Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Problem for RST: The Need for Multi-Level Discourse Analysis

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Thompson 1987), argues that in most coherent discourse, consecutive discourse elements are related by a small set of rhetorical relations. Moreover, RST suggests that the information conveyed in a discourse over and above what is conveyed in its component clauses can be derived from the rhetorical relation-based structure of the discourse. A large number of natural language generation systems rely on the rhetorical relations defined in RST to impose structure on multi-sentential text (Hovy 1991; Knott 1991; Moore and Paris 1989; Rosner and Stede 1992). In addition, many descriptive studies of discourse have employed RST (Fox 1987; Linden, Cumming, and Martin 1992; Matthiessen and Thompson 1988). However, recent work by Moore and Paris (1992) noted that RST cannot be used as the sole means of controlling discourse structure in an interactive dialogue system, because RST representations provide insufficient information to support the generation of appropriate responses to "follow-up questions. " The basic problem is that an RST representation of a discourse does not fully specify the intentional structure (Grosz and Sidner 1986) of that discourse. Intentional structure is crucial for responding effectively to questions that address a previous utterance: without a record of what an utterance was intended to achieve, it is impossible to elaborate or clarify that utterance. 1 Further consideration has led us to conclude that the difficulty observed by Moore and Paris stems from a more fundamental problem with RST analyses. RST presumes that, in general, there will be a single, preferred rhetorical relation holding between consecutive discourse elements. In fact, as has been noted in other work on discourse structure (Grosz and Sidner 1986), discourse elements are related simultaneously on multiple levels. In this paper, we focus on two levels of analysis. The first involves the relation between the information conveyed in consecutive elements of a coherent discourse. Thus, for example, one utterance may describe an event that can be presumed to be the cause of another event described in the subsequent utterance. This causal relation is at what we will call the informational level. The second level of relation results from the fact that discourses are produced to effect changes in the mental state of the discourse participants. In coherent discourse, a speaker is carrying out a consistent plan to achieve the intended changes, and consecutive discourse elements are related to one another by means of the ways in which they participate in that plan. Thus, one utterance may be intended to increase the likelihood that the hearer will come to
Mycobacterium bovis (bovine tuberculosis) infection in North American wildlife: current status and opportunities for mitigation of risks of further infection in wildlife populations

SUMMARY Mycobacterium bovis (M. bovis), the causative agent of bovine tuberculosis, has been identified in nine geographically distinct wildlife populations in North America and Hawaii and is endemic in at least three populations, including members of the Bovidae, Cervidae, and Suidae families. The emergence of M. bovis in North American wildlife poses a serious and growing risk for livestock and human health and for the recreational hunting industry. Experience in many countries, including the USA and Canada, has shown that while M. bovis can be controlled when restricted to livestock species, it is almost impossible to eradicate once it has spread into ecosystems with free-ranging maintenance hosts. Therefore, preventing transmission of M. bovis to wildlife may be the most effective way to mitigate economic and health costs of this bacterial pathogen. Here we review the status of M. bovis infection in wildlife of North America and identify risks for its establishment in uninfected North American wildlife populations where eradication or control would be difficult and costly. We identified four common risk factors associated with establishment of M. bovis in uninfected wildlife populations in North America, (1) commingling of infected cattle with susceptible wildlife, (2) supplemental feeding of wildlife, (3) inadequate surveillance of at-risk wildlife, and (4) unrecognized emergence of alternate wildlife species as successful maintenance hosts. We then propose the use of integrated and adaptive disease management to mitigate these risk factors to prevent establishment of M. bovis in susceptible North American wildlife species.
Prevalence of Root Dilaceration in Adult Patients Referred to Shiraz Dental School (2005-2010)

Statement of Problem: Dilaceration is defined as a sudden change in the axial inclination of root or between the crown and the root of a tooth. There is no previous study evaluating its prevalence in south of Iran. Purpose: This study evaluates the prevalence of root dilaceration on the basis of its location in dental arch in a sample of dental patients referring to Shiraz dental school, Iran. Materials and Method: This retrospective study was performed using full mouth periapical radiographs of 250 patients who were referred to Shiraz dental school. Buccal and lingual dilaceration was determined by its known” bull’s eye” appearance in the radiographs or if the deviation was in the mesial or distal directions; the angle of 90 degree or greater between the deviation and the axis of root was the inclusion criteria. Results: Root dilaceration was detected in 0.3% of teeth and 7.2% of patients. It was distributed equally between the maxilla and mandible. Mandibular second molar was the most frequent dilacerated tooth (1.6%) followed by maxillary first molar (1.3%) and mandibular first molar (0.6%). The alveolar nerve was the most common anatomic structure near dilacerated teeth. Conclusion: According to this study, root dilaceration is an uncommon developmental anomaly which occurs mostly in the posterior teeth.
Trial-by-trial coding of instructive signals in the cerebellum: Insights from eyeblink conditioning in mice

The cerebellum is an area of the brain that plays a crucial role in the learning of motor skills. This process involves climbing fibers, which provide teaching signals to Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex when perturbations occur during a movement. However, controversy has arisen over climbing fibers contribution to cerebellar learning. This is because climbing-fiber signals are described as "all-or-nothing": they fire a single burst of action potentials in response to all supra-threshold stimuli, regardless of their strength. On the contrary, motor learning is not all-or-nothing: the amount of learning is driven by the strength of perturbations. In this dissertation, I describe the experiments that I performed to unravel how climbing fibers may encode the strength of teaching signals. In Chapter 2, I present my behavioral studies in mice, which involved a simple cerebellar-dependent motor learning task, eyeblink conditioning. I show that mice take into account the strength of unexpected perturbations to adapt their movements trial-by-trial. In Chapter 3, I present a review of the previous literature and provide a hypothesis on how climbing fibers can encode the strength of teaching signals in a single trial. In Chapter 4, I present the findings of my in vivo two-photon calcium imaging experiments, which suggest climbing-fiber signals may not be all-or-nothing at the postsynaptic level. Finally, in Chapter 5 I describe the different mechanisms that we discovered for coding the intensity of teaching signals by Purkinje cells in the cerebellum of awake mice. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Biology First Advisor Javier F. Medina
Programming with Components in Robotics

This paper describes a component-oriented programming framework for robotics, CoolBOT , which is actually under development at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC). The framework has been designed to assist robotic system developers in building more structured and reusable systems. Components are the basic building blocks used in this framework, modeled as Port Automata, PA [7], that interact through their ports and that can be composed to build up new components from existing ones. Components, whether atomic or compound, are internally modeled as Discrete Event Systems and controlled using the same state control graph. CoolBOT hides any aspects related to communications and provides standard mechanisms for diﬀerent modes of data exchange between components, exception handling and support for distributed computing environments.
Predicting apple bruising using machine learning

Many models have been used to describe the influence of internal or external factors on apple bruising. Few of these have addressed the application of derived relationships to the evaluation of commercial operations. From an industry perspective, a model must enable fruit to be rejected on the basis of a commercially significant bruise and must also accurately quantify the effects of various combinations of input features (such as cultivar, maturity, size, and so on) on bruise prediction. Input features must in turn have characteristics which are measurable commercially; for example, the measure of force should be impact energy rather than energy absorbed. Further, as the commercial criteria for acceptable damage levels change, the model should be versatile enough to update bruise thresholds from existing data. Machine learning is a burgeoning technology with a vast range of potential applications particularly in agriculture where large amounts of data can be readily collected [1]. The main advantage of using a machine learning method in an application is that the models built for prediction can be viewed and understood by the owner of the data who is in a position to determine the usefulness of the model, an essential component in a commercial environment. Machine Learning software recently developed at Waikato University [2] offers potential as a prediction tool for the classification of bruising based on historical data. It gives the user the opportunity to select any number of measured input attributes and determine the influence of that combination on a range of bruise size categories. The user may require a high degree of accuracy in the classification and therefore prune the attributes or bruise classes accordingly, or alternatively seek to discover trends in the dataset (in which case a lower level of accuracy often clarifies implicit structures in the data). Models such as the theory of elasticity suggest that impact energy and radius of curvature will have a significant effect on the bruise surface area. Cell structure is also thought to contribute to variation in bruise size [3]. The experiment described in this paper uses the machine learning programs C4.5 [4] and M5' [5] to determine the influence of impact energy, radius of curvature and impact site location on bruise area.
A 0.602 /spl mu/m/sup 2/ nestled 'Chain' cell structure formed by one mask etching process for 64 Mbit FeRAM

We have successfully developed a 0.602 /spl mu/m/sup 2/ nestled 'Chain' FeRAM cell technology for 64Mbit FeRAM. In the 'Chain' FeRAM a pair of capacitors on a same node can be nestled close to each other A combination of a one mask etching process of ferro-electric capacitors and the nestled structure drastically scaled down the cell size to 0.602 /spl mu/m/sup 2/. The cell size was reduced to 32% of previous work. Signal window of 600 mV was obtained by the nestled 'Chain' FeRAM structure after full integration of three-metal CMOS technology.
Authorship Identification with Modality Specific Meta Features - Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2011

This paper presents the approach used in the PAN ’11 authorship identification competition. Our method extracts meta features from several independently generated clustering solutions from the training set. Each clustering solution uses a disjoint set of features that represent a specific linguistic modality. The different clustering solutions encode similarities in writing styles of authors across specific dimensions. The final classifier is trained with a combination of the meta features with first level features. Our approach has outperformed a more syntactic oriented state-of-the-art method on web forum data. We achieved moderately successful results on this PAN competition, with better results on the test set with a smaller number of authors. However, considering that our system was not fine tuned for the PAN evaluation data we found our results very encouraging.
Shifts in the Population Response in the Middle Temporal Visual Area Parallel Perceptual and Motor Illusions Produced by Apparent Motion

We recorded behavioral, perceptual, and neural responses to targets that provided apparent visual motion consisting of a sequence of stationary flashes. Increasing the flash separation degrades the quality of motion, but for some separations evoked larger smooth pursuit responses from both humans and monkeys than did smooth motion. The same flash separations also produced an increase in perceived speed in humans. Recordings from single neurons in the middle temporal visual area (MT) of awake monkeys revealed a potential basis for the illusion in the population response. Apparent motion produced diminished neural responses relative to smooth motion. However, neurons with slow preferred speeds were more affected than were those with fast preferred speeds. Increasing the flash separation thus caused the population response to become diminished in amplitude and to shift so that the most active neurons had higher preferred speeds. The entire constellation of effects of apparent motion on the magnitude and latency of the initial pursuit response was accounted for if the MT population response was decoded by (1) creating an opponent motion signal for each neuron by treating its preferred and opposite direction responses as those of a pair of oppositely tuned neurons and (2) computing the vector average of these opponent motion signals. Other ways of decoding the population response recorded in MT failed to account for one or more aspects of behavior. We conclude that the effects of apparent motion on both pursuit and perception can be accounted for if target speed is estimated from the MT population response by a neural computation that implements a vector average based on opponent motion.
Mixed Signal DFT at GHz Frequencies

A high frequency analog IC testing technique using a periodic input stimuli and a sequential undersampling algorithm has been developed. This algorithm overcomes many of the loading problems associated with high speed analog signal testing. The utility of the undersampling technique was shown in previous work using a 1.2 μm CMOS prototype IC. This paper expands that work by improving the performance of the original sampling circuits, investigating the possibility of generating control signals on-chip to reduce test cost, and developing a structured analog Design For Testability (DFT) approach. This approach can be used for high speed testing and is based upon undersampling techniques used in sampling oscilloscopes and mixed-signal testers.
Creating a Bigger Bath Using the Deferred Tax Valuation Allowance

The provisions of SFAS No. 109 allow US companies to make an earnings big bath even bigger through the establishment of a deferred tax valuation allowance. At the time a firm recognizes a non-cash charge, it also recognizes a deferred tax asset to represent the future tax benefits of the charge. Recognition of the deferred tax asset partially mitigates the negative earnings impact of the special charge. However, if the firm does not expect to have sufficient future taxable income to utilize the future tax benefits of the charge, SFAS No. 109 requires the firm to establish a deferred tax valuation allowance, effectively eliminating the recognized deferred tax asset. Thus, the establishment of the valuation allowance amplifies the negative earnings impact of the non-cash charge. We use a valuation allowance prediction model to identify firms that create a larger-than-expected valuation allowance; these firms may be creating a large valuation allowance as a reserve to be used to manage earnings in a subsequent period. We find that the vast majority of these larger-than-expected valuation allowances apparently reflect informed management pessimism about the future in that these firms actually do have poorer operating performance in subsequent periods. We do not find any evidence that subsequent reversals of valuation allowances are used to turn a loss into a profit. However, we do find a very small number of firms that appear to have used a valuation allowance reversal to meet or beat the mean analyst forecast. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Moment-Ratio Diagrams for Univariate Distributions

We present two moment-ratio diagrams along with guidance for their interpretation. The first moment-ratio diagram is a graph of skewness versus kurtosis for common univariate probability distributions. The second moment-ratio diagram is a graph of coefficient of variation versus skewness for common univariate probability distributions. Both of these diagrams, to our knowledge, are the most comprehensive to date. The diagrams serve four purposes: (1) they quantify the proximity between various univariate distributions based on their second, third, and fourth moments; (2) they illustrate the versatility of a particular distribution based on the range of values that the various moments can assume; (3) they can be used to create a short list of potential probability models based on a data set; and (4) they clarify the limiting relationships between various well-known distribution families. The use of the moment-ratio diagrams for choosing a distribution that models given data is illustrated.
Heat distribution in the lower leg from pulsed short-wave diathermy and ultrasound treatments.

OBJECTIVE To compare tissue temperature rise and decay after 20-minute diathermy and ultrasound treatments. DESIGN AND SETTING We inserted 3 26-gauge thermistor microprobes into the medial aspect of the anesthetized triceps surae muscle at a depth of 3 cm and spaced 5 cm apart. Eight subjects received the diathermy treatment first, followed by the ultrasound treatment. This sequence was reversed for the remaining 8 subjects. The diathermy was applied at a frequency of 27.12 MHz at the following settings: 800 bursts per second, 400-microsecond burst duration, 850-microsecond interburst interval, peak root mean square amplitude of 150 W per burst, and an average root mean square output of 48 W per burst. The ultrasound was delivered at a frequency of 1 MHz and an intensity of 1.5 W/cm(2) in the continuous mode for 20 minutes over an area of 40 times the effective radiating area. The study was performed in a ventilated research laboratory. SUBJECTS Sixteen (11 men, 5 women) healthy subjects (mean age = 23.56 +/- 4.73 years) volunteered to participate in this study. MEASUREMENTS We recorded baseline, final, and decay temperatures for each of the 3 sites. RESULTS The average temperature increases over baseline temperature after pulsed short-wave diathermy were 3.02 degrees C +/- 1.02 degrees C in site 1, 4.58 degrees C +/- 0.87 degrees C in site 2, and 3.28 degrees C +/- 1.64 degrees C in site 3. The average temperature increases over baseline temperature after ultrasound were only 0.17 degrees C +/- 0.40 degrees C, 0.09 degrees C +/- 0.56 degrees C, and -0.43 degrees C +/- 0.41 degrees C in sites 1, 2, and 3, respectively. The temperature dropped only 1 degrees C in 7.65 +/- 4.96 minutes after pulsed short-wave diathermy. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that pulsed short-wave diathermy was more effective than 1-MHz ultrasound in heating a large muscle mass and resulted in the muscles' retaining heat longer.
Selenium and Prostate Cancer Prevention: Insights from the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT)

The Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT) was conducted to assess the efficacy of selenium and vitamin E alone, and in combination, on the incidence of prostate cancer. This randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, 2 × 2 factorial design clinical trial found that neither selenium nor vitamin E reduced the incidence of prostate cancer after seven years and that vitamin E was associated with a 17% increased risk of prostate cancer compared to placebo. The null result was surprising given the strong preclinical and clinical evidence suggesting chemopreventive activity of selenium. Potential explanations for the null findings include the agent formulation and dose, the characteristics of the cohort, and the study design. It is likely that only specific subpopulations may benefit from selenium supplementation; therefore, future studies should consider the baseline selenium status of the participants, age of the cohort, and genotype of specific selenoproteins, among other characteristics, in order to determine the activity of selenium in cancer prevention.
Proprioceptive guidance of human voluntary wrist movements studied using muscle vibration.

1. The alterations in voluntary wrist extension and flexion movement trajectories induced by application of vibration to the tendon of flexor carpi radialis throughout the course of the movement, together with the associated EMG patterns, have been studied in normal human subjects. Both extension and flexion movements were routinely of a target amplitude of 30 deg and made against a torque load of 0.32 N m. Flexor tendon vibration consistently produced undershooting of voluntary extension movements. In contrast, voluntary flexion movements were relatively unaffected. 2. The degree of vibration‐induced undershooting of 1 s voluntary extension movements was graded according to the amplitude (0.75, 1.0 and 1.5 mm) of flexor tendon vibration. 3. As flexor vibration was initiated progressively later (at greater angular thresholds) during the course of 1 s voluntary extension movements, and the period of vibration was proportionately reduced, so the degree of vibration‐induced undershooting showed a corresponding decline. 4. Varying the torque loads (0.32, 0.65 and 0.97 N m) against which 1 s extension movements were made, and thereby the strength of voluntary extensor contraction, produced no systematic changes in the degree of flexor vibration‐induced undershooting. 5. Analysis of EMG patterns recorded from wrist flexor and extensor muscles indicated that vibration‐induced undershooting of extension movements resulted largely from a reduction in activity in the prime‐mover rather than increased antagonist activity. The earliest reductions in extensor EMG commenced some 40 ms after the onset of vibration, i.e. well before voluntary reaction time; these initial responses were considered to be ‘automatic’ in nature. 6. These results support the view that the central nervous system utilizes proprioceptive information in the continuous regulation of moderately slow voluntary wrist movements. Proprioceptive sensory input from the passively lengthening antagonist muscle, presumably arising mainly from muscle spindle I a afferents, appears to be particularly important and to act mainly in the reciprocal control of the prime‐mover.