Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multitask Learning of Deep Neural Networks for Low-Resource Speech Recognition

We propose a multitask learning (MTL) approach to improve low-resource automatic speech recognition using deep neural networks (DNNs) without requiring additional language resources. We first demonstrate that the performance of the phone models of a single low-resource language can be improved by training its grapheme models in parallel under the MTL framework. If multiple low-resource languages are trained together, we investigate learning a set of universal phones (UPS) as an additional task again in the MTL framework to improve the performance of the phone models of all the involved languages. In both cases, the heuristic guideline is to select a task that may exploit extra information from the training data of the primary task(s). In the first method, the extra information is the phone-to-grapheme mappings, whereas in the second method, the UPS helps to implicitly map the phones of the multiple languages among each other. In a series of experiments using three low-resource South African languages in the Lwazi corpus, the proposed MTL methods obtain significant word recognition gains when compared with single-task learning (STL) of the corresponding DNNs or ROVER that combines results from several STL-trained DNNs.
Evaluation of the national Cleanyourhands campaign to reduce Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia and Clostridium difficile infection in hospitals in England and Wales by improved hand hygiene: four year, prospective, ecological, interrupted time series study

Objective To evaluate the impact of the Cleanyourhands campaign on rates of hospital procurement of alcohol hand rub and soap, report trends in selected healthcare associated infections, and investigate the association between infections and procurement. Design Prospective, ecological, interrupted time series study from 1 July 2004 to 30 June 2008. Setting 187 acute trusts in England and Wales. Intervention Installation of bedside alcohol hand rub, materials promoting hand hygiene and institutional engagement, regular hand hygiene audits, rolled out nationally from 1 December 2004. Main outcome measures Quarterly (that is, every three months) rates for each trust of hospital procurement of alcohol hand rub and liquid soap; Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia (meticillin resistant (MRSA) and meticillin sensitive (MSSA)) and Clostridium difficile infection for each trust. Associations between procurement and infection rates assessed by mixed effect Poisson regression model (which also accounted for effect of bed occupancy, hospital type, and timing of other national interventions targeting these infections). Results Combined procurement of soap and alcohol hand rub tripled from 21.8 to 59.8 mL per patient bed day; procurement rose in association with each phase of the campaign. Rates fell for MRSA bacteraemia (1.88 to 0.91 cases per 10 000 bed days) and C difficile infection (16.75 to 9.49 cases). MSSA bacteraemia rates did not fall. Increased procurement of soap was independently associated with reduced C difficile infection throughout the study (adjusted incidence rate ratio for 1 mL increase per patient bed day 0.993, 95% confidence interval 0.990 to 0.996; P<0.0001). Increased procurement of alcohol hand rub was independently associated with reduced MRSA bacteraemia, but only in the last four quarters of the study (0.990, 0.985 to 0.995; P<0.0001). Publication of the Health Act 2006 was strongly associated with reduced MRSA bacteraemia (0.86, 0.75 to 0.98; P=0.02) and C difficile infection (0.75, 0.67 to 0.84; P<0.0001). Trust visits by Department of Health improvement teams were also associated with reduced MRSA bacteraemia (0.91, 0.83 to 0.99; P=0.03) and C difficile infection (0.80, 0.71 to 0.90; P=0.01), for at least two quarters after each visit. Conclusions The Cleanyourhands campaign was associated with sustained increases in hospital procurement of alcohol rub and soap, which the results suggest has an important role in reducing rates of some healthcare associated infections. National interventions for infection control undertaken in the context of a high profile political drive can reduce selected healthcare associated infections.
Morphometric characteristics of the primordial to primary follicle transition in the human ovary in relation to age.

BACKGROUND The growth pattern of the smallest ovarian follicles in humans is still incompletely documented. Using follicle hemispheres in thick histological sections, morphometric changes of primordial to primary follicles and possible age-related effects were evaluated. METHODS In ovarian sections from 25 females aged 4-39 years a total of 1122 primordial, transitory or primary follicles were assessed for the diameters of follicles, oocytes and oocyte nuclei and for number of granulosa cells (GCs). RESULTS The number of GCs in primordial, transitory and primary follicles were approximately 30, 50 and 100, respectively. The diameters of primordial follicles and oocytes increased with the woman's age until the mid-30's, after which time they decreased in size. The number of GCs in primordial follicles showed a moderate increase with age, whereas the number of GCs in transitory follicles showed a clear increase with age . The oocyte nucleus diameter (14-23 microm) showed significant linear correlations with the oocyte and follicular diameters and number of GCs in the follicle, while the number of GCs in the whole follicle and in the largest cross-section were closely related to the oocyte diameter. CONCLUSIONS The number of GCs in small follicles is accurately estimated and shows an increase with age, indicating that the starting point of follicular development alters with female age. The age-related changes observed may be linked to the poorer reproductive performance of older women.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND OLDER PEOPLE: TOWARDS A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The concept of social exclusion represents a key theme in current social policy debates. This reflects not only the deepening of social inequalities in Britain over recent decades, but also a growing marginalisation of particular social groups and areas. While poverty and income inequality continue to be important elements of the social exclusion debate, a central concern of this debate refers to loss of access to important life chances, especially those that connect individuals to the mainstream of society. However, policy initiatives on social exclusion have tended, for a combination of economic and political reasons, to focus on groups such as children, young families and the unemployed. Ways in which social exclusion may affect older people have largely been neglected. This paper, arising from a study funded under the ESRC’s Growing Older Programme, seeks to generate a better understanding of the dimensions of social exclusion that are relevant to older people. The paper draws upon initial empirical evidence generated through group discussions with older people living in socially deprived neighbourhoods in three English cities. These discussions addressed issues such as older people’s income and living standards, their family and social networks, community participation, and living environment. The paper discusses the relevance of such factors in relation to social exclusion.
A study on ICT Acceptance Model for a Virtual Team

com Abstract: It is significantly important to select an appropriate ICT for effective communication among members of a virtual team. Based on the "Technology Acceptance Model", this paper adopt the methods of conceptual modeling and empirical study to research ICT adoption model for virtual team, emphasize on the study of ICT applicability through AHP, and then use case study to verify them. This study could be used as a reference in selecting ICT before a virtual team is set up. Additionally, this model could also be used to evaluate the applicability of the adopted ICT for virtual team management.
Implementing Extensible Theorem Provers

(cid:0) The growing application of theorem proving techniques has increased the need for customized theorem provers(cid:9) Powerful provers con(cid:4) tain numerous interacting subsystems(cid:0) each of which requires substantial time and expertise to build(cid:10) constructing new provers from scratch is vir(cid:4) tually prohibitive(cid:9) Plug(cid:4)and(cid:4)play prover frameworks promise an alterna(cid:4) tive in which developers can construct provers by selecting logics(cid:0) reason(cid:4) ing techniques(cid:0) and interfaces(cid:9) Realizing such frameworks cleanly requires specialized software architectures and particular language abstractions(cid:0) even for frameworks supporting only simple interactions between logics(cid:9) This paper explores architectural and linguistic issues in plug(cid:4)and(cid:4)play theorem prover development(cid:9) It re(cid:11)ects our experience creating and us(cid:4) ing such a framework to develop several versions of a research prototype theorem prover(cid:9)
Functional diversity of voltage‐sensing phosphatases in two urodele amphibians

Voltage‐sensing phosphatases (VSPs) share the molecular architecture of the voltage sensor domain (VSD) with voltage‐gated ion channels and the phosphoinositide phosphatase region with the phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN), respectively. VSPs enzymatic activities are regulated by the motions of VSD upon depolarization. The physiological role of these proteins has remained elusive, and insights may be gained by investigating biological variations in different animal species. Urodele amphibians are vertebrates with potent activities of regeneration and also show diverse mechanisms of polyspermy prevention. We cloned cDNAs of VSPs from the testes of two urodeles; Hynobius nebulosus and Cynops pyrrhogaster, and compared their expression and voltage‐dependent activation. Their molecular architecture is highly conserved in both Hynobius VSP (Hn‐VSP) and Cynops VSP (Cp‐VSP), including the positively‐charged arginine residues in the S4 segment of the VSD and the enzymatic active site for substrate binding, yet the C‐terminal C2 domain of Hn‐VSP is significantly shorter than that of Cp‐VSP and other VSP orthologs. RT‐PCR analysis showed that gene expression pattern was distinct between two VSPs. The voltage sensor motions and voltage‐dependent phosphatase activities were investigated electrophysiologically by expression in Xenopus oocytes. Both VSPs showed “sensing” currents, indicating that their voltage sensor domains are functional. The phosphatase activity of Cp‐VSP was found to be voltage dependent, as shown by its ability to regulate the conductance of coexpressed GIRK2 channels, but Hn‐VSP lacked such phosphatase activity due to the truncation of its C2 domain.
Corporate Stagnation: Discussion and Reform Proposal

This Article concentrates on the tendency of the corporate structure to preserve the status quo. This phenomenon is most severe when the status quo is pro-managerial. The increasing gravity of institutional shareholders, vis-a-vis managements' central role in the corporate charter amendment process, is the crucial force that drives this corporate stagnation. Evidently, many frequently used corporate charter provisions that impede the ability to take over a corporation, such as provisions for staggered boards, are subject to the above-mentioned corporate stagnation. While seasoned firms only rarely adopt such charter provisions, firms that previously added the said provisions to their charters do not tend to repeal them. Consequently, this Article advances a new legal standard, the Future Oriented Default, as a possible remedy. The Future Oriented Default pierces the status quo by eliminating current charter provisions that are suspected of being sub-optimal, but nevertheless allows the corporation to deviate, in the future, from the imposed standard. The Future Oriented Default is shown to be superior, in some circumstances, to any other proposal, whether mandatory or enabling. Finally, it is suggested that the Future Oriented Default might play a significant role in mitigating inefficiencies at the Initial Public Offering stage by helping the market to overcome an undesirable standard.
HSP47 Expression by Smooth Muscle Cells Is Increased During Arterial Development and Lesion Formation and Is Inhibited by Fibrillar Collagen

Abstract—HSP47 is a heat-shock protein that interacts with intracellular procollagen. It has been found in fibrous atherosclerotic plaque, but its involvement in acute vascular restructuring is unknown. We analyzed the expression of HSP47 and its regulation in the developing rat aorta and after balloon injury to the adult rat carotid artery. HSP47 was strongly expressed in each layer of the maturing fetal aorta (embryonic day 17 to birth). Expression declined during the first 4 postnatal days but persisted at low abundance into adulthood. HSP47 expression was substantially upregulated in the injured carotid artery, with intense immunostaining in neointimal smooth muscle cells (SMCs). HSP47 expression in SMCs was correlated with the emergence of a less mature phenotype and with expression of type I procollagen. Interestingly, a precipitous decline in HSP47 expression was evident during aortic development and after carotid artery injury, in association with the appearance of collagen fibrils in the local extracellular matrix. Furthermore, type I collagen fibrils, but not collagen monomers, inhibited expression of HSP47 by SMCs. These findings indicate that upregulation of HSP47 is a feature of vascular restructuring, including acute neointimal formation, and that the constituents of the extracellular matrix regulate the duration of expression. This feedback control may be important for self-termination of vascular development and lesion growth.
The JHU-HLTCOE Spoken Web Search System for MediaEval 2012

We present an overview for a truly zero resource query-byexample search system designed for the 2012 MediaEval Spoken Web Search task. Our system is based on the recently proposed randomized acoustic indexing and logarithmictime search (RAILS) framework. The input is merely the raw acoustic observations for the query and search collection, requiring no trained models whatsoever, not even unsupervised ones. Even still the system is capable of search speeds of at least a thousand times faster than real time, and capable of producing competent zero resource performance.
Use of transgenic mice to map cis-acting elements in the intestinal fatty acid binding protein gene (Fabpi) that control its cell lineage- specific and regional patterns of expression along the duodenal-colonic and crypt-villus axes of the gut epithelium

The mouse intestinal epithelium is able to establish and maintain complex lineage-specific, spatial, and temporal patterns of gene expression despite its rapid and continuous renewal. A multipotent stem cell located near the base of each intestinal crypt gives rise to progeny which undergo amplification and allocation to either enterocytic, Paneth cell, goblet cell, or enteroendocrine cell lineages. Differentiation of these four lineages occurs during their geographically ordered migration along the crypt-villus axis. Gut stem cells appear to have a "positional address" which is manifested by differences in the differentiation programs of their lineal descendants along the duodenal-colonic (cephalocaudal) axis. We have used the intestinal fatty acid binding protein gene (Fabpi) as a model to identify cis-acting elements which regulate cell- and region-specific patterns of gene expression in the gut. Nucleotides -1178 to +28 of rat Fabpi direct a pattern of expression of a reporter (human growth hormone [hGH]) which mimics that of mouse Fabpi (a) steady-state levels of hGH mRNA are highest in the distal jejunum of adult transgenic mice and fall progressively toward both the duodenum and the mid-colon; and (b) hGH is confined to the enterocytic lineage and first appears as postmitotic, differentiating cells exit the crypt and migrate to the base of small intestinal villi or their colonic homologs, the surface epithelial cuffs. Nucleotides -103 to +28, which are highly conserved in rat, mouse and human Fabpi, are able to correctly initiate transgene expression in late fetal life, restrict hGH to the enterocytic lineage, and establish an appropriate cephalocaudal gradient of reporter expression. This cephalocaudal gradient is also influenced by cis- acting elements located between nucleotides -1178 and -278, and -277 and -185 that enhance and suppress (respectively) expression in the ileum and colon and by element(s) located upstream of nucleotide -277 that are needed to sustain high levels of hGH production after weaning. Nucleotides -277 to -185 contain part of a domain conserved between the three orthologous Fabpi genes (nucleotides -240 to -159), a 24-bp element (nucleotides -212 to -188) that binds nuclear factors present in colonic but not small intestinal epithelial cells, and a portion of a CCAAT/enhancer binding protein footprint (C/EBP alpha, nucleotides - 188 to -167). Removal of nucleotides -277 to -185 (yielding I-FABP-184 to +28/hGH+3) results in inappropriate expression of hGH in proliferating and nonproliferating epithelial cells located in the mid and upper portions of duodenal, jejunal, ileal, and colonic crypts without affecting the "shape" of the cephalocaudal gradient of transgene expression. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Extraction and Visualization of the Chain of Narrators from Hadiths using Named Entity Recognition and Classification

A Hadith is a report of the deeds or sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Each of these reports were orally transmitted from one person to another till it reached a person who recorded the report along with the chain of transmission. We present a system to automatically extract the chain of narrators from a Hadith through Named Entity Recognition and Classification, and present these transmission chains as a network. In a Hadith, the name of a person may appear as a narrator or as someone who is mentioned in the Hadith. This distinction of names is important as identifying and evaluating the narrators is an important part of Hadith studies. We manually annotated a large Hadith corpus with named entities and used a set of keywords and special verbs to train machine learning algorithms for named entity recognition and classification. The keywords and special verbs identified the context surrounding the tokens labeled as named entities. We compared the performance of different classifiers including generative (Naïve Bayes), and discriminative (K-nearest neighbour and decision tree) and were able to achieve a 90% precision and 82% recall for the named entities. The classifiers were evaluated on a different corpus within the same domain that resulted in an 80% precision and 73% recall. The best classifier was used to label a bigger Hadith corpus and the narrators names thus identified from each Hadith were concatenated to create a chain of narration from the Hadith. These chains were represented as a graph of narrators in the end.
Accurate Ritz wavelengths of parity-forbidden [FeII], [TiII] and [CrII] infrared lines of astrophysical interest

Context: With new astronomical infrared spectrographs the demands of accurate atomic data in the infrared have increased. In this region there is a large amount of parity-forbidden lines, which are of importance in diagnostics of low-density astrophysical plasmas. Aims: We present improved, experimentally determined, energy levels for the lowest even LS terms of Fe ii, Ti ii and Cr ii, along with accurate Ritz wavelengths for parity-forbidden transitions between and within these terms. Methods: Spectra of Fe ii, Ti ii and Cr ii have been produced in a hollow cathode discharge lamp and acquired using high-resolution Fourier Transform (FT) spectrometry. The energy levels have been determined by using observed allowed ultraviolet transitions connecting the even terms with upper odd terms. Ritz wavelengths of parity-forbidden lines have then been determined. Results: Energy levels of the four lowest Fe ii terms (a6D, a4F, a4D and a4P) have been determined, resulting in 97 different parityforbidden transitions with wavelengths between 0.74 and 87 µm. For Ti ii the energy levels of the two lowest terms (a4F and b4F) have been determined, resulting in 24 different parity-forbidden transitions with wavelengths between 8.9 and 130 µm. Also for Cr ii the energy levels of the two lowest terms (a6S and a6D) have been determined, in this case resulting in 12 different parity-forbidden transitions with wavelengths between 0.80 and 140 µm. (Less)
Impact of security education on password change

Users and their passwords are the weakest link of security, because they tend to create passwords that are not strong, easy to remember and contain words that are familiar to them. Users' lack of security consciousness and their behavior can be influenced by security education. Our research explores the effect of password security training on the strength of the passwords chosen by the users. The objective of this paper is to explore possible differences in the quality of passwords between students from different faculties with different foreknowledge and education about passwords and security. In this paper we analyze the passwords of the students from the Faculty of Tourism and compare the results to the ones from the Faculty of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Maribor. We collected the data by means of an online questionnaire, performed among undergraduate and graduate students. Despite our efforts to educate the users about the importance of frequent password change, a large percent of users did not change their passwords following the lectures. The overall conclusion of this preliminary study is that users still lack security knowledge regarding password change and need to be further educated in this direction.
Variable Structure Control of buck converter based on inverse system

In order to increase the precision and simplify the process, a novel control strategy was proposed for the buck converter, which is based on the inverse system method aiming at the nonlinear identity of the mathematic model of the buck converter using the state-space average modeling method, a pseudo-linear model is given based on the inverse system method, then a Variable Structure Controller is designed to meet some performance index in terms of the pseudo-linear system. Through comparing the simulation performance with the method this paper proposed and the exited methods, it shows excellent starting-up response and strong robust to the disturbance of the input voltage and load, and the design process of the controller was simplified for a really application.
Multistatic Micro-Doppler Signature of personnel

For the first time the multistatic Micro-Doppler Signature (mu-DS) of personnel targets has been collected using University College Londonpsilas NetRAD radar system. The data demonstrates that using a multistatic mu-DS is a viable approach to overcoming the problem of self-occlusion, where a target obstructs its own mu-DS, in automatic target recognition. The data analysis is supported by extending the theory of micro-Doppler into the multistatic domain, and a simplified model of human locomotion is developed. These advances lead to a computer simulation of the multistatic personnel mu-DS that is contrasted with the real data.