Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intentionality and Conative Constructions in English

The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between intentionality and affectedness. Specifically, I make a semantic generalization called the Complementarity of Intentionality and Affectedness (CIA), which states that intentionality and affectedness cannot be entailed in a minimal accomplishment predicate (the combination of a verb and its complement(s) which is a causative accomplishment) at the same time. This mutual exclusivity of entailments of intentionality and affectedness is observed in Korean accomplishment predicates, which have multiple readings in which either the subject is necessarily intentional or the patient is necessarily affected, but not both. After the introduction of the CIA, I argue that English conative alternations are an instance of the CIA: The conative constructions (e.g. He kicked at the ball) entail intentionality, but not affectedness; on the contrary the corresponding transitive verb constructions (e.g. He kicked the ball) entail affectedness, but not intentionality. Finally, I discuss some predictions of the generalization and argue that the CIA can be further supported cross-linguistically.
The Case for Intervention Bias in the Practice of Medicine

Bias is an inclination to present or hold a partial perspective at the expense of possibly equal or more valid alternatives. In this paper, we present a series of conditional arguments to prove that intervention bias exists in the practice of medicine. We then explore its potential causes, consequences, and criticisms. We use the term to describe the bias on the part of physicians and the medical community to intervene, whether it is with drugs, diagnostic tests, non-invasive procedures, or surgeries, when not intervening would be a reasonable alternative. The recognition of intervention bias in medicine is critically important given today’s emphasis on providing high-value care and reducing unnecessary and potentially harmful interventions.
Regional properties of global communication as reflected in aggregated Twitter data

Twitter is a popular public conversation platform with world-wide audience and diverse forms of connections between users. In this paper we introduce the concept of aggregated regional Twitter networks in order to characterize communication between geopolitical regions. We present the study of a follower and a mention graph created from an extensive data set collected during the second half of the year of 2012. With a k-shell decomposition the global core-periphery structure is revealed and by means of a modified Regional-SIR model we also consider basic information spreading properties.
Comparative Changes in Tissue Oxygenation Between Laparoscopic and Open Cholecystectomy

Background Previous studies examined the effect of laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) versus open cholecystectomy (OC) on physiological variables of the respiratory system. In this study we compared changes in arterial blood gases-related parameters between LC and OC to assess their comparative influence on gas exchange. Methods We studied 28 patients, operated under identical anesthetic protocol (LC: 18 patients, OC: 10 patients). Measurements were made on the morning before surgery (BS), the second (AS2) and the eighth (AS8) postoperative day. Studied parameters, including alveolar-arterial difference in PO2 ((A-a)DO2) and oxygen content (Oct in vol%), were statistically compared. Results On AS2 a greater increase was found in ((A-a)DO2) for the OC compared to LC (4.673 ± 0.966 kPa versus 3.773 ± 1.357 kPa, respectively). Between BS and AS2, Oct in vol% decreased from 17.55 ± 1.90 to 15.69 ± 1.88 in the LC and from 16.99 ± 2.37 to 14.62 ± 2.23 in the OC, whilst a reduction (P = 0.093) between AS2 and AS8 was also found for the open method. Besides, on AS2, SaO2% decrease was greater in OC compared to LC (P = 0.096). Conclusions On AS2, the greater increase in OC-((A-a)DO2) associated with Oct in vol% and SaO2% findings also in OC group suggest that LC might be associated with lower risk for impaired tissue oxygenation.
Using Formal Methods To Mechanize Category-Partition Testing

We extend the category-partition method, a speci cation-based method for testing software. Previous work in category-partition has focused on developing structured test speci cations that describe software tests. We o er guidance in making the important decisions involved in transforming test speci cations to actual test cases. We present a structured approach to making those decisions, including a mechanical procedure for test derivation. With this procedure, we suggest a heuristic for choosing a minimal coverage of the categories identi ed in the test speci cations, suggest parts of the process that can be automated, and o er a solution to the problem of identifying infeasible combinations of test case values. Our method uses formal schema-based functional speci cations and is illustrated with an example of a simple le system. We conclude that our approach eases test case creation and leads to e ective tests of software. We also note that by basing this procedure on formal speci cations, we can identify anomalies in the functional speci cations. Partially supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant NAG 1-1123-FDP. Partially supported by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-93-11967.
Feature transformation for speaker verification under speaking rate mismatch condition

Speaker verification suffers from serious performance degradation under speaking rate mismatch condition. This degradation can be largely attributed to the spectrum distortion caused by different speaking rates. This paper proposes a feature transform approach which projects speech features in slow speaking rates to features in normal speaking rates. The feature space maximum likelihood linear regression (fMLLR) is adopted to conduct the transform, under the well-known GMM-UBM framework. The proposed approach has been evaluated on the CSLT-SPRateDGT2016 corpus which consists of normal and slow speech. The experiments show that with the transform, the equal error rate (EER) of the GMM-UBM system was reduced by 19.04% relatively. More interestingly, the transform learned based on the GMM-UBM system can improve i-vector systems as well. Our experiments show a 10.16% relative EER reduction after the transform was applied to the i-vector/PLDA system.
2 00 7 preprint LAUR-07-0471 Optimal Shape of a Blob

This paper presents the solution to the following optimization problem: What is the shape of the two-dimensional region that minimizes the average Lp distance between all pairs of points if the area of this region is held fixed? [The Lp distance between two points x = (x1, x2) and y = (y1, y2) in R2 is (|x1 − y1| + |x2 − y2|). ] Variational techniques are used to show that the boundary curve of the optimal region satisfies a nonlinear integral equation. The special case p = 2 is elementary and for this case the integral equation reduces to a differential equation whose solution is a circle. Two nontrivial special cases, p = 1 and p = ∞, have already been examined in the literature. For these two cases the integral equation reduces to nonlinear secondorder differential equations, one of which contains a quadratic nonlinearity and the other a cubic nonlinearity.
Bayesian Structural Inference for Hidden Processes

We introduce a Bayesian approach to discovering patterns in structurally complex processes. The proposed method of Bayesian structural inference (BSI) relies on a set of candidate unifilar hidden Markov model (uHMM) topologies for inference of process structure from a data series. We employ a recently developed exact enumeration of topological ε-machines. (A sequel then removes the topological restriction.) This subset of the uHMM topologies has the added benefit that inferred models are guaranteed to be ε-machines, irrespective of estimated transition probabilities. Properties of ε-machines and uHMMs allow for the derivation of analytic expressions for estimating transition probabilities, inferring start states, and comparing the posterior probability of candidate model topologies, despite process internal structure being only indirectly present in data. We demonstrate BSI's effectiveness in estimating a process's randomness, as reflected by the Shannon entropy rate, and its structure, as quantified by the statistical complexity. We also compare using the posterior distribution over candidate models and the single, maximum a posteriori model for point estimation and show that the former more accurately reflects uncertainty in estimated values. We apply BSI to in-class examples of finite- and infinite-order Markov processes, as well to an out-of-class, infinite-state hidden process.
Road Investments and Inventory Reduction: Firm Level Evidence from China

This study presents new evidence on the causal impact of transport infrastructure on the economy. In China, inventory has declined over recent decades, while the country’s road infrastructure has expanded rapidly. Building on the existing literature, we introduce new approaches, including a quasi-experiment based on differential demand for distant suppliers, to identify the causal relationship between road investments and inventory decline. Examining a large panel data set of Chinese manufacturers from 1998 to 2007, we find one dollar of road spending saves around two cents of inventory costs. This effect is non-trivial but less than that in the United States in the 1970s. Moreover, our estimates also suggest spillover effect from road investments to firms in neighboring provinces.
An exact algorithm for the budget-constrained multiple knapsack problem

This paper is concerned with a variant of the multiple knapsack problem (MKP), where knapsacks are available by paying certain ‘costs’, and we have a fixed budget to buy these knapsacks. Then, the problem is to determine the set of knapsacks to be purchased, as well as to allocate items into the accepted knapsacks in such a way as to maximize the net total profit. We call this the budget-constrained MKP and present a branch-and-bound algorithm to solve this problem to optimality. We employ the Lagrangian relaxation approach to obtain an upper bound. Together with the lower bound obtained by a greedy heuristic, we apply the pegging test to reduce the problem size. Next, in the branch-and-bound framework, we make use of the Lagrangian multipliers obtained above for pruning subproblems, and at each terminal subproblem, we solve MKP exactly by calling the MULKNAP code [D. Pisinger, An exact algorithm for large multiple knapsack problem, European J. Oper. Res. 114 (1999), pp. 528–541]. Thus, we were able to solve test problems with up to 160,000 items and 150 knapsacks within a few minutes in our computing environment. However, solving instances with relatively large number of knapsacks, when compared with the number of items, still remains hard. This is due to the weakness of MULKNAP to this type of problems, and our algorithm inherits this weakness as well.
Furan in Thermally Processed Foods - A Review

Furan (C_4H_4O) is a volatile compound formed mostly during the thermal processing of foods. The toxicity of furan has been well documented previously, and it was classified as “possible human carcinogen (Group 2B)” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Various pathways have been reported for the formation of furan, that is, thermal degradation and/or thermal rearrangement of carbohydrates in the presence of amino acids, thermal degradation of certain amino acids, including aspartic acid, threonine, α-alanine, serine, and cysteine, oxidation of ascorbic acid at higher temperatures, and oxidation of polyunsaturated fatty acids and carotenoids. Owing to the complexity of the formation mechanism, a vast number of studies have been published on monitoring furan in commercial food products and on the potential strategies for reducing furan. Thus, we present a comprehensive review on the current status of commercial food monitoring databases and the possible furan reduction methods. Additionally, we review analytical methods for furan detection and the toxicity of furan.
Frequency analysis of time-varying graph signals

This paper focuses on the harmonic analysis of graph signals that evolve with time. Our goal is to generalize and, in fact, unify the familiar concepts from time- and graph-frequency analysis. To this end, we study the properties of a joint time and graph Fourier transform (JFT) and the associated notion of variation. We build on our results to create filters which act on the joint (time and graph) frequency domain, and provide an example of how joint filters can improve signal recovery on time-varying graph signals with non-separable temporal and graph frequency structure.
Modeling Load on a Publish/Subscribe System

Message oriented middleware (MOM) systems have been using publish/subscribe mechanism for asynchronous messaging among backend servers. Latest developments in modern Web-based clients have extended the use of publish/subscribe mechanism from backend servers to front-end clients. Some of the recently proposed protocols, like Bayeux, use topic-based publish/subscribe mechanism to exchange messages between clients and servers. This paper shares our experience in designing a load generation framework for benchmarking of an HTTP publish/subscribe server. It analyzes topic-based publish/subscribe domain by identifying major domain entities. It documents issues and challenges in load generation and benchmarking of such systems. It presents a model to represent a topic-based publish/subscribe system. We also share our experience in using the proposed model for load-generation and benchmarking of an HTTP/Bayeux based publish/subscribe server implementation. Some implementation details about our benchmarking framework, including an XML schema to represent a set of workloads, are shared. The paper is concluded by sharing shortcomings in the proposed model, and our plans on extending this work to other asynchronous and synchronous messaging paradigms.
Accretion during the Merger of Supermassive Black Holes

We study the evolution of disk accretion during the merger of supermassive black hole binaries in galactic nuclei. In hierarchical galaxy formation models, the most common binaries are likely to arise from minor galactic mergers and have unequal-mass black holes. Once such a binary becomes embedded in an accretion disk at a separation of a ~ 0.1 pc, the merger proceeds in two distinct phases. During the first phase, the loss of orbital angular momentum to the gaseous disk shrinks the binary on a timescale of ~107 yr. The accretion rate onto the primary black hole is not increased, and can be substantially reduced, during this disk-driven migration. At smaller separations, gravitational radiation becomes the dominant angular momentum loss process, and any gas trapped inside the orbit of the secondary is driven inward by the inspiralling black hole. The implied accretion rate just prior to coalescence exceeds the Eddington limit, so the final merger is likely to occur within a common envelope formed from the disrupted inner disk and to be accompanied by high-velocity (~104 km s-1) outflows.
Cerebrospinal Fluid from Patients with Subarachnoid Haemorrhage and Vasospasm Enhances Endothelin Contraction in Rat Cerebral Arteries

Introduction Previous studies have suggested that cerebrospinal fluid from patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) leads to pronounced vasoconstriction in isolated arteries. We hypothesized that only cerebrospinal fluid from SAH patients with vasospasm would produce an enhanced contractile response to endothelin-1 in rat cerebral arteries, involving both endothelin ETA and ETB receptors. Methods Intact rat basilar arteries were incubated for 24 hours with cerebrospinal fluid from 1) SAH patients with vasospasm, 2) SAH patients without vasospasm, and 3) control patients. Arterial segments with and without endothelium were mounted in myographs and concentration-response curves for endothelin-1 were constructed in the absence and presence of selective and combined ETA and ETB receptor antagonists. Endothelin concentrations in culture medium and receptor expression were measured. Results Compared to the other groups, the following was observed in arteries exposed to cerebrospinal fluid from patients with vasospasm: 1) larger contractions at lower endothelin concentrations (p<0.05); 2) the increased endothelin contraction was absent in arteries without endothelium; 3) higher levels of endothelin secretion in the culture medium (p<0.05); 4) there was expression of ETA receptors and new expression of ETB receptors was apparent; 5) reduction in the enhanced response to endothelin after ETB blockade in the low range and after ETA blockade in the high range of endothelin concentrations; 6) after combined ETA and ETB blockade a complete inhibition of endothelin contraction was observed. Conclusions Our experimental findings showed that in intact rat basilar arteries exposed to cerebrospinal fluid from patients with vasospasm endothelin contraction was enhanced in an endothelium-dependent manner and was blocked by combined ETA and ETB receptor antagonism. Therefore we suggest that combined blockade of both receptors may play a role in counteracting vasospasm in patients with SAH.
Does Sleep Enhance the Consolidation of Implicitly Learned Visuo-Motor Sequence Learning?

Sleep has been shown to facilitate the consolidation (i.e., enhancement) of simple explicit (i.e., conscious) motor sequence learning (MSL). It remains unclear the degree to which this applies to implicit (i.e., unconscious) MSL. Employing reaction time and response generation tasks, we investigated the extent to which sleep is involved in consolidating implicit MSL, specifically whether the motor or the spatial cognitive representations of a learned sequence are enhanced by sleep, and whether these changes support the development of explicit sequence knowledge across sleep but not wake. Our results indicate that spatial and motor representations can be behaviourally dissociated for implicit MSL. However, neither representation was preferentially enhanced across sleep nor were developments of explicit awareness observed. These results suggest that like explicit MSL, implicit MSL has dissociable spatial and motor representations, but unlike explicit sequence learning, implicit motor and spatial memory consolidation is independent of sleep.
Word repetition in amnesia. Electrophysiological measures of impaired and spared memory.

Amnesic patients often show improved performance when stimuli are repeated, even in the absence of conscious memory for those stimuli. Although these performance changes are typically attributed to perceptual or motor systems, in some cases they may be related to basic language processing. We examined two neurophysiological measures that vary with word repetition in 12 amnesic patients and 12 control subjects: (i) a late positive component of the event-related potential (ERP) linked to conscious memory and (ii) the N400 component that varies with language comprehension. In each trial, the subject heard a category name, then viewed a word, and then decided whether the word was semantically congruous or incongruous (e.g. 'yes' for 'baby animal: cub'; 'no' for 'water sport: kitchen'). Recall and recognition testing at the end of the experiment showed that control subjects had better memory for congruous than for incongruous words, as did the amnesic patients, who performed less well overall. In contrast, amnesic patients were unimpaired on the category decisions required in each trial and, like the control subjects, showed a large N400 for incongruous relative to congruous words. Similarly, when incongruous trials were repeated after 0-13 intervening trials, N400s were reduced in both groups. When congruous trials were repeated, a late positive repetition effect was observed, but only in the control group. Furthermore, the amplitude of the late positive repetition effect was highly correlated with later word recall in both patients and controls. In the patients, the correlation was also observed with memory scores from standardized neuropsychological tests. These data are consistent with a proposed link between the late positive repetition effect and conscious memory. On the other hand, the N400 repetition effect was not correlated with episodic memory abilities, but instead indexed an aspect of memory that was intact in the amnesic patients. The preserved N400 repetition effect is an example of preserved memory in amnesia that does not easily fit into the categories of low-level perceptual processing or of motor learning. Instead, the sensitivity of the N400 to both semantic context and repetition may reflect a short-term memory process that serves language comprehension in realtime.
Phase II trial of neoadjuvant gemcitabine and cisplatin in patients with resectable bladder carcinoma.

OBJECTIVES Gemcitabine and cisplatin (GC) is an active combination in the treatment of metastatic bladder cancer. We have prospectively analyzed the efficacy and tolerability of GC as neoadjuvant treatment of invasive bladder cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this single-institution phase II trial, patients with muscle-invasive transitional cell carcinoma received three cycles of gemcitabine 1200 mg/m2 on days 1 and 8 with cisplatin 75 mg/m2 on day 1 prior to surgery. Radiologic response was evaluated by computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. All patients were referred to surgery after chemotherapy completion. RESULTS Between June 2002 and March 2005, 22 patients (19 males) were enrolled. Median age was 63 years. Initial stage was II (T2) in 11 and III (T3-4) in 11 patients. Median follow-up is 26 months (4-43). Partial or complete radiologic response rate was documented in 13 out of 20 assessable patients (70%). One patient was excluded due to sarcomatoid carcinoma at definitive pathologic examination. Cystectomy was performed in 15 patients and pelvic radiotherapy in four patients. Nine out of 21 patients (43%) relapsed and four (19%) died due to disease progression. Complete pathologic response was observed in four patients (26.7% of 15). Median progression-free survival was 27 months (CI 95% not reached) with median overall survival of 36 months (CI 95%: 28.7 - 43.3). Grade III/IV toxicity was infrequent, with no deaths due to chemotherapy. CONCLUSIONS The combination of GC is effective and well-tolerated when used as neoadjuvant therapy in muscle-invasive bladder cancer. Longer follow-up is necessary to evaluate its impact on the overall survival of these patients.