Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE EFFECTS OF NOISE ON THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF FOREIGN-ACCENTED SPEECH

The effect of the presence of cafeteria noise on the perception of native English and Mandarin-accented speech was assessed in a sentence-verification task and a sentence-transcription (dictee) task. Ten advanced-level ESL learners and a comparison group of native English speakers read a set of simple true or false statements. These were presented in quiet and noisy conditions to 24 native English listeners who assessed their truth value and wrote out the utterances they heard. The outcomes of both tasks indicated strong adverse effects of noise on the intelligibility of many of the accented utterances. In fact, of the set of items that were verified perfectly in the noise-free condition, the Mandarin-accented ones were significantly less well verified in noise than the native English ones were. A large degree of interspeaker variability was also noted, particularly for the Mandarin speakers.
Did Smokefree Legislation in England Reduce Exposure to Secondhand Smoke among Nonsmoking Adults? Cotinine Analysis from the Health Survey for England

Background On 1 July 2007, smokefree legislation was implemented in England, which made virtually all enclosed public places and workplaces smokefree. Objectives We examined trends in and predictors of secondhand smoke exposure among nonsmoking adults to determine whether exposure changed after the introduction of smokefree legislation and whether these changes varied by socioeconomic status (SES) and by household smoking status. Methods We analyzed salivary cotinine data from the Health Survey for England that were collected in 7 of 11 annual surveys undertaken between 1998 and 2008. We conducted multivariate regression analyses to examine secondhand smoke exposure as measured by the proportion of nonsmokers with undetectable levels of cotinine and by geometric mean cotinine. Results Secondhand smoke exposure was higher among those exposed at home and among lower-SES groups. Exposure declined markedly from 1998 to 2008 (the proportion of participants with undetectable cotinine was 2.9 times higher in the last 6 months of 2008 compared with the first 6 months of 1998 and geometric mean cotinine declined by 80%). We observed a significant fall in exposure after legislation was introduced—the odds of having undetectable cotinine were 1.5 times higher [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.3, 1.8] and geometric mean cotinine fell by 27% (95% CI: 17%, 36%) after adjusting for the prelegislative trend and potential confounders. Significant reductions were not, however, seen in those living in lower-social class households or homes where smoking occurs inside on most days. Conclusions We found that the impact of England’s smokefree legislation on secondhand smoke exposure was above and beyond the underlying long-term decline in secondhand smoke exposure and demonstrates the positive effect of the legislation. Nevertheless, some population subgroups appear not to have benefitted significantly from the legislation. This finding suggests that these groups should receive more support to reduce their exposure.
Use of kidneys from hepatitis C seropositive donors shortens waitlist time but does not alter one‐yr outcome *

Utilization of hepatitis C seropositive kidney donors remains controversial. We examined the use of hepatitis C seropositive donors for renal transplantation. Data for creatinine, liver function tests, cold ischemia time, and graft and patient survival were analyzed from 20 hepatitis C seropositive recipients receiving cadaveric renal allografts from seropositive donors and were compared with 20 hepatitis C seropositive recipients receiving allografts from seronegative donors. Recipients receiving a kidney from a hepatitis C seropositive donor were on the waitlist for 9.9 ± 1.8 months, compared with 17.8 ± 3.3 months for those receiving a kidney from a seronegative donor (p < 0.05). There were no significant differences in graft or patient survival. Incidences of acute cellular rejection and acute tubular necrosis were similar. There were no significant differences in creatinine, alanine aminotransferase, alkaline phosphatase, or bilirubin values. While there was a significant difference in aspartate aminotransferase at 2 wk and 6 months, these differences were of questionable clinical importance. In conclusion, donor seropositivity for hepatitis C should not preclude renal transplantation into a hepatitis C seropositive recipient and utilization of these organs decreases waitlist time for hepatitis C seropositive recipients.
Vitamin D, Calcium, and Colorectal Neoplasia: New Insights on Mechanisms of Action

Perspective on Fedirko et al., [p. 213][1] In 1980, Garland and Garland ([1][2]) proposed that the lower mortality rates from colorectal cancer in southern regions of the United States might be related to higher sunlight exposure in those areas via a vitamin D–related mechanism. Calcium also has
Calibrated image appearance reproduction

Managing the appearance of images across different display environments is a difficult problem, exacerbated by the proliferation of high dynamic range imaging technologies. Tone reproduction is often limited to luminance adjustment and is rarely calibrated against psychophysical data, while color appearance modeling addresses color reproduction in a calibrated manner, albeit over a limited luminance range. Only a few image appearance models bridge the gap, borrowing ideas from both areas. Our take on scene reproduction reduces computational complexity with respect to the state-of-the-art, and adds a spatially varying model of lightness perception. The predictive capabilities of the model are validated against all psychophysical data known to us, and visual comparisons show accurate and robust reproduction for challenging high dynamic range scenes.
Radiation Hardness of the Siemens SIPART intelligent valve positioner

About 1400 Siemens SIPART PS2 intelligent valve positioners are installed in the LHC accelerator. They were selected assuming that their non-electronic parts are intrinsically radiation hard. This positioner variant is a split design: the electronic board located in a radiation protected area and the electro-pneumatic unit on the valve stem. The next LHC upgrade will result in a significant increase of the radiation levels and the initial radiation hardness assumption may not hold. A preliminary test on an electro-pneumatic unit was done with a cobalt 60 source. At the end of the test (99.8 kGy) one of the two miniature piezoelectric valves was damaged. After this result, the CERN CALLAB facility was used to irradiate 10 miniature piezoelectric valves while they were powered by an electrical signal. The first failures are observed after a dose of 137 kGy. The paper describes the test protocol and synthesizes the results.
Dead Regions in the Cochlea: Conceptual Foundations, Diagnosis, and Clinical Applications

Regions in the cochlea with no (or very few) functioning inner hair cells and/or neurons are called “dead regions”. This paper reviews the anatomical, physiological, and psychophysical foundations for the concept of dead regions. It then considers methods that have been used to diagnose dead regions, focusing particularly on psychophysical tuning curves and the test using threshold-equalizing noise. Problems and limitations of each approach are discussed. Applications of tests for diagnosing dead regions are described. These include: giving the client realistic expectation about the likely benefit of a hearing aid; guidance in the fitting of hearing aids; assessment of candidacy for cochlear implants; assessment of hearing loss for medico-legal applications. Finally, guidelines for implementation of the threshold-equalizing noise test in clinical practice are given.
A new solutions for staff localization in chemical plant

wireless sensor networks based on the ZigBee technology was designed and deployed in the chemical plant. Because of the complex indoor environment in the chemical workshop, the method of positioning through GPS signal is hard to reach. This paper proposed a low power consumption, low cost ZigBee scheme which can overcome the disadvantage above and extend the battery life of the devices. Enterprise Ethernet and RS-485 field bus was used as data transmission network. The data collection system included several network coordinators, reference nodes and blind nodes which using the TI's CC2430 and CC2431 modules. During the disaster like chemical explosions, the rescuers could get the exact location of the staffs who work in the workshop. A SVM-based approach also was presented in this paper, which uses SVM model to help location-based system to improve the accuracy of positioning.
Quantized guaranteed cost control for wireless networked control system

A new discrete system model is constructed for the wireless networked control system based on IEEE 802.11b. The model incorporates the network-induced delay, the packet dropout from IEEE802.11b protocol criteria and logarithmic quantization. Guaranteed cost control problem is further addressed for the wireless networked control systems. With the mathematic model, we design the guaranteed cost controller. The controller design condition is given in the form of matrices inequalities, which can be easily solved by Matlab. The condition can also be used to optimize the cost function. Finally, simulation is done to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Sex and Violence on the American Newsstand

Three studies tracing the scope and incidence of themes of “sex” and “violence” in mass media of communication are reported. The studies include content analyses of 55 magazines and of the covers of 296 paperback books available on newsstands, as well as an analysis of 10 leading U.S. newspapers.
Predicting the Stock Market

This paper presents a tuturial introduction to predictions of stock time series. The various approaches of technical and fundamental analysis is presented and the prediction problem is formulated as a special case of inductive learning. The problems with performance evaluation of near-random-walk processes are illustrated with examples together with guidelines for avoiding the risk of data-snooping. The connections to concepts like "the bias/variance dilemma", overtraining and model complexity are further covered. Existing benchmarks and testing metrics are surveyed and some new measures are introduced.
Information Theory Gallager bounds on the performance of maximum-likelihood decoded linear binary block codes in AWGN interference

Performance evaluation of maximum-likelihood (ML) soft-decision-decoded binary block codes is usually carried out using bounding techniques. Many tight upper bounds on the error probability of binary codes are based on the so-called Gallager's first bounding technique (GFBT). In this method, Gallager bisects the error probability to the joint probability of error and noise residing in a region ℜ (here referred to as the Gallager region) plus joint probability of error and noise residing in the complement of ℜ (also referred to as regions of many and few errors, respectively); where ℜ is a volume around the transmitted codeword. In this tutorial review, a comprehensive study of a number of upper bounds on the error probability of ML decoding of binary codes based on GFBT is provided. For some bounds, their applicability to other schemes is also pointed out and argued. We also provide an overview of bounds based on Gallager's second bounding technique (GSBT) and discuss some of their relations and interconnections. Copyright © 2006 AEIT
Travelling Salesman Problem Using Bee Colony With SPV

 Abstract— Challenge of finding the shortest route visiting each member of a collection of locations and returning to starting point is an NP-hard problem. It is also known as Traveling salesman problem, TSP is specific problem of combinatorial optimization studied in computer science and mathematical applications. In our work we present a solution for TSP problem using ABC with SPV rule. In this method we extend Artificial Bee Colony algorithm using SPV rule. Artificial bee colony algorithm solves real coded optimization problems but travelling salesman problem is a discrete optimization problem for converting the ABC algorithm to solve TSP problem SPV rule is used. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is an optimization algorithm based on the intelligent behavior of honey bee swarm. In the proposed method we extend ABC with SPV rule for local search strategy. The experimental results show that our proposed ABC with SPV performs better than GA (Genetic Algorithm), our ABC with SPV model can reach broader domains in the search space and show improvements in both precision and computational time. Index Terms—ABC, Artificial Bee Colony, GA, Genetic Algorithm, TSP, SPV.
Compact and Low Profile Frequency Agile Antenna for Multistandard Wireless Communication Systems

A novel compact and low profile microstrip antenna is proposed as a suitable radiating device for a software defined radio system. The antenna allows the frequency reconfigurability by activating a subset of the four groups of pin diodes connecting a central patch to four different peripheral elements. Each one of the four peripheral elements provides a resonance mode independent from the others that can be tailored by the designer. The radiating device guarantees an overall of 24 = 16 different states with both single and multifrequency resonances within a wide bandwidth going from 0.8 GHz-3.0 GHz, without requiring any extra matching network. Measurements on a realized prototype assess the level of performance estimated in simulations and prove the usefulness of the proposed antenna in a device exploiting the cognitive radio paradigm.
Representation Learning for cold-start recommendation

A standard approach to Collaborative Filtering (CF), i.e. prediction of user ratings on items, relies on Matrix Factorization techniques. Representations for both users and items are computed from the observed ratings and used for prediction. Unfortunatly, these transductive approaches cannot handle the case of new users arriving in the system, with no known rating, a problem known as user cold-start. A common approach in this context is to ask these incoming users for a few initialization ratings. This paper presents a model to tackle this twofold problem of (i) finding good questions to ask, (ii) building efficient representations from this small amount of information. The model can also be used in a more standard (warm) context. Our approach is evaluated on the classical CF problem and on the cold-start problem on four different datasets showing its ability to improve baseline performance in both cases.
CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL ORIENTATION:CONCEPTUALIZATION AND THE CASE OF ANDEAN EXPORTERS

Mientras mas consumidores, empresas y gobiernos desarrollen conciencia de la degradacion ambiental y tomen medidas para disminuir su contribucion negativa, las practicas verdes jugaran un papel mas prominente en la gestion corporativa. Este articulo realiza una revision de la literatura sobre modos de enverdecimiento, beneficios del mismo, metodos de implementacion y mercadeo verde para proponer una conceptualizacion de enverdecimiento de la empresa dentro de los negocios internacionales, con una mirada especial al comportamiento dentro de paises en via de desarrollo. Una encuesta de trescientas diecisiete empresas pequenas y medianas en Colombia, Ecuador y Venezuela determina las percepciones de las actividades verdes en las empresas andinas. Aunque los gerentes andinos tienen conciencia ambiental, no llevan a cabo niveles suficientes de medicion, auditoria y reportaje. Igualmente, el concepto de gobernabilidad y empresas-pares puede limitar su responsabilidad.
Video measurement approach with classification based on service performance clustering

The Information Technology is improving these days, which pushes users' experience for video services to improve rapidly. In this trend, to improve the quality of experience (QoE) of online video service, a Measuring and Recommending System for Online Video Service (MCS) have been developed. In some traditional method, researchers classify resources with their video with the video attribute to reduce the performance measurement scale. Therefore, we proposed a video measurement approach based on the cluster analysis. In this approach, videos are clustered by their service performance. Just limited videos, which are selected from each cluster, would be measured instead of measuring all of them. A contribution in this work is that the accuracy shall be maintained significantly in this approach when compared with using the tradition way. In this experiment, the accuracy maintained when 70 percent costs had been reduced.
Association of the rs3077 and rs9277535 polymorphisms in HLA-DP with hepatitis B virus infection and spontaneous clearance: A meta-analysis

Abstract Purpose. Owing to inconsistent observations in the literature of an association between HLA-DP polymorphisms (rs3077 and rs9277535) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and spontaneous clearance, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive and reliable understanding of this subject. This meta-analysis was performed to quantitatively summarise the evidence for the relevance of these HLA-DP polymorphisms to HBV infection and spontaneous clearance. Methods. A meta-analysis was conducted with the data from eight relevant papers published from April 2009 to March 2012, following strict selection. The pooled odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated for alleles, co-dominant, dominant and recessive genotype models of the rs3077 and rs9277535 loci. Results. Our analysis indicated a significant association of rs3077 and rs9277535 in HLA-DP with HBV infection, suggesting that these HLA-DP polymorphisms act beneficially against HBV infection (for rs3077, AG vs. GG: OR = 0.522, 95% CI = 0.485–0.561; AA vs. GG: OR = 0.350, 95% CI = 0.311–0.393; for rs9277535, AG vs. GG: OR = 0.542, 95% CI = 0.506–0.579; AA vs. GG: OR = 0.371, 95% CI = 0.336–0.409). Additionally, these HLA-DP polymorphisms served as protective factors in the spontaneous clearance of HBV (for rs3077, AG vs. GG: OR = 0.600, 95% CI = 0.464–0.775; AA vs. GG: OR = 0.420, 95% CI = 0.299–0.590; for rs9277535, AG vs. GG: OR = 0.623, 95% CI = 0.570–0.681 and AA vs. GG: OR = 0.464, 95% CI = 0.386–0.556) with similar results for both dominant and recessive genotype models. Conclusions. Our results demonstrated that the rs3077 and rs9277535 HLA-DP polymorphisms reduced HBV infection and increased the likelihood of spontaneous viral clearance in some Asian populations.
EFFECT OF HIGH SALT INTAKE ON LOCAL RENIN–ANGIOTENSIN SYSTEM AND VENTRICULAR DYSFUNCTION FOLLOWING MYOCARDIAL INFARCTION IN RATS

1 This study was performed to evaluate the effect of chronic high salt intake on local cardiac and renal components of the renin–angiotensin system (RAS) and its impact on cardiac remodelling and function after myocardial infarction (MI). 2 Rats submitted to coronary artery ligation to produce MI or sham operation (SO) were randomized to receive 1% NaCl solution or tap water as drinking water for 4 weeks. Plasma renin activity (PRA) and angiotensin‐converting enzyme (ACE) activity were quantified. Tissue angiotensin (Ang) II and ACE activity were determined by ELISA and a fluorimetric assay, respectively. Renal and cardiac AT1 and AT2 receptor protein levels were quantified by western blot. 3 Independent of the lower PRA levels, MI promoted a significant increase in the left ventricular/bodyweight ratio and impaired cardiac function. The cardiac RAS was activated after MI with a significant increase in ACE activity, AngII and AT1 receptor levels. The RAS was slightly attenuated under high‐salt conditions. 4 Interestingly, high salt intake increased the expression of the AT2 receptor by approximately twofold in the kidney of MI rats compared with the SO control group. Because of its natriuretic effect, the AT2 receptor may counterbalance the salt overload and prevent the additional impairment of cardiac function. 5 The present study indicates that 4 weeks after MI, high salt intake did not further increase cardiac hypertrophy or further impair cardiac function in MI rats. A chronic increase in salt intake significantly suppressed PRA, but did not prevent activation of the local RAS or the progression of cardiac remodelling and left ventricular dysfunction caused by MI. 6 The present results show that inhibition of systemic renin production with salt overload does not affect ventricular remodelling after MI in rats. This suggests that local activation of the RAS in the heart, which was not suppressed by salt overload, exerts a predominant role for local adaptations of the heart after MI.
Intrathecal Sufentanil and Fetal Heart Rate Abnormalities: A Double-Blind, Double Placebo-Controlled Trial Comparing Two Forms of Combined Spinal Epidural Analgesia with Epidural Analgesia in Labor

Combined spinal epidural analgesia (CSE) for labor pain relief has become increasingly popular. However, the effect of intrathecal sufentanil on the incidence of uterine hyperactivity and fetal heart rate (FHR) abnormalities remains controversial. We hypothesized that the use of intrathecal sufentanil in a dose of 7.5 &mgr;g is more likely to induce a nonreassuring FHR tracing than a small dose of spinal sufentanil combined with bupivacaine or epidural analgesia. Three-hundred parturients were randomized into three groups. In the first group, epidural analgesia was initiated with 12.5 mg of bupivacaine, 12.5 &mgr;g of epinephrine, and 7.5 &mgr;g of sufentanil in a volume of 10 mL (EPD group). In Group 2, initial intrathecal analgesia consisted of 2.5 mg of bupivacaine, 2.5 &mgr;g of epinephrine, and 1.5 &mgr;g of sufentanil (BSE group); in Group 3, spinal analgesia consisted of 7.5 &mgr;g of sufentanil (SUF group). Analgesia was maintained in all groups with patient-controlled epidural analgesia using bupivacaine 0.125%, 1.25 &mgr;g/mL of epinephrine, and 0.75 &mgr;g/mL of sufentanil (bolus, 4 mL; lockout, 15 min). Cardiotocography was monitored continuously 15 min before analgesia and for 60 min after the start of analgesia. The quality of analgesia, labor, and neonatal outcome and side effects were recorded. Twenty-four percent of patients in the SUF group developed FHR abnormalities (bradycardia or late decelerations) during the first hour after initiation of analgesia compared with 12% in the BSE group and 11% in the EPD group. Uterine hyperactivity occurred in 12% of parturients in the SUF group but in only 2% in the other groups. Onset of analgesia was more rapid in both CSE groups as compared with the EPD group. However, 29% of patients in the BSE group developed severe hypotension, requiring IV ephedrine (29% in the BSE group versus 7% and 12% in the EPD and SUF groups, respectively). All these differences reached statistical significance. The present data corroborate previous recommendations of caution when performing CSE using a large dose (7.5 &mgr;g or more) of spinal sufentanil because of the risk of uterine hyperactivity and FHR abnormalities.