Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance of an Event-Based Instantaneous Fundamental Frequency Estimator for Distant Speech Signals

This paper proposes a method for extracting the fundamental frequency of voiced speech from distant speech signals. The method is based on the impulse-like nature of excitation in voiced speech. The characteristics of impulse-like excitation are extracted by filtering the speech signal through a cascade of resonators located at zero frequency. The resulting filtered signal preserves information specific to the fundamental frequency, in the sequence of positive-to-negative zero crossings. Also, the filtered signal is free from the effects of resonances of the vocal tract. An estimate of the fundamental frequency is derived from the short-time spectrum of the filtered signal. This estimate is used to remove spurious zero crossings in the filtered signal. The proposed method depends only on the strengths of impulse-like excitations in the direct component of distant speech signals, and not on the similarity of speech signal in successive glottal cycles. Hence, the method is robust to the effects of reverberation and noise. Performance of the method is evaluated using a database of close-speaking and distant speech signals. Experiments show that the accuracy of the proposed method is significantly higher than that of existing methods based on time-domain and frequency-domain processing.
Regime signaling techniques for non-stationary time series forecasting

An accuracy based signaling technique is proposed as an alternative to a statistics based signaling for detecting changes in a time series distribution. Three different forecasting scenarios are analyzed in order to decide whether to reuse historically successful neural network models or retrain new ones when a change in the distribution is signaled. The results obtained on low noise and high noise, non-stationary time series provide strong evidence in favor of the accuracy based signaling technique.
Cooperative multi-relay non-orthogonal multiple access for downlink transmission in 5G communication systems

In this paper, we propose a new setup for a cooperative multi-relay non-orthogonal multiple access scheme (CMR-NOMA) to enhance the downlink performance of non-orthogonal multiple access, while operating in severe fading. We compare the performance of the proposed scheme to an existing cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access scheme (CNOMA) in terms of the user-average bit error rate, the ergodic sum-rate and the fairness index level, with a conventional NOMA system serving as the baseline for comparison. We also propose the use of a modified successive interference cancellation (SIC) technique at the mobile equipment in coded systems to reduce the highly-complex processing inherent in the recovery of NOMA signals.
Management Control Systems, Evaluative Style, and Behaviour

Organisations develop and implement performance measurement and performance evaluation systems to motivate employees to take actions that -in the end- improve organisational (financial) performance. But do these systems really influence employee behaviour as intended? This thesis shows that to answer that question not only the design of the system should be considered, but also the manner in which managers within an organisation use the system. This book describes a study on the influence of evaluative style of leaders on subordinates’ behaviour. Evaluative style refers to the manner in which a leader evaluates the performance of subordinates, controlling for the specific design of the performance evaluation system and the broader organisational context. This study improves our understanding of the concept of evaluative style by defining evaluative style, similar to leadership style, as a (behavioural) characteristic of leaders. The study also improves our understanding of the influence of evaluative style on subordinates’ behaviour. A literature review first reveals six topics that help improve this understanding. Subsequently, these six topics are investigated in an empirical study at Van den Bergh Netherlands (VDBN) that involves twelve leaders and their subordinates. The findings show that different evaluative styles exist within VDBN. These styles influence subordinate’s trust in superior and perceived fairness of evaluation, but no effect is found on functional (learning) or dysfunctional behaviour. These findings are context-specific and cannot be generalised outside the context of VDBN. However, the six topics and the way in which these topics have been investigated within a specific organisational context can be generalised and are relevant for future research.
Robust transmission of unbounded strings using Fibonacci representations

Families of Fibonacci codes and Fibonacci representations are defined. Their main attributes are robustness, manifesting itself by the local containment of errors; and simple encoding and decoding. The main application explored is the transmission of binary strings in which the length is in an unknown range, using robust Fibonacci representations instead of the conventional error-sensitive logarithmic ramp representation. Though the former is asymptotically longer than the latter, the former is actually shorter for very large initial segments of integers.
Increased Binding of Concanavalin A to Interferon-Treated Murine Leukemia L 1210 Cells

Summary Cultivation of mouse lymphoid leukemia L 1210 cells with mouse interferon preparations resulted in an increased binding of radioactive Concanavalin A (Con A). No increase in Con A binding was observed when L 1210 cells were cultivated with control preparations, inactivated mouse interferon preparations, or heterologous interferon preparations, nor when a subline of interferon resistant L 1210 cells was cultivated with mouse interferon. Electron microscopic examination of control or interferon-treated L 1210 cells using peroxidase-labeled Con A showed that all the label was seen at the cell surface. Interferon-treated L1210 cells exhibiting an increased binding of Con A were far less tumorigenic for DBA/2 mice than untreated L 1210 cells. We conclude that interferon treatment of L 1210 cells is accompanied by modifications of the cell surface which can be detected by an increased binding of Con A to the cell surface.
A Modeling and Experiment Framework for the Emergency Management in AHC Transmission

Emergency management is crucial to finding effective ways to minimize or even eliminate the damage of emergent events, but there still exists no quantified method to study the events by computation. Statistical algorithms, such as susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) models on epidemic transmission, ignore many details, thus always influencing the spread of emergent events. In this paper, we first propose an agent-based modeling and experiment framework to model the real world with the emergent events. The model of the real world is called artificial society, which is composed of agent model, agent activity model, and environment model, and it employs finite state automata (FSA) as its modeling paradigm. An artificial campus, on which a series of experiments are done to analyze the key factors of the acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis (AHC) transmission, is then constructed to illustrate how our method works on the emergency management. Intervention measures and optional configurations (such as the isolation period) of them for the emergency management are also given through the evaluations in these experiments.
High-Density Lipoprotein Subfractions and Cholesterol Efflux Capacity Are Not Affected by Supervised Exercise but Are Associated with Baseline Interleukin-6 in Patients with Peripheral Artery Disease

Objective To quantify the association between high-density lipoprotein (HDL) subfractions, efflux capacity, and inflammatory markers at baseline and the effect of supervised exercise on these HDL parameters in patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD). Methods The study to improve leg circulation (SILC) was a randomized trial of supervised treadmill exercise, leg resistance training, or control in individuals with PAD. In a post hoc cross-sectional analysis, we quantified the associations between baseline HDL subfraction concentrations (HDL2 and HDL3), HDL-C efflux capacity, and inflammatory markers [C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin-6 (IL-6)]. We then examined the effect of supervised exercise on changes in these lipoprotein parameters and inflammatory markers in 88 patients from SILC. Results Baseline HDL-C efflux capacity was associated with baseline concentrations of HDL2 (β = 0.008, p = 0.0106), HDL3 (β = 0.013, p < 0.0001), and IL-6 (β = −0.019, p = 0.03). Baseline HDL3 concentration was inversely associated with IL-6 concentration (β = −0.99, p = 0.008). Compared to control, changes in HDL2, HDL3, normalized HDL-C efflux capacity, CRP, or IL-6 were not significantly different at 6 months following the structured exercise intervention. Conclusion HDL efflux and HDL3 were inversely associated with IL-6 in PAD patients. Structured exercise was not associated with changes in HDL subfractions, HDL-C efflux capacity, CRP, and IL-6 in PAD patients. Our preliminary findings support the theory that inflammation may adversely affect HDL structure and function; however, further studies are needed to evaluate these findings.
Youth-Generated Media

This article examines the contemporary configuration of youth cultural politics through self-expressive artifacts, probing in the process the changing mediascape in the Arab world. The article discusses the relationship between youth and media focusing on the way young people develop and circulate their own messages outside corporate, religious, and state institutions. Youth-generated media is introduced as a framework for analyzing these alternative forms of communication. The article focuses on the case of Lebanese blogger Fink Ployd whose blog, BloggingBeirut.com, exemplifies the characteristics of youth-generated media. Blurring old and new media, BloggingBeirut.com, was a platform for youth cultural politics surrounding the July 06 War.
Structure, function, and plasticity of GABA transporters

GABA transporters belong to a large family of neurotransmitter:sodium symporters. They are widely expressed throughout the brain, with different levels of expression in different brain regions. GABA transporters are present in neurons and in astrocytes and their activity is crucial to regulate the extracellular concentration of GABA under basal conditions and during ongoing synaptic events. Numerous efforts have been devoted to determine the structural and functional properties of GABA transporters. There is also evidence that the expression of GABA transporters on the cell membrane and their lateral mobility can be modulated by different intracellular signaling cascades. The strength of individual synaptic contacts and the activity of entire neuronal networks may be finely tuned by altering the density, distribution and diffusion rate of GABA transporters within the cell membrane. These findings are intriguing because they suggest the existence of complex regulatory systems that control the plasticity of GABAergic transmission in the brain. Here we review the current knowledge on the structural and functional properties of GABA transporters and highlight the molecular mechanisms that alter the expression and mobility of GABA transporters at central synapses.
Understanding integer overflow in C/C++

Integer overflow bugs in C and C++ programs are difficult to track down and may lead to fatal errors or exploitable vulnerabilities. Although a number of tools for finding these bugs exist, the situation is complicated because not all overflows are bugs. Better tools need to be constructed - but a thorough understanding of the issues behind these errors does not yet exist. We developed IOC, a dynamic checking tool for integer overflows, and used it to conduct the first detailed empirical study of the prevalence and patterns of occurrence of integer overflows in C and C++ code. Our results show that intentional uses of wraparound behaviors are more common than is widely believed; for example, there are over 200 distinct locations in the SPEC CINT2000 benchmarks where overflow occurs. Although many overflows are intentional, a large number of accidental overflows also occur. Orthogonal to programmers' intent, overflows are found in both well-defined and undefined flavors. Applications executing undefined operations can be, and have been, broken by improvements in compiler optimizations. Looking beyond SPEC, we found and reported undefined integer overflows in SQLite, PostgreSQL, SafeInt, GNU MPC and GMP, Firefox, GCC, LLVM, Python, BIND, and OpenSSL; many of these have since been fixed. Our results show that integer overflow issues in C and C++ are subtle and complex, that they are common even in mature, widely used programs, and that they are widely misunderstood by developers.
Tolbutamide Controls Glucagon Release From Mouse Islets Differently Than Glucose

We evaluated the role of ATP-sensitive K+ (KATP) channels, somatostatin, and Zn2+ in the control of glucagon secretion from mouse islets. Switching from 1 to 7 mmol/L glucose inhibited glucagon release. Diazoxide did not reverse the glucagonostatic effect of glucose. Tolbutamide decreased glucagon secretion at 1 mmol/L glucose (G1) but stimulated it at 7 mmol/L glucose (G7). The reduced glucagon secretion produced by high concentrations of tolbutamide or diazoxide, or disruption of KATP channels (Sur1−/− mice) at G1 could be inhibited further by G7. Removal of the somatostatin paracrine influence (Sst−/− mice or pretreatement with pertussis toxin) strongly increased glucagon release, did not prevent the glucagonostatic effect of G7, and unmasked a marked glucagonotropic effect of tolbutamide. Glucose inhibited glucagon release in the absence of functional KATP channels and somatostatin signaling. Knockout of the Zn2+ transporter ZnT8 (ZnT8−/− mice) did not prevent the glucagonostatic effect of glucose. In conclusion, glucose can inhibit glucagon release independently of Zn2+, KATP channels, and somatostatin. Closure of KATP channels controls glucagon secretion by two mechanisms, a direct stimulation of α-cells and an indirect inhibition via somatostatin released from δ-cells. The net effect on glucagon release results from a balance between both effects.
The Automaticity of Visual Statistical Learning Statistical Learning

The visual environment contains massive amounts of information involving the relations between objects in space and time, and recent studies of visual statistical learning (VSL) have suggested that this information can be automatically extracted by the visual system. The experiments reported in this article explore the automaticity of VSL in several ways, using both explicit familiarity and implicit response-time measures. The results demonstrate that (a) the input to VSL is gated by selective attention, (b) VSL is nevertheless an implicit process because it operates during a cover task and without awareness of the underlying statistical patterns, and (c) VSL constructs abstracted representations that are then invariant to changes in extraneous surface features. These results fuel the conclusion that VSL both is and is not automatic: It requires attention to select the relevant population of stimuli, but the resulting learning then occurs without intent or awareness. The goal of visual processing is to recover information about the structure of the local environment, and what makes this problem difficult is that there is both too little and too much incoming information. The available information is rarely sufficient to definitively infer the structure of the world without making several heuristic assumptions, but at the same time we would be paralyzed if we were perceptually confronted with the massive amount of available sensory input. Thus, visual perception must be selective, and we are consciously aware of only a small part of the visual world at any time. Because the bulk of visual processing occurs beneath the level of awareness, we—as both laypeople and vision scientists—are often surprised at the scope and subtlety of such processing. In this article we explore the nature of a particularly powerful form of unconscious visual processing, concerning the relationships between objects over time. Associative learning of the relationships between objects has played a prominent role in several areas of psychology, but has been less widely explored in the context of human perception and cognition. Interest in this type of learning has flourished in recent years, however, due to the discovery of a novel form of statistical learning. The initial report of statistical learning demonstrated that 8-month-old infants can learn subtle statistical relationships that hold across a sequence of nonsense syllables in a pseudospeech stream (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). On the surface, this stream appeared to contain a random sequence of syllables (e.g., " pi-go-la-bi-ku-ti-. , " in …
Neuro-WPT Based Diagnosis and Protection of Three-Phase IPM Motors

This paper presents the practical implementation of a novel fault diagnosis scheme for an interior permanent magnet (IPM) motor protection using the neural network (NN). The preprocessing of line currents of different faulted and normal unfaulted conditions of an IPM motor are carried out by the wavelet packet transform (WPT) in order to minimize the structure and the training time of the proposed neural network based protection technique. It has been shown that the wavelet packet transformed second level high frequency coefficients (dd2) of line currents are able to differentiate between the healthy and faulted conditions. These are used as the input sets of a three-layer feed-forward neural network. The scheme is evaluated and tested on-line on a laboratory 1-hp IPM motor using the ds1102 digital signal processor board. Three types of faults such as single line to ground (L-G) fault, line-to-line (L-L) fault, and single phasing fault are investigated. In all the tests carried out, the types of fault are classified and identified promptly and properly, and the tripping action is initiated within one cycle of the fault occurrence based on a 60 Hz system.
Sexual Partner Characteristics, Serodiscordant/Serostatus Unknown Unprotected Anal Intercourse and Disclosure Among Human Immunodeficiency Virus-Infected and Uninfected Black Men Who Have Sex With Men in New York City

Objectives: Black men who have sex with men (MSM) are disproportionately infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the United States. This study describes sexual partner characteristics and disclosure of HIV serostatus and evaluates factors associated with sexual risk behaviors during last sex among black MSM. Design and Methods: Between 2008 and 2009, 328 black MSM who reported recent unprotected anal intercourse were enrolled in an HIV behavioral intervention study in New York City. Factors associated with serodiscordant/serostatus unknown UAI (defined as having UAI with a partner of different or unknown HIV serostatus) with a male partner during last sex were assessed using logistic regression. Results: A total of 205 HIV-infected and 123 uninfected men were enrolled in this study. Almost all men (91.6%) reported having a black male partner during last sex. About half (47.3%) of men used alcohol and 38.7% used other substances before or during last sex. About two-thirds (68.8%) of participants disclosed their HIV status to their last sex partner, while 57.2% of partners disclosed. In multivariate analysis, meeting a partner on the internet or chat line was associated with serodiscordant/serostatus unknown UAI during last sex among HIV-infected men. The only factor associated with serodiscordant/serostatus unknown UAI during last sex among HIV-uninfected men was the partner being a non-main partner. Conclusions: A significant proportion of black MSM in this study did not disclose their HIV status. Our data highlight the need for more data on dyadic variables and sexual risk behaviors among black MSM, as well as interventions to encourage communication between partners.
Perceptions of prescription warning labels within an underserved population

Objective To understand how underserved populations attend to prescription warning label (PWL) instructions, examine the importance of PWL instructions to participants and describe the challenges associated with interpreting the information on PWLs. Methods Adults from an underserved population (racial and ethnic minorities, individuals with low income, older adults) who had a history of prescription medication use and were able to understand English took part in semi-structured interviews. Participants were presented with eight different prescription bottles with an attached PWL. Participants were asked, “If this prescription was yours, what information would you need to know about the medicine? ” The number of participants who attended to the warning labels was noted. Other questions assessed the importance of PWLs, the challenges with understanding PWLs, and ways a pharmacist could help participant understanding of the PWL. Results There were 103 participants. The mean age was 50.25 years (SD=18.05). Majority attended to the PWL. Participants not currently taking medications and who had limited health literacy were likely to overlook the warning labels. Majority rated the warning instructions to be extremely important (n=86, 83.5 %), wanted the pharmacist to help them understand PWLs by counseling them on the information on the label (n=63, 61.2%), and thought the graphics made the label information easy to understand. Conclusions PWLs are an important method of communicating medication information, as long as they are easily comprehensible to patients. In addition to placing PWLs on prescription bottles, health care providers need to counsel underserved populations on medication warnings, especially individuals with limited health literacy who are not currently using a prescription medication.