Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hessian measures II

In our previous paper on this topic, we introduced the notion of k-Hessian measure associated with a continuous k-convex function in a domain Q in Euclidean n-space, k = 1,. , n, and proved a weak continuity result with respect to local uniform convergence. In this paper, we consider k-convex functions, not necessarily continuous, and prove the weak continuity of the associated k-Hessian measure with respect to convergence in measure. The proof depends upon local integral estimates for the gradients of k-convex functions.
An autoencoder with bilingual sparse features for improved statistical machine translation

Though sparse features have produced significant gains over traditional dense features in statistical machine translation, careful feature selection and feature engineering are necessary to avoid over-fitting in optimizations. However, many sparse features are highly overlapping with each other; that is, they cover the same or similar information of translational equivalence from slightly different points of view, and eventually overfit easily with only very feature training samples in given bilingual stochastic context-free grammar (SCFG) rules. We propose a natural autoencoder that maps all the discrete and overlapping sparse features for each SCFG rule into a continuous vector, so that the information encoded in sparse feature vectors becomes a dense vector that may enjoy more samples during training and avoid overfitting. Our experiments showed that for a 33-million bilingual SCFG rules statistical machine translation system, the autoencoder generalizes much better than sparse features alone using the same optimization framework.
Protein Flexibility (4): Applications of NMA to Protein-Protein and Ligand-Protein Binding

The “lock-and-key” model emphasizes the importance of shape complementarity between two rigid structures. It can not be used to explain the conformation changes before and after binding. The “induced fit” model considers the conformation change due to non-rigid protein interactions. A geometric fit is ensured only after the structure rearrangement of the base protein. In the preexisting equilibrium model, an ensemble of closely related conformations in equilibrium is used to represent the native state of a protein, and for different substrates, there are different suitable conformations to be used for binding. The preexisting equilibrium model can be combined with the “induced fit” model to explain the protein binding.
Monotonic Syntactic Processing : A Cross-linguistic Study of Attachment and Reanalysis

This paper describes a new addition to the family of parsing models based on the principles of Description Theory (Marcus, Hindle, & Fleck, 1983). We demonstrate how the definition of two simple parsing operations, simple attachment and tree lowering, which are related to the grammatical composition operations of substitution and adjunction in the Tree Adjoining Grammar formalism, yields a parser which is more constrained than previous Description Theory based models (e.g. Gorrell, 1995a). Since the tree-lowering operation allows the parser to reanalyse in the case of “unconscious” garden paths, it can be used to investigate the consequences of adopting various search strategies for reanalysis, predicting preferences in cases wheremorethan one possibility for reanalysis exists. Considering data from English and Japanese, we show that reanalysis preferences may differ between head-final and head-initial languages, and suggest some reasons why this might be so.
Structure Function Analysis of Long-Term Quasar Variability

In our second paper on long-term quasar variability, we employ a much larger database of quasars than in de Vries, Becker & White. This expanded sample, containing 35,165 quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 2 and 6413 additional quasars in the same area of the sky taken from the Two Degree Field (2dF) QSO Redshift Survey, allows us to significantly improve on our earlier conclusions. As before, all the historic quasar photometry has been calibrated onto the SDSS scale by using large numbers of calibration stars around each quasar position. We find the following: (1) The outbursts have an asymmetric light-curve profile, with a fast-rise, slow-decline shape; this argues against a scenario in which microlensing events along the line of sight to the quasars are dominating the long-term variations in quasars. (2) There is no turnover in the structure function of the quasars up to timescales of ∼40 yr, and the increase in variability with increasing time lags is monotonic and constant. (3) Consequently, there is not a single preferred characteristic outburst timescale for the quasars, but most likely a continuum of outburst timescales. (4) The magnitude of the quasar variability is a function of wavelength: variability increases toward the blue part of the spectrum. (5) High-luminosity quasars vary less than low-luminosity quasars, consistent with a scenario in which variations have limited absolute magnitude. On this basis, we conclude that quasar variability is intrinsic to the active galactic nucleus and is caused by chromatic outbursts or flares that have limited luminosity range, varying timescales, and an overall asymmetric light-curve shape. Currently, the model that has the most promise of fitting the observations is based on accretion disk instabilities.
Natural history of multiple sclerosis: risk factors and prognostic indicators

Purpose of reviewTo highlight progress in the description of the natural course and prognosis of multiple sclerosis. Recent findingsThe general evolution of multiple sclerosis is now well known at the level of patient groups. Characteristics of relapses early in the disease and the occurrence of a progressive phase seemed to be the most reliable prognostic factors. Recent works suggest that the progressive phase in multiple sclerosis could be an age-dependent, degenerative process, independent of previous relapses, and that the initial course of the disease does not substantially influence age at disability milestones. By contrast, a younger age at disease onset strongly correlates with a younger age when reaching disability landmarks, confirming that even if it takes longer for younger patients to accumulate irreversible disability, they are disabled at a younger age than patients with later onset. Multiple sclerosis might be considered as one disease with different clinical phenotypes, rather than an entity encompassing several distinct diseases. SummaryOverall course and prognosis in multiple sclerosis is most likely to be related to age and the occurrence of the progressive phase of the disease, rather than to relapses or other clinical parameters. Individual prognosis remains hazardous.
Experimental Coxiella burnetii infection in pregnant goats: excretion routes.

Q fever is a widespread zoonosis caused by Coxiella burnetii. Infected animals, shedding bacteria by different routes, constitute contamination sources for humans and the environment. To study Coxiella excretion, pregnant goats were inoculated by the subcutaneous route in a site localized just in front of the shoulder at 90 days of gestation with 3 doses of bacteria (10(8), 10(6) or 10(4) i.d. ). All the goats aborted whatever the dose used. Coxiella were found by PCR and immunofluorescence tests in all placentas and in several organs of at least one fetus per goat. At abortion, all the goats excreted bacteria in vaginal discharges up to 14 days and in milk samples up to 52 days. A few goats excreted Coxiella in their feces before abortion, and all goats, excreted bacteria in their feces after abortion. Antibody titers against Coxiella increased from 21 days post inoculation to the end of the experiment. For a Q fever diagnostic, detection by PCR and immunofluorescence tests of Coxiella in parturition products and vaginal secretions at abortion should be preferred to serological tests.
Design and Analysis of Ultra Wideband GaN Dual-Gate HEMT Low-Noise Amplifiers

In this paper, we present three ultra wide bandwidth low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) using dual-gate AlGaN/GaN HEMT devices. The single-stage, resistive feedback amplifiers target two different frequency bands: two LNAs operate in 0.3-4 GHz and one LNA is in 1.2-18 GHz. All three LNAs are capable of better than 13:1 bandwidth. The first low frequency amplifier uses a microstrip design and achieves 17.7 dB flat gain between 300 MHz-3 GHz, and 1.2 dB minimum noise figure around 1.3 GHz. The second 0.3-4 GHz LNA uses coplanar waveguide transmission lines and demonstrates 18 dB flat gain and 1.5 dB noise figure between 2 and 5 GHz. The high frequency microstrip-type LNA shows an average of 13 dB gain and between 2-3 dB noise figure across the band. The robust LNAs can be operated under various bias voltages while similar gain and noise figure performance are maintained.
Upregulation of Human ST8Sia VI (α2,8-Sialyltransferase) Gene Expression by Physcion in SK-N-BE(2)-C Human Neuroblastoma Cells

In this research, we firstly demonstrated that physcion, an anthraquinone derivative, specifically increased the expression of the human α2,8-sialyltransferase (hST8Sia VI) gene in SK-N-BE(2)-C human neuroblastoma cells. To establish the mechanism responsible for the up-regulation of hST8Sia VI gene expression in physcion-treated SK-N-BE(2)-C cells, the putative promoter region of the hST8Sia VI gene was functionally characterized. Promoter analysis with serially truncated fragments of the 5′-flanking region showed that the region between −320 and −240 is crucial for physcion-induced transcription of hST8Sia VI in SK-N-BE(2)-C cells. Putative binding sites for transcription factors Pax-5 and NF-Y are located at this region. The Pax-5 binding site at −262 to −256 was essential for the expression of the hST8Sia VI gene by physcion in SK-N-BE(2)-C cells. Moreover, the transcription of hST8Sia VI induced by physcion in SK-N-BE(2)-C cells was inhibited by extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase (ERK) inhibitor U0126 and p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) inhibitor SB203580, but not c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) inhibitor SP600125. These results suggest that physcion upregulates hST8Sia VI gene expression via ERK and p38 MAPK pathways in SK-N-BE(2)-C cells.
Empirical and Bayesian approaches to fossil-only divergence times: A study across three reptile clades

Estimating divergence times on phylogenies is critical in paleontological and neontological studies. Chronostratigraphically-constrained fossils are the only direct evidence of absolute timing of species divergence. Strict temporal calibration of fossil-only phylogenies provides minimum divergence estimates, and various methods have been proposed to estimate divergences beyond these minimum values. We explore the utility of simultaneous estimation of tree topology and divergence times using BEAST tip-dating on datasets consisting only of fossils by using relaxed morphological clocks and birth-death tree priors that include serial sampling (BDSS) at a constant rate through time. We compare BEAST results to those from the traditional maximum parsimony (MP) and undated Bayesian inference (BI) methods. Three overlapping datasets were used that span 250 million years of archosauromorph evolution leading to crocodylians. The first dataset focuses on early Sauria (31 taxa, 240 chars.), the second on early Archosauria (76 taxa, 400 chars.) and the third on Crocodyliformes (101 taxa, 340 chars.). For each dataset three time-calibrated trees (timetrees) were calculated: a minimum-age timetree with node ages based on earliest occurrences in the fossil record; a ‘smoothed’ timetree using a range of time added to the root that is then averaged over zero-length internodes; and a tip-dated timetree. Comparisons within datasets show that the smoothed and tip-dated timetrees provide similar estimates. Only near the root node do BEAST estimates fall outside the smoothed timetree range. The BEAST model is not able to overcome limited sampling to correctly estimate divergences considerably older than sampled fossil occurrence dates. Conversely, the smoothed timetrees consistently provide node-ages far older than the strict dates or BEAST estimates for morphologically conservative sister-taxa when they sit on long ghost lineages. In this latter case, the relaxed-clock model appears to be correctly moderating the node-age estimate based on the limited morphological divergence. Topologies are generally similar across analyses, but BEAST trees for crocodyliforms differ when clades are deeply nested but contain very old taxa. It appears that the constant-rate sampling assumption of the BDSS tree prior influences topology inference by disfavoring long, unsampled branches.
Volatility leveraging in heart rate: Health vs disease

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) data exhibit long memory and time-varying conditional variance (volatility). These characteristics are well captured using Fractionally Integrated AutoRegressive Moving Average (ARFIMA) models with Generalised AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (GARCH) errors, which are an extension of the AR models usual in the analysis of HRV. GARCHmod-els assume that volatility depends only on the magnitude of the shocks and not on their sign, meaning that positive and negative shocks have a symmetric effect on volatility. However, HRV recordings indicate further dependence of volatility on the lagged shocks. This work considers Exponential GARCH (EGARCH) models which assume that positive and negative shocks have an asymmetric effect (leverage effect) on the volatility, thus better copping with complex characteristics of HRV. ARFIMA-EGARCH models, combined with adaptive segmentation, are applied to 24 h HRV recordings of 30 subjects from the Noltisalis database: 10 healthy, 10 patients suffering from congestive heart failure and 10 heart transplanted patients. Overall, the results for the leverage parameter indicate that volatility responds asymmetrically to values of HRV under and over the mean. Moreover, decreased leverage parameter values for sick subjects, suggest that these models allow to discriminate between the different groups.
Unification in the Description Logic EL Without Top Constructor

Unification in Description Logics has been proposed as a novel inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in ontologies. The inexpressive Description Logic EL is of particular interest in this context since, on the one hand, several large biomedical ontologies are defined using EL. On the other hand, unification in EL has recently been shown to be NP-complete, and thus of considerably lower complexity than unification in other DLs of similarly restricted expressive power. However, EL allows the use of the top concept (>), which represents the whole interpretation domain, whereas the large medical ontology SNOMEDCT makes no use of this feature. Surprisingly, removing the top concept from EL makes the unification problem considerably harder. More precisely, we will show that unification in EL without the top concept is PSpace-complete.
eSagu™: a data warehouse enabled personalized agricultural advisory system

In this paper, we explain a personalized agricultural advisory system called eSagu, which has been developed to improve the performance and utilization of agriculture technology and help Indian farmers. In eSagu, rather than visiting the crop in person, the agricultural expert delivers the expert advice at regular intervals (once in one or two weeks) to each farm by getting the crop status in the form of digital photographs and other information. During 2004-06, through eSagu, agricultural expert advices delivered for about 6000 farms covering six crops. The results show that the expert advices helped the farmers to achieve savings in capital investment and improved the crop yield. Mainly, the data warehouse of farm histories has been developed which is providing the crop related information to the agricultural expert in an integrated manner for generating a quality agricultural expert advice. In this paper, after explaining eSagu and its advantages, we discuss how data warehouse of farm histories is enabling agricultural expert to deliver a quality expert advice. We also discuss some research issues to improve the performance of eSagu.
Morpheus: interactive exploration of subspace clustering

Data mining techniques extract interesting patterns out of large data resources. Meaningful visualization and interactive exploration of patterns are crucial for knowledge discovery. Visualization techniques exist for traditional clustering in low dimensional spaces. In high dimensional data, clusters typically only exist in subspace projections. This subspace clustering, however, lacks interactive visualization tools. Challenges arise from typically large result sets in different subspace projections that hinder comparability, visualization and understandability. In this work, we describe Morpheus, a tool that supports the knowledge discovery process through visualization and interactive exploration of subspace clusterings. Users may browse an overview of the entire subspace clustering, analyze subspace cluster characteristics in-depth and zoom into object groupings. Bracketing of different parameter settings enables users to immediately see the effects of parameters and to provide feedback to further improve the subspace clustering. Furthermore, Morpheus may serve as a teaching and exploration tool for the data mining community to visually assess different subspace clustering paradigms.
Designing a Computer-based Rehabilitation Solution for Older Adults: The Importance of Testing Usability

Over the past years, the development of technology applications for elderly people has increased, creating new possibilities for treatment. These applications are usually identified as successful solutions for mental health but usability limitations may influence their effective deployment in clinical use. The objective of this study was to examine the usability aspects of a cognitive and physical training platform, comparing these aspects in healthy elderly, subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and others with dementia. Method: 80 elderly were recruited from different clinical contexts. They received three months of training with the Long Lasting Memories (LLM) platform and were assessed through a special questionnaire that asked for the usability aspects of the program. Results: High scores were found in all the sections of the questionnaire, indicating good usability and satisfaction with the LLM system. Participants with dementia expressed more difficulties than the rest of subjects (F(2,160) = 4,488; p = . 009) in learning how to use LLM. Also most of the professionals found LLM difficult (60%) or very difficult (20%) for elderly subjects with cognitive impairment to use without help and revealed that this group needed more explanations in the use of the platform. Conclusion: The strengths and problems found related to usability enabled a better understanding of the LLM system that contributed improving the software. The results also highlighted the importance of examining not only the cognitive effectiveness of new rehabilitation programs, but also the immediate issues of design and acceptance by end users.
Stability of Multiscale Transformations.

After brieey reviewing the interrelation between Riesz-bases, biorthogonality and a certain stability notion for multiscale basis transformations we establish a basic stability criterion for a general Hilbert space setting. An important tool in this context is a strengthened Cauchy inequality. It is based on direct and inverse estimates for a certain scale of spaces induced by the underlying multiresolution sequence. Furthermore, we highlight some properties of these spaces pertaining to duality, interpolation, and applications to norm equivalences for Sobolev spaces. 1 Background and Motivation A standard framework for approximately recapturing a function v in some innnite dimensional separable Hilbert space V , say, either from explicitly given data or as a solution of an operator equation, is a nested dense sequence S of closed subspaces S j where the closure is taken with respect to the norm k k V on V. Typical examples of interest are the space L 2 (() of square integrable functions on some measure space or Sobolev spaces deened over. A common feature of multiscale methods deened in such a framework, such as multigrid methods (see e.g.) is to work in one way or another with successive ne scale corrections of current approximate solutions. One possible way to formulate this is to seek for appropriate decompositions of each space S j into a direct sum of its coarser predecessor S j? 1 and some complement W j
Racial Battle Fatigue and Mental Health in Black Men

The experiences of Black men in the United States are significantly different from men of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. Black men have to deal with racism on a daily basis. Understanding of the effects of daily racism and its implications is limited. Racial battle fatigue is a relatively new concept in the field of mental health. The current chapter discusses the concept of racial battle fatigue and its effects on Black men. The authors discuss both the physical and psychological effects of daily racism on the health of Black men.
Tracking of multiple contaminant clouds

In this paper, we address the problem of detection and tracking of multiple contaminant clouds. We develop a stochastic extension of the Gaussian puff model to characterize evolution of the average atmospheric pollutant concentration. To perform the sequential inference on this difficult problem, we propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based Particle algorithm. Numerical simulations illustrate the ability of the algorithm to detect and track multiple contaminant clouds.
A two-ball mouse affords three degrees of freedom

We describe a prototype two-ball mouse containing the electronics and mechanics of two mice in a single chassis. Unlike a conventional mouse, which senses x-axis and y-axis displacement only, our mouse also senses z-axis angular motion. This is accomplished through simple calculations on the two sets of x-y displacement data. Our mouse looks and feels like a standard mouse, however certain primitive operations are performed with much greater ease. The rotate tool -- common in most drawing programs -- becomes redundant as objects are easily moved with three degrees of freedom. Mechanisms to engage the added degree of freedom and different interaction techniques are discussed.
Will evolutionary psychology become extinct? Evolutionary psychology as the Leaning Tower of Pisa

ABSTRACT Evolutionary psychology has as its foundation the classical Darwinian-Wallace theory of evolution. Using this theory as a guideline, evolutionary psychologists have interpreted human behaviors from an adaptationist outlook using a circular logic wherein no matter what the behavior is being looked at it is always given an evolutionary rationale. Additionally, there is much speculation as to evolutionary effects in the past and these speculations are seen as factual. Furthermore, there is evidence that the classical theory is flawed in that the emphasis on adaptation as the basis for evolution is incorrect. In that there is no actual evidence that Natural Selection (i.e., adaptation) has led to speciation. Previous scientists who have criticized the classical theory are cited, who made the case for speciation having occurred through a sudden “saltationist” process rather than the classical gradual process. As such, the author predicts that evolutionary psychology may ultimately become extinct as a subdiscipline.