Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Minimum error training of log-linear translation models

Recent work on training of log-linear interpolation models for statistical machine translation reported performance improvements by optimizing parameters with respect to translation quality, rather than to likelihood oriented criteria. This work presents an alternative and more direct training procedure for log-linear interpolation models. In addition, we point out the subtle interaction between log-linear models and the beam search algorithm. Experimental results are reported on two Chinese-English evaluation sets, C-Star 2003 and Nist 2003, by using a statistical phrase-based model derived from Model 4. By optimizing parameters with respect to the BLUE score, performance relative improvements by 9.6% and 2.8% were achieved, respectively.
Perspectives on the use of lakes and ponds as model systems for macroecological research

Macroecology studies large-scale patterns aiming to identify the effects of general ecological processes. Although lakes (and ponds) are particularly suited for macroecological research due to their discrete nature and non geographically-structured variability, the development of this discipline in lentic habitats is comparatively much smaller than for terrestrial environments. This is despite the interest of limnologists for large-scale phenomena, which results in the high level of development of some disciplines such as predictive limnology. Here we discuss how current state-of-the-art in macroecology may benefit from research in lentic habitats at five topics. First, by including an island biogeography analytical framework to incorporate the effects of lake origin and history on lentic biodiversity. Second, by studying local and regional effects on the latitudinal gradients of species richness. Third, by considering lakes and ponds altogether for the study of beta diversity and metacommunity structure, which is already common ground in limnological research. Fourth, by relating species traits with ecosystem structure and functioning; here we consider in particular the potential effects of body size-determined dispersal and competitive exclusion processes on lake-wide trophic organization. And fifth, by incorporating current research in functional (i.e., trait) and phylogenetic diversity to the study of community structure. We finally conclude that lentic habitats can be particularly important for the development of the most functional aspects of macroecology, due to the relative ease of studying the different biotic and abiotic components of the system separately, compared to most terrestrial systems. This can allow teasing apart many of the confounding factors that are characteristic of macroecological research, thus helping the development of future theoretical syntheses.
An Analysis of the Problem of Disappearing Black Educators

There has been a significant decline in the number of minority teachers and principals, particularly blacks. The recent downturn has been so drastic that writers have referred to these groups as "endangered species. " The dwindling black work force can be attributed to a variety of political, economic, demographic, and sociological factors affecting both black teachers and black principals: (1) the decline in the number of college students declaring teacher education majors; (2) the decline in black college students; (3) widening career options for blacks, especially black females; and (4) teacher competency tests. These decreasing numbers and the factors that have contributed to them should be addressed by policymakers, school systems, and teacher educators. Equally important will be the ability of all teachers and principals-black and white-to educate effectively an increasingly multiethnic school population.
A Processor and Cache Online Self-Testing Methodology for OS-Managed Platform

Software-based self-test (SBST) is an effective method to detect operational faults of a processor system. We propose an architectural approach to support high fault-coverage online SBST: Processor Shield, which tackles the difficult-to-test issues raised due to the protection of an operating system. The processor shield, including a software framework and design for testing hardware, creates an online self-testing environment without influencing other processes and on-bus devices even if the SBST fails. We present a case study that demonstrates SBST executions under Linux kernel on an ARMv5-compatible processor system. For CPU testing, the stuck-at fault coverage is over 99% while the transition fault coverage is higher than 93%. For cache control logic testing, the stuck-at fault coverage is over 99% while the transition fault coverage is higher than 95%. For RAM module testing, the fault coverage is nearly 100%. Cache SBSTs finish in a context-switch interval of less than 4 ms while CPU SBST finishes in less than 8 ms for 1-GHz clock. The hardware overhead of the processor shield is only 0.494% of the whole processor area. We also present an SBST-dynamic voltage and frequency scaling application that calibrates the dynamic minimal guardbands and helps achieving lower power consumption and mitigating transistor-aging effect.
Alterations at the Intercalated Disk Associated with the Absence of Muscle Lim Protein

In this study, we investigated cardiomyocyte cytoarchitecture in a mouse model for dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), the muscle LIM protein (MLP) knockout mouse and substantiated several observations in a second DCM model, the tropomodulin-overexpressing transgenic (TOT) mouse. Freshly isolated cardiomyocytes from both strains are characterized by a more irregular shape compared with wild-type cells. Alterations are observed at the intercalated disks, the specialized areas of mechanical coupling between cardiomyocytes, whereas the subcellular organization of contractile proteins in the sarcomeres of MLP knockout mice appears unchanged. Distinct parts of the intercalated disks are affected differently. Components from the adherens junctions are upregulated, desmosomal proteins are unchanged, and gap junction proteins are downregulated. In addition, the expression of N-RAP, a LIM domain– containing protein located at the intercalated disks, is upregulated in MLP knockout as well as in TOT mice. Detailed analysis of intercalated disk composition during postnatal development reveals that an upregulation of N-RAP expression might serve as an early marker for the development of DCM. Altered expression levels of cytoskeletal proteins (either the lack of MLP or an increased expression of tropomodulin) apparently lead to impaired function of the myofibrillar apparatus and to physiological stress that ultimately results in DCM and is accompanied by an altered appearance and composition of the intercalated disks.
Auditory mechanics of the frog Basilar papilla

The anuran ear is frequently used for studying fundamental properties of vertebrate auditory systems. This is due to its unique anatomical features, most prominently the lack of a basilar membrane and the presence of two dedicated acoustic end organs, the basilar papilla and the amphibian papilla. Our current anatomical and functional knowledge implies that three distinct regions can be identified within these two organs. The basilar papilla functions as a single auditory filter. The low-frequency portion of the amphibian papilla is an electrically tuned, tonotopically organized auditory end organ. The high-frequency portion of the amphibian papilla is mechanically tuned and tonotopically organized, and it emits spontaneous otoacoustic emissions. This high-frequency portion of the amphibian papilla shows a remarkable, functional resemblance to the mammalian cochlea.
The Personal/Group Discrimination Discrepancy

An unexpected finding that has surfaced in research on discrimination is that respondents perceive a higher level of discrimination directed at their group as a whole than at themselves as individual members of that group. The present study directly tested this personal/group discrepancy by focusing on two groups of Canadian immigrants who have been the targets of much discrimination, Haitian and South Asian women. Respondents were questioned about their personal and group discrimination on four separate dimensions: race, culture, status as newcomers to Canada, and gender Strong support was found for the generality of the personal/group discrimination discrepancy. Three possible explanations for the discrepancy point to possible avenues for future research: the denial of personal discrimination, the exaggeration of group discrimination, and information-processing biases.
Introducing service-level awareness in the cloud

Managing the resources of a virtualized data-center is a key issue in cloud computing [1]. Existing research mostly assumes that applications are either allocated the required resources or fail [2--15]. Combined with the fact that most cloud applications have dynamic resource requirements [16], this imposes a fundamental limitation to cloud computing: To guarantee on-demand resource allocations, the data-center needs large spare capacity, leading to inefficient resource utilization.
Atopic dermatitis‐mitigating effects of new Lactobacillus strain, Lactobacillus sakei probio 65 isolated from Kimchi

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is an inflammatory skin disease. Probiotics have been reported to modulate immune responses and thus are now being suggested as potential treatments for allergies. In this study, we investigated the inhibitory effects of Lactobacillus sakei probio 65 isolated from Kimchi on artificially inducing AD in NC/Nga mice.
The Cartilage-Bone Interface

Abstract In the knee joint, the purpose of the cartilage-bone interface is to maintain structural integrity of the osteochondral unit during walking, kneeling, pivoting, and jumping–during which tensile, compressive, and shear forces are transmitted from the viscoelastic articular cartilage layer to the much stiffer mineralized end of the long bone. Mature articular cartilage is integrated with subchondral bone through a ~20 to ~250 µm thick layer of calcified cartilage. Inside the calcified cartilage layer, perpendicular chondrocyte-derived collagen type II fibers become structurally cemented to collagen type I osteoid deposited by osteoblasts. The mature mineralization front is delineated by a thin ~5 µm undulating tidemark structure that forms at the base of articular cartilage. Growth plate cartilage is anchored to epiphyseal bone, sometimes via a thin layer of calcified cartilage and tidemark, while the hypertrophic edge does not form a tidemark and undergoes continual vascular invasion and endochondral ossification (EO) until skeletal maturity upon which the growth plates are fully resorbed and replaced by bone. In this review, the formation of the cartilage-bone interface during skeletal development and cartilage repair, and its structure and composition are presented. Animal models and human anatomical studies show that the tidemark is a dynamic structure that forms within a purely collagen type II-positive and collagen type I-negative hyaline cartilage matrix. Cartilage repair strategies that elicit fibrocartilage, a mixture of collagen type I and type II, are predicted to show little tidemark/calcified cartilage regeneration and to develop a less stable repair tissue-bone interface. The tidemark can be regenerated through a bone marrow-driven growth process of EO near the articular surface.
Fast breakpoints: design and implementation

In re-implementing fast breakpoints for stock hardware, I discovered the joys of putting self-modifying code to good use.By "fast breakpoints" I mean inserting transfers of control to change the behavior of a running program. I don't claim to have invented fast breakpoints: I have traced their use back to 1951 [1]. I didn't even put these breakpoints to novel uses. All I did was rediscover how easy it is to take statically compiled code and modify it at runtime to alter the semantics of programs. The most obvious application is to evaluate predicates and expressions for debugging, but other uses are possible.We have designed and implemented a fast breakpoint facility. Breakpoints are usually thought of as a feature of an interactive debugger, in which case the breakpoints need not be particularly fast. In our environment breakpoints are often used for non-interactive information gathering; for example, procedure call count and statement execution count profiling [Swinehart, et al.]. When used non-interactively, breakpoints should be as fast as possible, so as to perturb the execution of the program as little as possible. Even in interactive debuggers, a conditional breakpoint facility would benefit from breakpoints that could transfer to the evaluation of the condition rapidly, and continue expeditiously if the condition were not satisfied. Such conditional breakpoints could be used to check assertions, etc. Program advising could also make use of fast breakpoints [Teitelman]. Examples of advising include tracing, timing, and even animation, all of which should be part of an advanced programming environment.We have ported the Cedar environment from a machine with microcode support for breakpoints [Lampson and Pier] to commercial platforms running C code [Atkinson, et al.]. Most of our ports run under the Unix* operating system, so one choice for implementing breakpoints for Cedar was to use the breakpoint facility provided by that system. The breakpoints provided by the Unix operating system are several orders of magnitude too slow (and also several process switches too complicated) for the applications we have in mind. So we designed a breakpoint system that was fast enough for our purposes.Breakpoints for uni-processors running single threads of control used to be fast and simple to implement. This paper shows that breakpoints can still be fast, even with multiple threads of control on multi-processors. This paper describes problems in the design of a breakpoint package for modern computer architectures and programming styles, and our solutions to them for a particular architecture.
Down‐regulation of bcl‐2 in AML blasts by all‐trans retinoic acid and its relationship to CD34 antigen expression

High levels of expression of the bcl‐2 oncoprotein in acute myeloblastic leukaemia (AML) cells have been associated with low complete remission rates and poor survival. The sensitivity of AML blasts to drugs such as Ara‐C can be increased by the down‐regulation of bcl‐2 expression by antisense oligonucleotides. All‐trans retinoic acid (ATRA) has been reported to increase the sensitivity of AML cell lines to Ara‐C and to induce differentiation in the HL60 promyelocytic cell line, with both effects being accompanied by a decrease in bcl‐2 expression. Using flow cytometry and a monoclonal antibody to bcl‐2, we have investigated the effects of ATRA (1 μM) on bcl‐2 expression in the blast cells of 25 AML patients and the K562 cell line after incubation for 72 or 24 h, respectively. Using Kolmogorov‐Smirnov statistical analysis where a D value of > 0.12 was statistically significant, we found that in 8/25 AML samples and the K562 cells there was a significant decrease in bcl‐2 protein expression after incubation with ATRA (D value range 0.14–0.44). The mean peak fluorescence (MPF) values for the bcl‐2 levels of the ATRA responders (n = 8) was reduced to 35.5 ± 6.9 following incubation with ATRA compared to 47.6 ± 8.2 (mean ± SEM) for control samples incubated in the absence of ATRA (P = 0.014). There was no significant difference between the baseline bcl‐2 molecules of equivalent soluble fluorochrome (MESF) levels in the ATRA responders (48.9 ± 5.7, n = 8) and the non‐responders (41.3 ± 3.9, n = 17) (mean ± SEM) (P = 0.28). The down‐ regulation of bcl‐2 expression by ATRA was particularly associated with CD34‐negative AML and of the eight AML patients’ cells that responded to ATRA by down‐regulating bcl‐2, seven were CD34 negative (P<0.05). Our data suggest that the addition of ATRA to combination chemotherapy would increase the chemosensitivity of some patients with AML, particularly CD34‐negative AML, due to down‐regulation of bcl‐2 expression.
The Importance of Global Studies of the Genetics of Type 2 Diabetes

Genome wide association analyses have revealed large numbers of common variants influencing predisposition to type 2 diabetes and related phenotypes. These studies have predominantly featured European populations, but are now being extended to samples from a wider range of ethnic groups. The transethnic analysis of association data is already providing insights into the genetic, molecular and biological causes of diabetes, and the relevance of such studies will increase as human discovery genetics increasingly moves towards sequencing-based approaches and a focus on low frequency and rare variants.
Weakly supervised structured output learning for semantic segmentation

We address the problem of weakly supervised semantic segmentation. The training images are labeled only by the classes they contain, not by their location in the image. On test images instead, the method must predict a class label for every pixel. Our goal is to enable segmentation algorithms to use multiple visual cues in this weakly supervised setting, analogous to what is achieved by fully supervised methods. However, it is difficult to assess the relative usefulness of different visual cues from weakly supervised training data. We define a parametric family of structured models, were each model weights visual cues in a different way. We propose a Maximum Expected Agreement model selection principle that evaluates the quality of a model from the family without looking at superpixel labels. Searching for the best model is a hard optimization problem, which has no analytic gradient and multiple local optima. We cast it as a Bayesian optimization problem and propose an algorithm based on Gaussian processes to efficiently solve it. Our second contribution is an Extremely Randomized Hashing Forest that represents diverse superpixel features as a sparse binary vector. It enables using appearance models of visual classes that are fast at training and testing and yet accurate. Experiments on the SIFT-flow dataset show a significant improvement over previous weakly supervised methods and even over some fully supervised methods.
Action perception via auditory information: Agent identification and discrimination with complex movement sounds

Action and perception are represented in a common framework. Greater motor experience should therefore lead to improved perception. This has been shown with the help of visual stimuli. Given that rhythm and timing are important factors in movement perception, auditory self-recognition should also be superior to recognition of auditory stimuli produced by others. To test this hypothesis, we examined performance in a discrimination and an identification task with movement sounds produced by participants themselves (motor and auditory experiences), by the partner of the participant within the experimental study (auditory experience), and by strangers (no experience). The results of the discrimination task show that participants could distinguish between identical and different sound pairs independent of the agent. The results of the identification task show that participants could identify their own movement sounds significantly better than strangers' sounds. The coupling of action and perception thus seems detectable via naturally emerging movement sounds (auditory information). Taken together the present study confirms and extends current theories regarding action-perception coupling, by providing evidence that self–other effects occur in the auditory domain using movement sounds. Future research should explore the underlying (neurophysiological) mechanisms that account for the present results.
Space-time block coding for multiple transmit antennas over time-selective fading channels

58 I would like to dedicate this work to my parents Demetrios and Koulla Erotokritou, who have supported me throughout my academic endeavors, without them this may have never been possible. ii 59 Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Xue-Bin Liang for his constant encouragement, guidance and research support throughout my master's studies. His technical advice and suggestions, made this work wonderful learning experience. Shuangqing Wei, for taking time out of their busy schedule and accepting to be part of my committee. I would like to give special thanks to my friend Elena Loizou for her help and support during this difficult time. In addition, I would like to thank my friends here at LSU and back home for all their help, love, and support. Finally, I want to thank my beloved parents, who have always stood behind me regardless of my decisions. They have encouraged me to get my degree and succeed in life more than anyone. I hope the effort that I put to complete this degree will be a new starting point for my professional career that will open many doors to future success.
Automated Tone Transcription

In this paper I report on an investigation into the problem of assigning tones to pitch contours. The proposed model is intended to serve as a tool for phonologists working on instrumentally obtained pitch data from tone languages. Motivation and exemplification for the model is provided by data taken from my fieldwork on Bamileke Dschang (Cameroon). Following recent work by Liberman and others, I provide a parametrised F_0 prediction function P which generates F_0 values from a tone sequence, and I explore the asymptotic behaviour of downstep. Next, I observe that transcribing a sequence X of pitch (i.e. F_0) values amounts to finding a tone sequence T such that P(T) {}~= X. This is a combinatorial optimisation problem, for which two non-deterministic search techniques are provided: a genetic algorithm and a simulated annealing algorithm. Finally, two implementations---one for each technique---are described and then compared using both artificial and real data for sequences of up to 20 tones. These programs can be adapted to other tone languages by adjusting the F_0 prediction function.
Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology

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