Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimizing Selection of Assessment Solutions for Completing Information Extraction Results

Incomplete information produces serious consequences in information extraction: it increases costs and leads to problems in downstream processing. This work focuses on improving the completeness of extraction results by applying judiciously selected assessment methods to information extraction based on the principle of complementarity. Our recommendation model simplifies the selection of assessment methods which can overcome a specific incompleteness problem. This paper also focuses on the characterization of information extraction and assessment methods as well as on a rule-based approach that allows estimation of general processability, profitability in the complementarity approach, and the performance of an assessment method under evaluation.
African farmers’ perceptions of erratic rainfall

Farmers‟ perceptions of how rainfall is changing is crucial in anticipating the effects of climate change, as only farmers who perceive a problem will adapt to it. However, even within the same location, people may perceive rainfall changes differently. Therefore, how can scientists, practitioners, and farmers ensure that they talk about the same rainfall changes? The overall aim of this paper is to improve the understanding of what people mean when they say rainfall is becoming more erratic. To do this we compared farmers‟ perceptions of rainfall changes from four semi-arid regions in Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana and Malawi, and integrated this with meteorological data. A conceptual rainfall matrix was designed to organise the data as perceptions of onset, duration or cessation. The matrix helped to clarify ways in which rainfall was becoming “more erratic”, in particular in identifying that increasing frequency of dry days and reduced amounts of rainfall (i.e. a meteorological definition) were behind perceptions that rainy seasons started later and finished earlier. A common perception that could not be found within meteorological data was that “rainfall used to start earlier than now”. Perceptions that could be reproduced across datasets include “it is difficult to know when the rainy season starts”. Here, “more erratic rainfall” may refer to increasing inter-annual variability in the timing of onsets (using an agronomic definition), which resulted in less predictable rainy seasons. Factors confounding perceptions of rainfall include (lack of and existing) institutional support that prevent farmers from responding at the onset of the rainy season. We introduce “access droughts” to denote crop failures that result from institutional support that leads to maladaptation strategies and increased sensitivity of the agricultural system. Access droughts are sometimes mistaken (by farmers, scientists, extension, policy makers etc.) for agronomic or meteorological droughts. The research suggests that top-down climate impact scenarios need to be grounded with farmers‟ and extension workers‟ understandings of how weather is changing more carefully in order to improve policy implementation. The graphs presented in this paper are an attempt to contribute to enhanced clarity in such communications.
An Efficient MAC Protocol for Improving the Network Throughput for Cognitive Radio Networks

The limitation of spectrum has become a major bottleneck of the development of next generation radio system. One of the key challenges of the emerging opportunistic cognitive radio is how to utilize unused spectrum holes efficiently without interference to incumbent system. Assuming that channel status is known, in this paper, we propose a decentralized adaptive medium access control (AMAC) protocol that has no dedicated global common control channel (CCC) and can utilize available resources efficiently. In AMAC, each cognitive radio maintains channel status table and indexes them frequently. The channel that has more probability to be stable is ranked channel one. The most reliable common channel between communicating pair is selected as a CCC. We proposed two data communication mode according to the channel condition. The simulation results show that the proposed decentralized adaptive medium access control (AMAC) protocol significantly increases cognitive radio networks (CRNs) connectivity and data throughput.
Liquidity Coinsurance, Moral Hazard, and Financial Contagion

A speed control device used in an image forming apparatus which includes a detector for checking whether the backing of an image receiving sheet is made of ordinary paper or OHP film, and is capable of controlling the rotating speeds of the motors depending upon the type of the image receiving sheet, i.e., an ordinary paper type or an OHP film type, thereby ensuring that the thermoplastic resin is molten to achieve optimum fluidity irrespective of the type of image receiving sheet.
A high-level dynamic-error model of a pipelined analog-to-digital converter

The paper presents a fast and accurate high-level model of a pipelined analog-to-digital converter implemented in MATLAB. Mechanisms causing dynamic errors, such as the settling time of a slew-rate-limited amplifier, are analyzed and parameters to model these identified. All parameters are associated with actual physical properties and all simulations are validated by comparison to measured data in both time and frequency domains.
Prospective randomized study determining whether a 3-day application of ofloxacin results in the selection of fluoroquinolone-resistant coagulase-negative Staphylococcus.

PURPOSE To determine whether a 3-day application of ofloxacin results in the selection of fluoroquinolone-resistant conjunctival coagulase-negative Staphylococcus. DESIGN Prospective randomized trial. METHODS Patients scheduled for ocular surgery were randomized to a control (89 eyes) or study group (70 eyes). The study group received topical ofloxacin (0.3%) four times a day for 3 days. Conjunctival cultures were obtained at baseline (T0) and after 3 days of ofloxacin (T1). Cultures were also obtained at T0 and T1 for the control group, but these eyes did not receive an antibiotic. Bacteria isolated were identified and antibiotic susceptibility was determined. RESULTS At T0, 53 out of 89 patients (60%) in the control and 48 out of 70 patients (69%) in the study group harbored coagulase-negative Staphylococcus. Among these coagulase-negative Staphylococcus, 12 out of 53 in the control and 11 out of 48 in the study group were resistant to ofloxacin (p>0.9999). At T1, significantly fewer coagulase-negative Staphylococcus (p=0.0003) were isolated from the study group (18 coagulase-negative Staphylococcus), compared the control group (48 coagulase-negative Staphylococcus). Of these, 5 out of 17 coagulase-negative Staphylococcus in the study group and 9 out of 48 coagulase-negative Staphylococcus in the control group were resistant to ofloxacin (p=0.5649). There was no significant difference in the number of coagulase-negative Staphylococcus resistant to ciprofloxacin or norfloxacin in the study group compared to the control group at T1. CONCLUSIONS Ofloxacin given four times a day for 3 days does not select out for conjunctival fluoroquinolone-resistant coagulase-negative Staphylococcus.
Down-regulation of mannosyl receptor-mediated endocytosis and antigen F4/80 in bacillus calmette-guerin-activated mouse macrophages. Role of T lymphocytes and lymphokines

Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) infection alters the surface and endocytic properties of mouse peritoneal macrophages (PM) compared with thioglycollate- elicited (TPM) or resident PM (RPM). Expression of Ia antigen (Ag) is enhanced up to fourfold, but plasma membrane receptors that mediate binding and uptake of mannosyl/fucosyl-terminated glycoconjugates (MFR), Fc receptors, and the macrophage (mφ)-specific Ag F4/80 are reduced by 50-80 percent. Levels of Mac-1 remain relatively stable. These changes are accompanied by enhanced secretion of O(2)(-), after further stimulation with phorbyl myristate acetate, and of plasminogen activator. Both these products are released by TPM, but not RPM. The characteristic surface phenotype of BCG-PM can also be induced by injection of C. parvum, another mφ- activating agent, but not by thioglycollate broth, lipopolysaccharide, or proteose peptone. Purified protein derivative (PPD) and N-acetylmuramyl-L- alanyl-D-isoglutamine. 2H(2)0 are soluble agents with partial activity. Alteration of mφ markers by BCG infection depends on T lymphocyte function, although studies with nude mice indicate that other pathways may also serve to modify the surface of the mφ. Mφ from uninfected animals displayed all markers of activation after adoptive transfer of specifically-sensitised lymphocytes with PPD, intraperitoneally, or after co- cultivation. Treatment of primed lymphocytes with anti-Thy-1 antibody and complement ablated this effect. Lymphokines obtaned by Ag or mitogen stimulation induced similar changes in TPM and RPM. Mannose-specific endocytosis decayed rapidly, time 1/2 approximately equal to 16 h and stabilized at approximately 25 percent of control values. Single-cell analysis showed that residual MFR activity was uniform in the target population. Loss of Ag F4/80 after activation by lymphocyte and PPD was less marked than after infection (35 percent vs 80 percent), unlike MFR activity, which declined to a similar extent. Induction of mφ Ia by lymphokine reached a peak after 2-3 d and was lost within 2 d of its removal. Recovery of MFR and F4/80 was incomplete under these conditions. These studies establish that activated mφ known to display enhanced antimicrobial/anticellular activity express markedly different surface properties distinct from elicited or resident cells. The role of antigen- stimulated T cell products in regulating mφ function is confirmed, and down-regulation of mannosyl-receptor-mediated endocytosis provides a sensitive, quantitative, and cell-specific new marker to study their properties and mechanism of action. Extensive, but selective remodeling of mφ plasma membrane structure could play an important role in controlling recognition and effector mechanisms of the activated mφ.
Chikungunya vaccines in development

ABSTRACT Chikungunya virus has become a global health threat, spreading to the industrial world of Europe and the Americas; no treatment or prophylactic vaccine is available. Since the late 1960s much effort has been put into the development of a vaccine, and several heterogeneous strategies have already been explored. Only two candidates have recently qualified to enter clinical phase II trials, a chikungunya virus-like particle-based vaccine and a recombinant live attenuated measles virus-vectored vaccine. This review focuses on the current status of vaccine development against chikungunya virus in humans and discusses the diversity of immunization strategies, results of recent human trials and promising vaccine candidates.
Interkinetic nuclear migration: A mysterious process in search of a function

During interkinetic nuclear migration (INM), the nuclei in many epithelial cells migrate between the apical and basal surfaces, coordinating with the cell cycle, and undergoing cytokinesis at the apical surface. INM is observed in a wide variety of tissues and species. Recent advances in time‐lapse microscopy have provided clues about the mechanisms and functions of INM. Whether actin or microtubules are responsible for nuclear migration is controversial. How mitosis is initiated during INM is poorly understood, as is the relationship between the cell cycle and nuclear movement. It is possible that the disagreements stem from differences in the tissues being studied, since epithelia undergoing INM vary greatly in terms of cell height and cell fates. In this review we examine the reports addressing the mode and mechanisms that regulate INM and suggest possible functions for this dramatic event.
Color Constancy by Learning to Predict Chromaticity from Luminance

Color constancy is the recovery of true surface color from observed color, and requires estimating the chromaticity of scene illumination to correct for the bias it induces. In this paper, we show that the per-pixel color statistics of natural scenes—without any spatial or semantic context—can by themselves be a powerful cue for color constancy. Specifically, we describe an illuminant estimation method that is built around a "classifier" for identifying the true chromaticity of a pixel given its luminance (absolute brightness across color channels). During inference, each pixel's observed color restricts its true chromaticity to those values that can be explained by one of a candidate set of illuminants, and applying the classifier over these values yields a distribution over the corresponding illuminants. A global estimate for the scene illuminant is computed through a simple aggregation of these distributions across all pixels. We begin by simply defining the luminance-to-chromaticity classifier by computing empirical histograms over discretized chromaticity and luminance values from a training set of natural images. These histograms reflect a preference for hues corresponding to smooth reflectance functions, and for achromatic colors in brighter pixels. Despite its simplicity, the resulting estimation algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art color constancy methods. Next, we propose a method to learn the luminance-to-chromaticity classifier "end-to-end". Using stochastic gradient descent, we set chromaticity-luminance likelihoods to minimize errors in the final scene illuminant estimates on a training set. This leads to further improvements in accuracy, most significantly in the tail of the error distribution.
Does Situationism Excuse? The Implications of Situationism for Moral Responsibility and Criminal Responsibility

In this Article, I will argue that a person may be deserving of criminal punishment even in certain situations where she is not necessarily morally responsible for her criminal act. What these situations share in common are two things: (a) the psychological factors that motivate the individual’s behavior are environmentally determined and (b) her crime is serious, making her less eligible for sympathy and therefore less likely to be acquitted. To get to this conclusion, I will proceed in four steps. In Part II, I will offer the first two of these steps. First, I will argue that our foundational assumption that moral responsibility is necessary for just blame and punishment is not self-evident and is actually rather difficult to explain and justify. Second, I will offer an explanation and justification that appeals to our moral psychology. Specifically, I will argue that we subscribe to this assumption (that moral responsibility is necessary for just blame and punishment) ultimately because we sympathize with agents who lack responsibility for their actions. Third, in Part IV, I aim to show that even if moral responsibility is not conceptually — only “emotionally” — necessary for just blame and punishment, the traditionally recognized criminal excuses (automatism, duress, entrapment, hypnosis, infancy, insanity, involuntary intoxication, mistake of fact, and mistake of law) are not at risk because, contrary to popular wisdom, they do not really rely on this assumption to begin with. Instead, they stand less for the metaphysical proposition that we should refrain from blaming and punishing the non-responsible and more for the normative/ethical proposition that we should refrain from blaming and punishing those whom we cannot reasonably expect to have acted better. I will further argue that the latter proposition does not necessarily reduce to the former. Fourth, once I have defended my account of the excuses, I will question in Parts V and VI the increasingly popular notion that we should add certain conditions or circumstances to the list of recognized excuses. I will focus on one in particular — the psychological theory of “situationism” — and will argue that, despite its initial plausibility, it should be kept off the list. While situationism arguably does negate moral responsibility, it does not negate criminal responsibility. Of course, this is a controversial point. Criminal responsibility is almost universally thought to require moral responsibility. But in a previous article, "Dangerous Psychopaths: Criminally Responsible But Not Morally Responsible, Subject to Criminal Punishment And to Preventive Detention," 48 San Diego L. Rev. 1299 (2011), I used personality psychology to drive a wedge between the two. In this article, I will use the opposite end of the psychological spectrum — social psychology — to drive the same important wedge.
A Centralized Autonomous System of Cooperation for UAVs- Monitoring and USVs- Cleaning

This article proposes an approach which deals with the problem of monitoring ocean pollution and cleaning dirty zones using autonomous unmanned vehicles. The authors present a cooperative agent-based planning approach for heterogeneous unmanned vehicles with different roles. Unmanned aerial vehicles UAVs monitor multiple ocean regions and unmanned surface vehicles USVs tackle the cleaning of dirty zones. Due to the rapid deployment of these unmanned vehicles, and the increase of ocean pollution, it is convenient to use a fleet of unmanned vehicles. Thus, most of the existing studies deal with the monitoring of different zones, the detection of the polluted zones and then the cleaning of the zones. In order to optimize this process, the authors' solution aims to use one UAV and one USV to reduce the pollution level of the ocean zones while taking into account the problem of fault tolerance related to these vehicles.
Using Register-Diversified Corpora for General Language Studies

The present study summarizes corpus-based research on linguistic characteristics from several different structural levels, in English as well as other languages, showing that register variation is inherent in natural language. It further argues that, due to the importance and systematicity of the linguistic differences among registers, diversified corpora representing a broad range of register variation are required as the basis for general language studies.First, the extent of cross-register differences are illustrated from consideration of individual grammatical and lexical features; these register differences are also important for probabilistic part-of-speech taggers and syntactic parsers, because the probabilities associated with grammatically ambiguous forms are often markedly different across registers. Then, corpus-based multidimensional analyses of English are summarized, showing that linguistic features from several structural levels function together as underlying dimensions of variation, with each dimension defining a different set of linguistic relations among registers. Finally, the paper discusses how such analyses, based on register-diversified corpora, can be used to address two current issues in computational linguistics: the automatic classification of texts into register categories and cross-linguistic comparisons of register variation.
Obligate coupling of CFTR pore opening to tight nucleotide-binding domain dimerization

In CFTR, the chloride channel mutated in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients, ATP-binding-induced dimerization of two cytosolic nucleotide binding domains (NBDs) opens the pore, and dimer disruption following ATP hydrolysis closes it. Spontaneous openings without ATP are rare in wild-type CFTR, but in certain CF mutants constitute the only gating mechanism, stimulated by ivacaftor, a clinically approved CFTR potentiator. The molecular motions underlying spontaneous gating are unclear. Here we correlate energetic coupling between residues across the dimer interface with spontaneous pore opening/closure in single CFTR channels. We show that spontaneous openings are also strictly coupled to NBD dimerization, which may therefore occur even without ATP. Coordinated NBD/pore movements are therefore intrinsic to CFTR: ATP alters the stability, but not the fundamental structural architecture, of open- and closed-pore conformations. This explains correlated effects of phosphorylation, mutations, and drugs on ATP-driven and spontaneous activity, providing insights for understanding CF mutation and drug mechanisms. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.18164. 001
A circuit for on-chip skew adjustment with jitter and setup time measurement

This paper reports a circuit for on-chip skew adjustment with jitter and setup time measurement. A test chip has been fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process. It successfully measures the random jitter distribution and the relative setup time. This circuit becomes necessary in SoCs because direct measurement cannot be performed by external equipment. Setup time of a D-FF is measured by sweeping over the range of an adjustable input delay line. Its jitter is represented by a Cumulative Distribution Function which is measured by sampling the setup time repeatedly. The skew can be adjusted based on the setup time and jitter determined by our method. Furthermore, this method can be extended for almost any number of Target/Reference Programmable Delay Lines. This system enables designers to adjust skew between the distributed clock paths as well as to measure sub-picosecond level jitter and setup time of D-FFs beyond 10-GHz.
Evaluation of the Relationship Between Pharmacokinetics and the Safety of Aripiprazole and Its Cardiovascular Effects in Healthy Volunteers

Aims The aim of this study was the evaluation of the possible relationship between pharmacokinetics and the safety of aripiprazole as well as its influence on blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR), and corrected QT (QTc) interval. Methods The study population comprised 157 healthy volunteers from 6 bioequivalence clinical trials. Subjects were administered a single 10-mg oral dose of each formulation separated by a 28-day washout period. Plasma concentrations were measured using high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. Blood pressure was measured at the following times: predose and 0.5, 2, 4, 6, and 8 hours postdose. An electrocardiogram was recorded at predose, 4, and 8 hours postdose. Results Area under the curve (AUC), maximum plasma concentration, half-life, and distribution volume corrected for weight were higher in women. Aripiprazole treatment produced a decrease of BP (9.3 mm Hg on systolic and 6.2 mm Hg on diastolic pressure) and an increase in HR (12.1 beats per minute) and QTc interval (9.1 milliseconds). There were sex differences in BP, HR, and QTc interval. Women and subjects with higher AUC and maximum plasma concentration values were more prone to experience adverse drug reactions and gastrointestinal adverse reactions. The AUC was related with systolic BP and diastolic BP decrease and HR increase but there was no relationship between aripiprazole concentrations and QTc increase. Conclusions Aripiprazole decreases BP and increases HR and QTc interval. Pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and safety of aripiprazole are affected by sex. There is a directly proportional relationship between pharmacokinetic parameters and adverse drug reactions and effect on BP and HR.