Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How the characteristics of words in child-directed speech differ from adult-directed speech to influence children’s productive vocabularies

Child-directed speech has long been known to influence children’s vocabulary learning. However, while we know that caregiver utterances differ from those directed at adults in various ways, little is known about any differences in the lexical properties of child-directed and adult-directed utterances. We compare over half a million word tokens from adult speech directed at children (from caregiver–child transcriptions) to the same quantity directed at adults. We show that child-directed speech contains greater numbers of words that are lower in phonemic length, higher in frequency, lower in phonotactic probability, and higher in neighborhood density than adult-directed speech; furthermore, child-directed speech explains over twice the variability of children’s productive noun vocabularies than adult-directed speech. These findings indicate that children’s word production is clearly influenced by the characteristics of the words spoken directly to them and that researchers need to be wary of using adult-directed language corpora when calculating lexical measures.
Perturbation analysis for the trace quotient problem

Given a symmetric matrix B ∈ ℝ m×m and a symmetric and positive-definite matrix W ∈ ℝ m×m , maximizing the ratio trace(V ⊤ BV)/trace(V ⊤ WV) with respect to V ∈ ℝ m×ℓ (ℓ ≤ m) subject to the orthogonal constraint V ⊤ V = I ℓ is called the trace quotient problem or the trace ratio problem (TRP). TRP arises originally from the linear discriminant analysis (LDA), which is a popular approach for feature extraction and dimension reduction. It has been known that TRP is equivalent to a nonlinear extreme eigenvalue problem and very efficient method has been proposed to find a global optimal solution successfully. The matrices B and W arising in LDA are constructed from samples, and thereby are contaminated by noises and errors. In this article, we perform a perturbation analysis for TRP assuming the original B and W are perturbed. The upper perturbation bounds of both the global optimal value and the set of global optimal solutions are derived, and numerical investigation is carried out to illustrate these perturbation estimates.
Application of Least Squares Regression to Relationships Containing Auto-Correlated Error Terms

Abstract We point out that autocorrelated error terms require modification of the usual methods of estimation and prediction; and we present evidence showing that the error terms involved in most current formulations of economic relations are highly positively autocorrelated. In doing this we demonstrate that when estimates of autoregressive properties of error terms are based on calculated residuals there is a large bias towards randomness. We demonstrate how much efficiency may be lost by current methods of estimation and prediction; and we give a tentative method of procedure for regaining the lost efficiency. * We wish to express our thanks for the considerable assistance we have received from Richard Stone.
A Highly Compressed Accelerator With Temporal Optical Flow Feature Fusion and Tensorized LSTM for Video Action Recognition on Terminal Device

Deep learning-based action recognition has become ubiquitous in the video analysis area; however, large neural networks require enormous computations to achieve high performance, which hinder them from mobile applications that are tightly constrained by hardware resources. In this work, we introduce a highly compact and fast neural network-based action recognition accelerator named ARA on the terminal device. We build an LSTM-based spatio-temporal action recognition model with extracted time-series features from RGB frames and flow features from optical flow fields. Then the LSTM-based spatio-temporal model is deeply compressed with tensor decomposition to further reduce redundant parameters and lessen computation overhead. Based on the datasets UCF-11, UCF-101, and HMDB51, our proposed method achieves 95.87%, 94.08%, and 75.71% classification accuracy, being comparable with other state-of-the-art methods. In particular, our proposed method significantly compresses the parameter of the LSTM model $215\times $ on the UCF-101 dataset. The proposed system can also achieve a fast running speed of 157.7 FPS on GPU. Furthermore, we validate the performance of the proposed system on an ARM-based terminal device; the results show it only has 0.017-s latency and 4.73-W power consumption.
DAPC: Answering Why-Not Questions on Top-k Direction-Aware ASK Queries in Polar Coordinates

A direction-aware augmented spatial keyword top-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$ </tex-math></inline-formula> query (DAT<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k\text{Q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) returns the top-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$ </tex-math></inline-formula> objects based on a ranking function that considers spatial distance, textual similarity, query numeric attributes, and query direction. When a user initiates a DAT<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k\text{Q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, some user-desired objects (missing objects) may not appear in the query result set, and then the user wonders why they do not appear, which is called the why-not question. This paper focuses on answering why-not questions on DAT<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$ </tex-math></inline-formula>Qs. We first discuss how to obtain the refined query direction by analyzing the position relationship between missing objects and original query direction in Polar coordinates. Then a DAPC index structure is designed, which can cut down irrelevant search space based on not only conventional distance pruning, keyword pruning, and attribute pruning but also query direction pruning. Particularly, by comparing the position relationship between the query direction and the sector (sector ring) region segmented by the DAPC-based method, the search space that does not meet the query direction is pruned. In addition, we discuss the applicability of our scheme for handling why-not questions on regional spatial keyword queries (SKQ), ordinary direction-aware top-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$ </tex-math></inline-formula> SKQ queries and complex scoring SKQ queries. Finally, a series of experiments are conducted on two real datasets to show the efficiency of our DAPC-based method.
Forecasting the impact of an 1859‐caliber superstorm on geosynchronous Earth‐orbiting satellites: Transponder resources

We calculate the economic impact on the existing geosynchronous Earth‐orbiting satellite population of an 1859‐caliber superstorm event were it to occur between 2008 and 2018 during the next solar activity cycle. From a detailed model for transponder capacity and leasing, we have investigated the total revenue loss over the entire solar cycle, as a function of superstorm onset year and intensity. Our Monte Carlo simulations of 1000 possible superstorms, of varying intensity and onset year, suggest that the minimum revenue loss could be of the order of $30 billion. The losses would be larger than this if more that 20 satellites are disabled, if future launch rates do not keep up with the expected rate of retirements, or if the number of spare transponders falls below ∼30%. Consequently, revenue losses can be significantly reduced below $30 billion if the current satellite population undergoes net growth beyond 300 units during Solar Cycle 24 and a larger margin of unused transponders is maintained.
Effects of lower and upper body fatigue in striking response time of amateur karate athletes

In combat sports, strikes or counter-strikes response time (RT) can be related to performance and sporting success. Moreover, training sessions are usually highly fatiguing, which is expected to impair basic skills, such as RT. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the effect of fatigue on punch and kick RTs of karate practitioners. Twelve individuals of both sexes from different levels (three yellow belts, three red belts, two orange belts, two green belts, one brown belt, and one black belt) were selected. Participants were aged 22 ± 3 years old, with a stature of 169.1 ± 6.5 cm, and a body mass of 65.5 ± 10 kg. Six visits were held with each participant. On the first 2 days, the RT of punches and kicks was measured by a validated smartphone app (TReaction). For the subsequent visits, a randomized incremental test for the upper or lower body was adopted as motor fatigue protocol, immediately followed by punches and kicks RT tests, also in random order. For induction of lower and upper body-specific muscle fatigue, the ITStriker app was used, which operates by emitting sound signals transmitted by a smartphone. One-way repeated measures ANOVA was performed, and significance was set at p ≤ 0.05. Regarding the mean punches RT, significant effects between situations for the upper (F(2,22) = 11.5; ω2 = 0.23; p < 0.001) and lower body (F(2,22) = 14.2; ω2 = 0.18; p < 0.001) fatigue protocols were found. The negative effect of the lower body fatigue protocol in punches RT was evident regardless of the order of the tests (punch RT first: Δ = 10.5%; t = 4.4; p < 0.001; d = 1.0; kick RT first: Δ = 11.4%; t = 4.8; p < 0.001; d = 1.1). Regarding mean kicks RT, significant effects were found between situations for the lower (F(2,22) = 16.6; ω2 = 0.27; p < 0.001) but not for the upper (F(2,22) = 2.3; ω2 = 0.02; p = 0.12) body fatigue protocols. Kick RTs were negatively affected by the lower body fatigue protocol regardless of the RT order applied (punch RT first: Δ = 7.5%; t = 3.0; p = 0.01; d = 0.8; kick RT first: Δ = 14.3%; t = 5.7; p < 0.001; d = 1.5). Upper body fatigue does not impair punch or kick RTs. Thus, it is concluded that the specificity of fatigue protocols and striking order should be considered while performing RT demanding techniques in karate practice. Specifically, lower body motor fatigue may impair both kicks and punches RT, which highlights the role of lower limbs in punches performance. Otherwise, upper body motor fatigue seems to induce impairments that are limited to the specific motor actions of this body segment.
Epidemiological Situation of Glanders in the State of Pará, Brazil

Glanders is an anthropozoonosis caused by the bacteria Burkholderia mallei, affecting mainly equids. It has been eradicated in North America, Australia, and Western Europe, but continues to occur sporadically in countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America. Its notification is mandatory by the World Organization for Animal Health. After 30 years, the disease reappeared in Brazil in 1999 and, thereafter, 1,413 outbreaks have been reported. However, the epidemiological situation of the disease in the country is not adequately known. Thus, 2718 animals from 654 properties in the state of Pará were randomly selected by sampling and examined using a serial protocol with Complement Fixation and Western Blot serological tests. The prevalence of properties infected with glanders in the state was estimated at 1.68% [0.84; 3.33] and of seropositive animals at 0.50% [0.27; 0.94]. The introduction of animals was individualized as a risk factor for disease introduction in the properties (OR = 5.9 [1.4; 25.5]). Despite the low prevalence of infected properties and seropositive animals, the state must review actions to fight the disease, considering that the strategies implemented have not affected the endemic balance of the disease. This process must involve all public and private agents interested in the topic.
A TF/SF Plane Wave Source Condition for the Constraint-Preserving FVTD Method

A low-leakage total-field/scattered-field plane wave source condition capable of propagating at any incident angle is developed for a newly-developed DGTD-based FVTD method. This constraint-preserving FVTD method provides solutions up to any order of accuracy, preserves the divergence constraints imposed by Gauss’ laws, and may be easily adapted to non-conformal and unstructured meshes. In order to implement the proposed plane wave source condition, several of the steps within the updating loop of the FVTD model, including the Riemann solvers and update equations, must be adapted to ensure the field variables always remain consistent (are consistently designated as either total or scattered fields). The proposed total-field/scattered-field technique is shown to provide numerical leakage errors at the level of machine precision (−300 dB) for second-, third-, and fourth-order constraint-preserving FVTD schemes.
Fitting age‐specific fertility rates by a flexible generalized skew normal probability density function

Mixture probability density functions have recently been proposed to describe some fertility patterns characterized by a bimodal shape. These functions are adequate when the fertility pattern is actually bimodal, but they appear to be less useful when the shape of age‐specific fertility rates is unimodal. A further model is proposed, based on flexible skew symmetric probability density functions. This model can fit symmetric and skew patterns as well as reflect humps that are observed in some fertility patterns. It is more parsimonious than mixture distributions and more flexible, showing a good fit with several shapes (bimodal or unimodal) of fertility patterns. Empirical evaluation of the model proposed and comparisons with other functions for Italian data from 1952 to 2003 and US data from 1933 to 2006 are also discussed.
On Neutral Responses (Zeros) in the Sign Test and Ties in the Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney Test

An alternative treatment of neutral responses in the sign test is proposed that makes explicit use of the probability of a neutral response in the hypotheses being tested. It permits a more conservative (liberal) interpretation of neutral responses in the context of a test with good power properties for the hypotheses chosen. The extension of this formulation to treating ties in the Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney problem setting is also discussed.
Actinides in the Source of Cosmic Rays and the Present Interstellar Medium

The abundances of the actinide elements in the cosmic rays can provide critical constraints on the major sites of their acceleration. Using recent calculations of the r-process yields in core collapse supernovae, we have determined the actinide abundances averaged over various assumed time intervals for their supernova generation and their cosmic-ray acceleration. Using standard Galactic chemical evolution models, we have also determined the expected actinide abundances in the present interstellar medium. From these two components, we have calculated the U/Th and other actinide abundances expected in the supernova-active cores of superbubbles, as a function of their ages and mean metallicity resulting from dilution with interstellar cloud debris. Then, using observations of the fractions of Galactic supernovae that occur in superbubbles and in the rest of the interstellar medium, we calculate the expected actinide abundances in cosmic rays accelerated by Galactic supernovae. We find that the current measurements of actinide/Pt-group and preliminary estimates of the UPuCm/Th ratio in cosmic rays are all consistent with the expected values if superbubble cores have mean metallicities of around 3 times solar. Such metallicities are quite comparable to the superbubble core metallicities inferred from other cosmic-ray observations. Future, more precise measurements of these ratios with experiments such as ECCO (Westphal, Weaver, & Tarle 2001) are needed to provide a better measure of the mean source metallicity sampled by the local Galactic cosmic rays. Measurements of the cosmic-ray actinide abundances have been favorably compared with the protosolar ratio, inferred from present solar system abundances, to infer that the cosmic rays are accelerated from the general interstellar medium. We suggest, however, that such an inference is not valid because the expected actinide abundances in the present interstellar medium are very different from the protosolar values, which sampled the interstellar medium 4.5 Gyr ago and included an additional fresh ejecta component from a neighboring supernova.
The North Pacific Experiment (NORPEX-98): Targeted Observations for Improved North American Weather Forecasts

Abstract The objectives and preliminary results of an interagency field program, the North Pacific Experiment (NORPEX), which took place between 14 January and 27 February 1998, are described. NORPEX represents an effort to directly address the issue of observational sparsity over the North Pacific basin, which is a major contributing factor in short-range (less than 4 days) forecast failures for land-falling Pacific winter-season storms that affect the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The special observations collected in NORPEX include approximately 700 targeted tropospheric soundings of temperature, wind, and moisture from Global Positioning System (GPS) dropsondes obtained in 38 storm reconnaissance missions using aircraft based primarily in Hawaii and Alaska. In addition, wind data were provided every 6 h over the entire North Pacific during NORPEX, using advanced and experimental techniques to extract information from multispectral geostationary satellite imagery. Preliminary results of NORPEX dat.
The Efficacy of Biological Disease-modifying Antirheumatic Drugs on Sarcopenia in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis

Objective Sarcopenia is characterized by a loss of muscle mass and strength, which leads to frailty and mortality. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is considered to be a cause of sarcopenia. The present study assessed the effectiveness of biological disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (bDMARDs) on sarcopenia. Methods This was a prospective cohort study including 48 patients [11 men, 37 women; 67.5 (57.0-74.8) years old] with RA who started bDMARDs in Niigata Rheumatic Center. We monitored the physical ability, nutritional status and body composition at the baseline, 6 months and 12 months. The physical activity was measured by the Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ) and 10-m walking test (10MWT). The nutritional status was assessed by the controlling nutrition status (CONUT) score. Results Among the 48 patients who started bDMARDs, 21 were classified as having sarcopenia. The physical activity and nutritional status were significantly ameliorated after 12 months of bDMARDs. The body composition analysis showed a significant increase in the body weight but no significant increase in the skeletal muscle mass index. The proportion of patients diagnosed with sarcopenia decreased significantly after 12 months of bDMARDs (43.8% vs. 27.1%, p=0.039). Among the 21 patients who were diagnosed with sarcopenia when starting bDMARDs, the skeletal muscle index was significantly increased after 12 months of bDMARDs. [5.22 (4.76-5.43) kg/m2 vs. 5.44 (4.84-5.77), p=0.039]. Conclusion Biologics may be useful in the treatment of sarcopenia through mechanisms such as improving the disease activity, physical activity and nutritional status.
Defect Detection for the Insulation Layer of Bent Aircraft Cables Based on Ultrasonic Guided Waves

The damage of aircraft cables is a major issue in the aerospace industry, which usually starts from insulation layer defect and can lead to serious casualties and financial losses. In this article, a method for defect detection for the insulation layer of bent aircraft cables is proposed, which is based on ultrasonic guided waves (UGWs). The propagation characteristics of UGWs in bent cables were studied by simulation and experiments, and wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) was used for feature extraction of the detection signals to distinguish bending and defects in the insulation layer. The experimental results show that the method is able to detect and locate both bending and defects (abrasion and cut) in the insulation layer. The maximum relative error in bending and defect localization does not exceed 0.3%.
Polyphasic Characterization of Geotalea uranireducens NIT-SL11 Newly Isolated from a Complex of Sewage Sludge and Microbially Reduced Graphene Oxide

Graphene oxide (GO), a chemically oxidized sheet of graphite, has been used as a conductive carbon carrier of microbes to boost various bioelectrochemical reactions. However, the types of microbes that can reduce GO have rarely been investigated. In this study, a strain of GO-reducing bacteria, named NIT-SL11, which was obtained from a hydrogel of microbially reduced GO and anaerobic sludge that converts sewage to electricity, was phylogenically identified as a novel strain of Geotalea uraniireducens. Considering the current lack of information on the electrogenic ability of the bacterium and its physicochemical and chemotaxonomic characteristics, the polyphasic characterization of the Geotalea uraniireducens strain NIT-SL11 was performed. NIT-SL11 utilized various organic acids, such as lactate, benzoate, and formate, as electron donors and exhibited respiration using GO, electrodes, fumarate, and malate. The strain contained C16:1ω7c and C16:0 as the major fatty acids and MK-8 and 9 as the major respiratory quinones. The complete genome of NIT-SL11 was 4.7 Mbp in size with a G+C content of 60.9%, and it encoded 80 putative c-type cytochromes and 23 type IV pili-related proteins. The possible extracellular electron transfer (EET) pathways of the strain were the porin–cytochrome (Pcc) EET pathway and type IV pili-based pathway.
FUNOff: Offloading Applications at Function Granularity for Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) offers a promising technology that deploys computing resources closer to mobile devices for improving performance. Most of the existing studies support on-demand remote execution of the computing tasks in applications through program transformation, but they commonly assume that mobile devices merely resort to a single server for computation offloading, which cannot make full use of the scattered and changeable computing resources. Thus, for object-oriented applications, we propose a novel approach, called FUNOff, to support the dynamic offloading of applications in MEC at the function granularity. First, we extract a call tree via code analysis and locate the function invocations that are suitable for offloading. Next, we refactor the code of related object functions according to a specific program structure. Finally, we make offloading decisions referring to the context at runtime and send function invocations to multiple remote servers for execution. We evaluate the proposed FUNOff on two real-world applications. The results show that, compared with other approaches, FUNOff better supports the computation offloading of object-oriented applications in MEC, which reduces the response time by 10.7%-58.2%.