Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Assessment of the Perception of Phonetic Ambiguities in 4 and 5 Year Olds

The question of how humans clearly perceive speech, which is anything but clear when analyzed acoustically, has prompted researchers to look at the phenomenon of phonetic ambiguity. In adults, phonetic ambiguity perception has been shown to be aided by the listener using expectations due to the saliency (i.e., familiar­ ity of the ambiguous word or phrase) and to pre-ex? osure (i.e., priming) to the items prior to testing. Priming makes the subject aware of the alternative (i.e., unfa­ miliar or rare) member of a phonetic ambiguity pair. In the present study, thirty-two 4 and 5 year olds were exposed to a tape containing familiar and rare ambiguity m e mbers and control items. One-half of them were primed. Results indicated that there was a strong bene­ ficial effect of priming and saliency. The results of the present study were also compared with a previous adult study; this revealed a great deal of similarity between the two groups, implying 4 and 5 year olds can and do employ the same linguistic cues as adults. Phonetic Ambiguities
Intersection Signal Control Approach Based on PSO and Simulation

This paper applies fuzzy theory and machine learning in the process of intersection signal control. It provides a fuzzy traffic signal control approach based on Particle Swarm Optimization for intersection signal control. Through fuzzy classifying traffic flow in under control intersection and adjacent intersection, this paper puts decision schemes of signal control in different conditions as rule-set into knowledge-database. It applies PSO to improve the rule-sets in traffic signal control process, so the control model has the self-learning ability. After programming the simulation program of this control model and simulating, this paper compares the control effect of this new approach with the traditional fuzzy control method. The result of simulating illustrates that the effect of the model is obviously better than the traditional ones.
Conceptual analysis of military knowledge based on service-ontology

The paper introduce a concept analysis method based on ontology, and applied to the construction of military knowledge. Using the method we establish an ontological structure and concept between the military knowledge and communication, in order to eliminate differences between military knowledge. The conceptual analysis of knowledge can be constructed to the knowledge operability can be realized and knowledge refinement can be achieved. Moreover, the contradictive and redundant knowledge can be found. Knowledge interconnectivity also can check consistency and completeness of knowledge base. According to the characteristics of the military domain knowledge and semantic interoperability methods. The paper puts forward Semantic Tree and Relation Degree, and description logic is given with the mapping ontology language. Finally completed the analysis of the military concept of domain knowledge and reasoning process, also provides the corresponding algorithm.
THE EFFECTS OF AGING ON MULTIPLE POSTURAL MUSCLE CONTROL AND POSTURAL SWAY BEHAVIOR

Episodes of instability and falls in the elderly represent a major public health concern. The lack of scientific information about the effects of age-related changes on neurophysiological mechanisms of postural control has limited the advance in the field of fall prevention and rehabilitation of balance disorders. The overall goal of this dissertation was to investigate the effects of aging on postural control. Considering the progressive non-homogeneous deterioration of aging physiological systems, a series of five experimental studies, with healthy young and healthy nonfaller older adults performing upright stance tasks, explored three main hypotheses: (1) intermuscular coherence analysis is able to detect signs of intermuscular synchronization at lower frequency bands as one of the strategies used by the Central Nervous System to control upright stance; (2) aging is associated with a reorganization of correlated neural inputs controlling postural muscles; and (3) aging is associated with changes in body sway behavior. The first three studies corroborated the use of intermuscular coherence analysis to investigate the formation of correlated neural inputs forming postural muscle synergies during upright stance. The fourth study revealed an age-related reorganization of the distribution and strength of correlated neural inputs to multiple postural muscles. Healthy nonfaller older adults presented stronger levels of synchronization, within 0–10 Hz, for three distinct muscle groups: anterior, posterior, and antagonist muscle groups. The fifth study investigated age-related changes on postural sway using traditional and novel postural indices extracted from the center of pressure coordinates. Although the functional base support is preserved in healthy nonfaller older adults, these seniors revealed a larger, faster, shakier, and more irregular pattern of body sway compared to healthy young adults. In addition, age-related changes on supraspinal mechanisms, spinal reflexes, and intrinsic mechanical properties of muscles and joints involved in postural control were observed by changes in both rambling and trembling components of the postural sway. Findings reported here provide valuable information regarding compensatory mechanisms adopted by healthy nonfaller older adults to control upright stance. Together, these findings suggest an age-related reorganization of correlated neural inputs controlling multiple postural muscles, accompanied by changes in body sway behavior.
Bounded coordinate-descent for biological sequence classification in high dimensional predictor space

We present a framework for discriminative sequence classification where linear classifiers work directly in the explicit high-dimensional predictor space of all subsequences in the training set (as opposed to kernel-induced spaces). This is made feasible by employing a gradient-bounded coordinate-descent algorithm for efficiently selecting discriminative subsequences without having to expand the whole space. Our framework can be applied to a wide range of loss functions, including binomial log-likelihood loss of logistic regression and squared hinge loss of support vector machines. When applied to protein remote homology detection and remote fold recognition, our framework achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art (e.g., kernel support vector machines). In contrast to state-of-the-art sequence classifiers, our models are simply lists of weighted discriminative subsequences and can thus be interpreted and related to the biological problem -- a crucial requirement for the bioinformatics and medical communities.
Chronically elevated endothelin levels reduce pulmonary vascular reactivity to nitric oxide.

UNLABELLED Although local tissue activation of the endothelin (ET) system contributes to the development of pulmonary hypertension, the impact of isolated chronic plasma hyperendothelinemia on the pulmonary circulation is unknown. METHODS Mini-osmotic pumps were implanted in rats to deliver ET-1 during 7 or 28 days. After in vivo hemodynamics, the lungs were isolated to derive pressure-flow relations. Small pulmonary arteries ( approximately 250 microm) were mounted on an isometric myograph to study their reactivity. RESULTS Plasma ET-1 approximately doubled (p < 0.05) after 7 and 28 days. Lung tissue ET-1 level increased fourfold after 7 days (p < 0.001) but was no longer significantly elevated after 28 days. Right ventricular systolic pressure was unaffected. The pulmonary pressure-flow relation shifted upward with a steeper slope (p < 0.05) at 7 days, but not after 28 days. Maximum dilatations to both acetylcholine (p < 0.01) and sodium nitroprusside (p < 0.001) were greatly reduced by approximately 50% after 28 days and were normalized by the addition of the nitric oxide synthase inhibitor L-NNA and the antioxidant N-acetyl-L-cysteine, respectively. CONCLUSION Chronic hyperendothelinemia reduces the pulmonary vasodilator reserve in response to nitric oxide. Correction by an antioxidant and L-NNA suggests that this relates to increased production of reactive oxygen species, which may have clinical relevance for conditions associated with chronic increase of ET. Further studies are required to determine if, in the long term, this could contribute to the development of pulmonary hypertension.
Influence of weak anisotropy on scaling regimes in a model of advected vector field

AbstractInﬂuence of weak uniaxial small-scaleanisotropyon the stability of inertial-rangescaling regimesin a model of a passive transverse vector ﬁeld advected by an incompressible turbulent ﬂow is in-vestigated by means of the ﬁeld theoretic renormalization group. Weak anisotropy means thatparameters which describe anisotropy are chosen to be close to zero, therefore in all expressions itis enough to leave only linear terms in anisotropy parameters. Turbulent ﬂuctuations of the velocityﬁeld are taken to have the Gaussian statistics with zero mean and deﬁned noise with ﬁnite correla-tions in time. It is shown that stability of the inertial-range scaling regimes in the three-dimensionalcase is not destroyed by anisotropy but the corresponding stability of the two-dimensional systemcan be destroyed even by the presence of weak anisotropy. A borderline dimension d c below whichthe stability of the scaling regime is not present is calculated as a function of anisotropy parameters. Introduction
Impact of the Smoothened Inhibitor, IPI-926, on Smoothened Ciliary Localization and Hedgehog Pathway Activity

A requisite step for canonical Hedgehog (Hh) pathway activation by Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) ligand is accumulation of Smoothened (Smo) to the primary cilium (PC). Activation of the Hh pathway has been implicated in a broad range of cancers, and several Smo antagonists are being assessed clinically, one of which is approved for the treatment of advanced basal cell carcinoma. Recent reports demonstrate that various Smo antagonists differentially impact Smo localization to the PC while still exerting inhibitory activity. In contrast to other synthetic small molecule Smo antagonists, the natural product cyclopamine binds to and promotes ciliary accumulation of Smo and “primes” cells for Hh pathway hyper-responsiveness after compound withdrawal. We compared the properties of IPI-926, a semi-synthetic cyclopamine analog, to cyclopamine with regard to potency, ciliary Smo accumulation, and Hh pathway activity after compound withdrawal. Like cyclopamine, IPI-926 promoted accumulation of Smo to the PC. However, in contrast to cyclopamine, IPI-926 treatment did not prime cells for hyper-responsiveness to Shh stimulation after compound withdrawal, but instead demonstrated continuous inhibition of signaling. By comparing the levels of drug-induced ciliary Smo accumulation with the degree of Hh pathway activity after compound withdrawal, we propose that a critical threshold of ciliary Smo is necessary for “priming” activity to occur. This “priming” appears achievable with cyclopamine, but not IPI-926, and is cell-line dependent. Additionally, IPI-926 activity was evaluated in a murine tumor xenograft model and a pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic relationship was examined to assess for in vivo evidence of Hh pathway hyper-responsiveness. Plasma concentrations of IPI-926 correlated with the degree and duration of Hh pathway suppression, and pathway activity did not exceed baseline levels out to 96 hours post dose. The overall findings suggest that IPI-926 possesses unique biophysical and pharmacological properties that result in Hh pathway inhibition in a manner that differentiates it from cyclopamine.
Vocabulary and language model adaptation using information retrieval

The goal of vocabulary optimization is to construct a vocabulary with exactly those words that are the most likely to appear in the test data. We will present a new approach to reduce the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rate by adapting the vocabulary model during the ASR process. This method can also be used for the statistical language model (SLM) adaptation. An information retrieval system is used after the first pass of the ASR system to obtain a set of relevant documents. These documents are then used to generate the new vocabulary and/or corpus. In this paper, we propose a new retrieving method well-adapted for this purpose. Experiments were carried out on French with a 28% OOV rate reduction. Experiments were also carried out on English for the SLM adaptation, with 7.9% perplexity reduction, and minor WER improvement.
Vers le consensus: la formulation de synthèse *

A cours des dernieres decennies, la polemique qui entoure Ie terme «formulation» a seme la confusion dans les couloirs de la psychiatrie universitaire, tant chez les enseignants que chez les residents. Une enquete sur la maniere dont on enseigne la formulation des cas au Canada, effectuee recemment ala demande du Conseil de l'education et de la liaison professionnelle de I'Association des psychiatres du Canada, revele que si on la range generalement parmi les aptitudes fondamentales du clinicien, la formulation des cas demeure mal definie et on ne s'entend que de facon tres marginale sur ce qu'elle devrait englober au depart (1). Les attentes et la definition ne different pas seulement d'un programme a I'autre, mais aussi au sein du merne programme, a tel point que dans trois cas, il a ete impossible de dire si on dispensait ou non un cours veritable sur Ie sujet, sans doute parce que les enseignants croyaient parler de «formulation» et que les residents pensaient Ie contraire, ou vice-versa. De fait, il semble qu' en l'absence d' une definition normalisee, generalement acceptee, chaque psychiatre ou enseignant s'en est forgee une personnelle. Les ouvrages de reference habituels eux-memes ne donnent que des indications sommaires sur la question et I' opinion des auteurs manque d'uniformite (2). Pareille situation exige qu'on parvienne a un «consensus» utilisable quelconque. Les residents en psychiatrie interreges estiment a l'unanimite qu' on devrait normaliser la terminologie et fournir des lignes directrices. Le Conseil s' est precisement donne cette mission et y a consacre la totalite du present document.
Experience in social affective applications: methodologies and case study

New forms of social affective applications are emerging, bringing with them challenges in design and evaluation. We report on one such application, conveying well-being for both personal and group benefit, and consider why existing methodologies may not be suitable, before explaining and analyzing our proposed approach. We discuss our experience of using and writing about the methodology, in order to invite discussion about its suitability in particular, as well as the more general need for methodologies to examine experience and affect in social, connected situations. As these fields continue to interact, we hope that these discussions serve to aid in studying and learning from these types of application.
Tissue harmonic imaging

Harmonics have much significance in music. A musical note has three characteristics. 1 Pitch (or frequency) 2 Loudness 3 Quality (or tone). Quality is the audible difference heard between two musical notes of the same pitch and loudness. Hence, a piano based C-note does not sound the same as a C-note played on a guitar, due to the existence of harmonic frequencies. The same note from various instruments has different qualities because the sounds are not pure notes i.e. of one frequency and these integral multiples of the fundamental frequency (overtones) give an instrument its characteristic sound. In an ultrasound context, tissue harmonic imaging is a signal processing technique also termed native harmonic imaging. An ultrasound beam insonates body tissues and generates such harmonic waves from nonlinear distortion during the transmit phase of the pulse-echo cycle. This imaging method was discovered by accident in USA when scientists working on the development of microbubbles for contrast in echocardiography found that a tissue image was still created when the receiver was tuned to receive at twice the transmitted frequency. This meant harmonics frequencies arose from soft tissue even without the injection of microbubble contrast agents. In fact some of the features of the image were superior to the fundamental image. The ultrasonic pulse gets altered with time as it traverses the tissues with non-linear motion. The peaks within the pulse waveform move faster than the troughs because the propagation speed is higher in compressed regions of tissue than in the areas which are expanded by the passing pressure wave. The degree of such acoustic signal distortion in tissue depends on the amplitude of the emitted pulse and the distance it has travelled in the tissue. For example, a 3.0 MHz transducer transmits a band of frequencies centered on the 3.0 MHz frequency. In traditional imaging, when tissue is insonated with a band of fundamental frequencies centered at 3.0 MHz, most of the returning echoes to the transducer will be linked to the same 3 MHz frequency band. Harmonics are multiples of the fundamental frequency, hence transmitting a band of frequencies centered at 3 MHz will result in the production of harmonic frequency bands centered at 6 MHz, 9 MHz, 12 MHz, etc.
Color space MS-based feature extraction method for face verification

In the last years, face verification has gained a great interest in the pattern recognition community and in many application fields. It is among the most attractive research areas because face images can be captured in a non-intrusive way. Many algorithms have been developed in this area, among them the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a typical face based technique which considers face as global feature. However, PCA method suffers the disadvantage in terms of discriminant ability and large computational load. Its performance deteriorates especially in the present of varying lighting condition and facial expression. This paper proposes a face authentication method using color information based on a new simple feature extraction technique using face image Mean and Standard deviation (MS) features. The results of evaluation carried out on XM2VTS face database show that MS-based features outperforms PCA-features for all tested color spaces, with best score for the MS-based features using the S component of the HSV (90.44%). In addition, to be stable in different color spaces, MS-based technique proves to be quite stable between validation and tests conditions, which showed strength and robustness of MS-features. The Robustness and ease of extraction make MS-features ideal candidates for a real time application with limited resources.
Distance-Based Differential Analysis of Gene Curves : Supplementary Material

A key reason for using the N × N distance matrix Δ = {dij}i,j=1 in any analysis of N objects, curves in this case, is that it provides an easy way to visualise the data. A common technique used to visualise the N objects is multidimensional scaling (Krzanowski, 2000), where each of the N objects is represented by a coordinate in a given number of dimensions in Euclidean space. The coordinates are found via the spectral decomposition of the centered inner product matrix
Some temporal characteristics of visual pattern perception.

Visual stimuli were constructed so that any given stimulus by itself appeared to be a random collection of dots. However, when 2 corresponding stimuli were superimposed by means of a 2-field tachistoscope, a 3-letter nonsense syllable was perceived. Temporal organization in perception was studied in Experiment I by varying the interval between the presentation of the 2 corresponding patterns over 300 msec. Identification accuracy of syllables was a decreasing function of interstimulus interval over a range in excess of 100 msec. Experiment II used unequal energy levels for the 2 corresponding patterns and also varied the sequence of occurrence of the high and low energy members of corresponding sets. The relevance of such concepts as perceptual memory, afterimages, and psychological moments to the data was considered. It was suggested that mechanisms in the visual system such as the "off" response that detect the termination of a stimulus may be responsible for inhibition of integration over time.
Minimization of functional tests by statistical modelling of analogue circuits

In this paper, we address the problem of functional test compaction of analogue circuits by using a statistical model of the performances of the Circuit Under Test (CUT). The statistical model is obtained using data from a Monte Carlo simulation and uses a multi-normal law to estimate the joint probability density function (PDF) of the circuit performances at the design stage. The functional test compaction method is based on the minimization of the defect level, again at the design stage, that is calculated from the estimated PDF and the actual specifications of the circuit performances. The suitability of the actual reduced functional test set for production test is evaluated in terms of its capability of detecting catastrophic faults.
On the Severi varieties of surfaces in P^3

The Severi variety V_{n,d} of a smooth projective surface S is defined as the subvariety of the linear system |O_S(n)|, which parametrizes curves with d nodes. We show that, for a general surface S of degree k in P^3 and for all n>k-1, d=0,. ,dim(|O_S(n)|), there exists one component of V_{n,d} which is reduced, of the expected dimension dim(|O_S(n)|)-d. Components of the expected dimension are the easiest to handle, trying to settle an enumerative geometry for singular curves on surfaces. On the other hand, we also construct examples of reducible Severi varieties, on general surfaces of degree k>7 in P^3.
Protein Aggregation in the Cell Nucleus: Structure, Function and Topology~!2009-04-10~!2009-06-05~!2010-01-02~!

The nucleus represents a cellular control unit that regulates all events concerning the storage and processing of DNA and RNA. It is organized by highly crowded, dynamic assemblies of proteins and nucleic acids in molecular machines, ribonucleoprotein complexes, clusters of ongoing nuclear processes, nuclear bodies, and chromatin. This review discusses the occurrence of nuclear protein aggregation with special emphasis on the functional architecture of the nucleus, and quality control by the ubiquitin-proteasome system.