Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Open-ended, Extensible System Utterances Are Preferred, Even If They Require Filled Pauses

In many environments (e. g. sports commentary), situations incrementally unfold over time and often the future appearance of a relevant event can be predicted, but not in all its details or precise timing. We have built a simulation framework that uses our incremental speech synthesis component to assemble in a timely manner complex commentary utterances. In our evaluation, the resulting output is preferred over that from a baseline system that uses a simpler commenting strategy. Even in cases where the incremental system overcommits temporally and requires a filled pause to wait for the upcoming event, the system is preferred over the baseline.
Significance of High Levels of Endogenous Melatonin in Mammalian Cerebrospinal Fluid and in the Central Nervous System

Levels of melatonin in mammalian circulation are well documented; however, its levels in tissues and other body fluids are yet only poorly established. It is obvious that melatonin concentrations in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of mammals including humans are substantially higher than those in the peripheral circulation. Evidence indicates that melatonin produced in pineal gland is directly released into third ventricle via the pineal recess. In addition, brain tissue is equipped with the synthetic machinery for melatonin production and the astrocytes and glial cells have been proven to produce melatonin. These two sources of melatonin may be responsible for its high levels in CNS. The physiological significance of the high levels of melatonin in CNS presumably is to protect neurons and glia from oxidative stress. Melatonin as a potent antioxidant has been reported to be a neuroprotector in animals and in clinical studies. It seems that long term melatonin administration which elevates CSF melatonin concentrations will retard the progression of neurodegenerative disorders, for example, Alzheimer disease.
Subgradient-Based Neural Networks for Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization Problems

This paper presents a subgradient-based neural network to solve a nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problem with a nonsmooth nonconvex objective function, a class of affine equality constraints, and a class of nonsmooth convex inequality constraints. The proposed neural network is modeled with a differential inclusion. Under a suitable assumption on the constraint set and a proper assumption on the objective function, it is proved that for a sufficiently large penalty parameter, there exists a unique global solution to the neural network and the trajectory of the network can reach the feasible region in finite time and stay there thereafter. It is proved that the trajectory of the neural network converges to the set which consists of the equilibrium points of the neural network, and coincides with the set which consists of the critical points of the objective function in the feasible region. A condition is given to ensure the convergence to the equilibrium point set in finite time. Moreover, under suitable assumptions, the coincidence between the solution to the differential inclusion and the ldquoslow solutionrdquo of it is also proved. Furthermore, three typical examples are given to present the effectiveness of the theoretic results obtained in this paper and the good performance of the proposed neural network.
The Simplest XML Storage Manager Ever

After more than four years of incubation within the W3C, XQuery 1.0 is close to completion. Even before its official release, development of numerous XQuery implementations is underway. However, those implementations have either focused on completeness or performance at the expense of the other. In this paper, we report on our experience building Jungle, a secondary storage manager for Galax. We designed Jungle to be the “simplest XML storage manager ever” that supports the complete XQuery 1.0 language, and we show it can scale to documents up to several hundred megabytes. Interestingly, the process of developing Jungle lead us to revisit several key features of currently proposed XML indexes. As a result, we propose alternative indices that provide more efficient support for the child axis and for XML serialization, two critical operations on the XQuery data model. Jungle is fully operational and now being deployed in production applications.
Randomized phase II study of cisplatin with gemcitabine or paclitaxel or vinorelbine as induction chemotherapy followed by concomitant chemoradiotherapy for stage IIIB non-small-cell lung cancer: cancer and leukemia group B study 9431.

PURPOSE To evaluate new drugs in combination with cisplatin in unresectable stage III non-small-cell lung cancer, Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB) conducted a randomized phase II study of two cycles of induction chemotherapy followed by two additional cycles of the same drugs with concomitant radiotherapy. PATIENTS AND METHODS Eligible patients received four cycles of cisplatin at 80 mg/m(2) on days 1, 22, 43, and 64 with arm 1: gemcitabine 1,250 mg/m(2) on days 1, 8, 22, and 29 and 600 mg/m(2) on days 43, 50, 64, and 71; arm 2: paclitaxel 225 mg/m(2) for 3 hours on days 1 and 22 and 135 mg/m(2) on days 43 and 64; and arm 3: vinorelbine 25 mg/m(2) on days 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29 and 15 mg/m(2) on days 43, 50, 64, and 71. Radiotherapy was initiated on day 43 at 2 Gy/d (total dose, 66 Gy). RESULTS One hundred seventy-five eligible patients were analyzed. Toxicities during induction chemotherapy consisted primarily of grade 3 or 4 granulocytopenia. Grade 3 or 4 toxicities during concomitant chemoradiotherapy consisted of thrombocytopenia, granulo-cytopenia, and esophagitis. Response rates after completion of radiotherapy were 74%, 67%, and 73% for arms 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Median survival for all patients was 17 months. One-, 2-, and 3-year survival rates for the patients on the three arms were 68%/37%/28%, 62%/29%/19%, and 65%/40%/23%. CONCLUSION Four cycles of gemcitabine, vinorelbine, or paclitaxel in combination with cisplatin can be administered at these doses and schedules. The observed survival rates exceed those of previous CALGB trials and may be attributable to the use of concomitant chemoradiotherapy. Induction chemotherapy added to concomitant chemoradiotherapy is being evaluated in a phase III randomized trial.
Unpacking Racial Discrimination: An Examination of the Processes and Consequences Involved in the Experience of Racial Discrimination.

Racial discrimination is a common experience for many African Americans and has been implicated in the Black-White disparities in mental health and physical health outcomes. While it is clear that racial discrimination is linked to negative outcomes, the processes by which racial discrimination is linked to these outcomes is unclear. The dissertation uses a process-focused framework that focuses on interpretative and racial identity (attitudes about the meaning and significance of race) factors. Moreover, the dissertation examines how African Americans respond to an actual racial discrimination event across 2 days thereby allowing for the examination of how responses unfold over time. African American women were recruited from a large public university in the Midwest. On day 1, the participants arrived at the laboratory and were treated as if they are intellectually inferior by a White or African American confederate. The participants then reported their emotions and had their heart rate and blood pressure activity monitored. The participants returned to the laboratory approximately 24 hours later to provide additional emotional and physiological data and report on their experiences with the event. To test the relations among the key study variables, a series of univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA), ordinary linear regression, and moderated mediation models were estimated. The findings revealed that the African American college students who experienced the event as being more race-related reported being more angry, tense, and depressed than those who experienced the event as being less race-related (or not at all). Moreover, individuals who reported being highly race central and who experienced the event as being less race-related (or
A Cross-Space, Multi-interaction-Based Dynamic Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowd Sensing

With the surge of varied crowd sensing systems, active user participation becomes a crucial factor that determines whether a crowd sensing system can provide good service quality. To encourage user participation in mobile crowd sensing, we propose a novel incentive mechanism called CSII -- a Cross-Space, multi-Interaction-based Incentive mechanism. CSII can estimate the value of a task based on the sensing context and historical data. It then has multiple interactions with both the task requester and the candidate contributors to provide a suggestion on budget and select suitable people to form the worker group. Finally, the requester pays the workers' reward that they deserved by reverse auction based on their reputation and bids. Both online and offline data are leveraged to estimate task value and user quality for a particular task. Experiments show that the incentive mechanism can achieve good performance in terms of acceptance ratio, overpayment ratio, user utility, and so on.
Letter: apoptosis and hepatic fibrosis in chronic hepatitis B

SIRS, Chao et al.’s systematic review and meta-analysis concluded that significant hepatic fibrosis may be present in approximately one-fifth of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients with only normal alanine transaminase (ALT) levels. However, the authors did not consider any mechanism(s) explaining the aforementioned results. In this regard, our own preliminary pilot study, published in 1999, reported comparable results in hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg)-negative CHB asymptomatic carriers with persistent normal ALΤ levels (<40 IU/L). Indeed, severe hepatic fibrosis stage ≥2 (by Batts–Ludwig system, also evaluated by the authors) was observed in 23.5% of our CHB asymptomatic carriers, thereby indicating potential application of new strategies for their management. Of note, this study received unfavourable criticism by the majority of our community of hepatologists at that time. Concerning the possible mechanisms which might explain, at least partly, the presence of severe liver fibrosis despite normal ALT levels in CHB asymptomatic carriers, up to 30% of CHB patients have normal serum aminotransferase activity; most of them have significant histological evidence of liver damage; and the progressive liver disease without elevated aminotransferase could be attributed to hepatocyte apoptosis, rather than necrotic hepatocyte damage. For instance, enhanced Fas-mediated hepatocyte apoptosis has been well documented in hepatitis B virus (HBV)and hepatitis C virus-associated chronic liver diseases, and the Fas expression increases in parallel to chronic viral hepatitis progression, underscoring the important role of cell death. Apoptosis does not correlate with transaminase levels, viral load or genotype. These data support the concept that immune-mediated apoptosis may play a role in the pathogenesis of chronic viral hepatitis and indicate that this type of reaction may occur in the absence of ALT elevation, thereby explaining the lack of correlation between biochemical activity and liver cell histological injury. On the other hand, defective apoptosis contributes to hepatocarcinogesis, including HBV-related hepatocellular carcinoma. 8
A study of structural properties on profiles HMMs

Motivation: Profile hidden Markov Models (pHMMs) are a popular and very useful tool in the detection of the remote homologue protein families. Unfortunately, their performance is not always satisfactory when proteins are in the 'twilight zone'. We present HMMER-STRUCT, a model construction algorithm and tool that tries to improve pHMM performance by using structural information while training pHMMs. As a first step, HMMER-STRUCT constructs a set of pHMMs. Each pHMM is constructed by weighting each residue in an aligned protein according to a specific structural property of the residue. Properties used were primary, secondary and tertiary structures, accessibility and packing. HMMER-STRUCT then prioritizes the results by voting. Results: We used the SCOP database to perform our experiments. Throughout, we apply leave-one-family-out cross-validation over protein superfamilies. First, we used the MAMMOTH-mult structural aligner to align the training set proteins. Then, we performed two sets of experiments. In a first experiment, we compared structure weighted models against standard pHMMs and against each other. In a second experiment, we compared the voting model against individual pHMMs. We compare method performance through ROC curves and through Precision/Recall curves, and assess significance through the paired two tailed t-test. Our results show significant performance improvements of all structurally weighted models over default HMMER, and a significant improvement in sensitivity of the combined models over both the original model and the structurally weighted models.
Hiding the misprediction penalty of a resource-efficient high-performance processor

Misprediction is a major obstacle for increasing speculative out-of-order processors performance. Performance degradation depends on both the number of misprediction events and the recovery time associated with each one of them. In recent years a few checkpoint based microarchitectures have been proposed. In comparison with ROB-based processors, checkpoint processors are scalable and highly resource efficient. Unfortunately, in these proposals the misprediction recovery time is proportional to the instruction queue size. In this paper we analyze methods to reduce the misprediction recovery time. We propose a new register file management scheme and techniques to selectively flush the instruction queue and the load store queue, and to isolate deeply pipelined execution units. The result is a novel checkpoint processor with Constant misprediction RollBack time (CRB). We further present a streamlined, cost-efficient solution, which saves complexity at the price of slightly lower performance.
Inter-team coordination in large-scale globally distributed scrum: Do Scrum-of-Scrums really work?

Scrum-of-Scrums meeting is mentioned in the literature as the mechanism for handling inter-team coordination in large-scale Scrum. However, how to implement it in projects with tens of teams is not explained. In this paper, we present a multiple case study on how Scrum-of-Scrum meetings were applied in two large-scale, globally distributed Scrum projects both employing at least twenty Scrum teams. We conducted 58 semi-structured interviews of project personnel, including managers, architects, product owners, developers and testers. Our results show that Scrum-of-Scrum meetings involving representatives from all teams were severely challenged: the audience was too wide to keep everybody interested and the participants did not know what to report that might be valuable to other teams, often ending up not reporting anything. As a solution, one of the case projects introduced feature-specific Scrum-of-Scrums meetings for 3-5 teams working on the same feature, which turned out to work well. However, challenges with coordination at the project level remained. The other case organization tried a site-based SoS structure that still did not work well.
An evaluation of variables affecting response allocation among concurrently available mand topographies

The primary purpose of the current study was to determine which variables influence or change response allocation among mand topographies. The variables evaluated consisted of response effort, schedule of reinforcement (extinction), changes in concurrent schedules arrangements, and availability of visual stimuli (i.e., a communication card). The stability of responding was evaluated across more than one reinforcement context (escape, attention, and tangible) for each of the 2 participants. Finally, a concurrent schedules arrangement was used to evaluate response allocation among card touches, manual sign, microswitch touches, and vocalizations. Results of the evaluation suggested that response allocation varied across reinforcement contexts in baseline and when responding was challenged. However, variations in response allocation were not uniform across all challenges and reinforcement contexts. Problem behavior continued to be exhibited at low levels throughout the evaluation even when mild punishment procedures were implemented. These results are discussed in terms of changes in patterns of responding across reinforcement contexts, variability in response allocation among available response options, and persistence of responding when challenges are implemented. Abstract Approved: __________________________________ Thesis SupervisorApproved: __________________________________ Thesis Supervisor __________________________________ Title and Department __________________________________ Date __________________________________ Thesis Supervisor __________________________________ Title and Department __________________________________ Date AN EVALUATION OF VARIABLES AFFECTING RESPONSE ALLOCATION AMONG CONCURRENTLY AVAILABLE MAND TOPOGRAPHIES by Kelly Marie Vinquist A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Psychological and Quantitative Foundations (School Psychology) in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa
Postsynaptic Y654 dephosphorylation of β‐catenin modulates presynaptic vesicle turnover through increased n‐cadherin‐mediated transsynaptic signaling

Synaptic adhesion molecules, which coordinately control structural and functional changes at both sides of synapses, are important for synaptogenesis and synaptic plasticity. Because they physically form homophilic or heterophilic adhesions across synaptic junctions, these molecules can initiate transsynaptic communication in both anterograde and retrograde directions. Using optical imaging approaches, we investigated whether an increase in postsynaptic N‐cadherin could correspondingly alter the function of connected presynaptic terminals. Postsynaptic expression of β‐catenin Y654F, a phosphorylation‐defective form with enhanced binding to N‐cadherin, is sufficient to increase postsynaptic surface levels of N‐cadherin and consequently promote presynaptic reorganizations. Such reorganizations include increases in the densities of the synaptic vesicle protein, Synaptotagmin 1 and the active zone scaffold protein, Bassoon, the number of active boutons and the size of the total recycling vesicle pool. In contrast, synaptic vesicle turnover is significantly impaired, preventing the exchange of synaptic vesicles with adjacent boutons. Together, N‐cadherin‐mediated retrograde signaling, governed by phosphoregulation of postsynaptic β‐catenin Y654, coordinately modulates presynaptic vesicle dynamics to enhance synaptic communication in mature neurons. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol 77: 61–74, 2017
Predictors of Early and Late Case-Fatality in a Nationwide Danish Study of 26 818 Patients With First-Ever Ischemic Stroke

Background and Purpose— Predictors of early case-fatality (3-day, 7-day, and 30-day) in first-ever ischemic stroke were identified and compared with predictors of late case-fatality (90-day and 1-year). Methods— A registry designed to register hospitalized patients with stroke in Denmark 2000 to 2007 holds 26 818 patients with first-ever ischemic stroke with information on stroke severity (Scandinavian Stroke Scale), CT scan, cardiovascular risk factors, marital status, and fatality within 1 year. Multiple logistic regression was used in identifying predictors. Results— Mean age was 71.2 years; 48.5% were women; mean Scandinavian Stroke Scale score was 43.9. Early case-fatality showed stroke severity and age were significant predictors of 3-day, 7-day, and 30-day case-fatality (nonlinear effect). In addition, atrial fibrillation (OR, 1.56) predicted 30-day case-fatality. For late case-fatality, significant predictors of 90-day and 1-year case-fatality were age, stroke severity (nonlinear effect), atrial fibrillation (OR, 1.37 and 1.57), and diabetes (OR, 1.35 and 1.33), respectively. Male gender (OR, 1.28), previous myocardial infarction (OR, 1.40), and smoking (OR, 1.21) were also associated with 1-year case-fatality. Alcohol consumption, hypertension, intermittent arterial claudication, and marital state had no influence. All case-fatality rates accelerated with increasing age, but 3-day and 7-day case-fatality rates tended to level off or decline at the highest ages. Conclusions— Age and stroke severity were the only significant predictors of fatality within the first poststroke week; they were associated with late case-fatality as well. Cardiovascular risk factors were associated with late case-fatality; with the exception of atrial fibrillation, they were not significantly associated with early case-fatality rates.
Identifying User Interests within the Data Space - a Case Study with SkyServer

Many scientific databases nowadays are publicly available for querying and advanced data analytics. One prominent example is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)—SkyServer, which offers data to astronomers, scientists, and the general public. For such data it is important to understand the public focus, and trending research directions on the subject described by the database, i.e., astronomy in the case of SkyServer. With a large user base, it is worthwhile to identify the areas of the data space that are of interest to users. In this paper, we study the problem of extracting and analyzing access areas of user queries, by analyzing the query logs of the database. To our knowledge, both the concept of access areas and how to extract them have not been studied before. We address this by first proposing a novel notion of access area, which is independent of any specific database state. It allows the detection of interesting areas within the data space, regardless if they already exist in the database content. Second, we present a detailed mapping of our notion to different query types. Using our mapping on the SkyServer query log, we obtain a transformed data set. Third, we aggregate similar overlapping queries by DBSCAN and gain an abstraction from the raw query log. Finally, we arrive at clusters of access areas that are interesting from the perspective of an astronomer. These clusters occupy only a small fraction (in some cases less than 1%) of the data space and contain queries issued by many users. Some frequently accessed areas even do not exist in the space spanned by available objects.