Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A tonal analysis of Cologne Schärfung

The word prosody of the dialect of Cologne includes a phonological contrast in stressed syllables which at first sight might either reflect a ternary quantity contrast or a binary quantity contrast plus a tone contrast. There are differences in duration as well as F0 between Accent 1 (Schärfung) and Accent 2, along with differences in the intensity profiles of the syllables. It is argued that the contrast is one between an unspecified lexical tone (T) (Accent 2) and no tone (Accent 1), and that the lexical tone assimilates to an intonational tone. We show that a ternary quantity contrast (i) cannot capture the difference between Accent 1 and Accent 2; (ii) would imply an otherwise unattested distributional confinement to the syllable coda of geminate consonants and (iii) would imply unexpected intonation contours in bimoraic syllables. By contrast, a tonal analysis readily accounts for the phonetic and distributional facts.
The effectiveness of ozone and acidulant treatments in extending the refrigerated shelf life of fresh-cut potatoes.

The objective of the study was to determine the effectiveness of acidulant dip treatments (with or without aqueous ozone) to reduce enzymatic browning and to extend the shelf life of fresh-cut potato slices during refrigerated storage (4 °C) for 28 d. Potato slices subjected to aqueous ozone (2 ppm) had significantly (P≤ 0.05) higher L-values and lower a-values, but ozone did not appear to have any effect on aerobic plate counts (APCs) or polyphenol oxidase (PPO) activity. NatureSeal (NS) and sodium acid sulfate (SAS) were the most effective acidulant treatments in reducing browning (significantly [P≤ 0.05] higher L-values, lower a-values, and browning index values) regardless of ozone treatment. NS and SAS also had lower PPO activity compared to other treatments on days 0 and 28, and significantly (P≤ 0.05) lower APCs (≤2.00 log CFU/g) over refrigerated storage. Therefore, the SAS treatment was comparable to NS, a commercially available product, and showed promise as an effective antibrowning dip to reduce browning and spoilage in fresh-cut potato products. Practical Application: A 1% SAS dip treatment which included 1% citric and 1% ascorbic acid was found to be an effective antibrowning dip for fresh-cut potatoes along with NatureSeal®'s PS-10, compared to other treatments. They were both effective in maintaining low microbial counts over refrigerated storage. Additionally, aqueous ozone washes (2 ppm) showed significant benefits to reduce browning; however, ozone did not affect microbial counts or PPO enzyme activity. Therefore, the SAS treatment could have potential use in the fruit and vegetable industry to reduce browning and spoilage in fresh-cut potato products.
M2M Rendezvous Redundancy for the Internet of Things

Machine to Machine communication will play an important role in enabling the Internet of Things. Devices in both home and industrial settings will cooperate to create smart spaces. Devices will communicate with each other autonomously, enabling them to make decisions to reach an optimal environmental goal. The nature of their deployment will involve these devices having to operate under extreme conditions, such as during a fire, flooding or following an explosion. Events such as these would usually cause a reduction in the number of devices that originally constituted the system. Individual device loss might be temporary or permanent. Devices might not be active at the time of failure and may be sleeping due to the low power requirements to extend device longevity. It is important that when devices wake they can obtain the information they require and if a device is destroyed that its last known state is preserved in the system. Preserving the last know state of a device also provides a useful source of information for post failure analysis as well as the continued operation of the system during the event. This paper details our rendezvous state redundancy protocol for the Internet of Things. We then validate the use of position relative topologies when creating distributed hash tables for redundancy in wireless mesh IoT sensor networks. We then provide an evaluation of the keying mechanism used to provide optimal redundancy for given failure patterns.
What drives the perceptual change resulting from speech motor adaptation? Evaluation of hypotheses in a Bayesian modeling framework

Shifts in perceptual boundaries resulting from speech motor learning induced by perturbations of the auditory feedback were taken as evidence for the involvement of motor functions in auditory speech perception. Beyond this general statement, the precise mechanisms underlying this involvement are not yet fully understood. In this paper we propose a quantitative evaluation of some hypotheses concerning the motor and auditory updates that could result from motor learning, in the context of various assumptions about the roles of the auditory and somatosensory pathways in speech perception. This analysis was made possible thanks to the use of a Bayesian model that implements these hypotheses by expressing the relationships between speech production and speech perception in a joint probability distribution. The evaluation focuses on how the hypotheses can (1) predict the location of perceptual boundary shifts once the perturbation has been removed, (2) account for the magnitude of the compensation in presence of the perturbation, and (3) describe the correlation between these two behavioral characteristics. Experimental findings about changes in speech perception following adaptation to auditory feedback perturbations serve as reference. Simulations suggest that they are compatible with a framework in which motor adaptation updates both the auditory-motor internal model and the auditory characterization of the perturbed phoneme, and where perception involves both auditory and somatosensory pathways.
The impact of monoaromatic hydrocarbons on OH reactivity in the coastal UK boundary layer and free troposphere

Abstract. Reaction with the hydroxyl radical (OH) is the dominant removal mechanism for virtually all volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the atmosphere; however, it can be difficult to reconcile measured OH reactivity with known sinks. Unresolved higher molecular weight VOCs contribute to OH sinks, of which monoaromatics are potentially an important sub-class. A method based on comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled to time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC × GC-TOFMS) has been developed that extends the degree with which larger VOCs can be individually speciated from whole air samples (WAS). The technique showed excellent sensitivity, resolution and good agreement with an established gas chromatography–flame ionisation (GC-FID) method, for compounds amenable to analysis on both instruments. Measurements have been made of VOCs within the UK east coast marine boundary layer and free troposphere, using samples collected from five aircraft flights in winter 2011. Ten monoaromatic compounds with an array of different alkyl ring substituents have been quantified, in addition to the simple aromatics, benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and Σm- and p-xylene. These additional compounds were then included in constrained box model simulations of atmospheric chemistry occurring at two UK rural and suburban field sites in order to assess the potential impact of these larger monoaromatics species on OH reactivity; they have been calculated to contribute an additional 2–6% to the overall modelled OH loss rate, providing a maximum additional OH sink of ~0.9 s−1.
From transplant to novel cellular therapies in multiple myeloma: European Myeloma Network guidelines and future perspectives

Survival of myeloma patients has greatly improved with the use of autologous stem cell transplantation and novel agents, such as proteasome inhibitors, immunomodulatory drugs and monoclonal antibodies. Compared to bortezomib- and lenalidomide-based regimens alone, the addition of high-dose melphalan followed by autologous transplantation significantly improves progression-free survival, although an overall survival benefit was not observed in all trials. Moreover, follow up of recent trials is still too short to show any difference in survival. In the light of these findings, novel agent-based induction followed by autologous transplantation is considered the standard upfront treatment for eligible patients (level of evidence: 1A). Post-transplant consolidation and maintenance treatment can further improve patient outcome (1A). The availability of several novel agents has led to the development of multiple combination regimens such as salvage treatment options. In this context, the role of salvage autologous transplantation and allotransplant has not been extensively evaluated. In the case of prolonged remission after upfront autologous transplantation, another autologous transplantation at relapse can be considered (2B). Patients who experience early relapse and/or have high-risk features have a poor prognosis and may be considered as candidates for clinical trials that, in young and fit patients, may also include an allograft in combination with novel agents (2B). Ongoing studies are evaluating the role of novel cellular therapies, such as inclusion of antibody-based triplets and quadruplets, and chimeric antigen receptor-T cells. Despite encouraging preliminary results, longer follow up and larger patient numbers are needed before the clinical use of these novel therapies can be widely recommended.
Cross-reacting allergens in tree pollen and pollen-related food allergy: implications for diagnosis of specific IgE.

BACKGROUND A number of recombinant allergens are by now constituents of devices that can be routinely used for the detection of specific IgE. Therefore, the results of diagnostic procedures using conventional allergen extracts can be compared with those employing selected recombinant allergens. METHODS Thirty-four sera from patients allergic to birch pollen were tested with the standard t3-CAP and rBet v 1a- and rBet v 2-CAP. cDNA was prepared by RT-PCR using primers according to the N terminus of purified allergens. Expression cDNA libraries were screened with IgE from selected patients. RESULTS Twenty-four patients allergic to birch pollen showed the same RAST class with t3 as with rBet v 1a; 8 patients differed within 1 RAST class. In addition, 3 patients showed RAST class 3 with rBet v 2. Besides Bet v 1 and Bet v 2, 3 allergens from celery and avocado belonging to highly conserved protein families were cloned and sequenced. CONCLUSIONS rBet v 1a can be expected to represent an excellent tool for the diagnosis of patients allergic to birch pollen in Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe. Still, a much higher number of patients has to be tested. For their high degree of conservation, further protein families have to be identified to explain cross-reactivities of birch pollen allergens other than Bet v 1 and Bet v 2 with, e.g., allergens from vegetable food.
Allopurinol: insights from studies of dose–response relationships

ABSTRACT Introduction: Gout is the most common inflammatory arthritis in men and is increasingly prevalent. Allopurinol is very effective at reducing plasma urate concentrations to a level sufficient to dissolve monosodium urate crystals. However, many patients fail to achieve a sufficient therapeutic response to allopurinol. Areas covered: This review covers the metabolism and pharmacokinetics of allopurinol and its active metabolite, oxypurinol and how these factors affect the plasma concentrations of urate at initiation and during long-term therapy with allopurinol. Significant aspects discussed are the importance of adherence to allopurinol therapy, allopurinol hypersensitivity reactions and insights into hyperuricemia. Expert opinion: The initial dosage of allopurinol should be low, particularly in patients with renal impairment. The dose should then be increased slowly until plasma concentrations of urate are sufficient to dissolve monosodium urate crystals (≤ 0.36 mmol/L). For this target, the maintenance dose of allopurinol can be estimated from the equation: Dose = 1413*(Up-0.36) where Up is the pre-treatment concentration of urate. Poor adherence is a major factor limiting successful therapy with allopurinol; however, its use can be improved considerably by education of patients and clinicians. Allopurinol is generally well tolerated and screening for genetic factors predictive of allopurinol hypersensitivity reactions can now be undertaken.
Development of Octyl Methoxy Cinnamates (OMC)/Silicon Dioxide (SiO2) Nanoparticles by Sol-Gel Emulsion Method

Although octyl methoxy cinnamates (OMC) is the most used Ultraviolet B (UVB) filter in sunscreen, it has poor light stability in emulsion system. In this study, OMC/SiO2 nanoparticles were prepared via sol-gel emulsion method. Tetraethoxy silane (TEOS) was used as the silica source to encapsulate OMC. Modification of experimental parameters such as stirring speed of condensation reaction and emulsion condition, pH value of acid-catalyzed, surfactant and different percentage of TEOS and OMC, adding of OMC and surfactant to different phase may affect the particle size, and yield and entrapment efficiency in preparation process of OMC/SiO2 nanoparticles. Concluding all the parameter, we found that when condensation reaction and emulsion conditions are at 1000 rpm, pH 1.5, Span 80/Tween 20, TEOS/OMC ratios 1:1, OMC and surfactants added in oil phase, resulting in smaller particle sizes 476.5 nm, higher yield 95.8%, and higher entrapment efficiency 61.09%. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) analysis demonstrated that OMC/SiO2 nanoparticles were successfully prepared. In vitro release profile supposed that OMC/SiO2 nanoparticles can delay OMC releasing and had 60.83% decreasing of cumulative amount. Therefore, the OMC/SiO2 nanoparticles have the potential to develop as new sunscreen materials in the use for cosmetics field in the future.
Iodine intake from supplements and diet during pregnancy and child cognitive and motor development: the INMA Mother and Child Cohort Study

Background The effect of mild-to-moderate maternal iodine deficiency on the neuropsychological development of their offspring is uncertain. We aimed to assess the association between iodine status during pregnancy and the cognitive and motor development of children at 4–5 years. Methods We conducted a prospective cohort study in four Spanish regions with recruitment of pregnant women between 2003 and 2008 and follow-up of their children up to 4–5 years (mean (SD)=4.8 (0.6)). Cognitive and motor function was assessed in 1803 children using the McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities. Dietary iodine and supplementation were measured through questionnaires twice during pregnancy. Urinary iodine concentration (UIC) was measured in spot samples. The residuals of a regression of UIC against creatinine were used to define a variable corrected for creatinine (UIC~Cr). Results Neither iodine supplements nor iodised salt consumption or maternal UIC were associated with cognitive or motor function. After adjusting for creatinine, children of women with UIC~Cr <100 µg/L had 3.93 (95% CI −6.18 to –1.69) general cognitive scores lower than the reference (150–249 µg/L). Dietary iodine was inversely associated with motor scores and milk but not other dairy products or seafood consumption accounted for this association (beta: −1.36; 95% CI −2.12 to –0.61; per one daily milk serving). Conclusions We found an association between low maternal urinary iodine and lower cognitive scores in childhood, although only when corrected for creatinine, adding to the evidence that iodine deficiency may have potential harmful effects on neurodevelopment. Iodine supplementation does not appear to improve child’s neurodevelopment at 4–5 years.
MANY-BODY POTENTIALS FOR CU-TI INTERMETALLIC ALLOYS AND A MOLECULAR-DYNAMICS STUDY OF VITRIFICATION AND AMORPHIZATION

The authors present central force many-body potentials for the Cu-Ti system which were constructed so as to reproduce a number of properties of the CuTi2 compound (tetragonal structure). The authors fitted the potentials not only to the available experimental data (equilibrium lattice parameters and enthalpy of mixing) but employed an ab initio method to determine additional data, in particular the bulk modulus. It is shown that these potentials ensure the stability of the CuTi2 crystal structure against alternate structures and changes in the c/a ratio and closely reproduce the melting temperature of CuTi2. The authors then employ these potentials in simulations of the glass transition and amorphization by irradiation and use the concept of atomic level stresses to interpret the results.
Ef?cient Duplicate Detection and Elimination in Hierarchical Multimedia Data

Today’s important task is to clean data in data warehouses which has complex hierarchical structure. This is possibly done by detecting duplicates in large databases to increase the efficiency of data mining and to make it effective. Recently new algorithms are proposed that consider relations in a single table; hence by comparing records pairwise they can easily find out duplications. But now a day the data is being stored in more complex and semi-structured or hierarchical structure and the problem arose is how to detect duplicates on XML data. Also due to differences between various data models, the algorithms which are for single relations cannot be applied on XML data. The objective of this project is to detect duplicates in hierarchical data which contain textual data and multimedia data like images, audio and video. It also focuses on eliminating the duplicates by using elimination technique such as delete. Here Bayesian network is used with modified pruning algorithm for duplicate detection, and experiments are performed on both artificial and real world datasets. The new XMLMultiDup method is able to perform duplicate detection with high efficiency and effectiveness on multimedia datasets. This method compares each level of XML tree from root to the leaves computing probabilities of similarity by assigning weights. It goes through the comparison of structure, each descendant of both datasets and find duplicates despite difference in data. General Terms Duplicate detection, Data cleaning.
Design and implementation of CC-NUMA card II for SCI-based PC clustering

It is extremely important to minimize network access time when constructing a high-performance PC cluster system. For an SCI-based PC cluster it is possible to reduce the network access time by maintaining network cache in each cluster node. This paper presents the second version CC-NUMA card (CC-NUMA card II) that utilizes network cache for SCI-based PC clustering. The CC-NUMA card II is directly plugged into the PCI slot of each node, and contains shared memory, network cache, a shared memory control module and network control module. The network cache is maintained for shared memory on the PCI bus of cluster nodes. The coherency mechanism between network cache and shared memory is based on the IEEE SCI standard. In previous research, the first version CC-NUMA card (CC-NUMA card I) was developed. The CC-NUMA card I adopting Dolphin's PCI-SCI card as the network control module caused overhead in exchanging data between the remote nodes. In this paper, the overhead is removed by developing the CC-NUMA card II that combines the shared memory control module and network control module in a single card. Throughout the experiment with the SPLASH-2 benchmark suite, the CC-NUMA card II based PC cluster shows better performance than a NUMA system based on Dolphin's PCI-SCI card.
Role of Hf4+ Doping on Oxygen Grain Boundary Diffusion in Alumina

Abstract : The growth of protective alumina scales in Al2O3-forming alloys can be affected by the addition of reactive elements, such as Hf(4+), which has been considered one of the most effective dopants to slow down the scale growth rate. While a number of theories concerning the reactive element effect have been proposed, a full explanation of this phenomenon is not yet available. The overall objective for this study was to conduct a systematic series of model experiments in order to elucidate the effect of HfO2 on oxygen grain boundary transport in alumina. The key questions to focus in the current work are: How do the doping levels of HfO2 / oxidizing temperature affect oxygen grain boundary diffusion in alumina? First part of this work investigated the effect of doping levels of HfO2 on oxygen grain boundary transport in alumina, which contains uniformly distributed Ni metallic particles. The second part of the work is focused on the temperature dependence of the oxidation kinetics in HfO2 doped AI2O3.
Investigating the Effect of Randomly Selected Feature Subsets on Bagging and Boosting

Bagging, boosting, and random subspace methods are three most commonly used approaches for constructing ensemble classifiers. In this article, the effect of randomly selected feature subsets (intersectant or disjoint) on bagging and boosting is investigated. The performance of the related ensemble methods are compared by conducting experiments on some UCI benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that bagging can be generally improved using the randomly selected feature subsets whereas boosting can only be optimized in some cases. Furthermore, the diversity between classifiers in an ensemble is also discussed and related to the prediction accuracy of the ensemble classifier.
An Improved HDR Technique by Classification Method

Now a day , HDR image is mostly used in applications of wide range such as next generation broadcast, digital cinema and digital photography, because of its high quality and its good expression ability. In our work we have improved an HDR (High Dimensional image) and changed it into multiple improved LOW DYNAMIC RANGE (LDR) IMAGES. We have further used multiple copies of the same image and classified differently as per new LOW DYANAMIC RANGE . Hence we obtain many new exponentially improved images. These images can be further improved by further LDR technique. Finally we combine all these images and obtain a final image . This final image will be better as compared to the original image . Hence we have a image which in itself will be improved version of the given image.
Theoretical perspectives on tourist criminal victimisation.

Crime on tourists is a topic that few tourism professionals like to discuss and even fewer would wish to endure. However, there are few tourist destinations in the world today that are immune to the problem. This paper attempted to place the location and incidence of crimes against tourists into two theoretical contexts. Hot Spot Theory and Routine Activity Theory provide a useful framework in which to explore how communities expose tourists to the risk of being criminally victimized and what feasibly can be done about it. Data front Florida on the frequency and location of crimes on tourists were used to illustrate these theoretical propositions. The intent of this paper was to provide insights to other communities as to how they can understand and manage their particular problems effectively. Dr John C Crotts is a Lecturer in the Centre for Tourism, Advanced Business Programme, University of Otago, New Zealand. Theoretical Perspectives on Tourist Criminal Victimisation