Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distilling Sequence-to-Sequence Voice Conversion Models for Streaming Conversion Applications

This paper describes a method for distilling a recurrent-based sequence-to-sequence (S2S) voice conversion (VC) model. Although the performance of recent VCs is becoming higher quality, streaming conversion is still a challenge when considering practical applications. To achieve streaming VC, the conversion model needs a streamable structure, a causal layer rather than a non-causal layer. Motivated by this constraint and recent advances in S2S learning, we apply the teacher-student framework to recurrent-based S2S- VC models. A major challenge is how to minimize degradation due to the use of causal layers which masks future input information. Experimental evaluations show that except for male-to-female speaker conversion, our approach is able to maintain the teacher model's performance in terms of subjective evaluations despite the streamable student model structure. Audio samples can be accessed on http://www.kecl. ntt.co.jp/people/tanaka.ko/projects/dists2svc.
Overview of the Cast Polyolefin Film Extrusion Technology for Multi-Layer Packaging Applications

The review article presents the technology of producing polyolefin-based films by extrusion casting. Due to the wide use of this type of film as packaging for food and other goods, obtaining films with favorable properties is still a challenge for many groups of producers in the plastics market. The feedblock process and multimanifold process are the main methods of producing multi-layer film. In the case of food films, appropriate barrier properties are required, as well as durability and puncture resistance also at low temperatures. On the other hand, in order to properly pack and present products, an appropriate degree of transparency must be maintained. Therefore, processing aids such as anti-slip, anti-block and release agents are commonly used. Other popular modifiers, such as waxes, fatty acid amides and mineral fillers—silica, talc or calcium carbonate–and their use in film extrusion are discussed. The article also presents common production problems and their prevention.
Inheritance of Early and Late Ascochyta Blight Resistance in Wide Crosses of Chickpea

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) is a globally important food legume but its yield is negatively impacted by the fungal pathogen Ascochyta blight (Ascochyta rabiei) causing necrotic lesions leading to plant death. Past studies have found that Ascochyta resistance is polygenic. It is important to find new resistance genes from the wider genepool of chickpeas. This study reports the inheritance of Ascochyta blight resistance of two wide crosses between the cultivar Gokce and wild chickpea accessions of C. reticulatum and C. echinospermum under field conditions in Southern Turkey. Following inoculation, infection damage was scored weekly for six weeks. The families were genotyped for 60 SNPs mapped to the reference genome for quantitative locus (QTL) mapping of resistance. Family lines showed broad resistance score distributions. A late responding QTL on chromosome 7 was identified in the C. reticulatum family and three early responding QTLs on chromosomes 2, 3, and 6 in the C. echinospermum family. Wild alleles mostly showed reduced disease severity, while heterozygous genotypes were most diseased. Interrogation of 200k bp genomic regions of the reference CDC Frontier genome surrounding QTLs identified nine gene candidates involved in disease resistance and cell wall remodeling. This study identifies new candidate chickpea Ascochyta blight resistance QTLs of breeding potential.
From Emergency Remote Teaching to Remote Online Education: Challenges, Benefits and Differences in EFL Setting

Purpose: Emergency distance learning that started in the middle of 2019-2020 education year caused a lot of uncertainties and even chaos in many education settings around the world. However, conditions were different when the 2020-2021 education year started fully online. This descriptive inquiry aims to explore the views, perceptions, and experiences of learners and instructors, who started fully online distance education in the preparatory class of a School of Foreign Languages at a state university and compare and contrast these experiences with the emergency distance education they had in the previous term. Design/Methodology/Approach: The participants of the study included 247 students and 27 instructors who were administered open-ended questions as the data collection tool. Hence, the study utilized qualitative data collection and analysis methods. Findings: The results provided insights about the participants’ experiences from various aspects and showed that both parties were conscious of the benefits and challenges of the online courses. Highlights: Different from emergency remote learning, online classes in 2020-2021 academic year were seemingly organized with better planning, which also contributed to instructors’ and students’ adaptation.
Light Drives and Temperature Modulates: Variation of Phenolic Compounds Profile in Relation to Photosynthesis in Spring Barley

Accumulation and metabolic profile of phenolic compounds (PheCs; serving as UV-screening pigments and antioxidants) as well as carbon fixation rate (An) and plant growth are sensitive to irradiance and temperature. Since these factors are naturally co-acting in the environment, it is worthy to study the combined effects of these environmental factors to assess their possible physiological consequences. We investigated how low and high irradiance in combination with different temperatures modify the metabolic profile of PheCs and expression of genes involved in the antioxidative enzyme and PheCs biosynthesis, in relation to photosynthetic activity and availability of non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) in spring barley seedlings. High irradiance positively affected An, NSC, PheCs content, and antioxidant activity (AOX). High temperature led to decreased An, NSC, and increased dark respiration, whilst low temperature was accompanied by reduction of UV-A shielding but increase of PheCs content and AOX. Besides that, irradiance and temperature caused changes in the metabolic profile of PheCs, particularly alteration in homoorientin/isovitexin derivatives ratio, possibly related to demands on AOX-based protection. Moreover, we also observed changes in the ratio of sinapoyl-/feruloyl- acylated flavonoids, the function of which is not yet known. The data also strongly suggested that the NSC content may support the PheCs production.
Cave-dwellers Diploexochus (Isopoda, Armadillidae): new species and new records of the genus from Brazil

Two new species of Diploexochus are described. Diploexochus spinatus sp. nov. from Lapa do Honorato cave, located in the municipality of Iuiu, and Diploexochus obscurus sp. nov. from Água Escura I cave, located in the municipality of Carinhanha, both in the southwest of Bahia State, northeastern Brazil. Both species are likely to occur in caves due to anthropogenic impacts in the surrounding area (such as deforestation) and/or looking for the stable microclimatic conditions found in the subterranean realm. Additionally, D. echinatus is recorded in a cave in the municipality of Rurópolis, Pará State, northern Brazil. These represent the first records of the genus for subterranean environments.
Detection of extended molecular gas in the disk of the LSB galaxy Malin 2

Aims. Our goal is to see if there is molecular gas extending throughout the optical low surface brightness disk of the galaxy Malin 2. Methods. We used the heterodyne receiver array (HERA) mounted on the IRAM 30 m telecope to make deep observations at the frequency of the CO(2-1) line at nine different positions of Malin 2. With a total observing time of 11 h at a velocity resolution of 11 km s -1 we achieve a sensitivity level of 1 mK. Results. We detect CO(2-1) line emission from Malin 2. The line is detected in four of the nine HERA beams; a fifth beam shows a marginal detection. These results not only confirm that there is molecular gas in the disk of Malin 2, but they also show that it is spread throughout the inner 34 kpc radius as sampled by the observations of the galaxy disk. The mean molecular gas surface density in the disk is 1.1 ± 0.2 M o pc -2 , and the molecular gas mass lies between the limits 4.9 x 10 8 to 8.3 × 10 8 M ⊙ . The observed velocity dispersion of the molecular gas is higher (~13 km s -1 ) than in star-forming galactic disks. This could explain the disk stability and its low star-formation activity.
Electric Power Audit Text Classification With Multi-Grained Pre-Trained Language Model

Electric power audit text classification is one of the important research problem in electric power systems. Recently, kinds of automatic classification methods for these texts based on machine learning or deep learning models have been applied. At present, the development of computing technology makes “pre-training and fine-tuning” the newest paradigm of text classification, which achieves better results than previous fully-supervised models. Based on pre-training theory, domain-related pre-training tasks can enhance the performance of downstream tasks in the specific domain. However, existing pre-training models usually use general corpus for pre-training, and do not use texts related to the field of electric power, especially electric power audit texts. This results in that the model does not learn too much electric-power-related morphology or semantics in the pre-training stage, so that less information can be used in the fine-tuning stage. Based on the research status, in this paper, we propose EPAT-BERT, a BERT-based model pre-trained by two-granularity pre-training tasks: word-level masked language model and entity-level masked language model. These two tasks predict word and entity in electric-power-related texts to learn abundant morphology and semantics about electric power. We then fine-tune EPAT-BERT for electric power audit text classification task. The experimental results show that, compared with fully supervised machine learning models, neural network models, and general pre-trained language models, EPAT-BERT can significantly outperform existing models in a variety of evaluation metrics. Therefore, EPAT-BERT can be further applied to electric power audit text classification. We also conduct ablation studies to prove the effectiveness of each component in EPAT-BERT to further illustrate our motivations.
Baroclinic Instability in Vertically Discrete Systems.

Abstract Two vertically discrete systems, one based on the “Charney-Phillips grid” and the other on the “Lorenz grid,” are compared in view of the quasi-geostrophic potential vorticity equation and baroclinic instability. It is shown that with the Charney-Phillips grid, the standard grid for the quasi-geostrophic system of equations, one can easily maintain important dynamical constraints on quasi-geostrophic flow, such as the conservation of quasi-geostrophic potential vorticity through horizontal advection and resulting integral constraints. With the Lorenz grid, however, in which horizontal velocity and (potential) temperature are carried at same levels, it is not straightforward even to define quasi-geostrophic potential vorticity. Moreover, due to an extra degree of freedom in potential temperature, the Lorenz grid can falsely satisfy the necessary condition for baroclinic instability near the lower and upper boundaries. In fact, eigenvalue solutions of the linear quasi-geostrophic equations show the.
Perbandingan Kinerja Clustered File System pada Cloud Storage menggunakan GlusterFS dan Ceph

Perkembangan teknologi yang cepat menyebabkan kebutuhan penyimpanan data semakin berkembang. Salah satu untuk memperbesar kapasitas penyimpanannya dengan metode Clustered file system. Pada pengujian ini membandingkan kecepatan upload dan download file dan write/read file pada GlusterFS dan Ceph. Pengujian transfer file menggunakan file dengan ukuran 500MB, 10 kali pengujian, dan menggunakan aplikasi teracopy. Dari pengujian maka diperoleh hasil untuk upload file bahwa metode GlusterFS lebih cepat 11,5% daripada Ceph dengan rata-rata upload file GlusterFS lebih tinggi sebesar 3,57MB/s dan CephFS sebesar 3,20MB/s, hasil yang diperoleh untuk download file bahwa metode GlusterFS lebih cepat 11,3% daripada Ceph dengan rata-rata upload file GlusterFS lebih tinggi 4,13MB/s dan CephFS sebesar 3,71MB/s, hasil yang diperoleh untuk write file bahwa metode GlusterFS lebih cepat 106% daripada Ceph dengan perbandingan sebesar 11,34kB/s dan 8,05kB/s, untuk read file bahwa metode GlusterFS lebih cepat 37% daripada Ceph dengan perbandingan sebesar 3,10kB/s dan 2,25kB/s. Dari analisis tersebut bahwa metode GlusterFS lebih baik 100% dengan menggunakan 2 node yang masing-masing memiliki virtual disk yang dapat digabung dan mempercepat performancenya, sedangkan Ceph terbagi 3 node dimana 1 node digunakan sebagai MON yang berisikan penyimpanan metadata dan pool data yang memiliki proses lebih banyak sehingga mengakibatkan turunnya performance pada file system tersebut
Focal points in multiple threshold public goods games: A single-project meta-analysis

This paper is a single-project meta-analysis of four experiments that first model charitable giving as individual contributions to a multiplicity of competing threshold public goods. Given the centrality of the coordination dilemma as the number of recipients increases, we pool 15,936 observations at the individual level for the purpose of identifying the most effective focal points, their mechanics, and their implications for donors’ wealth. We find that competition between public goods implies massive coordination problems that originate from fewer contributions and result in lower profits. In this setting, the most powerful coordination device turns out to be the existence of a single contribution option that stands out on its merits. We also observe an inverted U-shaped trend in the successful provision of public goods, offering evidence for experience as a focal point peculiar to the multiple-public-good framework. The effective focal points do not leverage greater contributions to solve the coordination dilemma, yet they generate higher earnings. Finally, delegation proves to be a sound device for reducing the risk of miscoordination as long as the delegate is formally obliged to pass along a high enough percentage of the transferred resources. We discuss possible implications of our findings.
Enhancing Monte-Carlo Tree Search with Multi-Agent Deep Q-Network in Open Shop Scheduling

Production disruptions, e.g., machine breakdowns, cannot be predicted in any case. Such disruptions lead to a deviation of the planned and optimized production schedule, and the actual production process. Instead of manually re-routing products, an online scheduler can re-route products automatically and maintain the best possible production throughput. To establish such an online scheduler, a framework for combining Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and a multi-agent Deep Q-Network (MADQN) to solve the Open Shop Scheduling Problem (OSSP) is developed. Similar to approaches of using some sort of single-agent to guide the MCTS during the exploration phase, this approach deploys a multi-agent. Although the combination of single agents and MCTS have shown promising results in relatively small environments, applications relying on this approach have a very limited number of use cases in a real production scenario due to the considerable number of machines and products [10]. However, for that particular use case, the multi-agents promise a scalable solution even for large environments [6]. To do so, the problem has to be formulated such that a multi-agent can solve it. In addition to that, a learning framework is presented, and the developed approach is compared to an MCTS and single-agent combination.
Research on Gait Switching Control of Quadruped Robot Based on Dynamic and Static Combination

To improve the adaptability of quadruped robot to different terrain and ensure the posture stability of the robot body during gait switching, it is necessary to plan different gaits for quadruped robot. This paper mainly studies the switching among three different gaits, and a switching control method of quadruped robot gait based on the dynamic and static combination is proposed, which includes intermittent static gait is switched to non-intermittent gait, non-intermittent gait is switched to trot gait. Firstly, this paper takes quadruped robot as the research object, the SolidWorks is used to conduct three-dimensional modeling, and the D-H algorithm is used to deduce the kinematics equation of a single leg. Then, the stability margin theory and the walking gait model of the quadruped robot is analyzed, and the gait switching strategy is formulated and the stability of the switching process is studied. Meanwhile, the important parameters affecting the motion stability of the robot during the switching process are analyzed, and the trajectory of the switching gait is planned by Matlab. In addition, based on Matlab-Adams co-simulation analysis and physical prototype experiment analysis, the simulation and experimental resulted verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed quadruped robot gait switching control strategy based on dynamic and static combination.
Happiness Detected by the Emotion Cognition System Is Associated with Burnout in an Information Technology Products and Services Trading Company

(1) Background: Although many previous studies have found an association between burnout and emotions, none have examined the association between emotions detected by an emotion cognition system and burnout. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the emotions detected by the emotion cognition system and burnout among workers. We hypothesized that burnout survivors are less likely to express their emotions as facial expressions. (2) Methods: One hundred and forty-one workers at an Information Technology (IT) products and services trading company were asked to take facial images for three months when they started and left work and responded to a burnout questionnaire once a month. Microsoft Azure was used to detect their emotions. (3) Results: Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that happiness in Period 1 was significantly and negatively associated with burnout at Time 2. This association was also observed after the various covariates were included. However, burnout at Time 3 was not significantly related to any emotions in Period 1. (4) Conclusions: Happiness, as detected by the emotion cognition system, was associated with burnout immediately afterward.
Dopaminergic regulation of hippocampal plasticity, learning, and memory

The hippocampus is responsible for encoding behavioral episodes into short-term and long-term memory. The circuits that mediate these processes are subject to neuromodulation, which involves regulation of synaptic plasticity and local neuronal excitability. In this review, we present evidence to demonstrate the influence of dopaminergic neuromodulation on hippocampus-dependent memory, and we address the controversy surrounding the source of dopamine innervation. First, we summarize historical and recent retrograde and anterograde anatomical tracing studies of direct dopaminergic projections from the ventral tegmental area and discuss dopamine release from the adrenergic locus coeruleus. Then, we present evidence of dopaminergic modulation of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus. Plasticity mechanisms are examined in brain slices and in recordings from in vivo neuronal populations in freely moving rodents. Finally, we review pharmacological, genetic, and circuitry research that demonstrates the importance of dopamine release for learning and memory tasks while dissociating anatomically distinct populations of direct dopaminergic inputs.
Effects of Bilateral Extracephalic Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on Lower Limb Kinetics in Countermovement Jumps

Objective: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is an effective method for improving sports/exercise performance in humans. However, studies examining the effects of tDCS on jumping performance have reported inconsistent findings, and there is a paucity of studies investigating the effects of tDCS on lower limb energy and kinetics in countermovement jumps (CMJs). Thus, we investigated the effects of tDCS on countermovement jump (CMJ) performance and analysed kinetic variations in the ankle, knee, and hip joints. Methods: In total, 15 healthy young participants randomly received anodal or sham bilateral stimulation of the primary motor cortex (M1). The bilateral tDCS (Bi-tDCS) montage used an intensity of 2 mA for a 20 min monophasic continuous current. Jump height, energy, and lower limb kinetic data in CMJs were collected at pre-stimulation (Pre), post-0 min (Post-0), and post-30 min (Post-30) using a motion capture system and two 3D force plates. Jump height, lower extremity energy, and kinetic variables in CMJs were analysed with two-way repeated-measures ANOVA. Results: (1) Compared to the baseline and sham conditions, the jump height increased except that at Post-30 relative to the sham condition, and the total net energy of lower limbs increased at Post-30 relative to the baseline. (2) Compared to the baseline, the ankle positive energy and net energy decreased in the sham condition; Compared to the baseline and values at Post-0, the maximum ankle torque at Post-30 decreased in both stimulation conditions. (3) The maximum knee power increased compared to the baseline and sham conditions. (4) Regardless of time points, the maximum hip torque in the tDCS condition was higher than it was in the sham condition. Conclusion: Bi-tDCS is an effective method for improving jump height by modulating ankle and knee net energy. The net energy improvement of the lower extremities may be due to variation in the kinetic chain resulting from tDCS-enhanced knee exploration force and maximum hip strength in CMJs. The effects of Bi-tDCS gradually decrease.
Extraction of key geometric errors of a precision cylindrical grinder based on improved Sobol method

In order to enhance the precision of metal rolling production, it is necessary to ensure the grinding accuracy of the cylindrical grinder. Since geometric errors constitute the primary factor that causes machine inaccuracies, the sensitivity analysis is carried out to extract the key geometric errors. The volumetric model of the grinder with 29 geometric errors is constructed by applying the homogeneous transfer matrix (HTM) and multi-body system (MBS) theory. This paper presents an improved Sobol method based on quasi-random set for performing the global sensitivity analysis (GSA). A simulation of error compensation is conducted to verify the analysis results. The key geometric errors extracted will serve as important guides for future error compensation.