Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chapter 9. There is no place for markedness in biologically-informed phonology

In the study of language from a biological perspective, doing away with traditional notions in linguistics has become a necessary procedure. This is a not a goal, but rather a realization: when one starts gathering information from different disciplines, it becomes apparent that many linguistic primitives and constraints just won’t do, and consequently must be abandoned for the purposes of the study of language as a biological capacity. This is not a completely foreign process in the sciences, and it applies to any approach to language or to anything: theories do away with previous notions very frequently, and that is a way in which a theory might depart from a previous one and become, in effect, a new and desirably better one. The degree to which this practice manifests itself—which in the case of a biological theory of language might seem extreme to linguists in general—is usually a function of how much new information is brought into the fold, and the importance conferred to it. By information I mean insights that inform a theory; not necessarily extra information encoded in the theory itself. Indeed, the more one tries to learn about and incorporate insights from other fields that pertain to an object of study, the more likely one is to reframe longheld assumptions, which tend to last for a long time when kept away from outside
Position-aware ad hoc wireless networks for inter-vehicle communications: the Fleetnet project

The Fleetnet project aims at the development of a wireless ad hoc network for inter-vehicle communications. We present the rationale behind the choice of an appropriate radio hardware and the use of a position-based routing approach and outline applications to exploit the Fleetnet platform. In addition, we discuss simulation of vehicle movements as a basis for protocol evaluation as well as aspects of Internet integration of Fleetnet. We state the basic problems together with the intended approach of tackling these challenges, thereby providing an overview of the Fleetnet project
Fine-grained analysis of packet losses in wireless sensor networks

Packet losses in a wireless sensor network represent an indicator of possible attacks to the network. Detecting and reacting to such losses is thus an important component of any comprehensive security solution. However, in order to quickly and automatically react to such a loss, it is important to determine the actual cause of the loss. In a wireless sensor network, packet losses can result from attacks affecting the nodes or the wireless links connecting the nodes. Failure to identify the actual attack can undermine the efficacy of the attack responses. We thus need approaches to correctly identify the cause of packet losses. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing and building a fine-grained analysis (FGA) tool that investigates the causes of packet losses and reports the most likely cause of these losses. Our tool uses parameters, e.g. RSSI and LQI, present within every received packet to profile the links between nodes and their corresponding neighborhood. Through real-world experiments, we have validated our approach and shown that our tool is able to differentiate between the various attacks that may affect the nodes and the links.
Formas Planas Invariante sob Transformaç ̃ o Afim

Resumo Um objeto visto de diferentes pontos de vista resulta em imagens diferentemente deformadas. O reconhecimento de formas invariante sob transformaç ão afim deve classificar corretamente um objeto, independentemente do ponto de vista. Neste trabalho, propomos novas caracteŕısticas locais e globais invariante sob transformaç ão afim. Estas caracter ı́sticas podem ser usadas para reconhecimento supervisionado ou ñ ao-supervisionado de formas, e para a recuperaç̃ ao e indexaç̃ ao de imagens baseado no contorno da forma. Uma das caracter ı́sticas propostas est á relacionada com a defici ência convexa e as outras s ão extráıdas a partir da matriz déareas. A matriz déareas foi usada por Shen [20] para o casamento por similaridade na recuperaç ão de imagens. Este casamento é realizado entre duas matrizes para determinar a similaridade das formas. Por ém, diferentemente do trabalho de Shen, reduzimos a informaç ão contida na matriz déareas em tr̂ es vetores coluna. Al ém disso, parametrizamos o contorno das formas usando o par âmetro comprimento de arco afim. Isto torna as nossas caracter ı́sticas robustas a parametrizaç ̃ o da forma, enquanto que o trabalho de Shen ñ ao possui esta propriedade. Os resultados experimentais indicam que as nossas caracter ı́sticas podem classificar corretamente at é as formas altamente deformadas e formas ruidosas usando um pequeno conjunto de treinamento.
The probability distribution function of the Lyman α transmitted flux from a sample of Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasars

We present a measurement of the probability distribution function (PDF) of the transmitted flux in the Lyman a (Lya) forest from a sample of 3492 quasars included in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release 3 (SDSS DR3). Our intention is to investigate the sensitivity of the Lya flux PDF as measured from low-resolution and low signal-to-noise ratio data to a number of systematic errors such as uncertainties in the mean flux, continuum and noise estimate. The quasar continuum is described by the superposition of a power law and emission lines. We perform a power-law continuum fitting on a spectrum-by-spectrum basis, and obtain an average continuum slope of α v = 0.59 ± 0.36 in the redshift range 2.5 < z < 3.5. We take into account that the variation in the continuum indices increases the mean flux by 3 and 7 per cent at z = 3 and 2.4, respectively, as compared to the values inferred with a single (mean) continuum slope. We compare our measurements to the PDF obtained with mock lognormal spectra, whose statistical properties have been constrained to match the observed Lya flux PDF and power spectrum of high-resolution data. Using our power-law continuum fitting and the SDSS pipeline noise estimate yields a poor agreement between the observed and mock PDFs. Allowing for a break in the continuum slope and, more importantly, for residual scatter in the continuum level substantially improves the agreement. A decrease of ∼10-15 per cent in the mean quasar continuum with a typical rms variance at the 20 per cent level can account for the data, provided that the noise excess correction is no larger than ≤10 per cent.
Why Do Intermediaries Divert Search?

We analyze the incentives to divert search for an information intermediary who enables buyers (consumers) to search affiliated sellers (stores). We identify two original motives for diverting search (i.e. inducing consumers to search more than they would like): i) trading off higher total consumer traffic for higher revenues per consumer visit; ii) influencing stores’ choices of strategic variables (e.g. pricing) once they have decided to affiliate. We characterize the conditions under which there would be no role for search diversion as a strategic instrument for the intermediary, thereby showing that it occurs even when the contracting space is significantly enriched. We then discuss several applications related to on-line and brick-and-mortar intermediaries.
Multiobjective Optimization Comparison - MOSWO vs MOGSA - for Solving the Job Scheduling Problem in Grid Environments

Scientists often have constraints from their experiments such as deadlines and budgets. For that reason, Job scheduling problem in Grid environments is not only important but also a challenging task. Both requirements - execution time and cost - are conflictive each other because faster resources usually involve higher costs. In this research, we compare two novel multiobjective algorithms from different fields - Complex Networks and Swarm approach - in an attempt to tackle the complex distributed infrastructure of Grid computing. On one hand, Multiobjective Small-World Optimization (MOSWO) is a multiobjective adaptation from algorithms based on the Small-World phenomenon, which is characteristic of complex scale-free networks. On the other hand, a novel swarm algorithm is the Multiobjective Gravitational Search Algorithm (MOGSA) inspired on gravitational attraction. Although both algorithms render good performance, MOGSA dominates in all the cases. Moreover, MOGSA attains improved performance with real schedulers such as the Workload Management System (WMS) from the most used European middleware gLite and the well-known Deadline Budget Constraint (DBC) algorithm from Nimrod-G.
Class Energy Image Analysis for Video Sensor-Based Gait Recognition: A Review

Gait is a unique perceptible biometric feature at larger distances, and the gait representation approach plays a key role in a video sensor-based gait recognition system. Class Energy Image is one of the most important gait representation methods based on appearance, which has received lots of attentions. In this paper, we reviewed the expressions and meanings of various Class Energy Image approaches, and analyzed the information in the Class Energy Images. Furthermore, the effectiveness and robustness of these approaches were compared on the benchmark gait databases. We outlined the research challenges and provided promising future directions for the field. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review that focuses on Class Energy Image. It can provide a useful reference in the literature of video sensor-based gait representation approach.
Vehicle Density Based Forwarding Protocol for Safety Message Broadcast in VANET

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the medium access control (MAC) protocol is of great importance to provide time-critical safety applications. Contemporary multihop broadcast protocols in VANETs usually choose the farthest node in broadcast range as the forwarder to reduce the number of forwarding hops. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that the farthest forwarder may experience large contention delay in case of high vehicle density. We propose an IEEE 802.11-based multihop broadcast protocol VDF to address the issue of emergency message dissemination. To achieve the tradeoff between contention delay and forwarding hops, VDF adaptably chooses the forwarder according to the vehicle density. Simulation results show that, due to its ability to decrease the transmission collisions, the proposed protocol can provide significantly lower broadcast delay.
Monte Carlo Search Algorithm Discovery for Single-Player Games

Much current research in AI and games is being devoted to Monte Carlo search (MCS) algorithms. While the quest for a single unified MCS algorithm that would perform well on all problems is of major interest for AI, practitioners often know in advance the problem they want to solve, and spend plenty of time exploiting this knowledge to customize their MCS algorithm in a problem-driven way. We propose an MCS algorithm discovery scheme to perform this in an automatic and reproducible way. First, we introduce a grammar over MCS algorithms that enables inducing a rich space of candidate algorithms. Afterwards, we search in this space for the algorithm that performs best on average for a given distribution of training problems. We rely on multiarmed bandits to approximately solve this optimization problem. The experiments, generated on three different domains, show that our approach enables discovering algorithms that outperform several well-known MCS algorithms such as upper confidence bounds applied to trees and nested Monte Carlo search. We also show that the discovered algorithms are generally quite robust with respect to changes in the distribution over the training problems.
Prevalence of left ventricular hypertrophy in a hypertensive population.

AIMS This investigation was set up to study the prevalence of left ventricular hypertrophy in a hypertensive population with reference to a normotensive control group. From the general population 3498 men and women aged 35, 45, 55 and 65 years old were invited to a health examination. Participants with blood pressure above 160 mmHg systolic or 95 mmHg diastolic or those taking antihypertensive medication or having done so during the previous 6 months were asked to undergo an echocardiographic examination. Normotensive controls were randomly selected from the same population. Of 552 participants in the final study population, 194 were normotensive controls and 358 were in the hypertensive group. Echocardiographic measurements were made according to the Penn conventions and indexed for body surface. Cut-off values for left ventricular hypertrophy were 134 g.m-2 for males and 102 g.m-2 for women. RESULTS Overall, the prevalence of left ventricular hypertrophy was 14%/20% (men/women) in normotensives and 25%/26% in hypertensives (P < 0.01). After subdivision by age and sex, there was a significant difference in the prevalence of left ventricular hypertrophy between normotensives and hypertensives only in the 65-year-old group (P < 0.02 for males and P < 0.05 for females). CONCLUSIONS The association between blood pressure and left ventricular hypertrophy in the general population is weak. Left ventricular hypertrophy is only significantly more frequent among hypertensives as compared to normotensives in older people.
Predictors of Male Violence in Dating Relationships

ii Predictors of Male Violence in Dating Relationships [ABSTRACT] Dating violence among college students has become a pressing concern. However, to date, the bulk of the research in this area has attempted to discern correlates of marital violence. Little attention has been paid to the isolation of predictors of violence that occurs early in the relationship. This paper demonstrates the utility of several risk factors identified among male college students in predicting dating violence. Factors included are history of abuse in the family of origin, insecure attachment style as measured by parental attachment and girlfriend attachment; attributional style; anger; and depression. Though it is likely that many other factors predict male dating violence, this study aims to isolate those factors which operate within the framework of history of abuse and insecure attachment. Results indicated the following: 1. History of abuse accounts for a substantial portion of the variance in predicting dating violence. 2. The interaction of attachment to family and partner was related to verbal aggression and abuse toward and from the partner. 3. Attributional style did not significantly predict dating violence beyond history of abuse. 4. Depression was not significantly related to dating violence; however, anger was significantly and directly related to verbal aggression and overall abuse from self toward partner. 5. Results were also discussed in terms of the four abuse criteria, including some notable findings regarding partner attachment style and direction of abuse. In addition, implications for treatment and prevention and suggestions for future research were offered. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank each and every member of my committee for his/her active participation in this thesis. Specifically, I would like to thank Ellie for her constant encouragement, Sigrid for her vast knowledge of statistics, and Richard for his continuing patience and insightful observations. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to Cynthia Lease for her constant support and advice regarding this thesis and for so willingly serving as an examiner in my defense. I would also like to thank my family members for their lifelong encouragement of my educational endeavors and their patience each time I falsely proclaimed to them that I no longer wanted to be a student. I only hope their patience lasts through my next degree.
CSIT sharing over finite capacity backhaul for spatial interference alignment

Cellular systems that employ time division duplexing (TDD) transmission are good candidates for implementation of interference alignment (IA) in the downlink since channel reciprocity enables the estimation of the channel state by the base stations (BS) in the uplink phase. However, the interfering BSs need to share their channel estimates via backhaul links of finite capacity. A quantization scheme is proposed which reduces the amount of information exchange (compared to conventional methods) required to achieve IA in such a system. The scaling (with the transmit power) of the number of bits to be exchanged between the BSs that is sufficient to preserve the multiplexing gain of IA is derived1.
Search Space Properties for Learning a Class of Constraint-based Grammars

We discuss a class of constraint-based grammars, Lexicalized Well-Founded Grammars (LWFGs) and present the theoretical underpinnings for learning these grammars from a representative set of positive examples. Given several assumptions, we deﬁne the search space as a complete grammar lattice. In order to prove a learnability theorem, we give a general algorithm through which the top and bottom elements of the complete grammar lattice can be built.
Knowledge Management As A Methodology Towards Intellectual Capital

This paper seeks to serve as a road map for a possible methodology of knowledge management, and of the research exploring it, highlighting main intersections, and the signs pointing ahead in such journey. The research aims eventually at advancing the creation of a coherent integration amongst Knowledge, Knowledge Management, Intellectual Capital, and some of the concepts in between, i.e. Value, Intellectual Property [1]. This paper however, suffices for demonstrating the argument motivating such an effort. It promotes the need for, rather than describes in full, such possible methodology, and highlights main themes afloat so far in the two years of research. Starting by reviewing some of the literature and the concepts, serves to build common grounds (and my argument) towards the questions ‘is knowledge management part of intellectual capital? And if so, how? ’, and attempts to clarify the relationship. The discussion of KM is developed to an array of processes and methods, involving various forms and components of knowledge, identifying inherent tensions in the term and concept. Further tensions are identified in the research as inherent along the whole spectrum of aligned concepts, some tracked to their epistemological roots. The motivation and relevancy are demonstrated through the vision behind KM, as perceived by the author.
Genetic and Metabolomic Dissection of the Ergothioneine and Selenoneine Biosynthetic Pathway in the Fission Yeast, S. pombe, and Construction of an Overproduction System

Ergothioneine is a small, sulfur-containing metabolite (229 Da) synthesized by various species of bacteria and fungi, which can accumulate to millimolar levels in tissues or cells (e.g. erythrocytes) of higher eukaryotes. It is commonly marketed as a dietary supplement due to its proposed protective and antioxidative functions. In this study we report the genes forming the two-step ergothioneine biosynthetic pathway in the fission yeast, Schizosaccharomyces pombe. We identified the first gene, egt1+ (SPBC1604.01), by sequence homology to previously published genes from Neurospora crassa and Mycobacterium smegmatis. We showed, using metabolomic analysis, that the Δegt1 deletion mutant completely lacked ergothioneine and its precursors (trimethyl histidine/hercynine and hercynylcysteine sulfoxide). Since the second step of ergothioneine biosynthesis has not been characterized in eukaryotes, we examined four putative homologs (Nfs1/SPBC21D10.11c, SPAC11D3.10, SPCC777.03c, and SPBC660.12c) of the corresponding mycobacterial enzyme EgtE. Among deletion mutants of these genes, only one (ΔSPBC660.12c, designated Δegt2) showed a substantial decrease in ergothioneine, accompanied by accumulation of its immediate precursor, hercynylcysteine sulfoxide. Ergothioneine-deficient strains exhibited no phenotypic defects during vegetative growth or quiescence. To effectively study the role of ergothioneine, we constructed an egt1+ overexpression system by replacing its native promoter with the nmt1+ promoter, which is inducible in the absence of thiamine. We employed three versions of the nmt1 promoter with increasing strength of expression and confirmed corresponding accumulations of ergothioneine. We quantified the intracellular concentration of ergothioneine in S. pombe (0.3, 157.4, 41.6, and up to 1606.3 µM in vegetative, nitrogen-starved, glucose-starved, and egt1+-overexpressing cells, respectively) and described its gradual accumulation under long-term quiescence. Finally, we demonstrated that the ergothioneine pathway can also synthesize selenoneine, a selenium-containing derivative of ergothioneine, when the culture medium is supplemented with selenium. We further found that selenoneine biosynthesis involves a novel intermediate compound, hercynylselenocysteine.
Cut From the Same Cloth? Comparing Urban District CBAs Within States and Across the United States

There is considerable speculation and some empirical evidence that teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in urban school districts are more restrictive to district administrators than CBAs in other districts. We build on prior work by comparing urban with nonurban CBAs in three states—California, Michigan, and Washington—and, for a set of high-profile provisions, with those in CBAs from 72 of the largest districts in the country outside those states. We find that urban CBAs are more restrictive than nonurban CBAs in all three states, but there is still considerable heterogeneity across districts in overall restrictiveness and in high-profile provisions.
Non-Peaky Signals in Wideband Fading Channels: Achievable Bit Rates and Optimal Bandwidth

In the context of fading channels it is well established that, with a constrained transmit power, the bit rates achievable by signals that are not peaky vanish as the bandwidth grows without bound. Stepping back from the limit, we characterize the highest bit rate achievable by such non-peaky signals and the approximate bandwidth where that apex occurs. As it turns out, the gap between the highest rate achievable without peakedness and the infinite-bandwidth capacity (with unconstrained peakedness) is small for virtually all settings of interest to wireless communications. Thus, although strictly achieving capacity in wideband fading channels does require signal peakedness, bit rates not far from capacity can be achieved with conventional signaling formats that do not exhibit the serious practical drawbacks associated with peakedness. In addition, we show that the asymptotic decay of bit rate in the absence of peakedness usually takes hold at bandwidths so large that wideband fading models are called into question. Rather, ultrawideband models ought to be used.
Learning Probabilistic and Possibilistic Networks : Theory and Applications

Inference networks, probabilistic as well as possibilistic, are popular techniques to make reasoning in complex domains feasible. Since constructing such networks by hand can be tedious and time consuming, a large part of recent research has been devoted to learning them from data. In this paper we review probabilistic and possibilistic networks and discuss the basic ideas used in learning algorithms for these types of networks. With an application in the automotive industry we demonstrate that the considered methods are not only of theoretical importance, but also relevant in practice.