Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Robust topic inference for latent semantic language model adaptation

We perform topic-based, unsupervised language model adaptation under an N-best rescoring framework by using previous-pass system hypotheses to infer a topic mixture which is used to select topic-dependent LMs for interpolation with a topic-independent LM. Our primary focus is on techniques for improving the robustness of topic inference for a given utterance with respect to recognition errors, including the use of ASR confidence and contextual information from surrounding utterances. We describe a novel application of metadata-based pseudo-story segmentation to language model adaptation, and present good improvements to character error rate on multi-genre GALE Project data in Mandarin Chinese.
Unsupervised Methods to Identify Cellular Signaling Networks from Perturbation Data

The inference of cellular architectures from detailed time-series measurements of intracellular variables is an active area of research. High throughput measurements of responses to cellular perturbations are usually analyzed using a variety of machine learning methods that typically only work within one type of measurement. Here, summaries of some recent research attempts are presented–these studies have expanded the scope of the problem by systematically integrating measurements across multiple layers of regulation including second messengers, protein phosphorylation markers, transcript levels, and functional phenotypes into signaling vectors or signatures of signal transduction. Data analyses through simple unsupervised methods provide rich insight into the biology of the underlying network, and in some cases reconstruction of key architectures of the underlying network from perturbation data. The methodological advantages provided by these efforts are examined using data from a publicly available database of responses to systematic perturbations of cellular signaling networks generated by the Alliance for Cellular Signaling (AfCS). DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-3604-0.ch030
Learning to Teach Health and Physical Education: The Experiences of Elementary Student Teachers

This research investigates elementary student teachers’ experiences of learning to teach health and physical education (HPE) in a one-year pre-service teacher education program at Windermere University in Canada. The participants in the research are preparing to become elementary classroom teachers; a group who often recall negative prior experiences of HPE from their time as school pupils and report an overwhelming lack of preparation and confidence to teach HPE. Mixed-methods of data gathering were employed in the form of preand post-test surveys of 308 student teachers, and three interviews conducted with a purposive sample of ten student teachers. Four main findings emerged from the research. First, elementary student teachers’ embodied identity as healthy and physically active individuals profoundly shaped their prior experiences of HPE. Second, the 12-hour HPE course offered in Windermere’s pre-service program broadened student teachers’ views of HPE and provided them with some basic strategies for teaching elementary HPE. Third, the practice teaching experience provided some student teachers with opportunities to either observe or to try teaching HPE; few had opportunities to do both. Fourth, there was a positive and statistically significant change in student teachers’ identities as teachers of HPE from the beginning to the end of the pre-service teacher education program. Implications for school HPE, pre-service teacher education iii programs, policy regarding teachers of HPE, and future avenues for research are discussed in light of the findings.
Ontology of Ontology Patterns as Linked Data Integration Tool

The paper present preview of ontology of ontology design patterns and transformation patterns being developed as support tool for emerging ontology design techniques and methodologies. The Linked Data initiative was started by Tim Berners-Lee as an architectural vision for the Semantic Web. It explores the idea of Semantic Web as puting emphasis on making links so both people and machines can explore the interconnected web of data [1].
Kinematic Modeling and Analysis of a Serial-Parallel Field Robot with Variable Structure

This paper addresses modeling and kinematic analysis of a serial-parallel structure-variable field robot which based on double spirals. Although a few researchers have studied on spiral propulsion mechanism, it is observed in our previous work that the spiral can move forward between gaps of plants and damages to the plants are very little. It can be used to carry measurement devices on investigation of the current state of wetlands. The robot consists of two pairs of spiral pipes and eight 4-DOF manipulators whose grippers handle the spiral pipes. Structure and main features of this double spiral propulsion robot are presented in this paper. The kinematic relations among manipula- tor's components are established through D-H method and walking plan is illustrated. To assure normal operation of this spiral propulsion mechanism, the forward and inverse kinematics analyses are presented.
Towards a distinctive body of knowledge for Information Systems experts: coding ISD process knowledge in two IS journals

Abstract. This paper introduces the idea of coding a practically relevant body of knowledge (BoK) in Information Systems (IS) that could have major benefits for the field. In its main part, the paper focuses on the question if and how an underlying body of action‐oriented knowledge for IS experts could be distilled from the IS research literature. For this purpose the paper identifies five knowledge areas as the most important parts for an IS expert's BoK. Two of these are claimed as distinct areas of competence for IS experts: IS application knowledge and IS development (ISD) process knowledge. The paper focuses particularly on ISD process knowledge because it allows the organizing of practically relevant IS knowledge in an action‐oriented way. The paper presents some evidence for the claim that a considerable body of practically relevant IS process knowledge might, indeed, exist, but also notes that it is highly dispersed in the IS literature. It then argues that the IS research community should take stock of this knowledge and organize it in an action‐oriented way. Based on results from prior work it proposes a four‐level hierarchical coding scheme for this purpose. In order to test the idea of coding action‐oriented knowledge for IS experts, the paper reports the results of a coded literature analysis of ISD research articles published from 1996 to 2000 in two leading IS journals – Information Systems Journal and MIS Quarterly. The results suggest that ISD approaches form a useful framework for organizing practically relevant IS knowledge.
New inhibitors of the mammalian target of rapamycin signaling pathway for cancer

Importance of the field: Contrasting with the broad activation of the PI3K/AKT/mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) survival pathway in most cancer, activity of rapalogues appears to be restricted to a few tumor types. Areas covered in this review: The analysis of molecular activity of the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway and resistance mechanisms of rapamycin and rapalogues led to the development of several inhibitory molecules. What the reader will gain: New anticancer agents including PI3K inhibitors, dual PI3K/mTOR inhibitors, specific mTOR inhibitors, and AKT inhibitors may have direct inhibitory effects on targets by competing with ATP or may be non-ATP-competitive allosteric modulators of protein functions. In addition, another way of blocking the abnormal activation of the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway may be achieved by using HSP90 inhibitors. In this paper we review novel drugs inhibiting the mTOR signaling pathway. Take home message: Several trials are ongoing with novel drugs targeting key kinases involved in the mTOR pathway. Benchmarking those agents with rapalogues in rationally designed preclinical models and conceiving clinical trials in everolimus/temsirolimus-sensitive tumor types may help to identify drugs with a real clinical potential. Understanding mechanisms associated with primary and acquired resistance to rapalogues may help to enlarge indications and provide a rationale for designing combinations that will minimize the risk of developing resistance to rapalogues.
Between Two Worlds

Although Canadians’ trust in police has waned over the last several years, more people still trust the police than they do judges, lawyers, or law makers. In an Ipsos Reid poll released in January 2011 entitled “A Matter of Trust”, the data reveals that police officers ratings in the trust survey is currently at 57% of Canadians. This is down 16 points from a rating of 73% in 2003. The trust in lawyers slid 7 points from 2003; they now sit at 22%. The trust in national politicians remained unchanged at 9% while judges had a trust rating of 51%. So, as in years past, police continue to top the trust ratings for professions involved in the criminal justice system.
Reinforcement Learning in Non-Markov Environments

Recently, techniques based on reinforcement learning (RL) have been used to build systems that learn to perform non-trivial sequential decision tasks. To date, most of this work has focussed on learning tasks that can be described as Markov decision processes (MDPs). While MDPs are useful for modeling a wide range of control problems, there are important problems that are inherently non-Markov. We refer to these as hidden state tasks since they arise when information relevant to identifying the state of the environment is hidden (or missing) from the agent's internal representation. Two important types of control problems that resist Markov modeling are those in which 1) the system has a high degree of control over the information collected by its sensors (e.g., as in active-vision), or 2) the system has a limited set of sensors that do not always provide adequate information about the current state of the environment. Not surprisingly, traditional RL algorithms, which are based primarily upon the principles of MDPs, perform unreliably on hidden state tasks. This article examines several approaches to extending RL to hidden state tasks. A generalized technique called the Consistent Representation (CR) Method is described. This method uniies such recent approaches as the Lion algorithm, the G-algorithm, and CS-QL; however it is restricted to a class of problems which we call adaptive perception tasks. Several, more general, memory-based algorithms that are not subject to this restriction are also presented. Memory-based algorithms, though quite diierent in detail, share the common feature that each derives its internal representation by combining immediate sensory inputs with internal state which is maintained over time. The relative merits of all of these methods are considered and conditions for their useful application are given.
Automatic extraction of popular music ringtones based on music structure analysis

Automatic extraction of popular music ringtones have become an important and useful area for communications and telecommunications industry. Quick and batch extraction of music ringtones increases the convenience in practical application. In this paper, we propose an automatic technology to extract the ringtones from popular music based on the musical structural analysis. This is a meaning attempt to use the theory of musical structural analysis to solve a practical problem. Experiments show the feasibility of the process, several sets of comparative experiments reflect that various stages of threshold may have different effects. The experiments also reflected some problems which inspired us to optimize the processing. On our testing database composed of 186 popular songs, the best accuracy of boundary detection with tolerance ±3 seconds achieves up to 79.9%. We also try to invite strangers to evaluate the result by using voting mechanism.
Genome sequencing of mucosal melanomas reveals that they are driven by distinct mechanisms from cutaneous melanoma

Mucosal melanoma displays distinct clinical and epidemiological features compared to cutaneous melanoma. Here we used whole genome and whole exome sequencing to characterize the somatic alterations and mutation spectra in the genomes of ten mucosal melanomas. We observed somatic mutation rates that are considerably lower than occur in sun‐exposed cutaneous melanoma, but comparable to the rates seen in cancers not associated with exposure to known mutagens. In particular, the mutation signatures are not indicative of ultraviolet light‐ or tobacco smoke‐induced DNA damage. Genes previously reported as mutated in other cancers were also mutated in mucosal melanoma. Notably, there were substantially more copy number and structural variations in mucosal melanoma than have been reported in cutaneous melanoma. Thus, mucosal and cutaneous melanomas are distinct diseases with discrete genetic features. Our data suggest that different mechanisms underlie the genesis of these diseases and that structural variations play a more important role in mucosal than in cutaneous melanomagenesis. Copyright © 2013 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A CYK+ Variant for SCFG Decoding Without a Dot Chart

While CYK+ and Earley-style variants are popular algorithms for decoding unbinarized SCFGs, in particular for syntaxbased Statistical Machine Translation, the algorithms rely on a so-called dot chart which suffers from a high memory consumption. We propose a recursive variant of the CYK+ algorithm that eliminates the dot chart, without incurring an increase in time complexity for SCFG decoding. In an evaluation on a string-totree SMT scenario, we empirically demonstrate substantial improvements in memory consumption and translation speed.
High prevalence of rhinitis symptoms without allergic sensitization in Estonia and Finland

Objectives Allergic rhinitis and atopy are more common in urban than rural environments. Non-allergic rhinitis has not been studied to a great extent. We aimed to assess the relationship of rhinitis symptoms with different profiles of allergic sensitization, comparing this in rural and urban environments. Methods The study population consisted of population-based cohorts of adults aged 26–60 from Helsinki, Finland, and rural Saaremaa and urban Tallinn, Estonia. We compared the results of a structured interview and skin prick tests and assessed the risk factors for rhinitis. Results The prevalence of rhinitis symptoms with atopy was 32.7% in Helsinki, 20.8% in Tallinn, and 12.5% in Saaremaa (p<0.001). Rhinitis symptoms without atopy were found in 26.4%, 29.8%, and 29.3% (p=n.s.), respectively. In Helsinki, 87.3% of participants with atopy identified symptoms as allergic, compared to 57.0% in Tallinn and 47.5% in Saaremaa. Childhood in the countryside (OR 0.63), family history of allergic rhinitis (OR 1.89), and polysensitization (OR 15.99) were significantly associated with rhinitis symptoms with atopy in a multivariate logistic regression model. The most common sensitizers were pollens and animals in Helsinki and mites in Estonia. Exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (OR 1.50) and family history of allergic rhinitis (OR 1.70) were associated with rhinitis symptoms without atopy. Conclusion Rhinitis symptoms without allergic sensitization were common in both Finland and Estonia and were associated with environmental tobacco smoke. Family history of allergic rhinitis predisposed to rhinitis symptoms irrespective of atopy status.
Critical evaluation of adult treatment panel III criteria in identifying insulin resistance with dyslipidemia.

OBJECTIVE The goal of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of the Third Report of the National Cholesterol Education Program Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults (ATP III) in identifying insulin resistance. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This study included 74 nondiabetic Caucasians who were evaluated for insulin resistance and risk factors associated with the metabolic syndrome. Glucose disposal rate (GDR) was measured by hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp and was used to quantify insulin resistance. Sensitivity and specificity of ATP III criteria in detecting insulin resistance were calculated for various cutoffs of GDR. RESULTS Insulin resistance was associated with increased waist circumference, fasting glucose, blood pressure, triglycerides, and decreased levels of HDL cholesterol. Only 12.2% of study subjects met ATP III criteria for metabolic syndrome, and ATP III criteria exhibited low sensitivity for detecting insulin resistance. Although high in specificities (>90%), the sensitivities of ATP III criteria ranged only between 20 and 50% when insulin resistance was defined as various GDR cutoff values below 10 to 12 mg.kg(-1). min(-1). The larger number of subjects who were insulin resistant but did not meet ATP III criteria were found to have an adverse cardiovascular disease risk profile, including higher BMI, waist circumference, fasting glucose, triglycerides, and an unfavorable lipoprotein subclass profile determined by nuclear magnetic resonance compared with insulin-sensitive individuals (i.e., increased large VLDL, increased small LDL, and decreased large HDL particle concentrations). CONCLUSIONS ATP III criteria have low sensitivity for identifying insulin resistance with dyslipidemia in nondiabetic individuals who are at increased risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. More sensitive criteria should be developed for clinical assessment of metabolic and cardiovascular disease risk relevant to the metabolic syndrome.
Methylation at the Huntington disease-linked D4S95 locus.

In a paper published in Nature last year, Wasmuth et al. (1988) reported the identification of a highly polymorphic locus, D4S95, which they demonstrated to be tightly linked to the Huntington Disease (HD) gene. The probe (pBS674E-D) for the locus they described detects five polymorphic sites with four different restriction enzymes. AccI is th most informative of the four enzymes, as the probe detects two polymorphic sites, one of which is a two-allele system (site A) and the other of which is a multiallele system with at least five different allelic fragments (site B; fig 1). Because of the high PIC and heterozygosity value of this allele system (fig. 1), Wasmuth et al. (1988) recommended its use in predictive testing for HD. Two reports have now appeared, one describing the use of D4S95 AccI polymorphisms in the analysis of a family showing a distal recombination event with HD (Hayden et al. 1988b) and one in which the allele system is used for presymptomatic diagnosis (Hayden et al. 1988a). Recently, we utilized the pBS674E-D probe and AccI allele system to analyze 56 DNA samples isolated from lymphoblastoid cell lines of members of the Venezuelan HD pedigree. To our surprise, we discovered three individuals with three alleles of the B type, each of which contained a B5 allele. Analysis of blood DNA from 12
ART PRIDE AND HERITAGE : LEARNERS RESPONDING TO MULTICULTURAL IMAGES

Do students naturally select artwork that is of their own heritage or do they choose what they find inspiring for other reasons? The purpose of this study was to detect if students prefer artwork based on what they find visually appealing or is it based on their racial background ethnic and cultural traditions. The answers to these questions may provide art teachers better insight on developing art lessons to teach learners to value cultures other than their own. The sample for this study was selected from a total of 98 elementary intermediate middle and high school classes comprised of Caucasian African American and Latino heritages. The participants in elementary are in 3rd grade 5th grade for intermediate 7th grade for middle and 9th through 12th for high school. Their ages ranged from 8 to 18 years. The measuring instrument was a PowerPoint presentation. This was viewed by students and was followed by a closed ended questionnaire. Items were selected from a large data base of artwork used nationally and selected by the classroom teacher according to curriculum standards. The results of the study were tabulated and presented in graph form. It was hypothesized that students in elementary school would choose artwork that they found interesting for a broad range of reasons. Students in high school would choose artwork along racial lines and that students in intermediate and middle school would show mixed results. The data did not support the hypothesis. Results showed that elementary students choose artwork along racial lines. Caucasian artwork was chosen most frequently by high school intermediate and middle school students even though Caucasians comprised the least amount of participants in the study. The results could give educators more insight in the need to motivate our elementary students to value artwork from many cultures. Perhaps with earlier introduction to the content of other cultures and encouraging techniques from teachers elementary students will appreciate art that is not only based on familiarity but from a place of inspiration. Diverse artwork can be a viable educational tool in a variety of subject areas with both cognitive and psychological benefits for all students. Art teachers should be consistent in providing this introduction to world visual cultures at an earlier grade level. In the age of multiculturalism it is important that educators take advantage of every available tool with which to increase students' personal and global understanding motivation and academic achievement.
Preemption and Federal Common Law

Brad Clark warned me about becoming a federal courts professor. When I was a young attorney in private practice in Washington, D.C., and thinking about applying for law teaching positions, Brad— then just a friend of a friend—was kind enough to advise me about how to “package” my candidacy to appeal to law schools. “Federal courts and constitutional law are the kiss of death,” he said, urging me to pick subjects in greater demand. I failed to heed his warning, but found out in short order why he had given it. When I interviewed with Jack Goldsmith, then representing the University of Chicago, the first thing Jack said to me was, “I think federal courts is a dead field. ” I did not get the job. The truth is that the careful doctrinal work that characterizes the federal courts field is not much in favor these days in “cutting edge” circles of legal academia. I have presented papers at faculty colloquia urging continued attention to the insights of the legal process school, only to be looked at as if I had two heads. Over a decade ago, many of the federal courts field’s leading lights gathered for a symposium at Vanderbilt University to consider (very earnestly) Jack Goldsmith’s question—that is, whether the federal courts field is somehow “dead. ”1 Some of the best evidence for the field’s continued vitality,
Control of the coupled motion of a 6 DoF robotic arm and a continuum manipulator for the treatment of pelvis osteolysis

The paper addresses the coupled motion of a 6 degree of freedom robot and a snake-like dexterous manipulator (SDM) designed for the treatment of bone defects behind the implant during total hip arthroplasty revision surgery. We have formulated the problem as a weighted, multi-objective constraint, linear optimization. A remote center of motion (RCM) acts as a virtual constraint for the robot. The coupled robot kinematics does not assume piecewise-constant curvature for the SDM. We have evaluated our method by simulating the coupled system inside a potential lesion area.