Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Morph-based speech retrieval: Indexing methods and evaluations of unsupervised morphological analysis

Speech retrieval enables users to Ⴁnd information in collections of spoken material. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is used to transform the spoken words into text, and information retrieval (IR) methods are used for searching. Traditional ASR systems have a predeႡned vocabulary of words, and any word that is out-of-vocabulary (OOV) can not be recognized. Typically, rare words are excluded, which is problematic for retrieval, because query words are often rare words such as proper names. The limited vocabulary is especially problematic for languages such as Finnish that have a very large number of distinct word forms. In this thesis, morpheme-like subword units are used for speech recognition and retrieval. The subword units, referred to as morphs, are discovered using a data driven method that learns morphological structure from text data. Using this approach, it is possible to recognize any word in speech, even a word that was not in the training data, as a sequence of morphs. A rule-based morphological analyzer could be used to Ⴁnd base forms of the recognized words for indexing. However, the vocabulary of the analyzer is also limited, and recognition errors cause further problems for the analyzer. Instead, in this work, morphs are used as index terms as well. In Finnish speech retrieval experiments, the morph-based approach is compared to using word-based language models in ASR, and to using base forms in retrieval. Also, morphs are compared for story segmentation of speech. The results show that morph-based language models clearly outperform word-based models in retrieval performance. As index terms, using morphs is about as efႡcient as using base forms, but combining the two approaches is better than either alone, especially when there are a high proportion of unseen words in the queries. The effect of unoptimal morph segmentations is reduced by using alternative morph segmentations of query words and by using latent semantic indexing. Even if the morph deemed most likely by the ASR is incorrect, it is possible that the correct one is among the candidates the ASR considers. Utilizing the candidates in retrieval can improve performance. In this thesis, a representation of ASR hypotheses called confusion network is used for extracting alternative recognition results. A rank-based weighting of index terms is proposed, and found to outperform posterior probability based weighting. This thesis also studies evaluation metrics for unsupervised morphological analysis methods. Application evaluations such as speech retrieval are time consuming and cannot be …
The transformation of U.S. unions : voices, visions, and strategies from the grassroots

Addressing the state of the trade unions in the US. Eighteen contributors argue that long-term solutions have to come from the grass roots of the union movement by expansion, militancy and internal democracy. The recruitment and active involvement of management is the way to break the stranglehold of business, union and government elites.
A Theory of Minority and Majority Governments

We develop a theory of the emergence of minority and majority governments in multiparty parliamentary systems using a canonical non-cooperative bargaining model and assuming a policy space of arbitrary finite dimension, any number of political parties, and a general class of preferences over the government agreement space. Only majority governments form in the absence of significant political disagreement. Generically, minority governments form with positive probability when parties represented in parliament are ideologically polarized (or when utility from holding cabinet office is small relative to partisan political disagreement). Rather than being paradoxical, minority governments are a regular equilibrium phenomenon.
A new Fractional Fourier transform based design of a band-pass FIR filter for power feedback in nuclear reactors under noisy environment

A new discrete Fractional Fourier transform based Kaiser-window design technique has been adopted in this paper for the synthesis of a band-pass filter (BPF) in finite impulse response (FIR) form. The filter design is attempted with the aim of efficient power feedback with the measured sensor data, to the regulating system of nuclear reactors. The ill effects of integer and fractional order noise in the online power measurement and feedback have been reduced with the BPF which helps in efficient reactor control.
A Novel Multi- Viewpoint based Similarity Measure for Document Clustering

: Data mining is a process of analyzing data in order to bring about patterns or trends from the data. Many techniques are part of data mining techniques. Other mining techniques such as text mining and web mining also exists. Clustering is one of the most important data mining or text mining algorithm that is used to group similar objects together. In other words, it is used to organize the given objects into some meaningful sub groups that make further analysis on data easier. Clustered groups make search mechanisms easy and reduce the bulk of operations and the computational cost. Clustering methods are classified into data partitioning, hierarchical clustering, data grouping. The aim of this paper is to develop a new method that is used to cluster text documents that have sparse and high dimensional data objects. Like k-means algorithm, the proposed algorithm work faster and provide consistent, high quality performance in the process of clustering text documents. The proposed similarity measure is based on the multi-viewpoint.
Steady-State Equilibrium in a Model of Short-Term Wage-Posting

This paper takes the canonical Burdett-Mortensen model of wage- posting and relaxes the assumption that wages are set once-for-all, instead assuming they can only be committed one period at a time. It derives a closed-form solution for a steady-state Markov Rank-Preserving Equilibrium and shows how this relates to the canonical model and performs some comparative statics on it. By means of example it is shown that a Rank-Preserving Equilibrium may fail to exist and that this non-existence can be a problem for plausible parameter values. The paper discusses how the model can be modified to ensure existence of a Rank-Preserving equilibrium. It is also shown, by means of example, how the opposite, a Rank-Inverting Equilibrium may exist.
Fractionation of human T lymphocytes on wheat germ agglutinin-sepharose

T cells from human peripheral blood was purified by fractionation on columns charged with human immunoglobulin and rabbit anti-human immuno- globulin. When assayed with 125I- or fluorescein isothiocyanate-labeled wheat-germ agglutinin (WGA), a weakly binding and a strongly binding subpopulation could be distinguished. These T-cell subpopulations were fractionated on columns charged with WGA, convalently bound to Sepharose 6MB. The cells responding to the mitogens leukoagglutinin from Phaseolus vulgaris and concanavalin A were enriched in the strongly binding subpopulation (approximately 20% of the T cells) while they were depleted from the weakly binding subpopulation.
W-learning: Competition among selfish Q-learners

W-learning is a self-organising action-selection scheme for systems with multiple parallel goals, such as autonomous mobile robots. It uses ideas drawn from the subsumption architecture for mobile robots (Brooks), implementing them with the Q-learning algorithm from reinforcement learning (Watkins). Brooks explores the idea of multiple sensing-and-acting agents within a single robot, more than one of which is capable of controlling the robot on its own if allowed. I introduce a model where the agents are not only autonomous, but are in fact engaged in direct competition with each other for control of the robot. Interesting robots are ones where no agent achieves total victory, but rather the state-space is fragmented among different agents. Having the agents operate by Q-learning proves to be a way to implement this, leading to a local, incremental algorithm (W-learning) to resolve competition. I present a sketch proof that this algorithm converges when the world is a discrete, finite Markov decision process. For each state, competition is resolved with the most likely winner of the state being the agent that is most likely to suffer the most if it does not win. In this way, W-learning can be viewed as `fair' resolution of competition. In the empirical section, I show how W-learning may be used to define spaces of agent-collections whose action selection is learnt rather than hand-designed. This is the kind of solution-space that may be searched with a genetic algorithm.
Photometric method for the quantification of chlorophylls and their derivatives in complex mixtures: fitting with Gauss-peak spectra.

Accurate quantification of pigments in mixtures is essential in all cases in which separation of pigments by chromatography is impracticable for one reason or another. An example is the analysis of in vivo formation of heavy metal-substituted chlorophylls in heavy metal-stressed plants. We describe here a novel, accurate UV/VIS spectrophotometric method for the quantification of individual chlorophyll derivatives in complex mixtures, which has the potential for universal applicability for mixtures difficult to separate. The method is based on the description of each pigment spectrum by a series of Gaussian peaks. A sample spectrum is then fitted by a linear combination of these "Gauss-peak spectra" including an automatic correction of wavelength inaccuracy and baseline instability of the spectrometer as well as a correction of the widening of absorbance peaks in more concentrated pigment solutions. The automatic correction of peak shifts can also partially correct shifts caused by processes like allomerization. In this paper, we present the Gauss-peak spectra for Mg-chlorophyll a, b, c, pheophytin a, b, c, Cu-chlorophyll a, b, c, and Zn-chlorophyll a in acetone; Mg-chlorophyll a, b, pheophytin a, b, Cu-chlorophyll a, b, allomerized Cu-chlorophyll a, b, and Zn-chlorophyll a, b in cyclohexane; Mg-chlorophyll a, b, pheophytin a, b, and Cu-chlorophyll a, b in diethyl ether.
No photos harmed/growing paths from seed: an exhibition

We report on an exhibition centered around a dialogue between a Computational Creativity researcher presenting artwork generated by a computer program and a classically trained artist taking inspiration from the computational processes. The main purpose of the exhibition was to place software-generated art (where the program takes on some aesthetic and generative responsibilities, rather than acting as a mere tool) in both an art-production context and an art-historical context, by exploring the themes of creative responsibility and the loss of aura surrounding a work of art. A secondary purpose was to highlight the fact that computer generated art can be representational without relying on digital photographs as inputs. We describe certain technical hurdles we overcame in the production of the exhibition and the feedback we gained, in addition to elaborating on how the event and the project as a whole fits into an art-historical context. We conclude with brief details of another exhibition involving art generated by the same software system, where the notion of progression was explored; by describing a planned exhibition, where autonomy and independence in the system will be highlighted; and by providing a partial roadmap for progress towards autonomously creative software in the visual arts.
Capacity of Regular Ad Hoc Networks with Multipacket Reception

In this paper, the effects of multipacket reception (MPR) capability on the capacity of wireless networks with regular structures are analyzed. Under uniform traffic and minimum connectivity, the maximum stable packet generation rate for the MPR Manhattan networks is obtained. For a network of size N , it is shown that the capacity is K1/ √ N , and adding MPR affects the coefficient K1 of a non-MPR network by no more than 1.6 times. For the same network the stability region of the slotted ALOHA random access protocol with MPR is shown to be K2/ √ N , for some constant K2 < K1. For increased connectivity, it is shown that the capacity can be increased further by adding MPR. In the limiting case, in a fully connected network, MPR increases the capacity linearly. These results indicate that minimum connectivity for MPR networks is not necessarily optimal. For non-uniform traffic, MPR can contribute much more to particular nodes which have sink type of traffic, and the dual concept of multipacket transmission (MPT) is very useful for source type of nodes. In other words, MPR and MPT can boost the throughput of the network also by being selectively added to the nodes that bottleneck the performance.
Justice and the American Metropolis

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Thick Injustice Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom I. The Roots of Injustice in the American Metropolis 1.Property-Owning Plutocracy: Inequality and American Localism Stephen Macedo 2.Public Reason and the Just City Loren King 3.Public Space in the Progressive Era Margaret Kohn II. Rethinking Metropolitan Inequality 4.Two Cheers for Very Unequal Incomes: Toward Social Justice in Central Cities Douglas W. Rae 5.Beyond the Equality-Efficiency Tradeoff Clarence N. Stone III. Planning for Justice 6.Redevelopment Planning and Distributive Justice in the American Metropolis Susan S. Fainstein 7.Justice, the Public Sector, and Cities: Relegitimating the Activist State Thad Williamson IV. Justice and Institutions 8.Voting and Justice Gerald Frug 9.The Color of Territory: How Law and Borders Keep America Segregated Richard Thompson Ford 10.Creating Justice for the Poor in the New Metropolis Margaret Weir Contributors Index
Personal information management behavior among postgraduate students of University of Birjand

Personal Information Management (PIM) process consists of four activities; acquisition, organization, maintenance and retrieval. Obviously this process is due to human limitations and expanding scope of personal space of information which has become an exhausting and difficult process. Use of technology and tools related to PIM could facilitate this procedure. This survey study aims to investigate PIM behavior and its four activities among graduate students in the University of Birjand and was performed on the basis of digital environment. Population of this study was all graduate students at the University of Birjand in the 2013-2014 academic year. Self assessment questionnaire was used to collect information. The results show that the overall PEVI and all four activities among graduate students at the University of Birjand were less than estimated desired rate and there were significant differences between PIM in various course studies, also among master's and doctoral students. Computer and laptop was most used tools for storage of personal collection, the most widely used method for organizing based on content and finally the most common method for retrieval of information was based on the explanatory notes.
Commonly perceived order within a category

Lexical ontologies cluster words by categories. Rarely they provide information about the inner relationships between words in a single category, particularly the order relation. We discuss the human perception of order among members of a single semantic category and introduce a novel computational method, Word Sequences, that arranges words by a commonly perceived order. We use proximity-search to acquire properties of order from the English webpages. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified in a preliminary experimental settings against orders provided by human subjects. The method might be applied for enrichment of existing ontologies with order relation, and might be used for planning tasks, recommendation systems and second language acquisition purposes.
Recrystallization of Commercial Carbamazepine Samples—A Strategy to Control Dissolution Variability

Physical properties of commercial carbamazepine (CBZ) samples can significantly influence drug release and thereby jeopardize bioequivalence of the final dosage form. The aim of this study was to reduce variability in commercial CBZ samples by recrystallization. CBZ samples of four different suppliers were recrystallized in ethanol solution containing 1% polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP). CBZ samples were analyzed by disk intrinsic dissolution rate (DIDR), X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Recrystallized CBZ samples showed strongly reduced variability in DIDR compared to the untreated CBZ samples. Moreover, transformation process to CBZ dihydrate was inhibited; no dihydrate crystals were visible on compact surfaces after 8 h intrinsic dissolution measurement. Recrystallized CBZ samples showed no change in polymorphic form, however, particle size and shape was inhomogenous. In binary mixtures with microcrystalline cellulose, recrystallized CBZ samples again showed difference in drug release. This difference was associated with the inhomogenous particle size in the recrystallized CBZ samples. The results show that a controlled grinding step is required after recrystallization. We suggest the recrystallization in presence of 1% PVP followed by a controlled grinding step as a strategy to reduce dissolution variability in commercial CBZ samples.
Fluorescence diffuse optical tomography: A simulation-based study comparing time-resolved and continuous wave reconstructions performances

The present paper is devoted to a comparison between time- resolved fluorescence diffuse optical tomography and continuous wave fluorescence diffuse optical tomography. Both of these techniques aim at reconstructing 3D biodistribution of fluorescent markers embedded in biological tissues. The study is restricted in the time domain to the exploitation of the first three temporal moments of measurements. The temporal benefits in terms of reconstruction have been shown to depend strongly on the optical parameters of the medium investigated as well as the fluorescence lifetime.
Adaptive Statistic Tracking Control Based on Two-Step Neural Networks With Time Delays

This paper presents a new type of control framework for dynamical stochastic systems, called statistic tracking control (STC). The system considered is general and non-Gaussian and the tracking objective is the statistical information of a given target probability density function (pdf), rather than a deterministic signal. The control aims at making the statistical information of the output pdfs to follow those of a target pdf. For such a control framework, a variable structure adaptive tracking control strategy is first established using two-step neural network models. Following the B-spline neural network approximation to the integrated performance function, the concerned problem is transferred into the tracking of given weights. The dynamic neural network (DNN) is employed to identify the unknown nonlinear dynamics between the control input and the weights related to the integrated function. To achieve the required control objective, an adaptive controller based on the proposed DNN is developed so as to track a reference trajectory. Stability analysis for both the identification and tracking errors is developed via the use of Lyapunov stability criterion. Simulations are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.
A synchrotron self-Compton scenario for the very high energy γ-ray emission of the radiogalaxy M 87. Unifying the TeV emission of blazars and other AGNs?

Context. M 87 is the first extragalactic source detected in the TeV range that is not a blazar. With the increasing performances of ground-based y Cerenkov telescopes, we can now probe the variability in the γ-ray flux on small timescales, thus putting strong constraints on the size of the emitting zone. The large scale jet of M 87 is misaligned with respect to the line of sight. A modification of standard emission models of TeV blazars appears necessary to account for the γ-ray observations despite this misalignment. Aims. We explain TeV γ-ray spectra and the fast variability of M 87 by invoking an emission zone close to the central supermassive black hole, which is filled with several plasma blobs moving in the large opening angle of the jet formation zone. Methods. We develop a new multi-blob synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model with emitting blobs set on a cap beyond the Alfven surface in the jet, at a distance of ∼100rg from the central engine to interpret the high energies inferred by new TeV observations. We present an SSC model that is explicitly adapted to dealing with large viewing angles and moderate values of the Lorentz factor inferred from (general relativistic) magnetohydrodynamic models of jet formation. Results. This scenario can account for the recent γ-ray observations of M 87 made by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) telescope array. We find individual blob radii of about 10 14 cm, that is compatible with the variability on timescales of days recently reported by the HESS collaboration and is close to the black hole gravitational radius. Predictions of the very high-energy emission for three other sources with extended optical or X-ray jet that could be misaligned blazars still with moderate beaming are presented for one Seyfert 2 radiogalaxy, namely Cen A, one peculiar BL Lac, PKS 0521−36, and one quasar, 3C 273.
CD46-Independent Binding of Neisserial Type IV Pili and the Major Pilus Adhesin, PilC, to Human Epithelial Cells

ABSTRACT Neisseria gonorrhoeae is a gram-negative bacterial pathogen which infects the human mucosal epithelium. An early critical event in neisserial infection is the type IV pilus-mediated adherence to the host cell. The PilC protein, located on the pilus tip, has earlier been identified as the major pilus adhesin. Previous studies suggested that the cell surface protein CD46 is a pilus receptor for Neisseria. We investigated the role of CD46 in pilus-mediated gonococcal infection of epithelial cells. Differences in binding efficiencies of piliated gonococci as well as purified pilus adhesin PilC2 on human epithelial cell lines did not correlate to the level of surface-expressed CD46. Additionally, no binding of piliated gonococci or PilC2 protein was observed on CD46-transfected CHO and MDCK cells. Furthermore, specific down-regulation of CD46 expression in human epithelial cell lines by RNA interference did not alter the binding efficiency of piliated gonococci or purified PilC2 protein, although other CD46-dependent processes, such as measles virus infection and C3b cleavage, were significantly reduced. These data support the notion that pilus-mediated gonococcal infection of epithelial cells can occur in a CD46-independent manner, thus questioning the function of CD46 as an essential pilus receptor for pathogenic neisseriae.
The Geometry of Resonant Signatures in Debris Disks with Planets

Using simple geometrical arguments, we paint an overview of the variety of resonant structures a single planet with moderate eccentricity (e ≲ 0.6) can create in a dynamically cold, optically thin dust disk. This overview may serve as a key for interpreting images of perturbed debris disks and inferring the dynamical properties of the planets responsible for the perturbations. We compare the resonant geometries found in the solar system dust cloud with observations of dust clouds around Vega, ϵ Eridani, and Fomalhaut.