Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sentence Accent Perception in Noise by French Non-Native Listeners of English

This paper investigates the use of prosodic information signalling sentence accent and the role of different acoustic features on sentence accent perception during native and non-native speech perception in the presence of background noise. A phoneme detection experiment was carried out in which English native listeners and French highly proficient non-native listeners of English were presented with target phonemes in English sentences. Sentences were presented in different levels of speech-shaped noise and in two prosodic contexts in which the target-bearing word was either deaccented or accented. Acoustic analyses of the two prosodic conditions showed that the target-bearing words in the accented condition carried more energy, had a higher F0, and more spectral tilt than those in the deaccented condition. Results of the behavioural data showed that the native listeners outperformed the French listeners in the clean condition but not in the noise conditions and that the effect of noise was smaller for the non-native compared to the native listeners. Possibly, the non-native listeners use more and different acoustic cues than the native listeners who primarily relied on more local cues for sentence accent detection.
FUZZY-STOCHASTIC MULTI-OBJECTIVE SUPPLY CHAIN COORDINATION MODELS

| IJAPIE | ISSN: 2455–8419 | www.ijapie. org | Vol. 3 | Issue. 3 | 2018 | 17 | Abstract : In this paper, we propose composite stochastic measure and fuzzy dominance degree to de-randomize and de-fuzzify fuzzy stochastic variables. These measures are then applied to solve the fuzzy stochastic profit sharing in long-term contracts for supply chain coordination problem with fuzzy cost, stochastic demand, and stochastic budget. These measures help to cover all shape characteristics as well as reflect the relative relationship between fuzzy numbers. We develop a new multi-item multi-objective manufacturer-retailer supply chain model that composes variance and expected profit in the objectives instead of setting allowance risk tolerances in the constraints. These allowances are easy to be biased. The proposed approach gives better results in both terms of supply chain profit and budget utilization. In addition, we extend our model to the more general case of all fuzzy stochastic cost, demand, and budget. The obtained solutions are very promising.
Outsourcing in universities : A comparative analysis of in-house sourcing vs outsourcing ( A case study of University of Ruhun

Over the past decade, the private sector took the lead in restructuring, downsizing, and outsourcing of the junctions, which have performed previously in-house. Many organizations have outsourced information processing, various personnel activities, and production of parts that can be performed better outside the company. The goals are to reduce cost, improve productivity, manage stress, enhance competitive advantage and respond to the fast-changing global environment that affects all organizations. Today the number ofpublic sector organizations have also followed this strategy to reduce overhead costs because of limited budgetary allocations by the government, and to eliminate or at least reduce inefficiency in their service delivery. However, there is an insignificant amount of research to reveal whether the public sector organizations have the capacity in achieving the goals, by following the above strategies by the private sector. Therefore, the objective of this study is to ascertain how outsourcing could be best executed in achieving those most prominent goals. The exploratory research method was appliedfor this study and the University of Ruhuna was selected as the case site. The study selected two value chain activities namely, cleaning, and cafeteria services that have been outsourced by the University of Ruhuna. The main reasons that led the University of Ruhuna to take the decision of outsourcing are achieving cost effectiveness, improving the service quality, and help senior administrative people to concentrate higher demanding tasks. The findings confirmed that a level of performance of services which has been outsourced was satisfactory as compared with their previous standard
Augmented Access for Querying and Exploring a Polystore

The huge diversity of database technologies in use inside organizations pose today new challenges of data management and integration. Polystores provide a solution to this scenario based on a loosely coupled integration of data sources and the direct access, with the local language, to each storage engine for exploiting its distinctive features. However, given the absence of a global schema, it is hard to know if a query to one system can be satisfied with data stored elsewhere in the polystore. We address this issue by introducing query augmentation, a data manipulation operator for polystores based on the automatic enrichment of the answer to a local query with related data in the rest of the polystore. Augmentation can be used to implement two effective methods for data access in polystores: augmented search and augmented exploration. We show that they provide effective tools for information discovery in polystores that avoid middleware layers, abstract query languages, and shared data models. We also illustrate the design of QUEPA, a system that fully implements our approach in an efficient way. A comprehensive campaign of experiments done with QUEPA shows that our approach is feasible and, unlike other approaches, scales nicely as the polystore grows in the number of stores and size of databases.
Greedy Deep Disaggregating Sparse Coding

This is the first study combining deep learning with sparse coding (dictionary learning) to solve the energy disaggregation problem. In the first layer, we learn a disaggregating dictionary. In subsequent layers, we learn sparsifying dictionaries. The first layer is learnt from the smartmeter data; subsequent layers are learnt from features obtained from the previous layer. For disaggregation, instead of using a single level of dictionary as the basis for each device, we use the multiple level dictionaries. Experimental results show that by going deeper, it is possible to improve disaggregation accuracy. Keywords— Energy Disaggregation, Dictionary Learning, Deep Learning,
VITICULTURAL FACTORS AND RESVERATROL IN GRAPES AND WINE

Introduction In recent time the relation between food and health has been the subject of a considerable amount of media interest highlighting in particular how the second is deeply influenced by the first. It is primarily the medical profession who is leading in the direction of understanding this relation, in particular the risks of certain habits, aware of the need to prevent related illness not only to keep patients healthy, but also to contain the public health expenditure
A review: remote sensing sensors

The cost of launching satellites is getting lower and lower due to the reusability of rockets (NASA, 2015) and using single missions to launch multiple satellites (up to 37, Russia, 2014). In addition, low-orbit satellite constellations have been employed in recent years. These trends indicate that satellite remote sensing has a promising future in acquiring high-resolution data with a low cost and in integrating high-resolution satellite imagery with ground-based sensor data for new applications. These facts have motivated us to develop a comprehensive survey of remote sensing sensor development, including the characteristics of sensors with respect to electromagnetic spectrums (EMSs), imaging and non-imaging sensors, potential research areas, current practices, and the future development of remote sensors.
A Study on Prevalence of Left Ventricular Dysfunction and Its Correlation with Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate (eGFR) in CKD patients

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: In Chronic Kidney Disease there is a higher incidence cardiovascular events. Most of the patients with CKD succumb to cardiovascular disease even before they reach the end stage of renal disease. Hence all efforts should be given in earlier stages of CKD to prevent the development of cardiovascular complications. LV diastolic dysfunction is found to antedate LVH and systolic dysfunction. It is not just associated with hemodynamic factors like anaemia and hypertension, but also with uraemia related non hemodynamic factors like secondary hyperparathyroidism, altered mineral metabolism, cardiotrophysin etc. ECHO provides a simple non-invasive method to assess the left ventricular structure and function, which helps us in identifying those prone for cardiovascular complications at an earlier stage of CKD. This study was done to find out the prevalence of LV dysfunction and its correlation with eGFR in CKD patients. METHODS: 50 hypertensive CKD patients and 50 normotensive CKD patients admitted to Government Rajaji Hospital between May 2013 to August 2014 were evaluated for the presence of LV dysfunction and LVH and the results were compared with that of 50 age and sex matched individuals. Patients with acute kidney injury, prior coronary artery disease, valvular heart disease, cardiomyopathy, diabetic individuals and CKD patients on renal replacement therapy or transplant patients were excluded from the study. The CKD patients were divided into various stages of CKD based on their eGFR (calculated according to MDRD formula) and they were evaluated by ECHO. Those with an ejection fraction 2 was grade III diastolic dysfunction. This was compared with the ECHO findings of the controls. The collected data was analysed using various statistical methods. RESULTS: 74% of CKD patients had LV diastolic dysfunction (p <0.0001). Diastolic dysfunction was found to occur in 84% of the hypertensive CKD and in 64% of the normotensive CKD (p=0.02). Comparing the CKD normotensives with the control group, 64% among the normotensive CKD had diastolic dysfunction whereas only16% of controls had diastolic dysfunction (p<0.05). There is a negative correlation between the eGFR and diastolic dysfunction. So as the eGFR falls, the diastolic dysfunction increases. INTERPRETATION AND CONCLUSION: Even in the absence of hypertension, LV diastolic dysfunction can occur in CKD. This emphasizes the need for correction of not just hemodynamic factors but also the uraemia related factors.
Low Randomness Masking and Shuffling: An Evaluation Using Mutual Information

Side-channel countermeasure designers often face severe performance overheads when trying to protect a device. Widely applied countermeasures such as masking and shuffling entail generating a large amount of random numbers, which can result in a computational bottleneck. To mitigate the randomness cost, this work evaluates low-randomness versions of both masking and shuffling, namely Recycled Randomness Masking (RRM) and Reduced Randomness Shuffling (RRS). These countermeasures employ memory units to store generated random numbers and reuse them in subsequent computations,making them primarily suitable for implementation on devices with sufficient memory. Both RRM and RRS are evaluated using the MI-based framework in the context of horizontal attacks. The evaluation exhibits the tradeoff between the randomness cost and the noisy leakage security level offered by the countermeasures, enabling the designer to fine-tune a masking or shuffling scheme and maximize the security level achieved for a certain cost.
A Meta-analysis of Sublethal Pesticide Exposure and Effects on Sensitive Receptors : Children

Background and objective: There is an increasing concern of chronic low level pesticide exposure during childhood and their influence on childhood cancers. In this meta-analysis, we aimed to examine associations between residential childhood pesticide exposures and childhood cancers. Method: We included all observational studies published in PubMed before February 2014. Effect sizes and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using a random effect model with inverse variance weights. The literature search yielded 267 studies that were matched to the keywords, and sixteen studies were included in the metaanalysis. Results: We found that childhood exposure to indoor residential insecticides was associated with a significant increase in risk of childhood leukemia (OR=1.47; 95% CI, 1.26-1.72; I=30%) and childhood lymphomas (OR=1.43; 95% CI, 1.15-1.78; I=0%). This risk was further elevated for acute leukemia (OR= 1.59; 95% CI, 1.39-1.81; I=0%). A significant increase of risk for leukemia was also associated with herbicide exposure (OR=1.25; 95% CI, 1.09-1.44; I=0%). A positive but not statistically significant association between home pesticides or herbicide exposure during childhood and childhood brain tumor was observed. There was no statistically significant association between outdoor insecticide exposures and any types of childhood cancers. Concussions: Results from the meta-analysis indicated that children exposed to indoor insecticides would have higher risk of childhood hemotopoietic cancers. Because of the limited studies, further researches are needed to confirm the association between indoor pesticide exposures and childhood cancers. Meanwhile, preventive measures should be considered in order to reduce children’s exposure to pesticides at home.
Overcoming Virtualization Overheads for Large-vCPU Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines (VM) frequently run parallel applications in cloud environments, and high performance computing platforms. It is well known that configuring a VM with too many virtual processors (vCPUs) worsens application performance due to scheduling cross-talk between the hypervisor and the guest OS. Specifically, when the number of vCPUs assigned to a VM exceeds available physical CPUs then parallel applications in the VM experience worse performance, even when number of application threads remains fixed. In this paper, we first track the root cause of this performance loss to inefficient hypervisor-level emulation of inter-vCPU synchronization events. We then present three techniques to minimize hypervisor-induced overheads on parallel workloads in large-VCPU VMs. The first technique pins application threads to dedicated vCPUs to eliminate inter-vCPU thread migrations, reducing the overhead of emulating inter-processor interrupts (IPIs). The second technique para-virtualizes inter-vCPU TLB flush operations. The third technique enables faster reactivation of idle vCPUs by prioritizing the delivery of rescheduling IPIs. Unlike existing solutions which rely on heavyweight and slow vCPU hotplug mechanisms, our techniques are lightweight and provide more flexibility in migrating large-vCPU VMs. Using several parallel benchmarks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our prototype implementation in the Linux KVM/QEMU virtualization platform. Specifically, we demonstrate that with our techniques, parallel applications can maintain their performance even when up to 255 VCPUs are assigned to a VM running on as few as 6 physical cores.
Not unreasonable: Carving vague dimensions with contraries and contradictions

Language provides multiple ways of conveying the opposite: A person not happy can be unhappy, sad, or perhaps neither, just not happy. Rather than being redundant, we hypothesize that uncertainty about the meaning of negation markers allows listeners to derive fine-grained distinctions among these various alternatives. We formalize this hypothesis in a probabilistic model of gradable adjectives (e.g., happy), and use this to address an outstanding puzzle: how to interpret double negations (e.g., not unhappy). Our model makes surprising additional predictions about a putative difference between morphological antonyms (unhappy) and negated positives (not happy): Listeners should judge unhappy as more sad than not happy only when confronted with alternatives in context; when interpreted in isolation, we predict no difference in understanding. Two behavioral experiments confirm consistent orderings of interpretations that interact with the presentational context in the way predicted. These findings support the hypothesis that listeners represent uncertainty even about the most logical elements of language.
Development of a 3 D conceptual design environment using a commodity head mounted display virtual reality system

Design processes for engineered systems are resource intensive and have a significant impact on a product’s profitability. Over half of a product’s total costs can be attributed to design stage decisions. The development of product designs often involves creating complex 3D models in a 2D environment, a non-trivial task. Current design workflows involve the utilization of robust modeling software on a 2D display. However, previous research highlights the benefits of visualizing full-scale 3D models in an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. These environments aid a user in understanding complex 3D geometry. Despite the benefits of VR, these systems have traditionally been large and costly, preventing widespread implementation within companies. However, the commercial availability of high-fidelity, commodity VR Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) provides an opportunity to explore the potential benefits this technology may bring to engineering design. This paper details a proof of concept VR environment displayed in a commodity HMD; specifically, the HTC Vive. The environment supports creation of full-scale 3D product geometry at the conceptual phase of a design process. The environment contains a World-in-Miniature (WIM) model for enhanced interaction and usability. WIM manipulation allows a user to modify full-scale geometry by adjusting corresponding parts on the miniature model. Free-form mesh deformation was also implemented to provide designers with flexibility and efficiency not found in traditional design packages. Vital design metrics (e.g., cost, weight, and center of mass) were incorporated to allow a user to perform preliminary design analysis to assess product feasibility. The environment was designed to provide an intuitive user interface with only a subset of features found in traditional design packages, tailored to conceptual design needs. This
RNA Dysfunction and RNA binding Proteins in the Syndrome of ALS / FTD

RNA dysfunction and abnormal intracellular aggregates comprise a key characteristic in most neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The discoveries with the identification of new genes as major genetic causes of ALS/FTD syndromes reinforce the genetic, clinical and pathological overlap between ALS and FTD. Common causes of these diseases include mutations in the RNA/DNA-binding proteins, TDP-43 and FUS and most recently, GGGGCC hexanucleotide expansions in the C9orf72 gene. TDP-43 and FUS are both RNA processing proteins whose dysfunction impacts on global cellular RNA regulation, and are both abnormally aggregated and mislocalized in ALS and FTD, while The expression of repeat expansions in the C9orf72 gene may induce RNA foci that could sequester RNA binding proteins such as Pur α and hnRNP A3 highlights a further possibly important mechanism of RNA dysfunction in disease. Furthermore, sequestration of key RNA binding proteins may also play an important role in ALS/FTD syndromes due to the association of TDP-43 and FUS with stress granules. In this review we discuss the importance of RNA dysfunction and RNA binding proteins and suggest mechanisms by which they may cause ALS/FTD.
Individual differences and patterns of convergence in prosody perception

The challenge of prosodic annotation is reflected in commonly reported variability among trained annotators in the assignment of prosodic labels. The present study examines individual differences in the perception of prosody through the lens of prosodic annotation. First, Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) reveal the non-linear pattern of some acoustic cues on the perception of prosodic features. Second, these same models reveal that while some of the untrained annotators are using these cues to determine prosodic features, the magnitude of effect differs quite dramatically across the annotators. Finally, the trained annotators follow the same cues as subsets of the untrained annotators, but present a much stronger effect for many of the cues. The findings show that while prosody perception is systemically related to acoustic and contextual cues, there are also individual differences that are limited to the selection and magnitude of the factors that influence prosodic rating, and the relative weighting among those factors.
A 15-week vitamin D supplementation and indoor cycling intervention reduces exercising heart rate, with no effect on glycaemic control in healthy adults: a pilot investigation

Significant positive correlations are often observed between vitamin D concentrations and physical activity levels. Whilst this may be due to individuals who are physically active spending time outdoors (i.e. increased opportunity for vitamin D synthesis), there is growing evidence to suggest a more complex relationship between vitamin D status, physical fitness and health outcomes. To explore this further thirty-nine healthy adults were randomly allocated to 15 weeks of exercise training (Ex), no training (NoEx), 2000 IU/day vitamin D (VitD) and/or placebo (Pla) supplementation (giving four possible allocations: NoEx+VitD; NoEx+Pla; Ex+VitD; Ex+Pla). Vitamin D status, glycaemic control and exercise responses were measured pre- and post-intervention. A series of 2 x 2 ANOVAs failed to find any effect of supplementation or exercise on any of the measures except heart rate during low intensity exercise, and vitamin D status. Heart rate was significantly reduced (6%, p < 0.05) in the Ex+VitD group. Vitamin D status was significantly raised (28%, p < 0,05) in the supplementation groups (NoEx+VitD and Ex+VitD) at a time of year (August-November) when a seasonal decline was observed in the placebo groups (33%, p < 0.05). These findings indicate that vitamin D supplementation (2000 IU/day) may have an enhancing role alongside exercise in inducing cardiorespiratory adaptations to exercise training. Further investigations are required to confirm these findings and identify the mechanisms involved.
Ultrasound-Guided Percutaneous Needle Treatment and Steroid Injection for Cal-cific Tendinopathy of the Shoulder : Can the Orthopedic Surgeon do it ?

Calcific tendinopathy is a painful disorder of the shoulder of unknown etiology [1]. It is characterized by the formation of deposits of calcium crystals in one or several of the rotator cuff tendons. Tendon inflammation located around the deposit and increased intratendineous pressure are considered to contribute to pain. The course of the disease is often self-limiting with spontaneous calcium resorption and resolution of symptoms over several months [2]. Oral analgesics or a steroid injection together with physiotherapy are recommended as primary treatment measures. In cases with persisting symptoms and delayed, incomplete or absent resorption, removal of the calcification may provide symptomatic relief. Different methods including ultrasoundguided percutaneous needle treatment and steroid injection (barbotage), extracorporal shockwave therapy (ESWT), and surgical treatment are possible treatment alternatives.