Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perception of L2 tones: L1 lexical tone experience may not help

This study investigates whether adult L2 learners’ experience with lexical tones and pitch accent in their first language facilitates the acquisition of L2 lexical tones. Three groups of beginning learners of Mandarin with different L1 prosodic experience: native Hmong (a tone language), native Japanese (a pitch and accent language), and native English (a non-tone, non-pitch accent language) speakers participated as listeners in a perception test on the four Mandarin tones. Results showed that native English listeners performed equally well as native Japanese listeners but native Hmong speakers performed significantly worse than the native Japanese and native English speakers in perceptual accuracy of Mandarin tones. The findings suggest that experience with lexical tones and pitch accent may not always facilitate learning. The lack of exact mapping of L2 tones onto L1 tones may interfere with the acquisition of nonnative tones especially at the initial stage of learning.
Escherichia coli DNA Polymerase IV Mutator Activity: Genetic Requirements and Mutational Specificity

ABSTRACT The dinB gene of Escherichia coli is known to be involved in the untargeted mutagenesis of λ phage. Recently, we have demonstrated that this damage-inducible and SOS-controlled gene encodes a novel DNA polymerase, DNA Pol IV, which is able to dramatically increase the untargeted mutagenesis of F′ plasmid. At the amino acid level, DNA Pol IV shares sequence homologies with E. coli UmuC (DNA Pol V), Rev1p, and Rad30p (DNA polymerase η) ofSaccharomyces cerevisiae and human Rad30A (XPV) proteins, all of which are involved in translesion DNA synthesis. To better characterize the Pol IV-dependent untargeted mutagenesis, i.e., the DNA Pol IV mutator activity, we analyzed the genetic requirements of this activity and determined the forward mutation spectrum generated by this protein within the cII gene of λ phage. The results indicated that the DNA Pol IV mutator activity is independent ofpolA, polB, recA,umuDC, uvrA, and mutS functions. The analysis of more than 300 independent mutations obtained in the wild-type or mutS background revealed that the mutator activity clearly promotes single-nucleotide substitutions as well as one-base deletions in the ratio of about 1:2. The base changes were strikingly biased for substitutions toward G:C base pairs, and about 70% of them occurred in 5′-GX-3′ sequences, where X represents the base (T, A, or C) that is mutated to G. These results are discussed with respect to the recently described biochemical characteristics of DNA Pol IV.
Rheumatic heart disease: 15 years of clinical and immunological follow-up

Rheumatic fever (RF) is a sequel of group A streptococcal throat infection and occurs in untreated susceptible children. Rheumatic heart disease (RHD), the major sequel of RF, occurs in 30%–45% of RF patients. RF is still considered endemic in some regions of Brazil and is responsible for approximately 90% of early childhood valvular surgery in the country. In this study, we present a 15-year clinical follow-up of 25 children who underwent surgical valvular repair. Histopathological and immunological features of heart tissue lesions of RHD patients were also evaluated. The patients presented severe forms of RHD with congestive symptoms at a very young age. Many of them had surgery at the acute phase of RF. Histological analysis showed the presence of dense valvular inflammatory infiltrates and Aschoff nodules in the myocardium of 21% of acute RHD patients. Infiltrating T-cells were mainly CD4+ in heart tissue biopsies of patients with rheumatic activity. In addition, CD4+ and CD8+ infiltrating T-cell clones recognized streptococcal M peptides and cardiac tissue proteins. These findings may open the possibilities of new ways of immunotherapy. In addition, we demonstrated that the surgical procedure during acute phase of the disease improved the quality of life of young RHD patients.
Restrictive dermopathy associated with transposition of the great arteries and microcolon: a rare neonatal entity with new symptoms.

BACKGROUND Restrictive dermopathy is a very rare autosomal recessive skin disorder. The typical pathologic findings are striking: microstomia, micrognathia, thin but very tight translucent skin that tears spontaneously, and arthrogryposis multiplex. The mechanisms behind this disease are unknown. OBSERVATIONS We describe for the first time a newborn girl with restrictive dermopathy, transposition of the great vessels, and microcolon. She had thin shiny skin with nearly no compliance indicating restrictive dermopathy. Additional dysmorphic findings included enlarged fontanelle, hypertelorism, absent eyelashes, small pinched nose, microstomia, micrognathia, dysplastic ears, pterygium colli, dyplastic fingers and toes with upper- and partial lower-limb flexion contractures, dysplastic genitalia, and muscular hypotonia. She also had left transposition of the great artery with small atrial septal defect, bilateral hypoplasia of the first rib, and congenital stenosis of the small bowel with microcolon. CONCLUSIONS The pathogonomic diagnostic features remain reduced dermal thickness and nearly complete absence of elastic fibers in the dermis. In mice, a defective fatty acid transport protein 4 gene (Fatp4) leads to clear signs of restrictive dermopathy by influencing the arrangement of the lipids in the epidermis. Whether the left transposition of the great artery is associated with restrictive dermopathy or represents an additional malformation of multifactorial, polygenetic, or monogenetic cause remains open.
On the Influence Propagation of Web Videos

We propose a novel approach to analyze how a popular video is propagated in the cyberspace, to identify if it originated from a certain sharing-site, and to identify how it reached the current popularity in its propagation. In addition, we also estimate their influences across different websites outside the major hosting website. Web video is gaining significance due to its rich and eye-ball grabbing content. This phenomenon is evidently amplified and accelerated by the advance of Web 2.0. When a video receives some degree of popularity, it tends to appear on various websites including not only video-sharing websites but also news websites, social networks or even Wikipedia. Numerous video-sharing websites have hosted videos that reached a phenomenal level of visibility and popularity in the entire cyberspace. As a result, it is becoming more difficult to determine how the propagation took place - was the video a piece of original work that was intentionally uploaded to its major hosting site by the authors, or did the video originate from some small site then reached the sharing site after already getting a good level of popularity, or did it originate from other places in the cyberspace but the sharing site made it popular. Existing study regarding this flow of influence is lacking. Literature that discuss the problem of estimating a video's influence in the whole cyberspace also remains rare. In this article we introduce a novel framework to identify the propagation of popular videos from its major hosting site's perspective, and to estimate its influence. We define a Unified Virtual Community Space (UVCS) to model the propagation and influence of a video, and devise a novel learning method called Noise-reductive Local-and-Global Learning (NLGL) to effectively estimate a video's origin and influence. Without losing generality, we conduct experiments on annotated dataset collected from a major video sharing site to evaluate the effectiveness of the framework. Surrounding the collected videos and their ranks, some interesting discussions regarding the propagation and influence of videos as well as user behavior are also presented.
Face Super Resolution by Patch-Based Sparse Coding

This paper proposes a new method for improving face image resolution (i.e. face super-resolution method). Our method utilizes a single high-resolution sample face image to infer the lost information in low-resolution test face image while all the test face image and sample face image are divided into image patches as atoms by sliding windows sampling. The entire high-resolution sample face image patches are formed into a raw dictionary and then compacted and optimized by K-SVD algorithm to get a trained high-resolution dictionary. Correspondingly, we can obtain a low-resolution dictionary by down sampling each atom and any low-resolution patch of test image can be linearly represented by the low-resolution dictionary with sparse coding method. With the one-to-one correspondence property for high-resolution dictionary and low-resolution dictionary, we can reconstruct a high-resolution test face image by mapping the atoms and coefficients. We conduct a series of experiments to present our method which can achieve satisfactory results and be ready for practical use.
Royalty Collection For Patented Livestock

Allowing animal patents provides potential benefits and costs for livestock producers. Costs, considered here, are royalty payments and collection mechanisms, made more complex by the unknown future distribution of multiple patented traits in the herd. This article evaluates three proposed collection systems, Qualified Sales, registration and pooled royalties. The first two are imposed only on breeding stock and at first sale, creating a cash flow and risk factor for producers. The third collects payments from all animals at point of slaughter, based on traits in a sample. It favors producers at the cost of delayed payments to the patent holders. The eventual system used will depend on the cost and speed of testing for patented traits.
Is the cosmological "constant" a nonlocal quantum residue of discreteness of the causal set type?

The evidence for an accelerating Hubble expansion appears to have confirmed the heuristic prediction, from causal set theory, of a fluctuating and ``ever-present'' cosmological term in the Einstein equations. A more concrete phenomenological model incorporating this prediction has been devised and tested, but it remains incomplete. I will review these developments and also mention a possible consequence for the dimensionality of spacetime.
Two genome-wide association studies of aggressive prostate cancer implicate putative prostate tumor suppressor gene DAB2IP.

BACKGROUND The consistent finding of a genetic susceptibility to prostate cancer suggests that there are germline sequence variants predisposing individuals to this disease. These variants could be useful in screening and treatment. METHODS We performed an exploratory genome-wide association scan in 498 men with aggressive prostate cancer and 494 control subjects selected from a population-based case-control study in Sweden. We combined the results of this scan with those for aggressive prostate cancer from the publicly available Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility (CGEMS) Study. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that showed statistically significant associations with the risk of aggressive prostate cancer based on two-sided allele tests were tested for their association with aggressive prostate cancer in two independent study populations composed of individuals of European or African American descent using one-sided tests and the genetic model (dominant or additive) associated with the lowest value in the exploratory study. RESULTS Among the approximately 60,000 SNPs that were common to our study and CGEMS, we identified seven that had a similar (positive or negative) and statistically significant (P<.01) association with the risk of aggressive prostate cancer in both studies. Analysis of the distribution of these SNPs among 1032 prostate cancer patients and 571 control subjects of European descent indicated that one, rs1571801, located in the DAB2IP gene, which encodes a novel Ras GTPase-activating protein and putative prostate tumor suppressor, was associated with aggressive prostate cancer (one-sided P value = .004). The association was also statistically significant in an African American study population that included 210 prostate cancer patients and 346 control subjects (one-sided P value = .02). CONCLUSION A genetic variant in DAB2IP may be associated with the risk of aggressive prostate cancer and should be evaluated further.
Genome-Wide Survey and Expression Analysis Suggest Diverse Roles of Glutaredoxin Gene Family Members During Development and Response to Various Stimuli in Rice

Glutaredoxins (GRXs) are glutathione-dependent oxidoreductase enzymes involved in a variety of cellular processes. In this study, our analysis revealed the presence of 48 genes encoding GRX proteins in the rice genome. GRX proteins could be classified into four classes, namely CC-, CGFS-, CPYC- and GRL-type, based on phylogenetic analysis. The classification was supported with organization of predicted conserved putative motifs in GRX proteins. We found that expansion of this gene family has occurred largely via whole genome duplication events in a species-specific manner. We explored rice oligonucleotide array data to gain insights into the function of GRX gene family members during various stages of development and in response to environmental stimuli. The comprehensive expression analysis suggested diverse roles of GRX genes during growth and development in rice. Some of the GRX genes were expressed in specific organs/developmental stages only. The expression of many of rice GRX genes was influenced by various phytohormones, abiotic and biotic stress conditions, suggesting an important role of GRX proteins in response to these stimuli. The identification of GRX genes showing differential expression in specific tissues or in response to environmental stimuli provide a new avenue for in-depth characterization of selected genes of importance.
Properties of Local Synaptic Connections in Neocortex, Studied With

dual intracellular recordings in vitro and correlated with cell and synaptic morphology are summarized. The different durations and sensitivities to somatic membrane potential of pyramid–pyramid excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) apparently reflect the positions of the synapses on the postsynaptic dendrites. Their time-, frequency-and voltage-dependent properties enable supra-linear summation of several low-frequency inputs arising in the same dendritic region, even if only loosely coincident, but they depress during repetitive firing in any one input. Pyramidal input to classical fast spiking and low threshold spiking interneurones are strikingly different. Here low presynaptic firing rates result in many transmission failures. EPSPs are brief and inputs must be near coincident for summation. However, these synapses display pronounced, frequency-dependent, incrementing facilitation at higher presynaptic frequencies. Once initiated by a brief high-frequency burst, this facilitation is maintained at lower frequencies. GABA A receptor-mediated inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs) arising proximally are of very different durations depending on the type of interneurone activated and can prevent and subsequently synchronize firing in their many postsynaptic partners with very different delays (eg. 10–100 ms). Low threshold spiking inter-neurones, in contrast, generate brief IPSPs only in more distal dendritic regions and have little effect on somatic excitability, acting to shunt input distally.
Association Bundle - A New Pattern for Association Analysis

In this paper we introduce the notion of association bundle as a new pattern for association analysis. Different from association rule which has the one-way association from rule antecedent to rule consequent, an association bundle has the two-way association between each pair of bundle elements. Association bundles present a more compact association pattern than association rules, and have meaningful interpretations in marketing applications including shelf arrangement and cross-selling by discounting. The identification of association bundles can be transformed into the problem of maximal clique enumeration, and very efficient algorithms can be applied. Our experimental results show that the time cost is less than two minutes on three real world data sets
A novel generic fast Fourier transform pruning technique and complexity analysis

The fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an essential tool in digital signal processing and communications. In the applications of the FFT where the required outputs are very sparse, for example, in digital filtering, one may only require the spectrum corresponding to certain bins of the FFT or in narrow frequency windows. In these cases, most of the FFT outputs are not required. Some pruning algorithms have been proposed to deal with such cases. However, most of the pruning algorithms require that the outputs be in continuous windows. This paper develops a traced FFT Pruning method (TFFTP), which is a novel technique and does not require this condition. Under some circumstances, considerable savings in computational complexity and power consumption can be realized using the TFFTP compared to the FFT. This paper derives the average number of butterflies that need to be executed when only k/sub in/ input or/and k/sub out/ output bins of an N point FFT, where k/sub in//spl les/N, or/and k/sub out//spl les/N are required. This method is then extended to arbitrary radix FFT pruning and simultaneous input and output pruning case.
Workshop on Machine Learning W21: Screening for risk of oral cancer and pre-cancer

Oral cancer has relatively low incidence but is potentially very serious if not identified early. For economic reasons, w idespread screening for the disease is not appropriate so opportunist ic, computeraided screening in primary and secondary healthcare is bein g investigated. The low incidence and disproportionately low number of positive diagnoses arising in oral screening programmes gives ris to a very sparse dataset. Even so, the machine learning techniqu es considered here perform as well as general dental and hospitalbased screeners in selecting individuals at risk, if less well at a voiding false positives. Once identified, patients can be recalled for a de t iled examination of their oral mucosa and lifestyle counselling.
A novel filter based on three variables mutual information for dimensionality reduction and classification of hyperspectral images

The high dimensionality of hyperspectral images (HSI) that contains more than hundred bands (images) for the same region called Ground Truth Map, often imposes a heavy computational burden for image processing and complicates the learning process. In fact, the removal of irrelevant, noisy and redundant bands helps increase the classification accuracy. Band selection filter based on “Mutual Information” is a common technique for dimensionality reduction. In this paper, a categorization of dimensionality reduction methods according to the evaluation process is presented. Moreover, a new filter approach based on three variables mutual information is developed in order to measure band correlation for classification, it considers not only bands relevance but also bands interaction. The proposed approach is compared to a reproduced filter algorithm based on mutual information. Experimental results on HSI AVIRIS 92AV3C have shown that the proposed approach is very competitive, effective and outperforms the reproduced filter strategy performance.
A Grammatical Approach to Understanding Textual Tables Using Two-Dimensional SCFGs

We present an elegant and extensible model that is capable of providing semantic interpretations for an unusually wide range of textual tables in documents. Unlike the few existing table analysis models, which largely rely on relatively ad hoc heuristics, our linguistically-oriented approach is systematic and grammar based, which allows our model (1) to be concise and yet (2) recognize a wider range of data models than others, and (3) disambiguate to a significantly finer extent the underlying semantic interpretation of the table in terms of data models drawn from relation database theory. To accomplish this, the model introduces Viterbi parsing under two-dimensional stochastic CFGs. The cleaner grammatical approach facilitates not only greater coverage, but also grammar extension and maintenance, as well as a more direct and declarative link to semantic interpretation, for which we also introduce a new, cleaner data model. In disambiguation experiments on recognizing relevant data models of unseen web tables from different domains, a blind evaluation of the model showed 60% precision and 80% recall.
An Efficient UPF Rectifier for a Stand-Alone Wind Energy Conversion System

In this paper, a near-unity-power-factor front-end rectifier employing two current control methods, namely, average current control and hysteresis current control, is considered. This rectifier is interfaced with a fixed-pitch wind turbine driving a permanent-magnet synchronous generator. A traditional diode-bridge rectifier without any current control is used to compare the performance with the proposed converter. Two constant wind speed conditions and a varying wind speed profile are used to study the performance of this converter for a rated stand-alone load. The parameters under study are the input power factor and total harmonic distortion of the input currents to the converter. The wind turbine generator-power electronic converter is modeled in PSIM, and the simulation results verify the efficacy of the system in delivering satisfactory performance for the conditions discussed. The efficacy of the control techniques is validated with a 1.5-kW laboratory prototype, and the experimental results are presented.
Cytokines as Mediators for or Effectors against Rotavirus Disease in Children

ABSTRACT Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe gastroenteritis in young children, but the pathogenesis and immunity of this disease are not completely understood. To examine the host response to acute infection, we collected paired serum specimens from 30 children with rotavirus diarrhea and measured the levels of nine cytokines (interleukin-1β [IL-1β], IL-2, IL-4, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, IL-12, gamma interferon [IFN-γ], and tumor necrosis factor alpha [TNF-α]) using a microsphere-based Luminex Flowmetrix system. Patients with acute rotavirus infection had elevated median levels of seven cytokines in serum, and of these, the levels of three (IL-6, IL-10, and IFN-γ) were significantly (P < 0.05) higher than those in serum from control children without diarrhea. Patients with fever had significantly (P < 0.05) higher levels of IL-6 in serum than control children, and those with fever and more episodes of diarrhea had significantly (P < 0.05) higher levels of TNF-α than those without fever and with fewer episodes of diarrhea. We further demonstrated a negative association (P < 0.05) between the levels of IL-2 and the number of stools on the day on which the first blood sample was collected. Finally, patients with vomiting had significantly (P < 0.05) lower levels of IFN-γ than those without vomiting. Our pilot study provides evidence that the types and magnitudes of cytokine responses to rotavirus infection in children influence or reflect the clinical outcome of disease. These findings suggest that certain cytokines may play an important role in the pathogenesis of and the protection against rotavirus disease in children and, consequently, may provide directions and insights that could prove critical to the prevention or treatment of this important disease.