Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Thai named entity recognition based on conditional random fields

This paper presents the Thai named entity recognition (NER) systems using Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). In the previous studies of Thai NER, there are not any systems using syllable-segmented data as an input but word-segmented one. Since the results of some researches on NER in other languages such as Chinese show that the systems based on character are better than those based on word, this study is also conducted to find out if the syllable-segmented input helps improve Thai NER. In order to compare the system getting word-segmented input to that getting syllable-segmented input, there will be two sets of features used in the systems in this study. The results of the experiment show that the systems do not perform well enough due to few features used. However, it reveals that the syllable-based system is slightly better than the word-based one. The corpus, training data preparation and system overview are also included in this paper.
Cortical Dynamics Underlying Face Completion in Human Visual System

In natural images, visual objects are typically occluded by other objects. A remarkable ability of our visual system is to complete occluded objects effortlessly and see whole, uninterrupted objects. How object completion is implemented in the visual system is still largely unknown. In this study, using a backward masking paradigm, we combined psychophysics and functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the temporal evolvement of face completion at different levels of the visual processing hierarchy. Human subjects were presented with two kinds of stimuli that were designed to elicit or not elicit the percept of a completed face, although they were physically very similar. By contrasting subjects' behavioral and blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) responses to completed and noncompleted faces, we measured the psychophysical time course of the face completion and its underlying cortical dynamics. We found that face completion manifested its effect between 50 and 250 ms after stimulus onset. Relative to noncompleted faces, completed faces induced weaker BOLD response at early processing phases in retinotopic visual areas V1 and V2 and stronger BOLD response at late processing phases in occipital face area and fusiform face area. Attending away from the stimuli largely abolished these effects. These findings suggest that face completion consists of two synergetic phases: early suppression in lower visual areas and late enhancement in higher visual areas; moreover, attention is necessary to these neural events.
Simultaneous expression of tissue factor and tissue factor pathway inhibitor by human monocytes. A potential mechanism for localized control of blood coagulation

Cells of monocytic lineage can initiate extravascular fibrin deposition via expression of blood coagulation mediators. This report is about experiments on three mechanisms with the potential to modulate monocyte- initiated coagulation. Monocyte procoagulant activity was examined as a function of lipid cofactor, protein cofactor, and specific inhibitor expression during short-term culture in vitro. Lipid cofactor activity was measured as the initial rate of factor X activation by intrinsic- pathway components, the assembly of which depends on this cofactor. Lipid cofactor activity levels changed by < 30% during 48-h culture. Protein cofactor, i.e., tissue factor (TF) antigen was measured by enzyme immunoassay. It increased from 461 pg/ml to a maximum value of 3,550 pg/ml at 24 h and remained at 70% of this value. Specific TF activity, measured as factor VII-dependent factor X activation rate, decreased from 54 to 18 nM FXa/min between 24 and 48 h. TF activity did not correlate well with either lipid cofactor or TF protein levels. In contrast, the decrease in TF activity coincided in time with maximal expression of tissue factor pathway inhibitor (TFPI) mRNA, which was determined using reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT- PCR), and with maximal TFPI protein levels measured by immunoassay. The number of mRNA copies coding for TFPI and TF in freshly isolated blood monocytes were 46 and 20 copies/cells, respectively. These values increased to 220 and 63 copies/cell during short-term cell culture in the presence of endotoxin. Results demonstrate concomitant expression by monocytes of genes coding for both the essential protein cofactor and the specific inhibitor of the extrinsic coagulation pathway. Together with functional and antigenic analyses, they also imply that the initiation of blood clotting by extravascular monocyte/macrophages can be modulated locally by TFPI independently of plasma sources of the inhibitor.
An architecture for overlaying private clouds on public providers

Organizations shifting to a public cloud infrastructure face potential hurdles regarding control and security, and must acquire a new set of best practices regarding developing and deploying to a cloud infrastructure. We propose a reference architecture for a virtual private cloud built on cross-provider ondemand compute instances, with a set of components, services, and algorithms to produce a managed platform that reduces the level of trust required for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers, increases control and isolation, improves security and data protection, and allows architects, developers, and operations staff to deploy applications to the cloud using their existing body of knowledge and best practices. Two concrete architectures based on this reference are presented, and a prototype implementation is described and tested.
Gamification in education: A methodology to identify student's profile

This paper presents a methodology to identify the students' gamification profiles for educational projects. Gamification is the application of game elements and game principles in non-game contexts. We propose a process to identify profiles in gamification through the use of ludic activities and gamification driven questionnaires. The choice of activities follows some information of the target audience, such as: age range, cell phone use, internet access and other data. The use of questionnaires is necessary to cross-check the activity data, analyze data and identify the resulting gamification profile. The proposed methodology consists of six steps process: making a baseline, defining core drivers, defining activities, preparing a questionnaire, planning data collection, and analyzing data. The purpose of the process is to identify which gamification core drivers (the motivations) may be most effective in attracting students' attention. Gamification is a powerful tool to attract students. Also, a good gamification rise their interest up to learn and caught attention for a long period of time. A good gamification educational project will produce a very attractive educational game. The resulting game will motivate students to do something different: to study in a new way. We used Yu Kai-Chou's Octalysis framework to identify and model the student profile. The final gamification project is also an Octalysis model. The Octalysis framework is based on basic human motivations according to eight core drivers, which are: Epic Meaning & Calling, Development & Accomplishment, Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, Ownership & Possession, Social Influence & Relatedness, Scarcity & Impatience, Unpredictability & Curiosity and Loss & Avoidance. Finally, in order to test and evaluate the methodology, we applied the whole process on four classes of two different public schools. The 98 students are from different ages and different grades (7th to 10th grades). The results indicate the process is useful to identify the students' gamification profile, the activities and the questionnaires provide a good data set to identify the core drivers and the resulting gamification project clearly depicts the final profile.
Lurking: a challenge or a fruitful strategy? A comparison between lurkers and active participants in an online corporate community of practice

For today's organisations to obtain competitive advantages, online corporate communities of practice (CoPs) are indispensable. However, often the majority of its participants does not post content; they lurk. We explore four different perspectives on why people lurk; that is free-riding, legitimate peripheral participation, microlearning, and knowledge sharing barriers, and analyses whether and why they are detrimental or fruitful for the knowledge management process. To gain insight in the reasons for people to lurk, we conducted a study comparing lurkers and active participants of an online corporate CoP in the light of the perspectives as presented above. First, the results of this study indicate that lurkers use the obtained knowledge on the job and therefore cannot simply be considered free-riders. Second, study results suggest that lurkers use lurking as a learning strategy, which confirms the microlearning hypothesis. Last, the results of this study indicate that knowledge sharing barriers can enhance lurking and might be detrimental for the knowledge management process.
The Changing Contours of the Immigrant Rights Protest Movement in the United States: Who Demonstrates Now?

Abstract Drawing from several original longitudinal surveys of the Mexican immigrant population in Texas and Indiana, we examine the course of the immigrant rights movement in the wake of the historic mobilization in the spring of 2006. We find that from 2007 to 2015, the number of participants in demonstrations, rallies, and marches to support immigrant rights dropped substantially, though protesting remains a fairly prevalent activity. The Mexicans taking part in protest events today, however, have higher levels of education and are older compared to 8 years ago, and they are not primarily driven by personal grievances. This change in the activist base suggests that the immigrant rights movement is following a trajectory that is common among protest movements across many democratic systems. What began as an expression of profound discontent has become a somewhat more conventional mode of involvement.
Commutation Torque Ripple Analysis and Reduction Through Hybrid Switching for BLDC Motor Drives

Permanent magnet brushless dc (BLDC) motor drives are widely used in high performance applications where torque smoothness is essential. In this paper, the reduction in commutation torque ripple due to phase commutation of brushless dc motor is described. In a conventional three-phase BLDC machine with two-phase 120deg electrical conduction, commutation torque ripple, which occurs at every 60deg electrical degrees changing over of load current from one phase to another. The torque ripple increases at higher speeds due to increase in commutation time. On the other hand for 180deg switching mode of phase currents, the torque ripple reduces at higher speeds but shows substantial increase at lower speeds. In this paper a hybrid switching characteristics is proposed at lower and higher speeds for satisfactory operation. Computer simulation and suitable experiments has been shown to validate the concept.
Working Together: How Teachers Teach and Students Learn in Collaborative Learning Environments

Active Learning in Maths and Science (ALMS) was a six-month face-to-face professional development program for middle school maths and science teachers carried out between June and November, 2010 in two Indian states. ALMS’s theory of action is grounded in the belief that collaborative learning serves as a “gateway” to learner-centered instruction. Designers theorized that this shift from individual to collaborative learning would redefine the teacher’s role; alter the teacher and student relationship; change teachers’ organizational, instructional and assessment practices; and begin to lay the groundwork for an eventual shift toward full learner-centered instruction. As this paper will discuss, this proposed theory of action was largely confirmed. Over 80 percent of teachers across the two states regularly implemented collaborative learning techniques and began the larger journey toward learner-centered instruction. This implementation also resulted in a number of benefits for students, including greater levels of engagement, increased confidence, and improved behavior. The research also suggests that when teachers see positive changes as a result of their actions, their deeply-held beliefs about traditional instruction may conflict with what they in fact witnessed in their classrooms. This is the beginning of the evolution of change
UBVRI Light Curves of 44 Type Ia Supernovae

We present UBVRI photometry of 44 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) observed from 1997 to 2001 as part of a continuing monitoring campaign at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The data set comprises 2190 observations and is the largest homogeneously observed and reduced sample of SNe Ia to date, nearly doubling the number of well-observed, nearby SNe Ia with published multicolor CCD light curves. The large sample of U-band photometry is a unique addition, with important connections to SNe Ia observed at high redshift. The decline rate of SN Ia U-band light curves correlates well with the decline rate in other bands, as does the U - B color at maximum light. However, the U-band peak magnitudes show an increased dispersion relative to other bands even after accounting for extinction and decline rate, amounting to an additional ∼40% intrinsic scatter compared to the B band.
Parsing modern standard Arabic using Treebank resources

A Treebank is a linguistic resource that is composed of a large collection of manually annotated and verified syntactically analyzed sentences. Statistical Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches have been successful in using these annotations for developing basic NLP tasks such as tokenization, diacritization, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, among others. In this paper, we address the problem of exploiting Treebank resources for statistical parsing of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) sentences. Statistical parsing is significant for NLP tasks that use parsed text as an input such as Information Retrieval, and Machine Translation. We conducted an experiment on Pen Arabic Treebank (PATB) and the parsing performance obtained in terms of Precision, Recall, and F-measure was 82.4%, 86.6%, 84.4%, respectively.
Political Polarization over Global Warming : Analyzing Twitter Data on Climate Change

The widespread adoption of social media for political communication creates unprecedented opportunities to monitor the opinions of large numbers of politically active individuals in real time. Several methods have been recently proposed for predicting the political alignment of Twitter users based on the content and structure of their political communication. In this study, we examine political polarization within the American public over the existence of anthropogenic climate change by analyzing Twitter data from 315,862 users who have participated in climate change discussions.
Vitamin D and calcium interactions: functional outcomes 1–4

I present the results of published studies and original data and describe the functional outcomes of effects related to the interaction between vitamin D status and calcium intake. These effects fall into 3 broad categories: 1 )synergisticeffectsofvitaminDstatusandcalciumintake oncalciumabsorption; 2 )effectsofcalciumintakeonvitaminDstatus; and 3 ) largely observational data suggesting an association between calciumandvitaminDstatusandnonskeletaloutcomes,suchascancer.Toaconsiderableextent,bothvitaminDstatusandthebenefitsassociatedtherewithappeartobedependenton,oratleastaug-mentedby,calciumintakesatorabovecurrentlyrecommendedlevels.
Case Frame Compilation from the Web using High-Performance Computing

Case frames are important knowledge for a variety of NLP systems, especially when wide-coverage case frames are available. To acquire such large-scale case frames, it is necessary to automatically compile them from an enormous amount of corpus. In this paper, we consider the web as a corpus. We first build a huge text corpus from the web, and then construct case frames from the corpus. It is infeasible to do these processes by one CPU, and thus we employ a high-performance computing environment composed of 350 CPUs. The acquired corpus consists of 470M sentences, and the case frames compiled from them have 90,000 verb entries. The case frames contain most examples of usual use, and are ready to be applied to lots of NLP analyses and applications.
Parasite Prevalence Corresponds to Host Life History in a Diverse Assemblage of Afrotropical Birds and Haemosporidian Parasites

Avian host life history traits have been hypothesized to predict rates of infection by haemosporidian parasites. Using molecular techniques, we tested this hypothesis for parasites from three haemosporidian genera (Plasmodium, Haemoproteus, and Leucocytozoon) collected from a diverse sampling of birds in northern Malawi. We found that host life history traits were significantly associated with parasitism rates by all three parasite genera. Nest type and nest location predicted infection probability for all three parasite genera, whereas flocking behavior is an important predictor of Plasmodium and Haemoproteus infection and habitat is an important predictor of Leucocytozoon infection. Parasite prevalence was 79.1% across all individuals sampled, higher than that reported for comparable studies from any other region of the world. Parasite diversity was also exceptionally high, with 248 parasite cytochrome b lineages identified from 152 host species. A large proportion of Plasmodium, Haemoproteus, and Leucocytozoon parasite DNA sequences identified in this study represent new, previously undocumented lineages (n = 201; 81% of total identified) based on BLAST queries against the avian malaria database, MalAvi.
Linking Wikipedia Events to Past News

We consider the task of linking Wikipedia events to relevant news articles from the past. Descriptions of events are abundant in Wikipedia and systematically curated in year, decade, and century articles. To address this task, we develop a two-stage cascade approach that builds a query model from temporal expressions in a set of initially retrieved documents. As baselines we consider several methods that integrate publication dates and/or temporal expressions into a language modeling approach. Our experimental evaluation on 50 randomly sampled Wikipedia events with crowd-sourced relevance assessments shows that the two-stage cascade approach outperforms the baselines. Our experimental testbed of queries and relevance assessments is made publicly available.
Left Inferior Prefrontal Cortex Activity Reflects Inhibitory Rather Than Facilitatory Priming

Functional neuroimaging has demonstrated reduced activation correlated with behavioral priming effects, a finding generally interpreted in terms of facilitated retrieval of target items in the context of related primes. Without a neutral prime, however, one cannot separate facilitatory effects of related primes from inhibitory effects of unrelated primes. Here we report an auditory semantic priming paradigm with congruent (The boy bounced the ball), neutral (The next item is ball), and incongruent (Pasta is my favorite kind of ball) sentence trials. As previously reported, reduced left inferior prefrontal cortex activation was observed for congruent relative to incongruent trials; however, the neutral condition allowed us to show that the effect arose from increased activation in the incongruent condition rather than reduced activation for congruent trials. Our results suggest that the left inferior prefrontal cortex inhibits interference from prepotent representations in order to select a task-appropriate target, and is consistent with its broader role in behavioral inhibition.
Enterprise Resource Planning Systems in Healthcare: A Qualitative Review

The aim of this article is to present an analysis of literature on the views, experiences and challenges of enterprise resource planning systems in healthcare. At the moment there is very limited systematic evidence on the role of these systems in healthcare. The PudMed, Emerald, CSA Engineering Research Database, ScienceDirect, ISI Web of Knowledge and Cinahl databases were searched, covering the period from January 2000 to April 2009. Studies were included if they concerned enterprise resource planning systems integrated into healthcare. The selected studies were analyzed with the thematic synthesis technique. The 135 articles were analyzed on the basis of the titles, abstracts, and full texts. At every phase, a number of articles were rejected for not meeting the inclusion criteria, and finally, 9 articles were accepted for deeper analysis. Three areas of views and experiences were identified from the reviewed studies. Furthermore, two challenge classes were identified when implementing enterprise resource planning systems.
Kann Cannabis das Risiko für schizophrene Psychosen erhöhen?

Zusammenfassung Hintergrund: Cannabis wurde in den letzten Jahren zunehmend als einer der wichtigsten umweltbezogenen Risikofaktoren für die Entstehung von schizophrenen Psychosen diskutiert. Dies ist hauptsächlich auf folgende Beobachtungen zurückzuführen: 1. Bei hohen Dosen kann Cannabis auch bei gesunden Personen vorübergehend akute psychotische Symptome auslösen. 2. Patienten mit schizophrenen Psychosen missbrauchen Cannabis deutlich häufiger als altersvergleichbare gesunde Kontrollpersonen. Fragestellung: Es ist weiterhin umstritten, ob Cannabis kausal an der Entstehung von schizophrenen Psychosen beteiligt ist. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurden deshalb die wichtigsten Evidenzen, die für oder gegen einen kausalen Zusammenhang zwischen Cannabiskonsum und Auslösung schizophrener Psychosen sprechen, gesichtet und kritisch überprüft. Methodik: Systematische Literaturrecherche in den Datenbanken PubMed, ISI Web of Science und PsycINFO zu den Schlüsselwörtern cannabis, marijuana, THC, hashish, psychosis, schizophrenia. Schlussfolgerungen: Es zeigte sich, dass ein kausaler Zusammenhang zwar nicht eindeutig belegbar, aber doch zumindest plausibel ist. Die Ergebnisse wiesen auch darauf hin, dass der Konsum von Cannabis insbesondere bei einem niedrigen Einstiegsalter das Risiko für schizophrene Psychosen erhöht.
Lateralized semantic priming: modulation by levodopa, semantic distance, and participants’ magical beliefs

We tested levodopa effects on lateralized direct and indirect semantic priming in 40 healthy right-handed men in a placebo-controlled, double-blind procedure. Crucially, priming was also analyzed as a function of participants’ positive schizotypal features (magical ideation, MI), previously found to be associated with an enhanced semantic spreading activation (SSA) within the right hemisphere. Across both priming conditions, we observed increased semantic priming in the levodopa group 1) specifically after right visual field stimulations and 2) in high MI scorers. In both instances, increased semantic priming emerged from exceedingly long reaction times to unrelated targets reflecting 1) the left hemisphere’s specialization for closely related concepts and 2) an opposite association between MI and SSA in the levodopa as compared with the placebo group. As a final finding, low MI scorers under levodopa performed like high MI scorers under placebo. Our findings speak against a general dopaminergic focusing of SSA, but one that respects each hemisphere’s specialization. They also suggest that individuals’ schizotypal features are important determinants of dopamine-induced changes in hemispheric functioning. We note that, in psychiatric patients, dopamine antagonists reportedly restore unusual lateralization. We discuss this dissociation between schizotypy and schizophrenia as supporting previous notions of protective brain mechanisms operating in the healthy “psychosis-prone” brain.