Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Investigation of Vocal Tract Characteristics for Acoustic Discrimination of Pathological Voices

This paper investigates the effectiveness of measures related to vocal tract characteristics in classifying normal and pathological speech. Unlike conventional approaches that mainly focus on features related to the vocal source, vocal tract characteristics are examined to determine if interaction effects between vocal folds and the vocal tract can be used to detect pathological speech. Especially, this paper examines features related to formant frequencies to see if vocal tract characteristics are affected by the nature of the vocal fold-related pathology. To test this hypothesis, stationary fragments of vowel /aa/ produced by 223 normal subjects, 472 vocal fold polyp subjects, and 195 unilateral vocal cord paralysis subjects are analyzed. Based on the acoustic-articulatory relationships, phonation for pathological subjects is found to be associated with measures correlated with a raised tongue body or an advanced tongue root. Vocal tract-related features are also found to be statistically significant from the Kruskal-Wallis test in distinguishing normal and pathological speech. Classification results demonstrate that combining the formant measurements with vocal fold-related features results in improved performance in differentiating vocal pathologies including vocal polyps and unilateral vocal cord paralysis, which suggests that measures related to vocal tract characteristics may provide additional information in diagnosing vocal disorders.
Quantitative comparison between the straight-forward and anatomical insertion technique for pedicle screw placement

Spinal deformity correction with vertebral fixation is nowadays the preferred surgical treatment, where pedicle screws are inserted through pedicles into corresponding vertebral bodies and afterwards connected with rods. In clinical practice, the straight-forward and anatomical insertion technique are currently being used for pedicle screw placement surgery. However, it is difficult to quantitatively compare both techniques and determine which technique is more adequate for each planned pedicle screw before surgery (i.e. preoperatively). In this paper, we therefore describe a framework for quantitative comparison between the straight-forward and anatomical insertion technique for pedicle screw placement surgery by evaluating the screw fastening strength. Quantitative comparisons were performed on computed tomography images of 11 patients with 74 manually planned pedicle screws, who underwent the vertebral fixation procedure. The first quantitative comparison was performed between the straight-forward and anatomical pedicle screw insertion technique, which resulted in a relatively high agreement with mean absolute difference of 0.0mm in screw diameter, 2.9mm in screw length, 1.2mm in pedicle crossing point and 6.5° in screw inclinations. The second quantitative comparison was performed between the best resulting pedicle screw insertion technique and manually obtained pedicle screw plans, which again resulted in a relatively high agreement with mean absolute difference of 0.5mm in screw diameter, 4.7mm in screw length, 2.4mm in pedicle crossing point and 6.0° in screw inclinations. Both the straight-forward and anatomical insertion technique proved approximately equal in terms of the screw fastening strength.
Feeding Preferences and Attitudes to Breastfeeding and Its Promotion Among Teenagers in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has one of the lowest breastfeeding initiation rates in the world. Given that attitudes toward infant feeding are formed at an early age and a high rate of teenage pregnancy, it has become necessary to survey attitudes to infant feeding and breastfeeding promotion preferences in teenagers in Northern Ireland. Questionnaires were distributed to teenagers aged 14 to 18 years (n = 419) based in 7 schools selected by type and location throughout Northern Ireland. Attitudes to breastfeeding in public reflected preferred infant-feeding method and were positively influenced by prior exposure to breastfeeding (P = .024). Females were more positive than males both in relation to breastfeeding in public (P = .002) and breastfeeding promotion (P = .003). Recommendations for breastfeeding promotion include specific targeting of young people (both male and female) and enabling contact between teenagers and nursing mothers as much as possible. J Hum Lact. 19(1):57-65. Preferencias alimenticias y actitudes hacia la lactancia y su promoción entre adolescentes del Norte de Irlanda El Norte de Irlanda tiene uno de los índices de iniciación de lactancia materna más bajos del mundo. Actitudes hacia la alimentación infantil se forman desde edades tempranas, y el alto índice de embarazo en adolescentes, ha hecho necesario hacer una encuesta de actitudes hacia la alimentación infantil y las preferencias de promoción de la lactancia materna en adolescentes en el Norte de Irlanda. Se distribuyeron cuestionarios a adolescentes de 14 a 18 años (n = 419) en 7 escuelas seleccionadas por el tipo y localización en todo el Norte de Irlanda. Actitudes sobre amamantar en público mostró que la lactancia es el método preferido de alimentación infantil y la exposición a la lactancia anteriormente fue una influencia positiva (P = .024). Las mujeres se mostraron mas positivas que los hombres en ambos tanto en la lactancia en público (P = .002) como en la promoción de la lactancia (P = .003). Recomendamos que para la promoción de la lactancia materna se incluyan a los grupos de jóvenes (ambos hombres y mujeres), y proveer mas contacto entre adolescentes y madres que amamanta.
Approximate dynamic programming via iterated Bellman inequalities

In this paper, we introduce new methods for finding functions that lower bound the value function of a stochastic control problem, using an iterated form of the Bellman inequality. Our method is based on solving linear or semidefinite programs, and produces both a bound on the optimal objective, as well as a suboptimal policy that appears to works very well. These results extend and improve bounds obtained in a previous paper using a single Bellman inequality condition. We describe the methods in a general setting and show how they can be applied in specific cases including the finite state case, constrained linear quadratic control, switched affine control, and multi‐period portfolio investment. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Account Strategies for the Violation of Social Norms: Integration and Extension of Sociological and Social Psychological Typologies

Account giving is regarded as both a determinant of normcontradictive behaviour and a means of coping with the social and individual side effects of normviolation. Based on the taxonomy proposed by Scott & Lyman (1968), Schonbach (1980) argues that there are four major account giving strategies, namely refusals, justifications, excuses and concessions. This typology is criticized here, both with regard to its poor applicability for the analysis of specific social normative behaviour, and for its lack of a clearly defined middle category between excuses and justifications. In order to redefine and expand the fourfold typology, the ways model of account giving is introduced, containing referentialization as a fifth meta-category of account giving. Here, an actor who is internally or externally accused of a normviolation connects the questioned behaviour with exonerating context information. This information is intended to ameliorate the actor's culpability by making reference to other norms, to other behaviours committed by the actor or to the behaviours of other persons; the actor acknowledges, however, that a norm has been violated. Determinants and impacts of referentialization are discussed with regard to the analysis of norm compliance, intrapersonal dynamics and interpersonal conflict.
Distributed Tabletops: Supporting Remote and Mixed-Presence Tabletop Collaboration

Mixed-presence tabletop interfaces aim to support collaboration between remote groups. However, it is unclear why tabletop interaction techniques should be important for mixed-presence or remote collaboration, and projects in this area differ as to which elements of tabletop interaction they choose to support. In this paper we discuss the benefits of tabletop interaction for mixed-presence and remote collaboration. In particular, we wish to support the natural tabletop awareness mechanisms of territoriality, orientation and consequential communication. We derive design guidelines for such systems and present distributed tabletops, a novel system that can be customised to investigate various mixed-presence tasks. Our early observations of distributed tabletops in use validate our design lines.
Foregrounding and Its Effect on Readers' Perception

There is an abundance of theory concerning the effects of reading literature. Some researchers do reveal effects, but few explain them. When they do, the textual features examined are neither necessary nor sufficient for literariness. Three experiments are presented here that study the relation between literary text quality and literary reading experience (aesthetic appreciation). The studies contrast effects of original literary texts and manipulated versions in which the degree of foregrounding found in the originals was minimized. To establish effects of foregrounding on literary reading experience, a rereading procedure was used. Results in part showed that foregrounding causes higher scores on aesthetic appreciation after participants read the texts a 2nd time. Furthermore, the literary texts revealed positive perception effects compared to nonforegrounding versions. These results suggest that foregrounding may enhance aesthetic appreciation and may be responsible for effects on perception.
Accountability and the making of knowledge statements : a study of academic discourse

This study investigates the manifestation of speaker accountability in connection with knowledge statements in two different kinds of academic discourse. The study focuses on knowledge statements which feature a set of knowledge stating verbs, namely argue, claim, suggest, propose, maintain, assume and believe. A corpus is used as the empirical basis and a general metadiscursive approach primarily informed by ideas from a recent account of metadiscourse (Hyland 2005a) is adopted (combined with reasoning from dialogic frameworks, e.g. Todorov 1984, Bakhtin 1999). The study falls into four parts: First, the study establishes what it is in the utterance that affects the manifestation of speaker accountability in connection with knowledge statements; speaker accountability is associated with how vocally present or absent speakers are in their texts at the particular point of the knowledge statement, i.e. as connected to the concept of discourse voice. Discourse voice maps directly onto a scalar conception of accountability and a model describing this interactive relationship is proposed. Second, the study investigates differences between the knowledge stating verbs selected with respect to their occurrence in typical accountability contexts (i.e. contexts in which speakers are accountable to different degrees). The result of the corpus investigation indicates that the verbs investigated display significant differences in terms of typical accountability contexts. For example, believe is found to be a typical High accountability verb whereas claim is typically found in Low accountability contexts and suggest occurs as a typical Medium-to-High accountability verb. Third, the study also investigates potential differences in the typical accountability contexts of the knowledge stating verbs across two different academic disciplines. The corpus is divided into two sub-corpora, one part featuring texts from two linguistic journals and the other part featuring texts from two journals of literary theory and literary history. The outcome of the investigation is that there are few significant differences across the two sub-corpora. Knowledge stating verbs appear to occur in similar kinds of accountability contexts in linguistic and in literary texts. Finally, the study addresses the issue of what accountability is, i.e. its status in a theory of language. It is established that accountability can be explained by appeal to social knowledge. Such social knowledge is addressed at the level of metadiscourse in communication. The discussion leads to the proposal of a layered concept of metadiscourse where accountability is claimed to be directly associated with higher-level metadiscourse.
A Language for Bi-Directional Tree Transformations

We present a semantic foundation and a collection of program combinators for bi-directional transformations on tree-structured data. In one direction, these transformations map a “concrete” tree into a simplified “abstract” one; in the other, they map a modified abstract tree, together with the original concrete tree, to a correspondingly modified concrete tree. The challenge of understanding and designing these transformations—called lenses—arises from their asymmetric nature: information is discarded when mapping from concrete to abstract, and must be restored on the way back. We identify a natural mathematical space of well-behaved lenses, in which the two components are constrained to fit together in a sensible way. We study definedness and continuity in this setting and state a precise connection with the classical theory of “update translation under a constant complement” from databases. We then instantiate our semantic framework in the form of a collection of lens combinators that can be assembled to describe powerful transformations on trees and whose well-behavedness follows from simple, local checks. These combinators include familiar constructs from functional programming (composition, mapping, projection, recursion) together with some novel primitives for manipulating trees (splitting, pruning, pivoting, etc.). An extended example shows how our combinators can be used to define a lens that translates between a native HTML representation of browser bookmarks and a generic
Conception de dispositifs électroniques portés pour le suivi de l’état de santé des personnes âgées

Les solutions techniques permettant de repondre a la problematique du vieillissement sont aujourd’hui une necessite. La mesure de l’activite motrice est un indicateur pour le praticien de l’etat de sante de la personne âgee. L’objectif de ce travail est de developper une instrumentation medicale pour mettre en place un suivi de l’activite a domicile. Ces solutions techniques associent : des capteurs portes et ambiants, des logiciels de traitement, et des interfaces utilisateurs. Ces travaux sont associes a deux applications cliniques : Le suivi de personnes dependantes en institution a l’aide d’un patch electronique porte et le suivi de personnes fragiles a domicile a l’aide d’une semelle intelligente. Le developpement des solutions techniques est realise en plusieurs etapes : conception technique, caracterisation en laboratoire, et essais en conditions d’usages. Les resultats de ces experimentations ont permis de proposer des recommandations en termes d’usages des solutions techniques.
Interaction of bishydroxycoumarin with polyvinylpyrrolidone.

Bishydroxycoumarin forms a highly soluble complex with polyvinylpyrrolidone in aqueous solution. A 1.0% solution of polyvinylpyrrolidone at pH 7.4 increased the solubility of bishydroxycoumarin, the increase being approximately 21.5 times that observed for the drug in the absence of the macromolecule. Equilibrium dialysis, viscometric, and spectrophotometric methods were used to study binding mechanisms. A polyvinylpyrrolidone molecule with a molecular weight of 40,000 provides approximately 50 identical sites for the bishydroxycoumarin molecule. This implies that one binding site consists of seven or eight monomer units of the polymer. The intrinsic association constant is in the order of 3 × 103 1. /mole at 20° and decreases with an increase in temperature. Thermodynamic data indicate that hydrophobic bonds form at low temperature. UV spectral changes of the drug in the presence of the macromolecule suggest that the α,β‐unsaturated lactone structure of bishydroxycoumarin is involved in the complexation. Intrinsic viscosity data indicate that coiling occurs during the binding process.
Inward rectification of resting and opiate-activated potassium currents in rat locus coeruleus neurons

Intracellular recordings were made from rat locus coeruleus neurons in vitro, and membrane currents were measured at potentials from -50 to - 130 mV. In the absence of any applied agonists, the slope conductance of the cells increased 3-fold when the cell was hyperpolarized from -60 to -120 mV. This conductance increase was complete within 5 msec of the onset of a hyperpolarizing command and was subsequently independent of time for several seconds. The conductance increase was blocked by cesium chloride (1–2 mM), rubidium chloride (1–2 mM), or barium chloride (1–100 microM). The membrane potential range over which the conductance increased was centered at the potassium equilibrium potential (EK; extracellular potassium concentration, 2.5–10.5 mM): the current/voltage (I/V) relation of the cell could be well described by supposing that there were 2 potassium conductances, one voltage independent (G1) and the other (inward rectifier, Gir) activated according to the expression Gir = Gir,max/(1 + exp[(V - EK)/k]), where k ranged from 15 mV in 2.5 mM potassium to 6 mV in 10.5 mM potassium. The additional membrane potassium conductance that developed when agonists at mu-opioid and alpha 2-adrenoceptors were applied also became larger with membrane hyperpolarization, and this voltage dependence was also reduced or blocked by rubidium, cesium, and barium; in the presence of these agonists the current also reached its final value within 5 msec. However, the conductance increased by the agonists (Gag) was not well expressed by simply increasing the values of G1 and Gir,max. It was best described by a potassium conductance that increased according to Gag,max/(1 + exp[(V - Vm)/k]), where Vm (the potential at which the conductance was half-maximum) was close to the resting potential of the cell. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Personal Data Management in the Internet of Things

Due to a sharp decrease in hardware costs and shrinking form factors, networked sensors have become ubiquitous. Today, a variety of sensors are embedded into smartphones, tablets, and personal wearable devices, and are commonly installed in homes and buildings. Sensors are used to collect data about people in their proximity, referred to as users. The collection of such networked sensors is commonly referred to as the Internet of Things. Although sensor data enables a wide range of applications from security, to efficiency, to healthcare, this data can be used to reveal unwarranted private information about users. Thus it is imperative to preserve data privacy while providing users with a wide variety of applications to process their personal data. Unfortunately, most existing systems do not meet these goals. Users are either forced to release their data to third parties, such as application developers, thus giving up data privacy in exchange for using data-driven applications, or are limited to using a fixed set of applications, such as those provided by the sensor manufacturer. To avoid this tradeoff, users may chose to host their data and applications on their personal devices, but this requires them to maintain data backups and ensure application performance. What is needed, therefore, is a system that gives users flexibility in their choice of data-driven applications while preserving their data privacy, without burdening users with the need to backup their data and providing computational resources for their applications. We propose a software architecture that leverages a user’s personal virtual execution environment (VEE) to host data-driven applications. This dissertation describes key software techniques and mechanisms that are necessary to enable this architecture. First, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation of our proposed architecture and demonstrate a privacy-preserving ecosystem of applications that process users’ energy data as a case study. Second, we present a data management system (called Bolt) that provides applications with efficient storage and retrieval of time-series data, and guarantees the confidentiality and integrity of stored data. We then present a methodology to provision large numbers of personal VEEs on a single physical machine, and demonstrate its use with LinuX Containers (LXC). We conclude by outlining the design of an abstract framework to allow users to balance data privacy and application utility.
Independent Candidate Serum Protein Biomarkers of Response to Adalimumab and to Infliximab in Rheumatoid Arthritis: An Exploratory Study

Response to treatment of rheumatoid arthritis shows large inter-individual variability. This heterogeneity is observed with all the anti-rheumatic drugs, including the commonly used TNF inhibitors. It seems that drug-specific and target-specific factors lead individual patients to respond or not to a given drug, although this point has been challenged. The search of biomarkers distinguishing responders from non-responders has included shotgun proteomics of serum, as a previous study of response to infliximab, an anti-TNF antibody. Here, we have used the same study design and technology to search biomarkers of response to a different anti-TNF antibody, adalimumab, and we have compared the results obtained for the two anti-TNF drugs. Search of biomarkers of response to adalimumab included depletion of the most abundant serum proteins, 8-plex isobaric tag for relative and absolute quantitation (iTRAQ) labeling, two-dimensional liquid chromatography fractionation and relative quantification with a hybrid Orbitrap mass spectrometer. With this approach, 264 proteins were identified in all the samples with at least 2 peptides and 95% confidence. Nine proteins showed differences between non-responders and responders (P < 0.05), representing putative biomarkers of response to adalimumab. These results were compared with the previous study of infliximab. Surprisingly, the non-responder/responder differences in the two studies were not correlated (rs = 0.07; P = 0.40). This overall independence with all the proteins showed two identifiable components. On one side, the putative biomarkers of response to either adalimumab or infliximab, which were not shared and showed an inverse correlation (rs = -0.69; P = 0.0023). On the other, eight proteins showing significant non-responder/responder differences in the analysis combining data of response to the two drugs. These results identify new putative biomarkers of response to treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and indicate that they are notably drug-specific.
An efficient, fast matching approach using posterior probability estimates in speech recognition

Acoustic fast matching is an effective technique to accelerate the search process in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. This paper introduces a novel fast matching method. This method is based on the evaluation of future posterior probabilities for a look-ahead number of timeframes in order to exclude unlikely phone models as early as possible during the search. In contrast to the likelihood scores used by more traditional fast matching methods these posterior probabilities are more discriminative by nature as they sum up to unity over all the possible models. By applying the proposed method we managed to reduce by 66% the decoding time consumed in our time-synchronous Viterbi decoder for a recognition task based on the Wall Street Journal database with virtually no additional decoding errors.