Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adjacency Analysis for Designing Unit Selection Speech Model on Micro-Prosodic Level

One of the speech synthesizer problems is the unnaturalness and unintelligible production of speech. It is believed that wave modification could also contribute to the distortion of synthesized speech. The objective of a unit selection speech corpus is to provide a few possible instance of unit in order to produce synthesized speech as close to human speech production without the need (or slight need) to perform wave modification. Different from a standard prerecorded speech database, unit selection allow multiple instances for same unit to be presented in a corpus. These instances are differentiated by a unique combination of acoustic and linguistic value. These acoustic and linguistic values form a set of speech corpus parameter. To minimize distortion in concatenative speech synthesizer, parameters of selected segments need to reflect the quality of natural speech. The selection process depends on the priority level of each parameter in the corpus. These parameters design unit selection model. One of the proposed parameter is adjacent phoneme of the target unit. This paper will describe the analysis on micro-prosody behaviour particularly in pitch. We will also see how adjacency influenced the changes in micro-prosodic features and how the physics of speech contribute to the changes in micro-prosodic aspect.
EFFECT OF STATIC PRELOADING ON THE DYNAMIC BUCKLING OF LAMINATED CYLINDERS UNDER SUDDEN PRESSURE

This article presents the results obtained while investigating the behavior of cylindrical laminated shells under suddenly applied lateral pressure. The investigations were based on a finite-element approach using an explicit time integration scheme. The Budiansky-Roth and phase-plane criteria were used to assess buckling. The response of the shells was investigated with and without statically applied preloading. Results are presented for different values of shell length, imperfection amplitude, shell total thickness, and laminae stacking sequences, and for different magnitudes of the static preloading. The results presented here can be used in the design of shell structures and can help better realize the influence of the variations in the system parameters upon the shell strength and stability.
Poly(3-hexylthiophene)–graphene composite-based aligned nanofibers for high-performance field effect transistors

We report the morphology and field effect transistor (FET) characteristics of aligned electrospun nanofibers prepared from poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT)–graphene composites. The graphene flakes were more uniformly distributed in the nanofibers compared with spin-coated films, leading to different FET characteristics. The geometrical confinement from electrospun nanofibers resulted in enhanced π–π molecular packing with highly ordered orientation and reduced the grain boundaries under strong stretching forces, thereby increasing carrier mobility. The graphene behaved as an electrically conducting bridge between the P3HT domains in the composites, and thus the FET mobility generally increased as the graphene composition increased. Remarkably, the ES-PG4 FET had the highest hole mobility of 1.82 cm2 V−1 s−1 and a moderately high ION/IOFF of 5.88 × 104, which also exhibited good environmental stability for its transfer characteristics. The experimental results indicated that semiconducting composites based one-dimensional nanofiber devices offer advantages over conventional spin-coated thin films and provide a simple strategy for producing high-performance FET devices.
Holistic UDAFs at streaming speeds

Many algorithms have been proposed to approximate holistic aggregates, such as quantiles and heavy hitters, over data streams. However, little work has been done to explore what techniques are required to incorporate these algorithms in a data stream query processor, and to make them useful in practice.In this paper, we study the performance implications of using user-defined aggregate functions (UDAFs) to incorporate selection-based and sketch-based algorithms for holistic aggregates into a data stream management system's query processing architecture. We identify key performance bottlenecks and tradeoffs, and propose novel techniques to make these holistic UDAFs fast and space-efficient for use in high-speed data stream applications. We evaluate performance using generated and actual IP packet data, focusing on approximating quantiles and heavy hitters. The best of our current implementations can process streaming queries at OC48 speeds (2x 2.4Gbps).
DUALITY IN PERTURBATION THEORY AND THE QUANTUM ADIABATIC APPROXIMATION

Duality is considered for the perturbation theory by deriving, given a series solution in a small parameter, its dual series with the development parameter being the inverse of the other. A dual symmetry in perturbation theory is identified. It is then shown that the dual to the Dyson series in quantum mechanics is given by a recently devised series having the adiabatic approximation as leading order. A simple application of this result is given by rederiving a theorem for strongly perturbed quantum systems.
Bone induction in excavation chambers in matrix of decalcified dentin.

EXPERIMENTS by Charles B. Huggins and his associates, 1 and many others during the past thirty years, 2-11 demonstrate that whole toothbuds and parts of toothbuds possess the capacity to grow and develop in areas of the body other than the jawbone, even in the form of explants in tissue culture. The toothbud not only continues its characteristic development, but also exhibits the capacity to induce undifferentiated connective tissues to form bone. To explain these observations, Hoffman 12 postulates that the enamel organ and its derivative, Hertwig's epithelial root sheath, stimulates connective tissue cells to differentiate into bone cells, while Zussman 13 contends that odontoblasts which had previously participated in dentin formation can produce bone even when not in contact with oral tissues. Except that the new bone originates from proliferating living cells in both the transplanted tooth and in the host bed, present knowledge of the local physiology of
Design of an Area-Effcient Million-Bit Integer Multiplier Using Double Modulus NTT

This brief proposes a double modulus number theoretical transform (NTT) method for million-bit integer multiplication in fully homomorphic encryption. In our method, each NTT point is processed simultaneously under two moduli, and the final result is generated through the Chinese reminder theorem. The employment of double modulus enlarges the permitted NTT sample size from 24 to 32 bits and thus improves the transform efficiency. Based on the proposed double modulus method, we accomplish a VLSI design of million-bit integer multiplier with the Schönhage–Strassen algorithm. Implementation results on Altera Stratix-V FPGA show that this brief is able to compute a product of two 1024k-bit integers every 4.9 ms at the cost of only 7.9k ALUTs and 3.6k registers, which is more area-efficient when compared with the current competitors.
The Effect of Topical Xylometazoline on the Mucosal Temperature of the Nasal Septum

Background The purpose of this study was to determine the short-term influence of the α2-adrenoreceptor agonist xylometazoline on the nasal mucosal temperature. Methods Thirty healthy subjects were enrolled into the study. Fifteen of these subjects got xylometazoline and 15 subjects, matched to age, got saline solution as control. A miniaturized thermocouple was used for continuous detection of the septal mucosal temperature without interruption of nasal breathing before and after application of nose spray. Results In the anterior nasal segment, the mucosal temperatures before decongestion were significantly higher than after decongestion (p < 0.05). These changes could not be found in the control group after saline solution. The mean end-expiratory mucosal temperatures were significantly higher than the end-inspiratory ones in both study groups (p < 0.005). Conclusions The reduction of the nasal mucosal blood flow because of vasoconstriction and the increase of the nasal cavity volume after decongestion with xylometazoline seem to cause a significant decrease of the septal mucosal temperature in the anterior nasal segment. This might be one possible causative factor of the common symptom of the “dry nose” in patients with nasal decongestant abuse.
Audio Bird Classification with Inception-v4 extended with Time and Time-Frequency Attention Mechanisms

We present an adaptation of the deep convolutional network Inception-v4 tailored to solving bioacoustic classification problems. Bird sound classification was treated as if it were an image classification problem by a transfer learning of Inception. Inception, the state-of-the-art in image classification, was used together with an attention algorithm, to (multiscale) time-frequency representations or images of bird sounds. This has resulted in an efficient pipeline, that we call Soundception. Soundception scored highest on all tasks in the BirdClef2017 challenge. It reached 0.714 Mean Average Precision in the task that asked for classification of 1500 bird species. To our knowledge Soundception is currently the most effective model for biodiversity monitoring of complex soundscapes.
Summarizing Entity Descriptions for Effective and Efficient Human-centered Entity Linking

Entity linking connects the Web of documents with knowledge bases. It is the task of linking an entity mention in text to its corresponding entity in a knowledge base. Whereas a large body of work has been devoted to automatically generating candidate entities, or ranking and choosing from them, manual efforts are still needed, e.g., for defining gold-standard links for evaluating automatic approaches, and for improving the quality of links in crowdsourcing approaches. However, structured descriptions of entities in knowledge bases are sometimes very long. To avoid overloading human users with too much information and help them more efficiently choose an entity from candidates, we aim to substitute entire entity descriptions with compact, equally effective structured summaries that are automatically generated. To achieve it, our approach analyzes entity descriptions in the knowledge base and the context of entity mention from multiple perspectives, including characterizing and differentiating power, information overlap, and relevance to context. Extrinsic evaluation (where human users carry out entity linking tasks) and intrinsic evaluation (where human users rate summaries) demonstrate that summaries generated by our approach help human users carry out entity linking tasks more efficiently (22-23% faster), without significantly affecting the quality of links obtained; and our approach outperforms existing approaches to summarizing entity descriptions.
Assessment of Health Related Quality of Life in Chronic Liver Disease Patients Using the Japanese Versions of CLDQ and SF-36

Liver disease affects health-related quality of life. The CLDQ is a liver disease specific questionnaire. This study attempted to translate the original CLDQ into Japanese and compare it with SF-36 in chronic liver disease patients, mainly chronic hepatitis C. The Japanese versions of CLDQ and SF-36 were administered to 120 CHC; 45 CHB; 29 NAFLD; 21 HCC post treatment and 50 healthy controls, between February and March, 2008. CLDQ scores of CHC pa- tients and controls were unaffected by sex and age. SF-36 scores of female CHC patients were significantly lower (P = 0.0081) compared to male in the domain of physical function. CHC patients over 70 years had significantly lower SF-36 scores in multiple domains compared to CHC patients below 70. CLDQ scores of CHC patients were lower than controls in all 6 domains. CHB & NAFLD patients had significantly low scores in 3 domains, compared to controls. CHC patients scored significantly lower than CHB & NAFLD patients in 2 domains. Significant differences in SF-36 scores between controls, CHC, CHB and NAFLD patients were not observed. CLDQ scores of treatment naive CHC patients, having ALT levels (�40 or� 40) IU/l; liver cirrhosis patients (child Pugh A) and HCC patients post treatment, revealed that HCC and cirrhosis patients had similar CLDQ scores and significantly lower scores compared to CHC patients with ALT �40 IU/l in 5 out of 6 domains. CHC patients with ALT �40 IU/l had significantly lower CLDQ scores than CHC pa- tients with ALT �40 IU/l in 3 domains. Similar differences was not observed using the SF-36. CLDQ gave a better un- derstanding of HRQL in patients with different forms of chronic liver disease and also disease progression. Age and sex did not affect CLDQ scores. CLDQ appears to be a more convenient tool to study the HRQL in chronic liver disease pa- tients.
Neck Vibration Proprioceptive Postural Response Intact in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy unlike Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease

Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and late-stage idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (IPD) are neurodegenerative movement disorders resulting in different postural instability and falling symptoms. IPD falls occur usually forward in late stage, whereas PSP falls happen in early stages, mostly backward, unprovoked, and with high morbidity. Postural responses to sensory anteroposterior tilt illusion by bilateral dorsal neck vibration were probed in both groups versus healthy controls on a static recording posture platform. Three distinct anteroposterior body mass excursion peaks (P1–P3) were observed. 18 IPD subjects exhibited well-known excessive response amplitudes, whereas 21 PSP subjects’ responses remained unaltered to 22 control subjects. Neither IPD nor PSP showed response latency deficits, despite brainstem degeneration especially in PSP. The observed response patterns suggest that PSP brainstem pathology might spare the involved proprioceptive pathways and implies viability of neck vibration for possible biofeedback and augmentation therapy in PSP postural instability.
Auxin transport routes in plant development

The differential distribution of the plant signaling molecule auxin is required for many aspects of plant development. Local auxin maxima and gradients arise as a result of local auxin metabolism and, predominantly, from directional cell-to-cell transport. In this primer, we discuss how the coordinated activity of several auxin influx and efflux systems, which transport auxin across the plasma membrane, mediates directional auxin flow. This activity crucially contributes to the correct setting of developmental cues in embryogenesis, organogenesis, vascular tissue formation and directional growth in response to environmental stimuli.
Effect of exercise on blood pressure control in hypertensive patients

Several large epidemiological studies have reported an inverse relationship between blood pressure and physical activity. However, longitudinal intervention studies are more appropriate for assessing the effects of physical activity. We performed meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials involving dynamic aerobic endurance training or resistance training. The meta-analysis on endurance training involved 72 trials and 105 study groups. After weighting for the number of trained participants, training induced significant net reductions in resting and daytime ambulatory blood pressure of, respectively, 3.0/2.4 mmHg (P < 0.001) and 3.3/3.5 mmHg (P < 0.01). The reduction in resting blood pressure was more pronounced in the 30 hypertensive study groups (−6.9/-4.9) than in the others (−1.9/-1.6; P < 0.001 for all). Systemic vascular resistance decreased by 7.1% (P < 0.05), plasma norepinephrine by 29% (P < 0.001), and plasma renin activity by 20% (P < 0.05). Body weight decreased by 1.2 kg (P < 0.001), waist circumference by 2.8 cm (P < 0.001), percentage body fat by 1.4% (P < 0.001) and the homeostasis model assessment index of insulin resistance by 0.31 units (P < 0.01); high-density lipoprotein cholesterol increased by 0.032 mmol/l (P < 0.05). Resistance training has been less well studied. A meta-analysis of nine randomized controlled trials (12 study groups) on mostly dynamic resistance training revealed a weighted net reduction in blood pressure of 3.2 (P =0.10)/3.5 (P < 0.01) mmHg associated with exercise. Endurance training decreases blood pressure through a reduction in systemic vascular resistance, in which the sympathetic nervous system and the renin-angiotensin system appear to be involved, and favourably affects concomitant cardiovascular risk factors. The few available data suggest that resistance training can reduce blood pressure. Exercise is a cornerstone therapy for the prevention, treatment and control of hypertension.
Phase aware deep neural network for noise robust voice activity detection

Phase information is ignored for almost all voice activity detection (VAD). To exploit full information in the original signal, this paper proposes a deep neural network (DNN) using magnitude and phase information (that is, phase aware DNN) to achieve better VAD performance. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC), power-normalized cepstral coefficients (PNCC), instantaneous frequency derivative (IF), baseband phase difference (BPD) and modified group delay cepstral coefficient (MGDCC) are used as magnitude and phase information. The proposed methods were evaluated using CENSREC-1-C database under noise condition. The results show that the phase aware DNN significantly outperforms the DNN using only magnitude information. For DNN-based classifier, the equal error rate (EER) was reduced from 23.70% of MFCC, to 20.43% of joint dual magnitude and single phase features (augmenting PNCC, MGDCC and IF), to 19.92% of joint dual phase and single magnitude feature features (augmenting PNCC, MGDCC and BPD). By combining joint dual magnitude and single phase features with joint dual phase and single magnitude features, the EER was reduced to 19.44%.
Inferring the structure and dynamics of interactions in schooling fish

Determining individual-level interactions that govern highly coordinated motion in animal groups or cellular aggregates has been a long-standing challenge, central to understanding the mechanisms and evolution of collective behavior. Numerous models have been proposed, many of which display realistic-looking dynamics, but nonetheless rely on untested assumptions about how individuals integrate information to guide movement. Here we infer behavioral rules directly from experimental data. We begin by analyzing trajectories of golden shiners (Notemigonus crysoleucas) swimming in two-fish and three-fish shoals to map the mean effective forces as a function of fish positions and velocities. Speeding and turning responses are dynamically modulated and clearly delineated. Speed regulation is a dominant component of how fish interact, and changes in speed are transmitted to those both behind and ahead. Alignment emerges from attraction and repulsion, and fish tend to copy directional changes made by those ahead. We find no evidence for explicit matching of body orientation. By comparing data from two-fish and three-fish shoals, we challenge the standard assumption, ubiquitous in physics-inspired models of collective behavior, that individual motion results from averaging responses to each neighbor considered separately; three-body interactions make a substantial contribution to fish dynamics. However, pairwise interactions qualitatively capture the correct spatial interaction structure in small groups, and this structure persists in larger groups of 10 and 30 fish. The interactions revealed here may help account for the rapid changes in speed and direction that enable real animal groups to stay cohesive and amplify important social information.
Forming and Microstructure Control of Ceramics by Electrophoretic Deposition (EPD)

Electrophoretic deposition (EPD) is one of the colloidal processes during in ceramic production and has gained significant interest because of the high versatility of its use with different materials including nanoparticles and its cost-ef fectiveness requiring simple equipment. Of the major parameters for ceramic processing involving the EPD, preparation of the suspensions and application methods of electric fields are particularly important factors that af fect the microstructure. At the beginning of this review, we introduce the fundamental aspects of the EPD processing. We then focus on the following four points: (1) the stability of the Pb(Zr,Ti)O2 /ethonol suspension by the addition of phosphate esters and its influence on the subsequent EPD process, (2) the stability of a TiO2/(2-propanal+2.4-pentanedione) suspension, which is a suspension without dispersants, (3) the film performance of the pulsed direct current EPD using an aqueous suspension, and (4) the laminated textured ceramics by EPD in a strong magnetic field.
On the smallest snarks with oddness 4 and connectivity 2

A snark is a bridgeless cubic graph which is not 3-edge-colourable. The oddness of a bridgeless cubic graph is the minimum number of odd components in any 2-factor of the graph. Lukot'ka, M\'acajov\'a, Maz\'ak and \v{S}koviera showed in [Electron. J. Combin. 22 (2015)] that the smallest snark with oddness 4 has 28 vertices and remarked that there are exactly two such graphs of that order. However, this remark is incorrect as -- using an exhaustive computer search -- we show that there are in fact three snarks with oddness 4 on 28 vertices. In this note we present the missing snark and also determine all snarks with oddness 4 up to 34 vertices.
Prevention of 3 “Never Events” in the Operating Room: Fires, Gossypiboma, and Wrong-Site Surgery

Background: This study sought to identify and provide preventative recommendations for potentially devastating safety violations in the operating room. Methods: A Medline database search from 1950 to current using the terms patient safety and operating room was conducted. All topics identified were reviewed. Three patient safety violations with potential for immediate and devastating outcomes were selected for discussion using evidence-based literature. Results: The search identified 2851 articles, 807 of which were directly related to patient safety in the operating room. Topics addressed by these 807 included infectious complications (26%), fires (11%), communication/teamwork (6%), retained foreign objects (3%), safety checklists (1%), and wrong-site surgery (1%). Fires, gossypiboma, and wrong-site surgery were selected for discussion. Conclusions: Although fire, gossypiboma, and wrong-site surgery should be “never events” in the operating room, they continue to persist as 3 common patient safety violations. This study provides the epidemiology, common etiologies, and evidence-based preventative recommendations for each.
Robust online face tracking-by-detection

The problem of online face tracking from unconstrained videos is still unresolved. Challenges range from coping with severe online appearance variations to coping with occlusion. We propose RFTD (Robust Face Tracking-by-Detection), a system which combines tracking and detection into a single framework to robustly track a face from unconstrained videos. RFTD is based on the idea that adaptive and stable algorithmic components can complement each other in the task of online tracking. An online Structured Output SVM (SO-SVM) is combined with an offline trained face detector to break the self-learning loop typical in tracking. In turn, the face detector is supervised by a Deformable Part Model (DPM) landmark detector to asses the reliability of the face detection output. Extensive evaluation shows that RFTD delivers consistently good tracking performances across different scenarios, i.e., high mean success rate and lowest standard deviation across benchmark videos.