Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sampling-Based Speech Parameter Generation Using Moment-Matching Networks

This paper presents sampling-based speech parameter generation using moment-matching networks for Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based speech synthesis. Although people never produce exactly the same speech even if we try to express the same linguistic and para-linguistic information, typical statistical speech synthesis produces completely the same speech, i.e., there is no inter-utterance variation in synthetic speech. To give synthetic speech natural inter-utterance variation, this paper builds DNN acoustic models that make it possible to randomly sample speech parameters. The DNNs are trained so that they make the moments of generated speech parameters close to those of natural speech parameters. Since the variation of speech parameters is compressed into a low-dimensional simple prior noise vector, our algorithm has lower computation cost than direct sampling of speech parameters. As the first step towards generating synthetic speech that has natural inter-utterance variation, this paper investigates whether or not the proposed sampling-based generation deteriorates synthetic speech quality. In evaluation, we compare speech quality of conventional maximum likelihood-based generation and proposed sampling-based generation. The result demonstrates the proposed generation causes no degradation in speech quality.
Facebook use and its relationship with personality traits, self-esteem, and internet self-efficacy among college students

Social networking sites like Facebook are used by thousands of people every day. This study explores Facebook intensity and its relationship with personality traits, self-esteem, and internet self-efficacy. Data was used from a sample of 80 undergraduate students (38 male, 42 female) between the ages of eighteen and twenty six. A negative significant relationship was established between Facebook intensity and self-esteem. Results also indicated that Facebook intensity had a positive significant relationship with personality traits. In addition, when the five personality traits were tested in a separate test, without self-esteem and selfefficacy, no correlation was found. Lastly, no relationship was found between internet selfefficacy and Facebook intensity. These results highlight the role self-esteem, personality traits, and internet self-efficacy has on Facebook usage. This research extends previous research by indicating that there was no relationship between internet self-efficacy and Facebook intensity as prior research fails to demonstrate this. Suggestions for limitations and further directions were discussed.
Use of Hyperspectral and High Spatial Resolution Image Data in an Asphalted Urban Road Extraction

With the popularization of the high spatial resolution images of commercial satellites several applications of remote sensing intended for urban tracking has been developed. These images of high spatial resolution generally have limited spectral information. Meanwhile, the main hyperspectrals images available have high spectral resolution and, in return, low spatial resolution. For most urban monitoring applications the spatial information is extremely relevant. Based on that, this work presents the use of high spatial and high resolution spectral images applied to urban monitoring, specifically the extraction and identification of the asphalted urban roads in the city of Mogiguaccedilu, state of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
An Effective Android Software Reinforcement Scheme Based on Online Key

Android is currently the most popular Operating System (OS) which is widespreadly installed on mobile phones, smart TVs and other wearable devices. Due to its overwhelming market share, Android attracts the attentions from many attackers. Reverse Engineering technology plays an important role in the field of Android security, such as cracking applications, malware analysis, software protection, etc. By deploying anti-debugging technology on Android applications, this paper designs and implements a reinforcement scheme for Android software with comprehensive utilization of encryption, dynamic loading and shell technologies. Evaluated the performance on different aspects, the proposed scheme can work effectively for android software protection.
Illness-Associated Productivity Costs Among Women With Employer-Sponsored Insurance and Newly Diagnosed Breast Cancer

Objective: Determine lost work time and job attrition for incident breast cancer (BC). Methods: The cases were employed women, aged 18 to 64, with BC identified by a validated algorithm between 1999 and 2005, from claims (MarketScan) and attendance databases. Controls without cancer were matched 3:1 on age, comorbidity, and index year. Results: First-year mean disability days were 60 (cases, N = 880) versus 5 (controls, N = 2640) (P < 0.001). The first-year disability costs were $4900 for cases versus $385 for controls (P < 0.001). In years 2 through 4, the disability days and associated costs were similar for the cases versus controls. After 4 years, 56.4% of cases were still enrolled in the employer-sponsored insurance programs compared to 6.5% of controls (P < 0.001). Conclusions: The lost work associated with BC is substantial in the first year after diagnosis. Employee retention is much higher for BC cases versus controls.
Recent progress on 2-micron fiber lasers

Highly Tm-doped silicate glasses and fibers were developed, which exhibit a high slope efficiency of 68.3% and a gain per unit length of greater than 2dB/cm. Single frequency fiber lasers with laser linewidth less than 3kHz, Q-switched single frequency fiber lasers, and mode-locked fiber lasers near 2 micron wavelength were demonstrated using this newly developed fiber.
A user defined taxonomy of factors that divide online information retrieval sessions

Although research is increasingly interested in session-based retrieval, comparably little work has focused on how best to divide web histories into sessions. Most automated attempts to divide web histories into sessions have focused on dividing web logs using simplistic rules, including user identifiers and specific time gaps. This research, however, is focused on understanding the full range of factors that affect the division of sessions, so that we can begin to go beyond current naive techniques like fixed time periods of inactivity. To investigate these factors, 10,000 log items were manually analysed by their owners into 847 naturally occurring web sessions. During interviews, participants reviewed their own web histories to identify these sessions, and described the causes of divisions between sessions. This paper contributes a taxonomy of six factors that can be used to better model the divisions between sessions, along with initial insights into how the divided sessions manifested in web logs. The factors in our taxonomy provide focus for future work, including our own, for finding practical ways to more intelligently divide and identify sessions for improved session-based retrieval.
La universidad desde sus imágenes. Profesionalización, desprofesionalización o proletarización en la universidad contemporánea

La universidad es uno de los actores que, junto al Estado, el Mercado o los grupos profesionales, entre otros, contribuye tanto a la profesionalizacion y desarrollo de las profesiones como a la suya propia. Pero la imagen de la universidad como organizacion profesional muestra solo una parte del rompecabezas; otras metaforas pueden ayudarnos a construir una coherente y sintetica radiografia de sus dimensiones y elementos. Las imagenes de la universidad han ido cambiando en el tiempo y con los tiempos. El objetivo de este texto es dar razon, sirviendonos de varias imagenes, de sus transformaciones. La intencion es aproximarnos a una mejor comprension de nuestra institucion en estos tiempos, asi como incidir en un debate siempre de actualidad: el que atane al conflicto entre profesionalizacion y desprofesionalizacion y sus repercusiones para pensar nuestra organizacion.
Adherence and Patients' Experiences with the Use of Capecitabine in Daily Practice

Introduction: Capecitabine is a widely prescribed oral anticancer agent. We studied medication adherence and explored its use in daily practice from a patients' perspective. Patients and Methods: Patients (n = 92) starting capecitabine were followed up to five 3-week cycles. Adherence was assessed using a pill count, pharmacy data and dosing information from the patients' medical file. Self-reported adherence was measured using the Medication Adherence Report Scale (MARS). At baseline and during week 2 of cycles 1, 3, and 5, patients filled out questionnaires about quality of life, symptoms, attitude toward medicines and disease and use in daily practice. Simultaneously, blood samples were taken to determine the area under the curve (AUC) of 5′-deoxy-5-fluorouridine (5′-DFUR), 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), and α-fluoro-β-alanine (FBAL) by a population pharmacokinetic model. Associations between AUCs and patient-reported symptoms were tested for cycles 3 and 5. Results: Most patients (84/92; 91%) had an adherence rate of ≥95 and ≤ 105%. The percentage of patients reporting any non-adherence behavior measured with MARS increased from 16% at cycle 1 to 29% at cycle 5. Symptoms were reported frequently and the dosing regimen was adjusted by the physician at least once in 62% of patients. In multivariate analysis the probability of an adjustment increased with the number of co-medication (OR 1.19, 95% CI: 1.03–1.39) and a stronger emotional response to the disease (OR 1.32, 95% CI: 1.10–1.59). The AUC of 5′-DFUR was associated with weight loss (OR 1.10, 95% CI: 1.01–1.19), AUC of FBAL with hand-foot syndrome (OR 0.90, 95% CI: 0.83–0.99), rhinorrhea (OR 1.21, 95% CI: 1.03–1.42 weight loss (OR 1.09, 95% CI: 1.00–1.20) and depression (OR 0.90, 95% CI: 0.82–0.99). Side effects were reported by one third of patients as the reason to discontinue treatment. Conclusion: Adherence to capecitabine was generally high. Nevertheless, adherence measured with MARS decreased over time Adherence management to support implementation of correct capecitabine use is specifically relevant in longer term treatment. In addition, it appears that adverse event management is important to support persistence. With the extending armamentarium of oral targeted anticancer agents and prolonged treatment duration, we expect the issue of medication adherence of increasing importance in oncology.
Personality-Based Recommendation in E-Commerce

In recent years there has been an exponential increase in the number of users each day adopting e-commerce as a purchasing vehicle of products and services. This has led to a growing interest from the scientific community in approaches and models that would improve the customer experience. Specifically, it has been repeatedly pointed out that the definition of a customer experience tailored to the user personality traits would likely increase the probability of purchase. In this article we illustrate a recommender system for e-commerce capable of adapting the product and service offer according to not only the user interests and preferences, and his context of use, but also his personality profile derived from information relating to his professional activities.
Corpus based reconstruction of speech degraded by wind noise

This contribution addresses the problem of enhancing a speech signal which is degraded by wind noise. The characteristic that wind noise signals are sparse in time and frequency is exploited in a way that only time-frequency regions that are determined as degraded are enhanced. In these regions of the noisy signal, a process is applied to reconstruct the clean speech data. This is realized by a separation of the noisy speech signal into an autoregressive filter representing the human vocal tract and its excitation signal. The clean filter coefficients of the former are estimated using a pre-trained codebook. A pitch cycle taken from clean speech is adapted to reconstruct the excitation of noisy speech segments.
Nested Maximum Likelihood Group Detection in Generalized Spatial Modulation MIMO Systems

This letter presents a new detection scheme for the generalized spatial modulation MIMO system. The strategy is based on the successive use of maximum likelihood detectors, applied in a nested fashion, to variable-length partitions of the post-equalization received signal. The choice of the antenna combination mapping, named spatial constellation, as well as the detection ordering strategy are key design factors to the implementation of the high-performance and low-complexity detector. Simulation results show the substantial performance advantage of the proposed detector compared with current suboptimal receivers.
The controller design of phase-lock loop based on the least-squares method

Some literatures propose the PI controller design method of phase-lock loop (PLL) that without the lowpass filter, and the design rule is easy since the PLL is a second-order system. However, the PLL with the lowpass filter is a high-order system, and the PI controller design is complicated according to traditional method. This paper proposes a new method to design the PI controller parameters of PLL based on the least-squares method. It analyzes the input sensitivity matrix and output sensitivity matrix of the simplified synchronous reference frame phase-lock loop (SRF-PLL) based on robust theory, and points out the problem of PI controller design based on the pole placement method. As for the three equations consisted of proportional gain and integral gain, this paper takes it as a linear regression model and uses the least-squares method to estimate the optimal proportional gain and integral gain. Under different adverse conditions, the performances of the PI controller designed by the proposed method are tested through simulation, and the simulation results show that the proposed method is effective.
A Data-Driven Mapping of Five ACT-R Modules on the Brain

In this paper we present a new, data-driven mapping of five ACT-R modules on the brain. In the last decade, many studies have been published that evaluated ACT-R models based on their ability to predict fMRI data in certain predefined brain regions. However, these predefined regions were based on a reading of the literature, and might not be optimal. Currently, we used the results of a model-based fMRI analysis of five datasets to define a new brain mapping for the problem state, declarative memory, manual, visual, and aural modules. Both the original and the new mapping were applied to data of an experiment that elicited differential activity in these five modules; the results were compared to model predictions. The new mapping performed slightly better for the problem state, declarative memory, aural, and manual modules, but not for the visual module. In addition, it provides a more principled way of validating ACT-R models. Although the mapping is ACT-R specific, the methodology can be use to map any cognitive architecture or model to the brain.
Influencia de los estilos parentales en la adicción al internet en alumnos de secundaria del Perú

Present study aimed to establish influence of parenting styles on addiction to Internet. 2370 teenage students from third to fifth grades of secondary school were evaluated. They belonged to 14 representative cities of coast, highlands and forest Peruvian regions and aged 13 to 18 years. Parenting Styles Questionnaire (Parker et al. 1997), adapted to our reality for the present study, and Addiction to Internet Test (Young, 1998), also adapted to our reality by Raymundo, Matalinares and Baca (2013, pending publication) were the instruments applied. Results showed that dysfunctional parenting styles (abuse and indifference) influenced on addiction to Internet. Greater incidence of teenage students addicted to Internet was observed in the coast while greater perception of dysfunctional parenting styles was observed in highlands. Dysfunctional parenting styles (indifference, abuse, overprotection) on one-parent family homes were also found.
Parent and Metabolite Opioid Drug Concentrations in Unintentional Deaths Involving Opioid and Benzodiazepine Combinations , ,

Effects of benzodiazepines on postmortem opioid parent and parent/metabolite blood concentration ratios were determined for fentanyl‐, hydrocodone‐, methadone‐, or oxycodone‐related accidental deaths. These opioids are partially metabolized by the CYP3A4 enzyme system, which is also affected by diazepam and alprazolam. Opioid/metabolite combinations examined were as follows: fentanyl/norfentanyl, hydrocodone/dihydrocodeine, methadone/EDDP, and oxycodone/oxymorphone. Parent opioid concentrations were analyzed for 877 deaths. Parent/metabolite concentration ratios were analyzed for 349 deaths, excluding cases with co‐intoxicants present known to interfere with opioid elimination. Alprazolam in combination with diazepam significantly decreased median hydrocodone concentrations by 48% (p = 0.01) compared to hydrocodone alone. The methadone parent/metabolite concentration ratio was reduced by 35% in the presence of diazepam compared to methadone alone (p = 0.03). Benzodiazepines did not statistically significantly affect fentanyl or oxycodone concentrations. Possible factors affecting opioid concentrations and possible toxicity development, including any differential effects on specific opioids, should continue to be explored.
Investigating academic malpractice within an MBA Marketing module

This paper reports on progress and findings to date on an ongoing action research project designed to address the problem of academic malpractice, notably collusion, amongst postgraduate students on an international MBA programme. Its roots lie in 2008 when it was found that case study assignments had largely designed-out plagia-rism but that collusion had taken its place with the result that 132 cases were taken to the University? s Unfair Practices Committee. Understanding the problem was ap-proached in several ways, including reference to existing literature, which highlighted the importance of students? previous cultural and educational experiences, and quali-tative research drawing on students? views and feelings. As a result, a two-pronged strategy was adopted, one element being a zero-tolerance policy with all MBA assign-ments submitted to the Turnitin text matching software and wide broadcasting of the dangers and penalties resulting from malpractice. These were coupled with strength-ening the induction and Study Skills elements of the programme in order to develop students? independent study skills and understanding and ability to comply with UK academic conventions. We conclude that the dual strategy of prevention and cure was effective, resulting in the overall rate of academic malpractice falling from a high of 34.8%, and of collusion of 26.6%, to single figures with both being maintained with subsequent cohorts. The ongoing question of how best to adapt teaching practices to suit the background and expectations of international students remains unresolved. Therefore, further research is being conducted with selected preliminary findings be-ing presented in this paper.
Impact of Standardized Protocol for MRSA Impact of a Standardized Protocol to Address Outbreak of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus Skin Infections at a large , urban County Jail System

Outbreaks of infections caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) have been reported in incarcerated populations nationwide. We compared rates before and after the implementation of a standardized treatment guideline in the San Diego County jail system. This guideline included mandatory culturing, personal and environmental hygiene measures, standardized antibiotic treatments based on sensitivity patterns, and close surveillance of cases. We found that our guideline reduced the proportion of soft tissue infections caused by MRSA (90.3% to 57.8%) and decreased the proportion of inmates diagnosed with MRSA after 10 days in custody. Documented resolution of the infection improved from 30.7% to 68.7% of cases. The average number of different antibiotic regimens decreased from 3.06 to 1.78 per patient. We conclude that our guideline resulted in a decrease in MRSA transmission, fewer antibiotic courses and improved resolution of cases.
DGAT1 deficiency decreases PPAR expression and does not lead to lipotoxicity in cardiac and skeletal muscle[S]

Diacylglycerol (DAG) acyl transferase 1 (Dgat1) knockout (−/−) mice are resistant to high-fat-induced obesity and insulin resistance, but the reasons are unclear. Dgat1−/− mice had reduced mRNA levels of all three Ppar genes and genes involved in fatty acid oxidation in the myocardium of Dgat1−/− mice. Although DGAT1 converts DAG to triglyceride (TG), tissue levels of DAG were not increased in Dgat1−/− mice. Hearts of chow-diet Dgat1−/− mice were larger than those of wild-type (WT) mice, but cardiac function was normal. Skeletal muscles from Dgat1−/− mice were also larger. Muscle hypertrophy factors phospho-AKT and phospho-mTOR were increased in Dgat1−/− cardiac and skeletal muscle. In contrast to muscle, liver from Dgat1−/− mice had no reduction in mRNA levels of genes mediating fatty acid oxidation. Glucose uptake was increased in cardiac and skeletal muscle in Dgat1−/− mice. Treatment with an inhibitor specific for DGAT1 led to similarly striking reductions in mRNA levels of genes mediating fatty acid oxidation in cardiac and skeletal muscle. These changes were reproduced in cultured myocytes with the DGAT1 inhibitor, which also blocked the increase in mRNA levels of Ppar genes and their targets induced by palmitic acid. Thus, loss of DGAT1 activity in muscles decreases mRNA levels of genes involved in lipid uptake and oxidation.
KompicsTesting - Unit Testing Event Streams

In this paper we present KompicsTesting, a framework for unit testing components in the Kompics component model. Components in Kompics are event-driven entities which communicate asynchronously solely by message passing. Similar to actors in the actor model, they do not share their internal state in message-passing, making them less prone to errors, compared to other models of concurrency using shared state. However, they are neither immune to simpler logical and specification errors nor errors such as dataraces that stem from nondeterminism. As a result, there exists a need for tools that enable rapid and iterative development and testing of message passing components in general, in a manner similar to the xUnit frameworks for functions and modular segments code. These frameworks work in an imperative manner, ill suited for testing message-passing components given that the behavior of such components are encoded in the streams of messages that they send and receive. In this work, we present a theoretical framework for describing and verifying the behavior of message-passing components, independent of the model and framework implementation, in a manner similar to describing a stream of characters using regular expressions. We show how this approach can be used to perform both black box and white box testing of components and illustrate its feasibility through the design and implementation a prototype based on this approach, KompicsTesting.