Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimating Upper and Lower Bounds on the Performance of Word-Sense Disambiguation Programs

We have recently reported on two new word-sense disambiguation systems, one trained on bilingual material (the Canadian Hansards) and the other trained on monolingual material (Roget's Thesaurus and Grolier's Encyclopedia). After using both the monolingual and bilingual classifiers for a few months, we have convinced ourselves that the performance is remarkably good. Nevertheless, we would really like to be able to make a stronger statement, and therefore, we decided to try to develop some more objective evaluation measures. Although there has been a fair amount of literature on sense-disambiguation, the literature does not offer much guidance in how we might establish the success or failure of a proposed solution such as the two systems mentioned in the previous paragraph. Many papers avoid quantitative evaluations altogether, because it is so difficult to come up with credible estimates of performance.This paper will attempt to establish upper and lower bounds on the level of performance that can be expected in an evaluation. An estimate of the lower bound of 75% (averaged over ambiguous types) is obtained by measuring the performance produced by a baseline system that ignores context and simply assigns the most likely sense in all cases. An estimate of the upper bound is obtained by assuming that our ability to measure performance is largely limited by our ability obtain reliable judgments from human informants. Not surprisingly, the upper bound is very dependent on the instructions given to the judges. Jorgensen, for example, suspected that lexicographers tend to depend too much on judgments by a single informant and found considerable variation over judgments (only 68% agreement), as she had suspected. In our own experiments, we have set out to find word-sense disambiguation tasks where the judges can agree often enough so that we could show that they were outperforming the baseline system. Under quite different conditions, we have found 96.8% agreement over judges.
A Reactive Transport Model For EvaluatingThe Long-term Performance Of Stainless SteelsIn Concrete

One significant challenge facing the world today is the decay of infrastructure. A major component of infrastructure decay is the degradation of bridges and highways due to corrosion of the embedded reinforcing steel. This problem has prompted the development of a variety of alternative strategies for increasing the service life of reinforced concrete structures exposed to harsh environments. Over the last two decades, many advanced metallic and non-metallic materials have been developed for withstanding severe corrosion typically encountered in concrete bridge decks. However, adoption of these materials by industry has fallen far short of initial expectations, due in a large extent to a lack of tools to evaluate their long term in-service performance. At present, very little reliable information is available for evaluating the corrosion performance of advanced reinforcement materials available in the market for bridge decks over the entire service life of the structure. Based on first principles, a comprehensive reactive transport model is proposed in this study for predicting the occurrence of general and localized corrosion in concrete bridge decks. Preliminary results show excellent agreement with experimental data under various environmental conditions.
Small animal radiotherapy research platforms

Advances in conformal radiation therapy and advancements in pre-clinical radiotherapy research have recently stimulated the development of precise micro-irradiators for small animals such as mice and rats. These devices are often kilovolt x-ray radiation sources combined with high-resolution CT imaging equipment for image guidance, as the latter allows precise and accurate beam positioning. This is similar to modern human radiotherapy practice. These devices are considered a major step forward compared to the current standard of animal experimentation in cancer radiobiology research. The availability of this novel equipment enables a wide variety of pre-clinical experiments on the synergy of radiation with other therapies, complex radiation schemes, sub-target boost studies, hypofractionated radiotherapy, contrast-enhanced radiotherapy and studies of relative biological effectiveness, to name just a few examples. In this review we discuss the required irradiation and imaging capabilities of small animal radiation research platforms. We describe the need for improved small animal radiotherapy research and highlight pioneering efforts, some of which led recently to commercially available prototypes. From this, it will be clear that much further development is still needed, on both the irradiation side and imaging side. We discuss at length the need for improved treatment planning tools for small animal platforms, and the current lack of a standard therein. Finally, we mention some recent experimental work using the early animal radiation research platforms, and the potential they offer for advancing radiobiology research.
Region Based Structure Layout Optimization by Selective Data Copying

As the gap between processor and memory continues to grow Memory performance becomes a key performance bottleneck for many applications. Compilers therefore increasingly seek to modify an application’s data layout to improve cache locality and cache reuse. Whole program Structure Layout [WPSL] transformations can significantly increase the spatial locality of data and reduce the runtime of programs that use link-based data structures, by increasing the cache line utilization. However, in production compilers WPSL transformations do not realize the entire performance potential possible due to a number of factors. Structure layout decisions made on the basis of whole program aggregated affinity/hotness of structure fields, can be sub optimal for local code regions. WPSL is also restricted in applicability in production compilers for type unsafe languages like C/C++ due to the extensive legality checks and field sensitive pointer analysis required over the entire application. In order to overcome the issues associated with WPSL, we propose Region Based Structure Layout (RBSL) optimization framework, using selective data copying. We describe our RBSL framework, implemented in the production compiler for C/C++ on HP-UX IA-64. We show that acting in complement to the existing and mature WPSL transformation framework in our compiler, RBSL improves application performance in pointer intensive SPEC benchmarks ranging from 3% to 28% over WPSL.
Cerebral oxygen metabolism and neuronal integrity in patients with impaired vasoreactivity attributable to occlusive carotid artery disease.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE It is still unclear that impaired cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) to acetazolamide is comparable to elevated oxygen extraction fraction (OEF) on positron emission tomography (PET) in patients with occlusive carotid diseases. Therefore, in this study, the authors aimed to clarify whether OEF is elevated in all patients with reduced cerebral blood flow (CBF) and CVR (type 3) on single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), and, if not, to specify the underlying pathophysiology of type 3 but normal OEF. METHODS This study included 46 patients who had decreased CBF and CVR on N-isopropyl-p-(123)I-iodoamphetamine SPECT in the ipsilateral middle cerebral artery area attributable to occlusive carotid diseases. Hemodynamic and metabolism parameters were determined in all patients by (15)O-gas PET, and neuronal integrity was evaluated in 19 patients using 11C-flumazenil (FMZ) PET. RESULTS OEF was significantly elevated in 20 (43.5%) of 46 type 3 patients. Another 26 type 3 patients had normal OEF. Regression analysis showed that OEF significantly correlated with cerebral metabolic rate for oxygen and 11C-FMZ binding potential but not with other parameters. Subcortical infarction had no significant effect on OEF values. CONCLUSIONS The results strongly suggest that type 3 patients with reduced CBF and CVR may be divided into 2 pathophysiologically different subgroups: misery perfusion attributable to hemodynamic compromise and matched hypometabolism attributable to incomplete infarction. Type 3 but normal OEF may represent a transition stage from misery perfusion to matched hypometabolism.
Disease and genetic contributions toward local tissue volume disturbances in schizophrenia: A tensor‐based morphometry study

Structural brain deficits, especially frontotemporal volume reduction and ventricular enlargement, have been repeatedly reported in patients with schizophrenia. However, it remains unclear whether brain structural deformations may be attributable to disease‐related or genetic factors. In this study, the structural magnetic resonance imaging data of 48 adult‐onset schizophrenia patients, 65 first‐degree nonpsychotic relatives of schizophrenia patients, 27 community comparison (CC) probands, and 73 CC relatives were examined using tensor‐based morphometry (TBM) to isolate global and localized differences in tissue volume across the entire brain between groups. We found brain tissue contractions most prominently in frontal and temporal regions and expansions in the putamen/pallidum, and lateral and third ventricles in schizophrenia patients when compared with unrelated CC probands. Results were similar, though less prominent when patients were compared with their nonpsychotic relatives. Structural deformations observed in unaffected patient relatives compared to age‐similar CC relatives were suggestive of schizophrenia‐related genetic liability and were pronounced in the putamen/pallidum and medial temporal regions. Schizophrenia and genetic liability effects for the putamen/pallidum were confirmed by regions‐of‐interest analysis. In conclusion, TBM findings complement reports of frontal, temporal, and ventricular dysmorphology in schizophrenia and further indicate that putamen/pallidum enlargements, originally linked mainly with medication exposure in early studies, also reflect a genetic predisposition for schizophrenia. Thus, brain deformation profiles revealed in this study may help to clarify the role of specific genetic or environmental risk factors toward altered brain morphology in schizophrenia. Hum Brain Mapp 33:2081–2091, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Studies on Wool Cuticle and Cuticle Components

A method based on moisture regain for&dquo;the quantitative analysis of cotton-polynosic blends has been investigated. It is observed that moistureregain of the blend can be obtained by the linear combination of the moisture regains of the component fibers. Maximum error in the estimation of blend composition will be ::f:: 1.5%. However, since moisture regains of different varieties of cotton as well as polynosic fibers vary . within a narrow range, the error in the analysis of the blend may be slightly more or less for the two extreme situations.
Estimating Distribution of Hidden Objects with Drones: From Tennis Balls to Manatees

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, have been used widely in military applications, but more recently civilian applications have emerged (e.g., wildlife population monitoring, traffic monitoring, law enforcement, oil and gas pipeline threat detection). UAV can have several advantages over manned aircraft for wildlife surveys, including reduced ecological footprint, increased safety, and the ability to collect high-resolution geo-referenced imagery that can document the presence of species without the use of a human observer. We illustrate how geo-referenced data collected with UAV technology in combination with recently developed statistical models can improve our ability to estimate the distribution of organisms. To demonstrate the efficacy of this methodology, we conducted an experiment in which tennis balls were used as surrogates of organisms to be surveyed. We used a UAV to collect images of an experimental field with a known number of tennis balls, each of which had a certain probability of being hidden. We then applied spatially explicit occupancy models to estimate the number of balls and created precise distribution maps. We conducted three consecutive surveys over the experimental field and estimated the total number of balls to be 328 (95%CI: 312, 348). The true number was 329 balls, but simple counts based on the UAV pictures would have led to a total maximum count of 284. The distribution of the balls in the field followed a simulated environmental gradient. We also were able to accurately estimate the relationship between the gradient and the distribution of balls. Our experiment demonstrates how this technology can be used to create precise distribution maps in which discrete regions of the study area are assigned a probability of presence of an object. Finally, we discuss the applicability and relevance of this experimental study to the case study of Florida manatee distribution at power plants.
High Modulus Asphalt Concrete with Limestone Aggregate

Utilization of local and alternative materials (such as steel slag) is one of the main aims of road building. This concerns both developed and developing countries. One can obviously notice changes and the rise of requirements for road pavements and materials applied. This occurrence observed lasting recent yerars is mainly the result of the growth of the intensity of road transportation. It is an important task to meet the more stringent requirements without excessively increasing the costs. Problems resulted from the limited accessibility of mineral aggregates appeared with the considerable growth of financial expenditures on road construction as well as logistics and transportation problems in delivery of aggregate from quarries located on the south of Poland to northern and eastern regions. This study is devoted to the applicability of using limestone aggregates, available in central and northern Poland, in the asphalt mixtures. Laboratory tests showed that limestone aggregate may be successfully used in High Modulus Asphalt Concrete for base and binder courses of road pavements. This result is also confirmed by full scale testing using a Heavy Vehicle Simulator.
REVERSAL OF AXONAL TRANSPORT AT A NERVE CRUSH 1

Abstract— —We have compared retrograde axonal transport of 3H‐labeled protein in normal rat motor and sensory axons, and axons which were injured by a distal ligation of the sciatic nerve. After injection of L‐[3H]leucine into the vicinity of the neuron cell bodies, labeled protein was transported into the axons. A premature return of protein towards the cell bodies occurred in the injured axons, which we interpret as a reversal of axonal transport occurring at the site of injury. We estimate that reversal of transport occurred within 1.9–2.4 h of the arrival of labeled protein at the injury, and that the minimum velocity of the subsequent retrograde transport was 112–133 mm day−1. The ability of the injured axons to reverse transport developed about 0.8 h after making the injury. A large fraction of the orthograde transported protein was returned towards the cell body: it is estimated that by 28 h after labeled protein in sensory axons reached the injury, 46% of the3H‐labeled protein originally transported to the injury site had been returned. In intact sensory nerves at this time only 15% of the transported protein had returned. It is suggested that axonal injury produces a sudden increase in the return of newly synthesized protein to the cell body, and that this might serve as a signal for chromatolysis.
Tubules of Globoid Leukodystrophy: A Right-Handed Helix

Morphologic similarity between the cytoplasmic tubules of globoid leukodystrophy and Gaucher's disease (as demonstrated by thin sectioning, negative staining, and shadowing techniques) and their resemblance to negatively stained beef cerebroside are presented as evidence favoring the accumulation of cerebrosides in globoid cells. The tubules of globoid leukodystrophy have a 60-angstrom periodic banding similar to the tubules of Gaucher's disease. A right-handed helical twisting of the tubules is observed in both diseases.
OverFlow: Multi-Site Aware Big Data Management for Scientific Workflows on Clouds

The global deployment of cloud datacenters is enabling large scale scientific workflows to improve performance and deliver fast responses. This unprecedented geographical distribution of the computation is doubled by an increase in the scale of the data handled by such applications, bringing new challenges related to the efficient data management across sites. High throughput, low latencies or cost-related trade-offs are just a few concerns for both cloud providers and users when it comes to handling data across datacenters. Existing solutions are limited to cloud-provided storage, which offers low performance based on rigid cost schemes. In turn, workflow engines need to improvise substitutes, achieving performance at the cost of complex system configurations, maintenance overheads, reduced reliability and reusability. In this paper, we introduce OverFlow, a uniform data management system for scientific workflows running across geographically distributed sites, aiming to reap economic benefits from this geo-diversity. Our solution is environment-aware, as it monitors and models the global cloud infrastructure, offering high and predictable data handling performance for transfer cost and time, within and across sites. OverFlow proposes a set of pluggable services, grouped in a data scientist cloud kit. They provide the applications with the possibility to monitor the underlying infrastructure, to exploit smart data compression, deduplication and geo-replication, to evaluate data management costs, to set a tradeoff between money and time, and optimize the transfer strategy accordingly. The system was validated on the Microsoft Azure cloud across its 6 EU and US datacenters. The experiments were conducted on hundreds of nodes using synthetic benchmarks and real-life bio-informatics applications (A-Brain, BLAST). The results show that our system is able to model accurately the cloud performance and to leverage this for efficient data dissemination, being able to reduce the monetary costs and transfer time by up to three times.
Balanced-RED: An Algorithm to Achieve Fairness in the Internet

Abstract : The problem of fair bandwidth sharing among adaptive (Transmission Control Protocol) and nonadaptive (Computer-Based Reference/User Datagram Protocol) flows at an Internet gateway is considered. An algorithm that drops packet preventively, in an attempt to actively penalize the nonadaptive traffic that attempts to "steal" buffer space, and therefore bandwidth from the adaptive traffic flows, is presented. This gateway algorithm provides fairness to the different flows passing through a gateway irrespective of whether the flow incorporates end-to-end feedback or not. Furthermore, the algorithm conforms with the scaling and design principles of the Internet. The resulting advantage is that nonadaptive applications have no incentive to remain so. The characteristics of the algorithm provided, Balanced Random Early Detection (BRED), is that it is simple to implement, maintains a small state, and is hence scalable. It should be remarked that a flow in this paper is identified by its source/destination addresses. The performance of the algorithm is compared with other gateway algorithms and it is shown that, in the presence of nonadaptive traffic, it achieves a more balanced bandwidth allocation among the different flows. The behavior of a flow subjected to the given algorithm also was analyzed in detail.
Rethinking Information Sharing for Actionable Threat Intelligence

In the past decade, the information security and threat landscape has grown significantly making it difficult for a single defender to defend against all attacks at the same time. This called for introduc- ing information sharing, a paradigm in which threat indicators are shared in a community of trust to facilitate defenses. Standards for representation, exchange, and consumption of indicators are pro- posed in the literature, although various issues are undermined. In this paper, we rethink information sharing for actionable intelli- gence, by highlighting various issues that deserve further explo- ration. We argue that information sharing can benefit from well- defined use models, threat models, well-understood risk by mea- surement and robust scoring, well-understood and preserved pri- vacy and quality of indicators and robust mechanism to avoid free riding behavior of selfish agent. We call for using the differential nature of data and community structures for optimizing sharing.
Effect of the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 (CLIA '88) on the Incidence of Invasive Cervical Cancer

The Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act of 1988 (CLIA '88) mandates strict, new quality-control measures for laboratories that interpret cervical cytology smears. Proposed regulations include proficiency testing of cytotechnologists and remediation for technologists and laboratories that fail to meet proposed proficiency standards. Proponents of the new regulations argue that these measures will reduce deaths from cervical cancer by reducing the false-negative rate of the Papanicolaou (Pap) test, but opponents argue that the regulations will increase the price of processing Pap tests and thereby reduce access to cervical cancer screening for high-risk, vulnerable populations. To examine these claims the authors used David Eddy's published simulation to model the natural history and detection of cervical neoplasia, and developed a new model to examine the health consequences of diminished access to Pap testing. The authors estimated the false-negative rate of the Pap test and the price elasticity of demand for preventive services on the basis of the published literature, and modeled the entire range of published or quoted predictions about the impact of CLIA '88 on accuracy and price. The results show that, if effects on access are ignored, reducing the false-negative rate from 15% to 5% would prevent 66 invasive cancers per 100,000 average risk women screened. However, under moderate assumptions regarding the effect of price on access, the regulations would prevent only 11 (instead of 66) cancers per 100,000 eligible women. The regulatory effect is very sensitive to the degree of improvement in the false-negative rate and increase in price that the regulations cause. Over the range of assumptions and predictions encountered in the literature and tested in our analysis, the proposed regulations could greatly reduce or greatly increase the incidence of invasive cancer, especially among high-risk and uninsured women. The implementation of the regulations should be delayed until new information regarding the actual false-negative rate of the Pap test allow a more precise estimate of the potential impact on the incidence of cervical cancer.
Efficiency of data structures for detecting overlaps in digital documents

This paper analyses the efficiency of different data structures for detecting overlap in digital documents. Most existing approaches use some hash function to reduce the space requirements for their indices of chunks. Since a hash function can produce the same value for different chunks, false matches are possible. In this paper we propose an algorithm that can be used for eliminating those false matches. This algorithm uses a suffix tree structure, which is space consuming. We define a modified suffix tree that only considers chunks starting at the beginning of words and we show how the algorithm can work on this structure. We can alternatively reduce space requirements of a suffix tree by converting it to a directed acyclic graph. We show that suffix link information can be preserved in this new structure and the matching statistics algorithm still works with those modifications that we propose.