Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Permeability anisotropy induced by the shear displacement of rough fracture walls

The permeability anisotropy that results from a shear displacement between the complementary self‐affine walls of a rough fracture is investigated. Experiments in which a dyed fluid radially injected into a transparent fracture displaces a transparent one are presented. A clear anisotropy is observed in the presence of shear displacements and allows us to estimate the ratio of the permeabilities for flows parallel and perpendicular to . A simple model which accounts for the development of channels perpendicular to qualitatively explains these results and predicts a permeability decreasing (increasing) linearly with the variance of the aperture field for flow parallel (perpendicular) to the shear displacement. These predictions are then compared to the results of numerical simulations performed using a lattice Boltzmann technique and to the anisotropies measured in displacement experiments.
Linking and anchoring techniques in test equating using the Rasch model

In analyzing computer assisted tests, the comparison between batches of examinees across different time frames is very important. In real testing situations, though great effort has been paid to construct parallel tests with the aim to ensure the fairness of the comparison between different cohorts using different tests, and overlap of test items in these different tests is often seen, an overall comparison is still not operational due to the existence of missing blocks in the data. In the traditional test theory (TTT), the standardization criterion is commonly used for the purpose of comparing the examinees’ achievement. However, the comparison is unarguable only when the examinees are considered from the same population. Using the Rasch model in the Item Response Theory (IRT), this paper presents the Linking and Anchoring techniques for comparing or equating tests. The advantages of these techniques are (1) the requirement that the examinees must be from same population is lifted and thus the comparison of examinee performance can be conducted across different academic levels; (2) the techniques are applicable even when the historic raw data are not available; and (3) the calibration of items using these techniques provides essential and comparable indexing reference for item banking.
The crosslinguistic assessment of foreign language vocabulary learning

ABSTRACT This study examines a task that can be applied in a uniform fashion across different languages to compare levels of vocabulary development in foreign language learning. Experiment I tested native speakers of Russian and German and demonstrated the basic comparability of the subjects' judgments for both words and nonwords. The results for Russian showed an influence of word length, which can be understood in terms of the Orthographical Depth Hypothesis. Experiment 2 applied the same task to learners of Russian and German and found that learners of Russian had achieved a lower level of vocabulary control than learners of German at comparable language exposure levels. This disadvantage for Russian can be attributed to the novelty of the Cyrillic graphemic system, which restricts the accessibility of written language input at early stages. There was a nonlinear increase over time in word sensitivity, which can be attributed to the increasing contribution of lexical plausibility factors at later stages of learning. Moreover, the lexical decision task appeared to be sensitive to inhibitory effects of concurrently studied languages, as well as to decay due to the lack of regular exposure. Together, these results indicate that the lexical decision task can be a useful tool for the assessment and crosslinguistic comparison of lexical development in foreign language learning.
An ultra-compact and low power neuron based on SOI platform

Analog and digital circuit designs have been proposed to mimic the biological neuron in CMOS compatible learning circuits for “brain” like computing. However, the adaptation of such conventional circuit based strategies requires many devices, large areas and hence power consumption. We propose a neuronal device based on the well-investigated impact-ionization based NPN selector on an SOI platform. The neuronal device has a small footprint (225·F2) and low active power (11.5nW/spike) and provides ~10,000x speed-up over biological timescales. In comparison to analog neuron, ultra-high density (>60x improvement) and low power operation (>5x improvement) are demonstrated.
Part-Of-Speech Tagging using Neural network

This paper presents two novel approaches of POS tagging using Neural network for Hindi language and compares them with two other machine learning approaches, HMM and CRF. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time Neural network is used for POS tagging of Hindi language. In this paper, a single-neuro tagger, a Neural network based POS tagger with fixed length of context chosen empirically is presented first. Then, a multineuro tagger which consists of multiple single-neuro taggers with fixed but different lengths of contexts is presented. Multineuro tagger performs tagging by voting on the output of all single-neuro taggers. The experiments carried out are discussed. It is shown that multi-neuro tagger performs as well as the HMM based tagger and the CRF based tagger and it performs slightly better than any of the single neuro tagger with fixed context. It is also shown that training cost of multi-neuro tagger is same as that of single-neuro tagger.
Participants’ Attitudes about the Integration of Developmentally Disabled People at a Center for Adults with Visual Impairments

The study reported in this article explored the responses of individuals who were being served by an agency for adults with visual impairments to the increasing inclusion of people with developmental disabilities in addition to visual impairments in the agency's activities. Qualitative approaches, including observations, interviews, and a focus group, revealed frequent examples of problem-solving, and a survey administered to 24 participants found widely diverse attitudes.
Presurgical planning for tumor resectioning

Since the birth of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—a noninvasive tool able to visualize brain function—now 15 years ago, several clinical applications have emerged. fMRI follows from the neurovascular coupling between neuronal electrical activity and cerebrovascular physiology that leads to three effects that can contribute to the fMRI signal: an increase in the blood flow velocity, in the blood volume and in the blood oxygenation level. The latter effect, gave the technique the name blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) fMRI. One of the major clinical uses is presurgical fMRI in patients with brain abnormalities. The goals of presurgical fMRI are threefold: 1) assessing the risk of neurological deficit that follows a surgical procedure, 2) selecting patients for invasive intraoperative mapping, and 3) guiding of the surgical procedure itself. These are reviewed here. Unfortunately, randomized trials or outcome studies that definitively show benefits to the final outcome of the patient when applying fMRI presurgically have not been performed. Therefore, fMRI has not yet reached the status of clinical acceptance. The final purpose of this article is to define a roadmap of future research and developments in order to tilt pre‐surgical fMRI to the status of clinical validity and acceptance. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Syllable-based Name Transliteration System

This paper describes the name entity transliteration system which we conducted for the "NEWS2009 Machine Transliteration Shared Task" (Li et al 2009). We get the transliteration in Chinese from an English name with three steps. We syllabify the English name into a sequence of syllables by some rules, and generate the most probable Pinyin sequence with the mapping model of English syllables to Pinyin (EP model), then we convert the Pinyin sequence into a Chinese character sequence with the mapping model of Pinyin to characters (PC model). And we get the final Chinese character sequence. Our system achieves an ACC of 0.498 and a Mean F-score of 0.786 in the official evaluation result.
Community-driven research on environmental sources of H. pylori infection in arctic Canada

The role of environmental reservoirs in H. pylori transmission remains uncertain due to technical difficulties in detecting living organisms in sources outside the stomach. Residents of some Canadian Arctic communities worry that contamination of the natural environment is responsible for the high prevalence of H. pylori infection in the region. This analysis aims to estimate associations between exposure to potential environmental sources of biological contamination and prevalence of H. pylori infection in Arctic Canada. Using data from 3 community-driven H. pylori projects in the Northwest and Yukon Territories, we estimated effects of environmental exposures on H. pylori prevalence, using odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) from multilevel logistic regression models to adjust for household and community effects. Investigated exposures include: untreated drinking water; livestock; dogs; cats; mice or mouse droppings in the home; cleaning fish or game. Our analysis did not identify environmental exposures associated clearly with increased H. pylori prevalence, except any exposure to mice or mouse droppings (OR = 4.6, CI = 1.2–18), reported by 11% of participants. Our multilevel models showed H. pylori clustering within households, but environmental exposures accounted for little of this clustering; instead, much of it was accounted for by household composition (especially: having infected household members; number of children). Like the scientific literature on this topic, our results do not clearly implicate or rule out environmental reservoirs of H. pylori; thus, the topic remains a priority for future research. Meanwhile, H. pylori prevention research should seek strategies for reducing direct transmission from person to person.
Valproic acid inhibits glioblastoma multiforme cell growth via paraoxonase 2 expression

We studied the potential mechanisms of valproic acid (VPA) in the treatment of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). Using the human U87, GBM8401, and DBTRG-05MG GBM-derived cell lines, VPA at concentrations of 5 to 20 mM induced G2/M cell cycle arrest and increased the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Stress-related molecules such as paraoxonase 2 (PON2), cyclin B1, cdc2, and Bcl-xL were downregulated, but p27, p21 and Bim were upregulated by VPA treatment. VPA response element on the PON2 promoter was localized at position -400/−1. PON2 protein expression was increased in GBM cells compared with normal brain tissue and there was a negative correlation between the expression of PON2 and Bim. These findings were confirmed by the public Bredel GBM microarray (Gene Expression Omnibus accession: GSE2223) and the Cancer Genome Atlas GBM microarray datasets. Overexpression of PON2 in GBM cells significantly decreased intracellular ROS levels, and PON2 expression was decreased after VPA stimulation compared with controls. Bim expression was significantly induced by VPA in GBM cells with PON2 silencing. These observations were further shown in the subcutaneous GBM8401 cell xenograft of BALB/c nude mice. Our results suggest that VPA reduces PON2 expression in GBM cells, which in turn increases ROS production and induces Bim production that inhibits cancer progression via the PON2–Bim cascade.
Dynamic Power and Sub-Carrier Allocation for OFDMA-Based Wireless Multicast Systems

Dynamic resource allocation is a key technique that can significantly improve the performance of next generation wireless systems under guaranteed QoS to users. Most of the current resource allocation algorithms are, however, limited to unicast traffics. In practice, how to efficiently allocate various resources in multicast wireless systems is not known. In this paper, we shall study dynamic resource allocation for OFDMA-based single-cell multicast systems. Specifically, we shall formulate an optimization problem to maximize the system throughput given a set of available resources (power and sub-carriers). The optimal resource allocation solution is proposed along with a low- complexity algorithm. In two extreme cases, namely, low and high SNR regimes, the low-complexity allocation algorithm is further simplified. Numerical results will show that the system throughput is significantly improved by using our proposed algorithms.
Local Terrain Mapping for Obstacle Avoidance Using Monocular Vision

We present a method for navigation of a small unmanned rotorcraft through an unsurveyed environment consisting of forest and urban canyons. Optical flow measurements obtained from a vision system are fused with measurements of vehicle velocity to compute estimates of range to obstacles. These estimates are used to populate a local occupancy grid which is fixed to the vehicle. This local occupancy grid allows modeling of complex environments and is suitable for use by generic trajectory planners. Results of simulations in a two-dimensional environment using a potential field obstacle avoidance routine are presented.
Offline social identity and online chat partner selection

This study examines whether the impact of offline identities on computer-mediated communication is stable across different social contexts or whether it depends on which identity aspect is salient. Field experiments with 206 teenagers tested the influence of gendered, ethnic, youth and personalized identities on teenagers' chat behaviour and cognitions. The findings show that offline identity varies in its relation to Internet self-efficacy but not chat partner selection. Self-efficacy differed significantly between boys and girls when youth and gender identities were emphasized but not when stressing personal identity. Across conditions, teenagers were most likely to choose chat partners from similar ethnic and opposite sex backgrounds. This partly supports the Social Identification and Deindividuation framework and argues that offline identities impact online behaviour and self-perception but that this effect depends on which identity aspect is activated.
Designing a Self-Organized Approach for Scheduling Bag-of-Tasks

This paper proposes a decentralized and self-organized agent system for dynamically load-balancing tasks arriving in the form of Bags-of-Tasks (BoTs) in large-scale decentralized systems. the approach is inspired by the emergent behavior of the sand pile model, a cellular automaton behaving at the edge of chaos. Depending on the state of the cellular automaton, rather different responses may occur when a new task is assigned to a resource. It may change nothing or generate avalanches that reconfigure the state of the system. the proportion between the abundance of avalanches and their sizes shows a power-law relation, a scale-invariant behavior that does not need to be tuned. That means that large - catastrophic - avalanches are very rare but small ones occur very often. Such a smart and emergent behavior fits well with the idea of non-clairvoyant scheduling, where tasks are load balanced into computing resources trying to maximize the performance but without assuming any knowledge on the tasks features. In order to study the viability of the approach, we have conducted an empirical experimentation which shows that the sand pile is able to find near-optimal schedules by reacting differently to different conditions of workloads and architectures.
Relationship between ivabradine treatment and cardiovascular outcomes in patients with stable coronary artery disease and left ventricular systolic dysfunction with limiting angina: a subgroup analysis of the randomized, controlled BEAUTIFUL trial.

AIMS BEAUTIFUL found no impact of ivabradine on outcomes in patients with stable coronary artery disease (CAD) and left ventricular systolic dysfunction (LVSD). We performed a post hoc analysis of the effect of ivabradine in BEAUTIFUL patients whose limiting symptom at baseline was angina, particularly in terms of coronary outcomes. METHODS AND RESULTS Of the BEAUTIFUL population, 13.8% had limiting angina at baseline (734 ivabradine, 773 placebo); of these, 712 patients had heart rate > or =70 b.p.m. Median duration of follow-up was 18 months. Ivabradine was associated with a 24% reduction in the primary endpoint (cardiovascular mortality or hospitalization for fatal and non-fatal myocardial infarction [MI] or heart failure) (HR, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.58-1.00) and a 42% reduction in hospitalization for MI (HR, 0.58, 95% CI, 0.37-0.92). In patients with heart rate > or =70 b.p.m. , there was a 73% reduction in hospitalization for MI (HR, 0.27, 95% CI, 0.11-0.66) and a 59% reduction in coronary revascularization (HR, 0.41, 95% CI, 0.17-0.99). Ivabradine was safe and well tolerated. CONCLUSION Our analyses raises the possibility that ivabradine may be helpful to reduce major cardiovascular events in patients with stable CAD and LVSD who present with limiting angina. However, a large-scale clinical trial is ongoing, which will formally test this hypothesis.
Fast Lithographic Mask Optimization Considering Process Variation

As nanometer technology advances, conventional optical proximity correction (OPC) that minimizes the edge placement error (EPE) at the nominal process condition alone often leads to poor process windows. To improve the mask printability across various process corners, process-window OPC optimizes EPE for multiple process corners, but often suffers long runtime, due to repeated lithographic simulations. This paper presents an efficient process variation (PV)-aware mask optimization framework, namely PVOPC, to simultaneously minimize EPE and PV band with fast convergence. The PVOPC framework includes EPE-sensitivity-driven dynamic fragmentation, PV-aware EPE modeling, and correction with three new EPE-converging techniques and a systematic subresolution-assisted feature insertion algorithm. Experimental results show that our approach efficiently achieves high-quality EPE and PV band results.
Are Few Bins Enough: Testing Histogram Distributions

A probability distribution over an ordered universe [n]={1,. ,n} is said to be a k-histogram if it can be represented as a piecewise-constant function over at most k contiguous intervals. We study the following question: given samples from an arbitrary distribution D over [n], one must decide whether D is a k-histogram, or is far in L_1 distance from any such succinct representation. We obtain a sample and time-efficient algorithm for this problem, complemented by a nearly-matching information-theoretic lower bound on the number of samples required for this task. Our results significantly improve on the previous state-of-the-art, due to Indyk, Levi, and Rubinfeld 2012) and Canonne, Diakonikolas, Gouleakis, and Rubinfeld (2016).
It’s like being in a little psychological pressure cooker sometimes! A qualitative study of stress and coping in pre-qualification clinical psychology

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the stressors involved in pre-qualification clinical psychology as reported by a sample of the UK trainee clinical psychologists. The main coping strategies reported by the trainees are also explored. Design/methodology/approach One-to-one interviews were conducted with 15 trainee clinical psychologists using qualitative research methods. Themes were established using the main principles of thematic analysis. Findings Three themes were identified that described the pressures involved in applying to the course, the support networks available to trainees, and the commonalities in their personal history, experiences and self-reported personality characteristics. Originality/value It is important to investigate the sources of stress and coping strategies in trainees to help them cope more effectively. The findings of the study are discussed within the context of clinical psychology training.
Stabilization of Linear Systems with Prescribed Transient Bounds Elmar Plischke

The feedback synthesis of linear systems satisfying certain exponential bounds on their transient behavior is studied. We present sufficient conditions ensuring that there exists a state feedback matrix such that the closed loop system satisfies a desired exponential growth bound. Special interest is directed to the case of generating contraction semigroups, which under certain conditions can be characterized by a simple growth condition on the kernel of the adjoint of the input matrix. Finally, bounds using quadratic norms are investigated.
Remote sensing input for regional to global CO 2 flux modelling

The current and future strength of the terrestrial carbon sink has a crucial influence on the expected climate warming on Earth. Usually, Earth Observation (EO) by its very nature focusses on diagnosing the current state of the planet. However, it is possible to use EO products in data assimilation systems to improve not only the diagnosis of the current state, but also the accuracy of future predictions. This contribution reports from an on-going Eurpean Space Agency (ESA) funded study in which the MERIS FAPAR product is assimilated into a terrestrial biosphere model within the global Carbon Cycle Data Assimilation System (CCDAS). Results are presented from a range of selected sites spanning the major biomes of the globe, and show how the inclusion of MERIS land products results in improved accuracy of the site carbon flux estimates. They also show the uncertainty in the predicted carbon sink of those sites for selected climate scenarios until 2039. (Less)
Designing an Evolving Internet TV Program Guide

The system described in this article helps users in compiling personal TV schedules. The system’s goal is to generate the schedules automatically based on user profiles. To tide over the profile’s training period, the system provides the users with additional tools that help in finding the desired information manually or semiautomatically while generating training input for the profile at the same time. This approach results in an evolving system. While the system behaves like a printed TV program guide in the beginning, it develops into a browser/ query tool, offers persistent settings and bookmarks in the next stage and finally allows the users to compile the desired profile.
Expression levels and activation of a PXR variant are directly related to drug resistance in osteosarcoma cell lines

Approximately 30% to 40% of all patients with osteosarcomas ultimately experience recurrence. The study investigated the hypothesis that the resistance of osteosarcoma to chemotherapy may be related to the expression of a pregnane xenobiotic receptor (PXR) variant protein and its role as the major inducer of P450 3A4 in these tumors.
How Safe are Money Market Funds

We examine the risk-taking behavior of money market funds during the financial crisis of 2007--2010. We find that (1) money market funds experienced an unprecedented expansion in their risk-taking opportunities; (2) funds had strong incentives to take on risk because fund inflows were highly responsive to fund yields; (3) funds sponsored by financial intermediaries with more money fund business took on more risk; and (4) funds suffered runs as a result of their risk taking. This evidence suggests that money market funds lack safety because they have strong incentives to take on risk when the opportunity arises and are vulnerable to runs. JEL Codes: G21, G23, E44. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.