dokuman analizinden yararlanilmistir. Calismada dokuman analizi kapsaminda ilkokul Matematik, Turkce, Sosyal Bilgiler, Fen ve Teknoloji Ogretim Programlari incelenmistir. Ilkokul 4.Sinif Matematik Ogretim Programinda 84, Turkce Ogretim Programinda 241; Fen ve Teknoloji Ogretim Programinda 177 ve Sosyal Bilgiler Ogretim Programinda 46 kazanim olmak uzere toplam 548 kazanim degerlendirilmistir. Arastirma sonucunda programlara bir butun olarak bakildiginda kazanimlarin buyuk cogunlugunun bilissel sistemde yer aldigi, bilissel farkindalik ve bireysel sistemde yer alan kazanim sayisinin oldukca yetersiz oldugu ortaya cikmistir.
ADOPTION STUDIES ON PSYCHIATRIC ILLNESS

Adoption studies on psychiatric illness. Epidemiological, environmental, and genetic aspects. Anne-Liis von Knorring, Department of Child and Youth Psychiatry, University of Umeå, S-901 85 Umeå, Sweden. The aim of this study is to evaluate the outcome of adoptions and to study the gene-environment influences on psychiatric illness as well as sick-leave patterns. The material consists of 2 966 adopted persons born between 1917 and 1949, their 5 932 adoptive parents and 5 438 identified biological parents. Adopted persons had a higher incidence of personality disorders and substance abuse than non-adopted controls. Adopted men also had an increased incidence of neuroses. Adopted women had an increased sick-leave because of somatic complaints, especially upper respiratory tract infections and abdominal complaints of short duration. Somatiza­ tion i.e. more than 2 sick-leaves/year because of somatic complaint together with nervous complaints was more frequent among adopted women. Women with somatization could be separated into 2 types according to the pattern of sick-leave. Type 1 ("high frequency") had frequent sick-leaves for psychiatric, abdominal and back com­ plaints. They also had a high frequency of alcohol abuse. Type 2 ("diversiform") had more diverse complaints and had fewer sick-leaves because of nervous complaints. High frequency somatizers had biological fathers with teenage onset of criminality and frequent registrations for alcohol abuse. Diversiform somatizers had the same genetic background as adopted men with petty criminality or male limited alcoholism. No specific genetic influences on treated depression or substance abuse were found in this study. However, a non-specific vulnerability of the biological mother influenced on the risk of depression and substance abuse among adopted women. There were some indications that placement in the adoptive home between 6 and 12 months of age was associated with reactive neurotic depression in adult life. Otherwise early negative experiences in term of unstable placements before adoption did not significantly influence on psychiatric illness in adulthood. Affective disorders in the adoptive father were associated with treat­ ment for depressions or substance abuse in the adoptee. Low social status in the part of the adoptive father increased the risk of somati­ zation of both types in the adoptee.
An Overview: Recent Development of Titanium Oxide Nanotubes as Photocatalyst for Dye Degradation

Today, organic dyes are one of the largest groups of pollutants release into environment especially from textile industry. It is highly toxic and hazardous to the living organism; thus, the removal of these dyes prior to discharge into the environment is essential. Varieties of techniques have been employed to degrade organic dyes and heterogeneous photocatalysis involving titanium dioxide (TiO2) appears to be the most promising technology. In recent years, TiO2 nanotubes have attracted much attention due to their high surface area and extraordinary characteristics. This paper presents a critical review of recent achievements in the modification of TiO2 nanotubes for dye degradation. The photocatalytic activity on dye degradation can be further enhanced by doping with cationic or anionic dopant.
Data-Driven Representation Learning with Applications in Gene Expression and Fake News Detection

Data scientists very often find that a central step in their work, is to implement an appropriate transformation restructuring the originally given data into a new and more revealing form. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, data-driven learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. In order to make it possible to apply machine learning to different domains, it is very important to make learning algorithms less dependent on manual feature engineering, so that novel AI based applications could be developed faster. The work in this thesis focuses not only on the mapping from representation to output but also the representation itself by mining hidden patterns from available data. Keeping this in mind, we propose a learning model to alleviate difficulties involved in feature engineering through automation. We develop a learning model, based on regression between feature pairs, that discovers underlying patterns and its variations in the data, by the way features are related to each other and selects a very small number of new features to create a significant improvement in predictive performance. Because this model takes into account the inherent feature structures, we took our next motivating example from bioinformatics. The features in this domain have some natural spatial order (for instance, in the medical domain, genes are often associated with different types of clinical features) and thus incorporating such structure can help select more important features and achieve more accurate classification accuracy. It also provides better readability and interpretability to the models. The final component of the work focuses on the problem of fake news detection. The low cost, easy access and rapid circulation of information over the internet has encouraged more people than ever, to seek out and consume news from online sources or social media rather than traditional news organizations. While the traditional (count-based) feature engineering strategies for textual data are effective methods for extracting features from text, due to the inherent nature of the model being just a bag of unstructured words, we lose additional information like the semantics, structure, sequence and context around nearby words in each text document. This formed as a motivation for us to explore more sophisticated models which can capture this information and give us features which are vector representation of words. Keeping in mind that fake news is intentionally written to mislead readers to believe false information, it can be difficult to detect it, solely based on news content. Therefore, we need to include auxiliary information, such as user social engagements on social media, to help make a
DNA Barcoding and Phylogenetic Relationships of Spodoptera litura and S. exigua (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)

Abstract Spodoptera spp. (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) are highly polyphagous pests that inflict serious damage to a wide spectrum of crops. The ability of Spodoptera spp. to thrive on diverse host plants is an adaptive advantage for their survival in the ecosystem, which is achieved by its high mobility, fecundity and capacity to develop resistance to wide spectrum of chemical insecticides. In this study, we present molecular diversity and phylogenetic relationship of S. litura (Fabricius) and S. exigua (Hübner) inferred from mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase-I (COI). Alignment of the sequences of COI from various life stages of the 2 species of Spodoptera shows that the molecular identification is independent of life stages and polymorphism of the target species. Maximum likelihood analyses of S. litura, S. exigua and S. mauritia (Boisduval) reveal that there exist significant variations among these. Spodoptera exigua showed intraspecific variations with respect to different geographic locations. Present study proves the utility of COI for identification of S. litura and S. exigua irrespective of their life stages, and also draws inferences on the phylogenetic relationships between the 3 pest species.
Object-based Multi-Image Semi-Global Matching - Concept and first results

Semi-Global Matching (SGM) is a widespread algorithm for image matching which is used for very different applications, reaching from real-time applications (e.g. for generating 3D-data for driver assistance systems) to aerial image matching. Originally developed for stereo-image matching, several extensions have been proposed to use more than two images within the matching process (multibaseline matching, multi-view stereo). Most of these extensions still perform the image matching in (rectified) stereo images and combine the pairwise results afterwards to create the final solution. This paper proposes an alternative approach which is suitable for the introduction of an arbitrary number of images into the matching process and utilizes image matching by using non-rectified images within a closed solution. The proposed approach differs from the original SGM method in two major aspects: Firstly, the cost calculation is formulated in object space within a dense voxel raster by using the grey- (or colour-) values of all images instead of pairwise cost calculation in image space. Secondly, the semi-global (path-wise) minimization process is transferred into object space as well, so that the result of semi-global optimization leads to index-maps (instead of disparity maps) which directly indicate the 3D positions of the best matches. The paper provides a detailed description of the approach and it discusses its advantages and disadvantages. Further on, first results and accuracy analysis are presented.
Distribution of gill parasite (Lernaeocera branchialis) infection in Northwest Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) and parasite-induced host mortality: inferences from tagging data

We describe geographic and host size related trends in the prevalence of the gill parasite Lernaeocera branchialis (Copepoda, Pennellidae) infecting Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in coastal Newfoundland and Labrador and assess the effect of parasitism on cod survival in the wild. Using cod-tagging studies conducted between 1962 and 1989, we test three null hypotheses: (1) parasite prevalence in the Northwest Atlantic is latitudinally invariant, (2) infected cod have the same survival probability as parasite-free cod, and (3) parasite prevalence is independent of fish length. The first hypothesis is rejected given a significantly negative relationship between prevalence and latitude. The second hypothesis is rejected in one geographic region where 8% fewer infected cod from northeast Newfoundland were recaptured relative to uninfected cod. This implies that parasitized cod can suffer an 8% differentially higher mortality relative to nonparasitized cod. The third hypothesis is rejected because the proportion of cod infected was generally greatest in the 43n49 cm length-class and decreased significantly with increasing length. Differential survival between infected and uninfected cod within length-classes was not observed. The use of L. branchialis as a population marker warrants caution. The parasite has the potential to affect the recovery of depleted Northwest Atlantic cod stocks in a geographically differential manner. Resume : Nous dOcrivons les tendances dues ‡ des facteurs gOographiques et ‡ la taille de lihUte qui caractOrisent la prOvalence du parasite des branchies Lernaeocera branchialis (Copepoda, Pennellidae), qui infecte la morue franche (Gadus
A demonstration project to test ecological restoration of a pinyon-juniper ecosystem

To test an approach for restoring historical stand densities and increasing plant species diversity of a pinyon-juniper ecosystem, we implemented a demonstration project at two sites (CR and GP) on the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in northern Arizona. Historical records indicated that livestock grazing was intensive on the sites beginning in the late 1800s and continuing through the mid 1900s. Repeat aerial photographs (1940 and 1992) indicated recent increases in stand density and encroachment of trees into formerly open areas. Age distributions indicated that the majority of pinyon trees at both sites were less than 100 years of age and juniper establishment appeared to peak in the late 1800s to early 1900s, although some junipers had establishment dates as early as 1700-1725. Pretreatment understory communities were sparse ( 50% pinyon mortality, which was positively related to tree size and age. The demonstration treatment consisted of thinning small trees (< 25 cm diameter at root collar (DRC)), lopping and scattering thinned trees, and seeding native understory species. Thinning and mortality reduced overstory density from 638 and 832 trees per hectare pretreatment (258 and 337 trees per acre) to 280 and 251 trees per hectare (113 and 102 per acre) posttreatment at CR and GP, respectively. Posttreatment densities were similar to those suggested for the late 1800s by dendrochronological stand reconstructions. Thinning small diameter pinyon increased residual quadratic mean diameter (QMD) at CR and the relative importance of juniper at both sites. Live canopy fuels were reduced by treatment at CR and by thinning plus beetle-related mortality at GP. Although thinning slash was lopped and scattered, woody surface fuels were not significantly different between treated and control units at either site, perhaps due to the small size of thinned trees and the large interspace areas into which slash was scattered. Treatment had no immediate effects on herbaceous cover or species richness, both of which may take more time to develop. Further monitoring will help to clearly evaluate the effectiveness of this treatment for satisfying restoration and conservation goals.