Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved corpus-based synthesis of fundamental frequency contours using generation process model

We have been developing corpus-based synthesis of fundamental frequency ( F 0 ) contours for Japanese text-to-speech (TTS) conversion systems. Since, in our method, the synthesis is done under the constraint of F 0 contour generation process model, a rather good quality is still kept even if the prediction process is done incorrectly. Although it was already shown that the synthesized F 0 contours sounded as highly natural as those using heuristic rules arranged by experts, there were occasional cases with low quality depending on sentences to be synthesized. Several features, including a code representing syntactic boundary depth obtainable through an automatic parsing process, were added to input parameters of the statistical methods, and a better prediction was realized. The boundary depth code was shown to be very effective for improving especially phrase component parameter prediction.
Two CDC 25 homologues are differentially expressed during mouse development

The cdc25 gene product is a tyrosine phosphatase that acts as an initiator of M-phase in eukaryotic cell cycles by activating p34cdc2. Here we describe the cloning and characterization of the developmental expression pattern of two mouse cdc25 homologs. Sequence comparison of the mouse genes with human CDC25 genes reveal that they are most likely the mouse homologs of human CDC25A and CDC25B respectively. Mouse cdc25a, which has not been described previously, shares 84% sequence identity with human CDC25A and has a highly conserved phosphatase domain characteristic of all cdc25 genes. A glutathione-S-transferase-cdc25a fusion protein can hydrolyze para-nitrophenylphosphate confirming that cdc25a is a phosphatase. In adult mice, cdc25a transcripts are expressed at high levels in the testis and at lower levels in the ovary, particularly in germ cells; a pattern similar to that of twn, a Drosophila homolog of cdc25. Lower levels of transcript are also observed in kidney, liver, heart and muscle, a transcription pattern that partially overlaps, but is distinct from that of cdc25b. Similarly, in the postimplantation embryo cdc25a transcripts are expressed in a pattern that differs from that of cdc25b. cdc25a expression is observed in most developing embryonic organs while cdc25b expression is more restricted. An extended analysis of cdc25a and cdc25b expression in preimplantation embryos has also been carried out. These studies reveal that cdc25b transcripts are expressed in the one-cell embryo, decline at the two-cell stage and are re-expressed at the four-cell stage, following the switch from maternal to zygotic transcription which mirrors the expression of string, another Drosophila homolog of cdc25. In comparison, cdc25a is not expressed in the preimplantation embryo until the late blastocyst stage of development, correlating with the establishment of a more typical G1 phase in the embryonic cell cycles. Both cdc25a and cdc25b transcripts are expressed at high levels in the inner cell mass and the trophectoderm, which proliferate rapidly prior to implantation. These data suggest the cdc25 genes may have distinct roles in regulating the pattern of cell division during mouse embryogenesis and gametogenesis.
Chronic neural stimulation with thin-film, iridium oxide electrodes

Experiments were conducted to assess the effect of chronic stimulation on the electrical properties of the electrode-tissue system, as measured using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and cyclic voltammetry (CV). Silicon, micromachined probes with multiple iridium oxide stimulating electrodes (400-1600 micron 2) were implanted in guinea pig cortex. A 10-17 day post-operative recovery period was followed by five days of monopolar stimulation, two hours/electrode each day using biphasic, constant current stimulation (5-100 microA, 100 microseconds/phase). EIS and CV data were taken before and after stimulation. The post-stimulation impedance [at mid-range frequencies (100 Hz-100 kHz)] consistently and significantly decreased relative to prestimulation levels. Impedance magnitude increased permanently at low frequencies (< 100 Hz), correlating to a change in the charge storage capacity (the area under a cyclic voltammagram). Impedance magnitude significantly increased during the recovery period, though this increase could be mostly reversed by applying small currents. A mathematical model of the electrode-tissue system impedance was used to analyze in vivo behavior. The data and modeling results shows that applying charge to the electrode can consistently reduce the impedance of the electrode-tissue system. Analysis of explanted probes suggests that the interaction between the tissue and electrode is dependent on whether chronic pulses were applied. It is hypothesized that the interface between the tissue and metal is altered by current pulsing, resulting in a temporary impedance shift.
Modeling conversational styles in Italian by means of overlaps

Conversational styles vary cross-culturally remarkably: communities of speakers – rather than single speakers seem to share turn-taking rules which do not always coincide with those shared by other communities of the same language. These rules are usually responsible for the smoothness of conversational interaction and the readiness of the attainment of communicative goals by conversants. Overlaps constitute a disruptive element in the economy of conversations: however, they show regular patterns which can be used to define conversational styles (Ford and Thompson, 1996). Overlaps constitute a challenge for any system of linguistic representations in that they cannot be treated as a one-dimensional event: in order to take into account the purport of an overlapping stretch of dialogue for the ongoing pragmatics and semantics of discourse, we have devised a new annotation schema which is then fed into the parser and produces a multidimensional linear syntactic constituency representation. This study takes a new tack on the issues raised by overlaps, both in terms of its linguistic representation and its semantic and pragmatic interpretation. It will present work carried out on the 60,000 words Italian Spontaneous Speech Corpus called AVIP, under national project API the Italian version of MapTask, in particular the parser, to produce syntactic structures of overlapped temporally aligned turns. We will also present preliminary data from IPAR, another corpus of spontaneous dialogues run with the Spot Differences protocol. Then it will concentrate on the syntactic, semantic and prosodic aspects related to this debated issue. The paper will argue in favour of a joint and thus temporally aligned representation of overlapping material to capture all linguistic information made available by the local context. This will result in a syntactically branching node we call OVL which contains both the overlapper's and the overlappee's material (linguistic or non-linguistic). An extended classification of the phenomenon has shown that overlaps contribute substantially to the interpretation of the local context rather than the other way around. They also determine the overall conversational style of a given community of speakers with cultural import.
Larger tumor size predicts nodal involvement in patients with follicular thyroid carcinoma

Aims and background Lymph node metastases are rare in patients with follicular thyroid carcinoma, with an average incidence of 5.5% of all cases reported in the literature. In the present study we focused on the search for risk factors predictive of lymph node involvement in patients with follicular thyroid carcinoma to plan the most appropriate management and follow-up. Methods and study design We carried out a cross-sectional study among patients with follicular thyroid carcinoma and lymph node metastasis at diagnosis and patients without lymph node involvement. From January 1998 to April 2008, 930 patients underwent thyroidectomy in our surgical department for a variety of thyroid disorders, 420 (45.2%) of them for a differentiated thyroid carcinoma. The medical records of 55 patients with histological diagnosis of follicular thyroid carcinoma were analyzed. Results Four patients (7.3%) had lymph node metastasis from follicular thyroid carcinoma at presentation in both the lateral and central neck compartments. Mean tumor size was significantly greater for follicular thyroid carcinomas with nodal metastasis (5.1 ± 1.4 cm) than for those without nodal involvement (3.0 ± 1.2 cm, P <0.010). Among factors supposed to influence the presence of nodal metastasis at diagnosis (age, gender, tumor size, multifocality, tumor poorly differentiated, tumor widely invasive, vascular invasion, thyroid capsular invasion, and extra thyroid invasion), tumor size larger than 4.0 cm was the only factor retained in the multivariate statistical model. Conclusions Lymph node dissection must be planned only in the case of large follicular thyroid carcinomas. Since follicular carcinoma is usually diagnosed postoperatively, more attention should be paid to nodal involvement in the tumor re-staging during follow-up of those patients with tumors larger than 4.0 cm in diameter.
Iron chelating agents for treating malaria.

BACKGROUND Mortality from Plasmodium falciparum malaria remains high; death and sequelae occur in even in patients treated with antimalarial drugs. Researchers are exploring the effects of adding treatments to the main antimalarial regimens in an attempt to reduce mortality. Iron chelation is one potential chemotherapeutic adjuvant treatment. Before advocating adjunctive therapy, the effects of iron chelators in improving patient outcomes needs to be examined. OBJECTIVES To assess the effects of iron-chelating agents combined with antimalarial drugs, or iron chelators alone, for treating Plasmodium falciparum malaria in adults and children, in relation to mortality, coma recovery time, parasite clearance, and adverse effects. SEARCH STRATEGY Electronic searches of the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, and EMBASE, using the standard Cochrane search strategy. Bibliographies of retrieved studies were scrutinized in order to identify further relevant trials. Organisations, experts and other individuals in malaria research were contacted for unpublished studies. SELECTION CRITERIA All randomised controlled trials of adults or children with P.falciparum malaria. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Trials were identified and extracted by a single reviewer (HS) and checked by a second (MM). Inclusion criteria were applied, and data were extracted independently by both reviewers. Authors were contacted for missing and additional data. Meta-analysis used Relative Risk (RR) and 95% Confidence Intervals. MAIN RESULTS No evidence of benefit or harm were shown in relation to mortality, but studies were small, and one trial was tending towards more deaths with the intervention when it was stopped. The risk of experiencing persistent seizures was significantly lower with desferrioxamine compared to placebo treatment (RR 0.80, 95% CI 0.67 to 0.95). Many adverse effects were more common in participants treated with desferrioxamine. REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS Trends suggestive of both harm (death) and potential benefit (fewer seizures) are demonstrated in this review. It is not possible to comment on time to event outcomes that include coma recovery or parasitaemia as we are clarifying data with the trialists. Whether to conduct further trials will depend on a judgement about potential benefit.
SOTIS - a self-organizing traffic information system

Traffic and travel information (TTI) systems in use today are based on a centralized structure. Sensors along the roadside monitor traffic density and transmit the results to a central unit where a situation analysis of the global traffic scenario is performed. The resulting traffic information is made available to drivers via broadcast service or alternatively on demand via cellular phone. Within the FleetNet project, a completely different proposal to establish a powerful traffic information system is developed and analyzed, which is based in inter-vehicle communications (IVC). All vehicles are part of a self-organizing traffic information system (SOTIS): each vehicle monitors the locally observed traffic situation by recurrently receiving data packets with detailed information from other vehicles. A traffic situation analysis if performed in each individual vehicle and the result is transferred via wireless data-link to all surrounding vehicles in the local neighborhood. No sensors along the highways, no central units and no local broadcast stations or cellular networks are needed, which minimizes infrastructure costs. The complete system can be easily avoided completely. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SOTIS technique can easily provide detailed information for each vehicle with an individual information range of more than 50 km from the current position with high accuracy and low delay. Even in situations where only a small fraction of all vehicles (e.g. 2%) is equipped with the SOTIS technology, the full functionality of a traffic information system is available.
Suicidality in pediatric patients treated with antidepressant drugs.

CONTEXT There has been concern that widely used antidepressant agents might be associated with an increased risk of suicidal ideation and behavior (suicidality) in pediatric patients. OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between antidepressant drugs and suicidality in pediatric patients participating in randomized, placebo-controlled trials. DATA SOURCES Data were derived from 23 trials conducted in 9 drug company-supported programs evaluating the effectiveness of antidepressants in pediatric patients and 1 multicenter trial (the Treatment for Adolescents With Depression Study) that evaluated fluoxetine hydrochloride. STUDY SELECTION All placebo-controlled trials submitted to the Food and Drug Administration were eligible for inclusion. Evaluable data were derived from 4582 patients in 24 trials. Sixteen trials studied patients with major depressive disorder, and the remaining 8 studied obsessive-compulsive disorder (n = 4), generalized anxiety disorder (n = 2), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (n = 1), and social anxiety disorder (n = 1). Only 20 trials were included in the risk ratio analysis of suicidality because 4 trials had no events in the drug or placebo groups. DATA EXTRACTION Individual patient data were available for all the trials. DATA SYNTHESIS A meta-analysis was conducted to obtain overall suicidality risk estimates for each drug individually, for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in depression trials as a group, and for all evaluable trials combined. There were no completed suicides in any of these trials. The multicenter trial was the only individual trial to show a statistically significant risk ratio (4.62; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.02-20.92). The overall risk ratio for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in depression trials was 1.66 (95% CI, 1.02-2.68) and for all drugs across all indications was 1.95 (95% CI, 1.28-2.98). The overall risk difference for all drugs across all indications was 0.02 (95% CI, 0.01-0.03). CONCLUSION Use of antidepressant drugs in pediatric patients is associated with a modestly increased risk of suicidality.
A Case for Enforcing App-Specific Constraints to Mobile Devices by Using Trust Leases

In certain usage scenarios, mobile devices are required to operate in some constrained manner. For example, when movies are being screened in movie theaters, all devices in the room must be muted. However, typical mobile devices operate in unrestricted mode, allowing users to control their configurations. As a result, it is hard to guarantee that mobile devices operate under certain restrictions. In this paper, we present a security architecture that enables mobile applications to temporarily restrict the functionality of devices. To this end, we introduce a novel abstraction for mobile operating systems (MOS) called trust lease, which enables devices to safely switch between modes. We discuss the design implications that need to be addressed to implement this primitive on modern MOSes.
EffiView: Trigger-Based Monitoring Approach with Low Cost in SDN

With the vigorous development of network applications, typical SDN (Software Defined Networks) such as data centers are gradually carrying more and more complex network traffic. This poses a great challenge for network monitoring — how to realize real-time, high-accuracy capture of traffic changes at low cost. In this paper, we propose a trigger-based monitoring approach called EffiView. This approach provides three ways to monitor flow statistics, including flow-stat triggering, FlowRemoved parsing and active polling. The flow-stat triggering can occur on all multiples of the presupposed flow-stat threshold for each flow entry. The latter two ways are complementary to the flow-stat triggering. FlowRemoved parsing is used to acquire flow statistics from FlowRemoved messages and active polling is conditionally carried out by the controller at the expiration of monitoring period. EffiView achieves low-cost monitoring by combining the three ways efficiently, while ensuring high accuracy and fine granularity. Based on the NetMagic platform, We implement EffiView and evaluate its monitoring performance. The experimental results show that EffiView can reach great advantages over traditional monitoring approaches.
Forearm Vascular Tone and Reactivity During Lumbar Epidural Anesthesia

&NA; BARON J‐F, PAYEN D, CORIAT P, EDOUARD A, VIARS P. Forearm vascular tone and reactivity during lumbar epidural anesthesia. Anesth Analg 67:1065‐70. Forearm vascular tone and sympathetic reactivity were investigated in ten unpremedicated patients during two levels of epidural sensory blockade, neither of which levels was high enough to block cardiac sympathetic pathways. An 8‐MHz pulsed Doppler blood flowmeter was used to determine brachial artery diameter and flow characteristics. Measurements were made before and during sympathetic stimulation induced by a contralateral isometric handgrip. The lower level of sensory blockade (T11) in the absence of sympathetic stimulation was associated with decreases in right atrial pressure, brachial artery diameter (3.9 ± 0.2 vs 4.2 ± 0.2 mm, P < 0.05) and brachial blood flow (42 ± 5 vs 66 ± 7 ml.min−1, p < 0.001), whereas forearm vascular resistance increased significantly (2.2 ± 0.3 vs 1.5 ± 0.2 mm Hg.ml−1.min−1, P < 0.01). Neither heart rate nor mean arterial pressure changed. At the higher level of blockade (T7), right atrial pressure and systemic arterial pressure decreased further without change in heart rate. Brachial artery diameter (3.8 ± 0.2 mm) remained unchanged while brachial blood flow additionally decreased (30 ± 3 ml.min, P < 0.05), and forearm vascular resistances further increased (3.0 ± 0.2 mm Hg.ml−1.min−1, P < 0.01). Changes in heart rate and in mean arterial pressure associated with isometric exercise were similar before and during epidural anesthesia at both levels of epidural blockade. The increase in forearm vascular resistance induced by contralateral exercise was significantly above control levels during the low level of blockade (0.5 ± 0.1 mm Hg.ml−1.min−1) than at control (0.15 ± 0.1 mm Hg.ml−1.min−1) and higher during the high level of blockade (1.9 ± 0.3 mm Hg.ml−1.min−1). These results indicate that forearm vascular tone and sympathetic reactivity are enhanced during lumbar epidural anesthesia. ANESTHETICS, local—bupivacaine. ANESTHETIC TECHNIQUES—epidural. BLOOD PRESSURE, hypotension—baroreceptor reflexes. REFLEXES—baroreceptor; cardiopulmonary receptors; somatic reflexes.
Building ensembles of audio and lyrics features to improve musical genre classification

Digital audio has become an almost ubiquitously spread medium, and for many consumers, digital audio is the major distribution and storage form of music. Numerous on-line music stores account for a growing share of record sales. The widespread adoption of digital audio on home computers and especially mobile devices, and numerous on-line music stores show the size of this market. Handling the ever growing size of both private and commercial collections however becomes increasingly difficult. Computer algorithms that can understand and interpret characteristics of music, and organise and recommend them for and to their users can be of great assistance. Music is an inherently multi-modal type of data, and the lyrics associated with the music are as essential to the reception and the message of a song as is the audio. Album covers are carefully designed by artists to convey a message consistent with the music and image of a band. Music videos, fan sites and other sources of information add to that in a usually coherent manner. In this paper, we focus on exploring the lyrics domain of music, and how this information can be combined with the acoustic domain. We evaluate our approach by means of a common task in music information retrieval, musical genre classification. Advancing over previous work that showed improvements with simple feature fusion, were we successfully demonstrated simple approaches of combining different representations of music, we apply a more sophisticated machine learning technique, ensemble classification. The results show that the approach is superior to the best choice of a single algorithm on a single feature set. Moreover, it also releases the user from making this choice explicitly.
Modest Neuropsychological Deficits Caused by Reduced Noradrenaline Metabolism in Mice Heterozygous for a Mutated Tyrosine Hydroxylase Gene

Tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) is the initial and rate-limiting enzyme for the biosynthesis of catecholamines that are considered to be involved in a variety of neuropsychiatric functions. Here, we report behavioral and neuropsychological deficits in mice carrying a single mutated allele of the TH gene in which TH activity in tissues is reduced to ∼40% of the wild-type activity. In the mice heterozygous for the TH mutation, noradrenaline accumulation in brain regions was moderately decreased to 73–80% of the wild-type value. Measurement of extracellular noradrenaline level in the frontal cortex by the microdialysis technique showed a reduction in high K+-evoked noradrenaline release in the mutants. The mutant mice displayed impairment in the water-finding task associated with latent learning performance. They also exhibited mild impairment in long-term memory formation in three distinct forms of associative learning, including active avoidance, cued fear conditioning, and conditioned taste aversion. These deficits were restored by the drug-induced stimulation of noradrenergic activity. In contrast, the spatial learning and hippocampal long-term potentiation were normal in the mutants. These results provide genetic evidence that the central noradrenaline system plays an important role in memory formation, particularly in the long-term memory of conditioned learning.