Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Patterns of consonant deletion in the word-internal onset position: Evidence from spontaneous Seoul Korean speech

This study examined the deletion of onset consonant in the word-internal structure in spontaneous Seoul Korean speech. It used the dataset of speakers in their 20s extracted from the Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech (Yun et al., 2015). The proportion of deletion of word-internal onset consonants was analyzed using the linear mixed-effects regression model. The factors that promoted the deletion of onsets were primarily the types of consonants and their phonetic contexts. The results showed that onset deletion was more likely to occur for a lenis velar stop [k] than the other consonants, and in the phonetic contexts, when the preceding vowel was a low central vowel [a]. Moreover, some speakers tended to more frequently delete onset consonants (e.g., [k] and [n]) than other speakers, which reflected individual differences. This study implies that word-internal onsets undergo a process of gradient reduction within individuals` articulatory strategies.
Personality and reproductive success in a high-fertility human population

The existence of interindividual differences in personality traits poses a challenge to evolutionary thinking. Although research on the ultimate consequences of personality differences in nonhuman animals has recently undergone a surge of interest, our understanding of whether and how personality influences reproductive decisions in humans has remained limited and informed primarily by modern societies with low mortality–fertility schedules. Taking an evolutionary approach, we use data from a contemporary polygynous high-fertility human population living in rural Senegal to investigate whether personality dimensions are associated with key life-history traits in humans, i.e., quantity and quality of offspring. We show that personality dimensions predict reproductive success differently in men and women in such societies and, in women, are associated with a trade-off between offspring quantity and quality. In women, neuroticism positively predicts the number of children, both between and within polygynous families. Furthermore, within the low social class, offspring quality (i.e., child nutritional status) decreases with a woman's neuroticism, indicating a reproductive trade-off between offspring quantity and quality. Consistent with this, maximal fitness is achieved by women at an intermediate neuroticism level. In men, extraversion was found to be a strong predictor of high social class and polygyny, with extraverted men producing more offspring than their introverted counterparts. These results have implications for the consideration of alternative adaptive hypotheses in the current debate on the maintenance of personality differences and the role of individual factors in fertility patterns in contemporary humans.
Multi-label active learning for image classification

Multi-label image data is becoming ubiquitous. Image semantic understanding is typically formulated as a classification problem. This paper focuses on multi-label active learning for image classification. It first extends a traditional example based active learning method for multilabel active learning for image classification. Since the traditional example based active method doesn't work well, we propose a novel example-label based multi-label active learning method. Our experimental results on two image datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the labeling workload and improves the performance of the built classifier. Additionally, we conduct experiments on two other types of multi-label datasets for validating the versatility of our proposed method, and the experimental results show the consistent effect.
Reducing parallel overheads through dynamic serialization

If parallelism can be successfully exploited in a program, significant reductions in execution time can be achieved. However, if sections of the code are dominated by parallel overheads, the overall program performance can degrade. We propose a framework, based on an inspector-executor model, for identifying loops that are dominated by parallel overheads and dynamically serializing these loops. We implement this framework in the Polaris parallelizing compiler and evaluate two portable methods for classifying loops as profitable or unprofitable. We show that for six benchmark programs from the Perfect Club and SPEC 95 suites, parallel program execution times can be improved by as much as 85% on 16 processors of an Origin 2000.
Analytic Combinatorics of Non-crossing Conngurations Analytic Combinatorics of Non-crossing Conngurations Analytic Combinatorics of Non-crossing Conngurations

This paper describes a systematic approach to the enumeration of \non-crossing" geometric conngurations built on vertices of a convex n-gon in the plane. It relies on generating functions, symbolic methods, singularity analysis, and singularity perturbation. A consequence is exact and asymptotic counting results for trees, forests, graphs, connected graphs, dissections, and partitions. Limit laws of the Gaussian type are also established in this framework; they concern a variety of parameters like number of leaves in trees, number of components or edges in graphs, etc. Combinatoire analytique des conngurations sans croisement R esum e : Cet article d ecrit une approche syst ematique au d enombrement de conngu-rations g eom etriques \sans croisements" construites sur les sommets d'un n-gone convexe plan. L'approche repose sur les fonctions g en eratrices, les m ethodes symboliques, l'analyse de singularit es et la perturbation de singularit es. On en d eduit des r esultats tant exacts qu'asymptotiques pour arbres, for^ ets, graphes connexes et g en eraux, dissections et partitions. Des lois limites de formes gaussienne r esultent egalement de cette m ethode; elles concernent le nombre de feuilles dans les arbres, le nombre de composantes ou d'ar^ etes dans les graphes, etc. Abstract This paper describes a systematic approach to the enumeration of \non-crossing" geometric conngurations built on vertices of a convex n-gon in the plane. It relies on generating functions, symbolic methods, singularity analysis, and singularity perturbation. A consequence is exact and asymptotic counting results for trees, forests, graphs, connected graphs, dissections, and partitions. Limit laws of the Gaussian type are also established in this framework; they concern a variety of parameters like number of leaves in trees, number of components or edges in graphs, etc.
Sales Success as Predicted by A Process Measure of Adaptability

Previous studies of sales performance have not used process measures to evaluate the sales interaction as it occurred. The purposes of this paper are to propose the use of a process measure of adaptability and to determine whether observed adaptability behaviors could predict sales success. Salespeople's observed adaptability was positively related to two measures of sales success in a sample of telemarketing sales representatives.A process measure of adaptability could be used to facilitate the selection of sales trainees by encouraging marketers to hire people who exhibit more adaptability during interactions. Sales training could also be used to teach current salespeople to adjust their dominance levels in order to project more adaptability in sales interactions.
A Failure Recovery Solution for Transplanting High-Performance Data-Intensive Algorithms from the Cluster to the Cloud

The computing-cloud manages huge numbers of virtualized resources to provide uniquely beneficial computing paradigms for scientific research. A modern cloud can behave in a virtual context - much like a local homogeneous computer cluster - to deliver High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms that provide public users with access, cut purchase costs, and eliminate the maintenance burden of sophisticated hardware. For decades most distributed scientific computing software has been designed to run on clusters. Research on how to transplant cluster-based programs and performance-tuning mechanisms onto the cloud platform has gathered momentum in recent years. This paper introduces a fault tolerant approach that assures the reliability virtual clusters on clouds where high-performance and data-intensive computing paradigms are deployed. We have solved the failure recovery issue for TCP connections containing MPI error handlers by exploiting and modeling the constraints of low-level distributed resources. The combined MPI and TCP environment can support software development for multiple parallel programming models, including asynchronous distributed computing based on MPI for scientific HPC and synchronous distributed computing for big data, such as MapReduce and Pregal. This paper sets out detailed MPI/TCP fault-tolerant mechanisms, including primitives and functions. These elements enable the systematic and hierarchical development of a globally optimized HPC on the cloud platform.
Arty Shapes

This paper shows that shape simplification is a tool useful in Non-Photorealistic rendering from photographs, because it permits a level of abstraction otherwise unreachable. A variety of simple shapes (e.g. circles, triangles, squares, superellipses and so on) are optimally fitted to each region within a segmented photograph. The system automatically chooses the shape that best represents the region; the choice is made via a supervised classifier so the 'best shape' depends on the subjectivity of a user. The whole process is fully automatic, aside from the setting of two user variables to control the number of regions in a pair of segmentations - and even these can be left fixed for many images. A gallery of results shows how this work reaches towards the art of later Matisse, of Kandinsky, and other artists who favored shape simplification in their paintings.
Structure and phase behavior of a model clay dispersion: A molecular-dynamics investigation

Reversible molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations have been carried out on simple models for dispersions of circular Laponite clay platelets to investigate the local structure on a mesoscopic scale. The platelets carry discrete charged sites interacting via a screened Coulomb potential. In model A all surface sites have identical negative charge, while model B also includes rim charges of opposite sign. These two models were used in a series of simulations in the semidilute regime, and for three values of the Debye screening length. The structure of the dispersions is characterized by translational and orientational pair distribution functions, and by the corresponding structure factors. Qualitative differences in the pair structure arising from variations in concentration and screening length lead to a tentative identification of sol, gel, and crystal phases. The rim charges have a dramatic effect on the local structure in the strong screening regime, leading to T-shaped pair configuration and clustering of.
Improving outcomes in patients with coexisting multimorbid conditions—the development and evaluation of the combined diabetes and renal control trial (C-DIRECT): study protocol

Introduction Diabetes mellitus (DM) is the most common cause of end-stage renal disease (ESRD). Patients with diabetes on dialysis have worse clinical outcomes and increased psychological burden. The need to manage the combined treatment demands for both conditions is particularly challenging yet there is paucity of data of the barriers preventing optimal management to combined therapy for diabetes and kidney failure. The study aims to explore needs of patients and develop an intervention to enable people with diabetes and ESRD to better manage both their conditions. Methods and analysis A two-phase study comprising a mixed method observational study (phase I) and a feasibility trial (phase II). Phase I will seek to document outcomes and needs of the population (patients with DM-ESRD) and seek input on preferred delivery/implementation for the programme. Data will be collected with in-depth interviews with patients, caregivers and healthcare providers (N=50), and from a questionnaire-based survey (N=170). Phase 2 will build on these data to design and test the feasibility of a practical, low-intensity, clinic-integrated intervention using a self-management paradigm. The intervention will primarily seek to support behavioural change so as to improve adherence and clinical outcomes for DM as well as for ESRD. For the feasibility trial, we will be evaluating acceptability, retention and completion rates of the programme. Ethics and dissemination The study protocol has been approved by the local ethics committee and written informed consent is required from every participant. Findings will be disseminated through journals, conferences and will be used to create a fully manualised intervention (materials) and training course for facilitators.
A Novel Technique for Prealignment in Multimodality Medical Image Registration

Image pair is often aligned initially based on a rigid or affine transformation before a deformable registration method is applied in medical image registration. Inappropriate initial registration may compromise the registration speed or impede the convergence of the optimization algorithm. In this work, a novel technique was proposed for prealignment in both monomodality and multimodality image registration based on statistical correlation of gradient information. A simple and robust algorithm was proposed to determine the rotational differences between two images based on orientation histogram matching accumulated from local orientation of each pixel without any feature extraction. Experimental results showed that it was effective to acquire the orientation angle between two unregistered images with advantages over the existed method based on edge-map in multimodalities. Applying the orientation detection into the registration of CT/MR, T1/T2 MRI, and monomadality images with respect to rigid and nonrigid deformation improved the chances of finding the global optimization of the registration and reduced the search space of optimization.
Genetic Diversity Analysis of Hypsizygus marmoreus with Target Region Amplification Polymorphism

Hypsizygus marmoreus is an industrialized edible mushroom. In the present paper, the genetic diversity among 20 strains collected from different places of China was evaluated by target region amplification polymorphism (TRAP) analysis; the common fragment of TRAPs was sequenced and analyzed. Six fixed primers were designed based on the analysis of H. marmoreus sequences from GenBank database. The genomic DNA extracted from H. marmoreus was amplified with 28 TRAP primer combinations, which generated 287 bands. The average of amplified bands per primer was 10.27 (mean polymorphism is 69.73%). The polymorphism information content (PIC) value for TRAPs ranged from 0.32 to 0.50 (mean PIC value per TRAP primer combination is 0.48), which indicated a medium level of polymorphism among the strains. A total of 36 sequences were obtained from TRAP amplification. Half of these sequences could encode the known or unknown proteins. According to the phylogenetic analysis based on TRAP result, the 20 strains of H. marmoreus were classified into two main groups.
Experimental Impacts of a Preschool Intervention in Chile on Children's Language Outcomes: Moderation by Student Absenteeism

ABSTRACT Despite consensus that school absenteeism has negative consequences for children's life outcomes, until recently, little was known about the prevalence of absenteeism or its potential to moderate the impacts of school-based interventions. This study provides evidence from a randomized experiment of a preschool intervention involving 1,876 children in 64 schools in Chile that chronic absenteeism develops in preschool and is predicted by multiple risk factors for poor academic achievement. We find moreover that individual children's likelihood of absenteeism moderated the intervention's impact on children's language and literacy outcomes such that there were positive impacts of the intervention only for children with the lowest likelihood of absenteeism. Experimental evaluations of school-based interventions that do not take absenteeism into account may thus mask heterogeneous effects. In the context of policy pushes to expand early education and preschool access in the United States and globally, these moderation analyses may prove essential for appropriately interpreting the results of experimental studies of school-based interventions.
On efficient description of rate compatible polar codes

Efficient code descriptions of rate compatible polar codes are studied. An efficient code description method, so-called the polarization weight sequence that defines multiple codewords, was proposed in 3GPP standardization. We verify the validity of the method for various environments. We assess the performance degradation under successive cancellation (SC) decoding and SC list decoding compared with optimal codes.
Linguistic Features of Helpfulness in Automated Support for Creative Writing

We examine an emerging NLP application that supports creative writing by automatically suggesting continuing sentences in a story. The application tracks users’ modifications to generated sentences, which can be used to quantify their “helpfulness” in advancing the story. We explore the task of predicting helpfulness based on automatically detected linguistic features of the suggestions. We illustrate this analysis on a set of user interactions with the application using an initial selection of features relevant to story generation.
Multicore ICs: Recent Trends in Developing Methodologies and Frameworks for Simulation

High Performance Computing Chips are expected to deliver several GFLOPs of computing power in the near future. Parallelism inherent in modern algorithms boosts the motivation for building multicore architectures. Design-space exploration and performance estimation has to be done before finding an optimal design point for a multicore IC. Role of a good multicore simulator is to provide the developer a holistic insight about the operation of proposed multicore system. In this paper we present the types and aspects of multicore simulators with an analysis of the key qualities a good multicore simulator should possess, and thereby to shed light on existing simulators from a critical angle.
A Dynamic Recommender System for Improved Web Usage Mining and CRM Using Swarm Intelligence

In modern days, to enrich e-business, the websites are personalized for each user by understanding their interests and behavior. The main challenges of online usage data are information overload and their dynamic nature. In this paper, to address these issues, a WebBluegillRecom-annealing dynamic recommender system that uses web usage mining techniques in tandem with software agents developed for providing dynamic recommendations to users that can be used for customizing a website is proposed. The proposed WebBluegillRecom-annealing dynamic recommender uses swarm intelligence from the foraging behavior of a bluegill fish. It overcomes the information overload by handling dynamic behaviors of users. Our dynamic recommender system was compared against traditional collaborative filtering systems. The results show that the proposed system has higher precision, coverage, F1 measure, and scalability than the traditional collaborative filtering systems. Moreover, the recommendations given by our system overcome the overspecialization problem by including variety in recommendations.
The application of image processing algorithms to the analysis of SPI images

Sediment Profile Imagery is a pollution monitoring technique that is widely used to evaluate whether the marine sediments provide the suitable habitat for benthic fauna. Currently, the SPI data is interpreted by human operators and as a consequence the results are inherently affected by intra and inter observer variability. SPI Analyser is a novel software environment that has been specially designed to perform quantitative measurements on SPI data. The devised software is a collection of automatic and semi-automatic image processing algorithms that are suitable to identify important features present in SPI images. Semi-automatic techniques have been developed to identify features such the sediment water interface or custom segmentation of various image details including burrows and voids. In addition an automatic technique for identification of the oxidised sediments has been devised. The software environment has a user-friendly mouse-driven visual interface that facilitates easy manipulation of the input data and outputs the results in a format that can be easily accessed or modified at any stage. The developed application has been evaluated on a collection of various SPI images and encouraging results have been achieved.
Comments on the Resource Allocation Process

It is a pleasure and honor to have the opportunity to comment on this impressive body of work. As a graduate student in the early 1980s, I vividly recall my first reading of the resource allocation process (RAP). Here was a work that tackled one of the principle tasks of a firm: allocating scarce financial capital. The problem had been nominally solved by financial economists, but Bower presented it in a way that both brought forth the richness of the phenomena and provided a clear theoretical framework that illuminated the underlying processes at work. The ultimate test of a piece of scholarship is its ability to influence other scholars. By that standard, as illustrated in this collected volume, the RAP framework is a huge success. Not only has it attracted enormous attention (and citations) from scholars pursuing related topics, but it has generated multiple generations of scholars to build upon and enrich the original framework. As the theoretical structure becomes more elaborated, it may be worthwhile to reflect on the core features of the argument. Doing so, I believe, will help researchers outside the immediate RAP ‘family’ to see the power of the underlying theoretical argument and help embed this literature in the larger literature on organizational decision making and adaptation of which it is a part. Disciplines Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods This book chapter is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn. edu/mgmt_papers/295
Enhancement of Calving Difficulty Breeding Values in New Zealand

A national genetic evaluation for the direct effect of calving difficulty (CD) in calves born to heifers was implemented in New Zealand (NZ) in the year 2000. Evaluations were done using a sire model (SM) that included relationships between sires and maternal grandsires, but no genetic grouping. Because AI bulls are mated to heifers far less frequently than to cows, a twotrait model, including CD in heifers (HCD) and CD in cows (CCD) was used to increase the accuracy of evaluation for HCD. The decision was made to move the genetic evaluation of CD to an animal model (AM). While doing so, a third trait, gestation length (GL), was included in the model so as to further increase the accuracy of evaluation. The purpose of this paper is to describe the new genetic evaluation system for HCD and to compare the breeding values (BVs) and reliabilities obtained from the SM and AM.