Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On Pregroups, Freedom, and (Virtual) Conceptual Necessity

The advent of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995) heralded a shift of emphasis from the by now familiar goals of descriptive and explanatory adequacy, to a characterization of human language in terms of departures from a minimally necessary system meeting various boundary ('bare output') conditions. This involves determining both what the appropriate boundary conditions are, and what the simplest systems are that meet these conditions. Work within the minimalist program can be viewed as concerning itself primarily with the first question: the nature of the interfaces. Work in theoretical computational linguistics, on the other hand, is easily understood as seeking answers to the second. Viewing languages as sets of strings, although an obvious simplification, allows us to formulate precisely simple but interesting boundary conditions, which in turn enables feasible inquiry into the various possible formalisms which meet these boundary conditions. Perhaps the best studied such boundary condition is that the grammar formalism be able to describe a particular class £ of languages, where £ usually ranges over classes of languages as given by the Chomsky hierarchy (Chomsky, 1956), or various refinements thereof. 1 Results obtained here bear directly on the questions raised by Chomsky, as they can be understood as exhibiting the minimal properties a grammar formalism must have in order to be able to describe (as such) the complex of patterns attested in natural language. Properties of motivated linguistic formalisms can be compared against these minimal properties, and differences in complexity can either be interpreted as providing evidence for heretofore unacknowledged boundary conditions, or, if there is no structure in the deviations from minimality, as departures of our language faculty from perfection. There is a broad consensus that languages are usefully described in terms of a finite set of generators (the lexicon) which are acted upon by another finite
Orientation correction based monocular SLAM for a mobile robot

We develop a new algorithm for SLAM that uses a PTZ-camera for visual observation of natural landmarks. A new divided JCBB algorithm is presented to quickly address the visual data association problem without bounding the number of image features. Additionally, the presented orientation correction method is employed to well address the difficult SLAM orientation problem. The presented algorithm can greatly improve the performance of map building by reducing almost all the repeated landmarks, and can make the SLAM loop process to be simple as the orientation error is bounded. Experimental results in real environment showed that the proposed algorithm was very fast, stable and accurate.
Neurophysiology Based Performance Analysis of a Novel Automated Seizure Detection Algorithm for Neonatal EEG

To aid seizure detection in sick neonates, our group has developed an automated seizure detection algorithm (ANSeR) and published initial performance results. In this thesis a validation study of the performance of ANSeR on a large unedited, unseen dataset of 70 EEGs from 2 institutions is presented. Results indicate that ANSeR sensitivity thresholds between 0.5-0.3 provide performance considered acceptable for clinical use with seizure detection rates of 52.6-75% and false detection rates of 0.04 -0.36 FD/h respectively. To determine the features of seizures affecting automated detection, a subset of 20 EEGs from the validation study were selected and seizures were manually analysed using a novel set of 10 criteria. Using multivariate analysis, 4 seizure features were found to affect automated detection including; seizure amplitude, duration, rhythmicity and propagation. The main causes of false detection were also characterised and quantified leading to an adaptation of the algorithm with improved performance. Observations suggest that phenobarbitone, a first line anticonvulsant, may affect seizure morphology and potentially the performance of ANSeR. Using similar seizure analysis criteria to compare pre and post phenobarbitone seizures, it was shown that post phenobarbitone seizures were both lower amplitude and showed reduced propagation but the performance of ANSeR was unaffected. As well as an ongoing quantification of seizure burden, it is important that automated algorithms detect seizures soon after onset to facilitate prompt treatment. Results of retrospective analysis of seizure detection by ANSeR here suggests that the use of ANSeR may reduce the latency of first treatment after seizure onset by 30-40 minutes at clinically relevant ANSeR thresholds, compared to current practice. As rhythmic artefacts and other sources may result in ANSeR false detections, clinicians reviewing the EEG as a result of ANSeR detections must decide if the detection is a true seizure or a false detection. A training resource developed by the author improved the ability of clinical staff to discriminate true seizures from false detections in a randomised study.
Climate control on ancestral population dynamics: insight from Patagonian fish phylogeography

Changes in lake and stream habitats during the growth and retreat of Pleistocene glaciers repeatedly altered the spatial distributions and population sizes of the aquatic fauna of the southern Andes. Here, we use variation in mtDNA control region sequences to infer the temporal dynamics of two species of southern Andean fish during the past few million years. At least five important climate events were associated with major demographic changes: (i) the widespread glaciations of the mid‐Pliocene (c. 3.5 Ma); (ii) the largest Patagonian glaciation (1.1 Ma); (iii) the coldest Pleistocene glaciation as indicated by stacked marine δ18O (c. 0.7 Ma); (iv) the last southern Patagonian glaciation to reach the Atlantic coast (180 ka); and (v) the last glacial maximum (LGM, 23–25 000 years ago). The colder‐water inhabitant, Galaxias platei, underwent a strong bottleneck during the LGM and its haplotype diversity coalesces c. 0.7 Ma. In contrast, the more warm‐adapted and widely distributed Percichthys trucha showed continuous growth through the last two glacial cycles but went through an important bottleneck c. 180 000 years ago, at which time populations east of the Andes may have been eliminated. Haplotype diversity of the most divergent P. trucha populations, found west of the Andes, coalesces c. 3.2 Ma. The demographic timelines obtained for the two species thus illustrate the continent‐wide response of aquatic life in Patagonia to climate change during the Pleistocene, but also show how differing ecological traits and distributions led to distinctive responses.
Evolutionary failing-test generation for modern microprocessors

The incessant progress in manufacturing technology is posing new challenges to microprocessor designers. Nowadays, comprehensive verification of a chip can only be performed after tape-out, when the first silicon prototypes are available. Several activities that were originally supposed to be part of the pre-silicon design phase are migrating to this post-silicon time as well. The short paper describes a post-silicon methodology that can be exploited to devise functional failing tests. Such tests are essential to analyze and debug speed paths during verification, speed-stepping, and other critical activities. The proposed methodology is based on the Genetic Programming paradigm, and exploits a versatile toolkit named μGP. The paper demonstrates that an evolutionary algorithm can successfully tackle a significant and still open industrial problem. Moreover, it shows how to take into account complex hardware characteristics and architectural details of such complex devices.
The Ultimate Debian Database: Consolidating bazaar metadata for Quality Assurance and data mining

FLOSS distributions like RedHat and Ubuntu require a lot more complex infrastructures than most other FLOSS projects. In the case of community-driven distributions like Debian, the development of such an infrastructure is often not very organized, leading to new data sources being added in an impromptu manner while hackers set up new services that gain acceptance in the community. Mixing and matching data is then harder than should be, albeit being badly needed for Quality Assurance and data mining. Massive refactoring and integration is not a viable solution either, due to the constraints imposed by the bazaar development model. This paper presents the Ultimate Debian Database (UDD),1 which is the countermeasure adopted by the Debian project to the above “data hell”. UDD gathers data from various data sources into a single, central SQL database, turning Quality Assurance needs that could not be easily implemented before into simple SQL queries. The paper also discusses the customs that have contributed to the data hell, the lessons learnt while designing UDD, and its applications and potentialities for data mining on FLOSS distributions.
Go Red for Women Progestogen-Only Contraceptives and the Risk of Stroke

Background and Purpose—The association between combined oral contraceptives (OC) use and increased risk of stroke has been reported. While progestogen-only contraceptives (POC) are commonly used worldwide, their impact on cardiovascular disease remains unclear. Methods—A meta-analysis based on EMBASE and MEDLINE referenced literature corresponding to OCs marketed since 1960 was carried out. Eligible articles assessing the risk of stroke in relation to OC or POC were reviewed, and relevant studies were extracted. All types of POC and routes of administration were taken into account in the meta-analysis. Results—Six case–control studies were identified. The combined odd ratio (OR) showed no increase in the risk of stroke among POC users (OR 0.96; 95% confidence interval: 0.70 to 1.31). This result was similar according to the route of administration (either implant or injectable or oral POC). Conclusion—Data from observational studies show that POC use is not associated with an increased risk of stroke. However, these results are based on limited data. Further investigations are needed in women with risk factors of stroke. (Stroke. 2009;40:1059-1062.)
Recognition of Facial Expression Using Eigenvector Based Distributed Features and Euclidean Distance Based Decision Making Technique

In this paper, an Eigenvector based system has been presented to recognize facial expressions from digital facial images. In the approach, firstly the images were acquired and cropping of five significant portions from the image was performed to extract and store the Eigenvectors specific to the expressions. The Eigenvectors for the test images were also computed, and finally the input facial image was recognized when similarity was obtained by calculating the minimum Euclidean distance between the test image and the different expressions.
Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revising the Revisionists

A recent revisionist literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an episodic event of the first half of the 1980s driven by nonmarket factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since the late 1980s substantially reflect the mechanical confounding effects of changes in labor force composition. Analyzing data from the Current Population Survey for 1963 to 2005, we find limited support for these claims. The slowing of the growth of overall wage inequality in the 1990s hides a divergence in the paths of upper-tail (90/50) inequalitywhich has increased steadily since 1980, even adjusting for changes in labor force compositionand lower-tail (50/10) inequality, which rose sharply in the first half of the 1980s and plateaued or contracted thereafter. Fluctuations in the real minimum wage are not a plausible explanation for these trends since the bulk of inequality growth occurs above the median of the wage distribution. Models emphasizing rapid secular growth in the relative demand for skillsattributable to skill-biased technical changeand a sharp deceleration in the relative supply of college workers in the 1980s do an excellent job of capturing the evolution of the college/high school wage premium over four decades. But these models also imply a puzzling deceleration in relative demand growth for college workers in the early 1990s, also visible in a recent polarization of skill demands in which employment has expanded in high-wage and low-wage work at the expense of middle-wage jobs. These patterns are potentially reconciled by a modified version of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis that emphasizes the role of information technology in complementing abstract (high-education) tasks and substituting for routine (middle-education) tasks.
Learning Posture Invariant Spatial Representations Through Temporal Correlations

A hierarchical neural network model is used to learn, without supervision, sensory-sensory coordinate transformations like those believed to be encoded in the dorsal pathway of the cerebral cortex. The resulting representations of visual space are invariant to eye orientation, neck orientation, or posture in general. These posture invariant spatial representations are learned using the same mechanisms that have previously been proposed to operate in the cortical ventral pathway to learn object representation that are invariant to translation, scale, orientation, or viewpoint in general. This model thus suggests that the same mechanisms of learning and development operate across multiple cortical hierarchies.
International Journal of Electronics and Communications (aeü) Listless Block-tree Set Partitioning Algorithm for Very Low Bit Rate Embedded Image Compression

Keywords: No list SPIHT Wavelet block tree coding Listless block tree coder Listless block tree DCT Image compression Embedded coder a b s t r a c t This paper presents a listless implementation of wavelet based block tree coding (WBTC) algorithm of varying root block sizes. WBTC algorithm improves the image compression performance of set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) at lower rates by efficiently encoding both inter and intra scale correlation using block trees. Though WBTC lowers the memory requirement by using block trees compared to SPIHT, it makes use of three ordered auxiliary lists. This feature makes WBTC undesirable for hardware implementation; as it needs a lot of memory management when the list nodes grow exponentially on each pass. The proposed listless implementation of WBTC algorithm uses special markers instead of lists. This reduces dynamic memory requirement by 88% with respect to WBTC and 89% with respect to SPIHT. The proposed algorithm is combined with discrete cosine transform (DCT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to show its superiority over DCT and DWT based embedded coders, including JPEG 2000 at lower rates. The compression performance on most of the standard test images is nearly same as WBTC, and outperforms SPIHT by a wide margin particularly at lower bit rates.
Arrhythmia Detection using Mutual Information-Based Integration Method

The aim of this paper is to propose an application of mutual information-based ensemble methods to the analysis and classification of heart beats associated with different types of Arrhythmia. Models of multilayer perceptrons, support vector machines, and radial basis function neural networks were trained and tested using the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. This research brings a focus to an ensemble method that, to our knowledge, is a novel application in the area of ECG Arrhythmia detection. The proposed classifier ensemble method showed improved performance, relative to either majority voting classifier integration or to individual classifier performance. The overall ensemble accuracy was 98.25%.
Green Bank Telescope Observations of the Water Masers of NGC 3079: Accretion Disk Magnetic Field and Maser Scintillation

We present observations of the 22 GHz H2O megamasers in the circumnuclear disk of NGC 3079 obtained with the Green Bank Telescope. The data are analyzed for circular polarization due to the Zeeman-induced splitting of the H2O maser lines. No circular polarization is detected, and we derive a 1 σ upper limit of 11 mG for the toroidal magnetic field at ~0.64 pc from the central black hole. This is the tightest upper limit for the magnetic field around a black hole to date. We use the magnetic field limit to derive an estimate of the mass accretion onto the central black hole. In addition to the polarimetric results, we present an observation of rapid variability in the maser lines, which we explain as weak interstellar scintillation. From the scintillation parameters, we estimate an intrinsic size of the mostly saturated maser features of ~12 μas. This is consistent with models assuming a thick, clumpy accretion disk.
Environmental adaptation in stomatal size independent of the effects of genome size

Cell sizes are linked across multiple tissues, including stomata, and this variation is closely correlated with genome size. These associations raise the question of whether generic changes in cell size cause suboptimal changes in stomata, requiring subsequent evolution under selection for stomatal size. We tested the relationships among guard cell length, genome size and vegetation type using phylogenetically independent analyses on 67 species of the ecologically and structurally diverse family, Proteaceae. We also compared how genome and stomatal sizes varied at ancient (among genera) and more recent (within genus) levels. The observed 60-fold range in genome size in Proteaceae largely reflected the mean chromosome size. Compared with variation among genera, genome size varied much less within genera (< 6% of total variance) than stomatal size, implying evolution in stomatal size subsequent to changes in genome size. Open vegetation and closed forest had significantly different relationships between stomatal and genome sizes. Ancient changes in genome size clearly influenced stomatal size in Proteaceae, but adaptation to habitat strongly modified the genome–stomatal size relationship. Direct adaptation to the environment in stomatal size argues that new proxies for past concentrations of atmospheric CO2 that incorporate stomatal size are superior to older models based solely on stomatal frequency.
Epigenetic regulation of rice flowering and reproduction

Current understanding of the epigenetic regulator roles in plant growth and development has largely derived from studies in the dicotyledonous model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Rice (Oryza sativa) is one of the most important food crops in the world and has more recently becoming a monocotyledonous model plant in functional genomics research. During the past few years, an increasing number of studies have reported the impact of DNA methylation, non-coding RNAs and histone modifications on transcription regulation, flowering time control, and reproduction in rice. Here, we review these studies to provide an updated complete view about chromatin modifiers characterized in rice and in particular on their roles in epigenetic regulation of flowering time, reproduction, and seed development.
Surgical Treatment of Otosclerosis: Eight years’ Experience at the Jordan University Hospital

Introduction: To report the experience of the Jordan University Hospital with respect to the surgical treatment of otosclerosis and to compare results and complications with published studies. Materials and Methods: The medical records of all patients who underwent stapes surgery for otosclerosis at the Jordan University Hospital during the period January 2003 to December 2010 were reviewed. Results: Out of 130 patients who underwent stapes surgery, 104 (80%) fulfilled the criteria and were enrolled in this study. There were 68 (65.4%) females and 36 (34.6%) males (female-to-male ratio, 1.9: 1). The disease was bilateral in 86 (82.7%) patients. Family history for otosclerosis was positive in 37(35.6%) patients. Tinnitus was observed at presentation in 82 (78.8%) patients and spontaneously resolved or improved in 51(62.2%) patients after surgery. Air bone gap after surgery was ≤ 10 dB in 79 (76.0%) patients, between 10 and 20 dB in 10 (9.6%) patients, and between 20 and 30 dB in four (3.8%) patients. Complications occurred in 17(16.3%) patients, which included: one (1.0%) deaf ear, two (2.0%) sensorineural hearing loss, two (2.0%) facial nerve palsy, six (5.8%) vertigo lasting more than 7 days, three (2.9%) chorda tympani damage, one (1.0%) floating of footplate, and two (2.0%) perforation of the tympanic membrane. Conclusion: The results of this study are comparable with those reported in the literature by surgeons with the same level of experience, but below than those with large series experience. Therefore, we believe that an experienced general ear, nose, and throat (ENT) surgeon can perform stapes surgery safely and successfully in the absence of an otologist.
Dictionary Learning with Mutually Reinforcing Group-Graph Structures

In this paper, we propose a novel dictionary learning method in the semi-supervised setting by dynamically coupling graph and group structures. To this end, samples are represented by sparse codes inheriting their graph structure while the labeled samples within the same class are represented with group sparsity, sharing the same atoms of the dictionary. Instead of statically combining graph and group structures, we take advantage of them in a mutually reinforcing way — in the dictionary learning phase, we introduce the unlabeled samples into groups by an entropy-based method and then update the corresponding local graph, resulting in a more structured and discriminative dictionary. We analyze the relationship between the two structures and prove the convergence of our proposed method. Focusing on image classification task, we evaluate our approach on several datasets and obtain superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods, especially in the case of only a few labeled samples and limited dictionary size.
A distance-based slice interleaving scheme for robust video transmission over error-prone networks

Video transmission over wireless networks suffers from packet loss due to either temporary packet drop or fading-induced bit errors. To ensure that the quality of the decoded video is not overly affected by the channel unreliability, the video applications have to provide sufficient robustness. In this paper, a novel slice interleaving algorithm is proposed for compressed video packetization. Each packet is constructed by interleaving independently decodable slices of the coded video bit-stream in a group of frames. We group slices into packets according to the maximum minimal distance of these slices. The scattered pattern guarantees that each lost slice has, as many as possible, spatial and temporal neighbors that belong to other correctly received packets. This scheme greatly strengthens the error concealment performance compared with traditional methods. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.