Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acoustic analysis of EFL speech production corpora according to the Speech Learning Model

It is widely accepted that L1 influences the acquisition of L2 phonology during Second Language Acquisition. Models such as the Speech Learning Model (SLM) have tried to explain this process by defining bi-directional interactions between the phonetic systems of both languages. Flege (2007) called them assimilation and dissimilation, by which non-native sounds are classified as either “new”, “identical” or “similar”. “New” would be likely not to be assimilated to any L1 category and, therefore, a new L2 category would be created. “Identical”, on the other hand, would be those sounds that the speaker assimilates, producing them in a native-like manner. Meanwhile, the ones classified as “similar” would be the most complicated sounds to both perceive and produce. The aim of this paper is to determine whether SLM can explain and predict FL (instead of L2) production mistakes by classifying them acoustically, i.e. using spectrograms. The data was provided by the supervisor of this paper, Dr. María Luisa García Lecumberri, and gathered at the University of Seville using the DiapixFL method as part of a larger corpus. This means that in order to prompt conversational speech between two subjects, a spot-the-difference task was used. In this case, native speakers of Spanish (more specifically, the Andalusian Spanish variety) were recorded. Afterwards, their production of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) was orthographically and phonetically transcribed and eventually classified by creating spectrograms. Finally, this classification of consonants and vowels was analysed in order to reach the following conclusion. The analysis of the results shows the limitations of SLM when dealing with phenomena such as hyper-correction and spelling pronunciation, as well as specific features of the variety of the study subjects. It would appear that, even though the acoustic analysis offered resourceful results, a more detailed research is preferable for upcoming occasions. Moreover, future collection of data is suggested, specifically in the Catalan and Galician regions. This addition could offer the chance to compare the production of English phonemes in native speakers of different varieties of Spanish.
Thrombelastogram assesses anticoagulant clinical effect of rivaroxaban versus low molecular weight heparin after total hip arthroplasty

Objective: This study aimed to assess the anticoagulant effect of rivaroxaban and low molecular weight heparin (LMWH) in patients undergoing total hip arthroplasty (THA). Methods: A retrospective study was performed on 110 patients who underwent primary THA in the department of orthopedics and traumatology. These patients were divided into an observation group (treated with rivaroxaban, n=60) and a control group (treated with LMWH, n=50) according to different anticoagulation methods after surgery. Hemoglobin (Hb), platelet count (PLT), thrombelastogram (TEG) parameters, and postoperative complications were monitored before surgery and 1, 3, 5, 7 days after surgery. Results: Hb in the observation group was significantly higher than that in the control group on the 7th postoperative day (P<0.05). PLT in the observation group was significantly higher than that in the control group on the 5th and 7th postoperative day (P<0.05). The number of hypercoagulable patients in the observation group was less than that in the control group on the 3rd, 5th and 7th postoperative day (P<0.05). The coagulation reaction time (R) in the observation group was higher than that in the control group on the 3rd, 5th and 7th postoperative day (P<0.05). The observation group showed lower maximum amplitude (MA) as well as higher coagulation index (CI) than the control group on the 7th postoperative day (P<0.05). However, there was no statistical difference in anticoagulant complications between the two groups (P>0.05). Conclusion: Rivaroxaban has better anticoagulant effect than LMWH, which can reduce the incidence of the hypercoagulable state, and rivaroxaban was effective and safe in clinical use.
READY‐TO‐EAT (RTE) WHEAT BRAN BREAKFAST CEREAL AS A HIGH‐FIBER DIET

ABSTRACT Bran is an excellent source of dietary fiber; for addition to food, it offers all the nutritional and nutraceutical benefits of whole grain. Ready-to-eat breakfast cereal is in line with dietary fiber recommendations; therefore, a process on wheat bran-based breakfast with fruits has been formulated with a unique formulation, following the toasting of raw wheat bran at 170–175C for 40–45 min to inhibit rancidity, then the mixing and wetting of wheat bran preserve with other nutritional ingredients, i.e., fruit banana preserve and binding syrup, according to formulation in order to enhance the nutritional importance of the product from the health point of view. The products were the most acceptable in terms of color, texture and having a concentrated flavor of wheat bran and fruit with a natural color, and no off-taste was observed in these products. Sensory evaluation, shelf-life studies and microbiological examination show that wheat bran products (products A and B) are fit for human consumption, can be utilized throughout the year in the form of preserve especially with fruit (banana), is a possible breakfast diet for obesity and diseases, such as diabetes, and is useful in the prevention and treatment of constipation, cardiovascular diseases and hypertension. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS The study shows the importance of dietary fiber as an important component of a healthy diet. Ready-to-eat (RTE) wheat bran breakfast cereal was manufactured with and without the addition of fruit (banana). The resultant products obtained after processing had a pleasant taste, texture and original color, and had a shelf life of more than one year when packed in a moisture vapor-proof packing material and stored under a reasonable cool and dry condition. These products will capture the attraction in local markets and abroad because of their natural nutritional ingredients such as vitamins, minerals, proteins and fibers. The nutritive values and physiological properties of these products have been enhanced with the addition of soluble fiber gum arabic (Acacia) and banana fruit for proper functions of nerves and muscles. RTE products will remain crisp without developing an off-flavor during storage, and will remain crisp in milk for at least 3–5 min. These products have the first and unique formulation of high dietary fiber, and are well suitable for the health conscious and for patients because adults who consume breakfast especially incorporated RTE cereals will have a better overall diet quality than those who skip breakfast.
Explicit and Implicit Antecedents of Users’ Information Systems Behavioral Beliefs: A Neuropsychological Investigation

Behavioral beliefs – perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use – have been identified as the most influential antecedents of individuals’ information systems use intentions and behaviors within the technology acceptance model. However, little research has been aimed at investigating the implicit (automatic or unconscious) determinants of such cognitive beliefs, and more importantly, the potential nonlinear relationships of such antecedents with explicit (perceptual) ones. As such, this paper theorizes that implicit neurophysiological states – memory load and distraction - and explicit – engagement and frustration - antecedents interact in the formation of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. In order to test the study’s hypotheses, we conducted an experiment that measured neurophysiological states while individuals worked on instrumental and hedonic tasks using technology. The results show that, as theorized, implicit and explicit constructs interact together, and thus, have a nonlinear effect on behavioral beliefs. Specifically, when engagement is high, neurophysiological distraction does not affect perceived usefulness, whereas when engagement is low, neurophysiological distraction has a negative and significant effect on usefulness. The results also show that when frustration is high, neurophysiological memory load has a negative effect on perceived ease of use, whereas when it is low, neurophysiological memory load has a positive effect on perceived ease of use. This study makes several contributions, including the demonstration of the importance of emotional perceptions for moderating the effects of neurophysiological states on behavioral beliefs.
Procedural Generation of Hand-drawn like Line Art

This paper presents a high quality Non-Photorealistic Ren-dering (NPR) framework. Our system focuses on artistic line drawing generation and supports diﬀerent contour and hatching line renderings. All these lines are represented as individual spline primitives and rendered as textured triangle strips. This paper mainly focuses on one powerful feature of our system, namely stroke style synthesis. To give the user a high degree of freedom in stylization, a sample stroke pattern can be deﬁned for each artistic line type and the style of these samples will be transferred to all other individual lines. The samples can be given as images and will be converted into an oﬀset list. We use random Markov ﬁelds and Q-learning to obtain new oﬀset lists that can be used to perturb our line primitives.
Studying and Analysing the Effect of Weight Norm Penalties and Dropout as Regularizers for Small Convolutional Neural Networks

– A long-standing problem for both machine learning neophytes and researchers has been to create a learning model that performs well not just on seen data points (training data) but also on unseen data points (test data). It is usually the case that a deep model learns and co-adapts representations and features from the training data so well, that it fails to perform effectively on the test data at all. This is known as the problem of overfitting. A lot of research has been devoted to come up with solutions to the problem of overfitting. To address this complication, apprehending the concept of generalization becomes pivotal. Generalization is the ability for a model to perform well on unseen inputs and collectively, all the approaches that work upon decreasing the generalization error of a learning algorithm are called regularization techniques. One way to reduce variance and generalization error in a model is to introduce a penalty term (weight decay) in the cost function that restricts the model’s parameters from increasing. Another recently accepted practice is to use dropout, wherein hidden units and visible units are randomly dropped to obtain a much simpler model that prevents it from overfitting. In this paper, an extensive analysis has been done between both these regularizers on the MNIST dataset for relatively small convolutional networks. The findings of this paper assert that with appropriate hyperparameter settings, dropout performed a better job in bringing down the training error and making the gap between training and test error (generalization gap) minimum.
A comparative study based on surgical and functional outcome of proximal tibia fractures between unicondylar and bicondylar fractures

Background: Tibia plateau fractures constitute 1%of all fractures. Bicondylar fractures account for 1030%, whereas isolated medial and lateral condyle fractures constitute the remaining injuries. Although only 3% of these fractures are open injuries, many of them have closed degloving, deep abrasions or severe soft tissue injuries which require careful consideration in deciding the timing and the nature of surgery. Proximal tibia fractures may be difficult to treat even in experienced hands due to intraarticular extension, comminution, cartilage damage and soft tissue injuries of the cruciate ligaments and menisci. Aim: To compare the functional and surgical outcomes of operative treatment of unicondylar and bicondylar fractures. Materials and Methods: It was a prospective and comparative study of Surgical and functional outcome of proximal tibial fractures in the department of orthopaedics from July 2019 to December 2019. Clearance was obtained from the hospital ethical committee. Fifty patients were taken into consideration for the study. All patients are selected on the basis of history, clinical examination and radiography. The Schatzker’s classification was used to classify these fractures. The patients were followed up for an average period of 6 to 12 months. The patients were divided into two groups. Twenty-five patients in the unicondylar fracture group 1and 25 patients in the bicondylar fracture group 2. Results: The mean age of group 1 patients was 45.72±10.85 years, and that of group 2 patients was 46.40±8.602 years (p>0.05). In group 1 there were 18 (72%) males and 7 (28%) females, in group 2 there were 21 (84%) males and 4 (16%) females. In group 1, the mean union time was 3.04 ± 0.351 and in group 2 was 3.1± 0.433(p>0.05). In group 1, the mean follow-up time was 12.81 ± 2.09 and in group 2 was 13.04 ± 2.28 (p>0.05). The mean functional score of group 1 was 91.2±12.27, and in group 2, it was 87±18.2 (p>0.050). In group1 mean WOMAC score was 12.2 ± 21.179, and in group 2 was 16.72 ± 16.923 (p>0.05). 2 patients had hypertension, and none of the patients had diabetes. While in group two, three patients had diabetes, and two patients had hypertension. Conclusion: In the light of the aforementioned results, it was found in the surgical and functional outcomes of both unicondylar and bicondylar fractures of the proximal tibia are satisfactory and comparable to each other. Furthermore, it was identified that Factors such as age, gender and the fracture type did not influence the outcome in both the study groups. Additionally, most fractures occurred in the middle age group with male preponderance in both unicondylar and bicondylar fractures. © This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: drsambitpanda@gmail.com (S. K. Panda).
BOOTSTRAP DEA EFFICIENCIES OF THE GCC ISLAMIC BANKS: SOURCES AND COMPARISON DURING 2014-2016

This paper, first, obtained three categories of efficiencies, overall bias-corrected technical efficiency (OTEBC), bias-corrected pure technical efficiency (PTEBC) and bias-corrected scale efficiency (SE) of the Islamic banks of the Gulf Cooperating Countries (GCC) during 2014-2016 using the Simar and Wilson (1998) Bootstrap data envelopment analysis (DEA). Second, decomposing the overall bias-corrected technical efficiency (OTEBC) the paper found the bias-corrected pure technical efficiency (PTEBC) and the bias-corrected scale efficiency (SE) were 91% and 59.8% respectively and thus PTEBC dominated the OTBBC (82.4%) and the SE (59.8%) of the GCC Islamic banks. Third, the paper found the sources of the inefficiency of the Islamic banks of the GCC was the DRS. Except the Islamic banks of Qatar, banks of the GCC countries were inefficient either because they operated under the IRS or DRS. DRS was the major source of inefficiency. Qatar Islamic banks demonstrated the highest level of efficiency in all three efficiency among GCC. The paper provides suggestions for future study.
Cost-reflective network tariffs: experiences with forward looking cost models to design electricity distribution charges

To better reflect local grid conditions to consumers, many regulators are reforming their distribution network tariffs. In this literature review, we start by discussing the difference between short-run and long-run marginal pricing for distribution grids. Short-run marginal pricing is first-best but hard to implement in practice. Several authors therefore argue to that it makes sense to signal long-run marginal costs through a forward-looking charge based on a forward looking cost model. After, we compare four implementations of forward looking cost models that are currently being used in Great-Britain. Finally, we discuss the link between cost models and charge design. We formulate two conclusions. First, forward looking cost models are complex both for the regulator and the grid users. Designing costreflective distribution tariffs can help, but tariffs are regulatory tools with limitations. Second, we identify a gap in the literature. There is more academic work on charge design than on forward looking cost models.
A comprehensive review of sodium layered oxides: powerful cathodes for Na-ion batteries

The room temperature Na-ion secondary battery has been under focus lately due to its feasibility to compete against the already well-established Li-ion secondary battery. Although there are many obstacles to overcome before the Na-ion battery becomes commercially available, recent research discoveries corroborate that some of the cathode materials for the Na-ion battery have indeed indisputable advantages over its Li-ion counterparts. In this publication, a comprehensive review of layered oxides (NaTMO2, TM = Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, and a mixture of 2 or 3 elements) as a viable Na-ion battery cathode is presented. Single TM systems are well characterized not only for their electrochemical performance but also for their structural transitions during the cycle. Binary TM systems are investigated in order to address issues regarding low reversible capacity, capacity retention, operating voltage, and structural stability. As a consequence, some materials already have reached an energy density of 520 mW h g−1, which is comparable to that of LiFePO4. Furthermore, some ternary TM systems retained more than 72% of their capacity along with over 99.7% Coulombic efficiency for 275 cycles. The goal of this review is to present the development of Na layered oxide materials in the past as well as the state of the art today in order to emphasize the compatibility and durability of layered oxides as powerful candidates for Na-ion battery cathode materials.
CO2-equivalence metrics for surface albedo change based on the
radiative forcing concept: A critical review

Abstract. Management of Earth's surface albedo is increasingly viewed as an important climate change mitigation strategy both on (Seneviratne et al., 2018) and off (Field et al., 2018; Kravitz et al., 2018) the land. Assessing the impact of a surface albedo change involves employing a measure like radiative forcing (RF) which can be challenging to digest for decision-makers who deal in the currency of CO2-equivalent emissions. As a result, many researchers express albedo change (Δα) RFs in terms of their CO2-equivalent effects, despite the lack of a standard method for doing so, such as there is for emissions of well-mixed greenhouse gases (WMGHGs; e.g., IPCC AR5, Myhre et al. (2013)). A major challenge for converting Δα RFs into their CO2-equivalant effects in a manner consistent with current IPCC emission metric approaches stems from the lack of a universal time-dependency following the perturbation (perturbation lifetime). Here, we review existing methodologies based on the RF concept with the goal of highlighting the context(s) in which the resulting CO2-equivalent metrics may or may not have merit. To our knowledge this is the first review dedicated entirely to the topic since the first CO2-eq. metric for Δα surfaced 20 years ago. We find that, although there are some methods that sufficiently address the time-dependency issue, none address or sufficiently account for the spatial disparity between the climate response to CO2 emissions and Δα – a major critique of Δα metrics based on the RF concept (Jones et al., 2013). We conclude that considerable research efforts are needed to build consensus surrounding the RF efficacy of various surface forcing types associated with Δα (e.g., crop change, forest harvest, etc.), and the degree to which these are sensitive to the spatial pattern, extent, and magnitude of the underlying surface forcings.
02 0 v 2 1 0 D ec 2 00 3 Closer towards inflation in string theory

In brane inflation, the relative brane position in the bulk of a brane world is the inflaton. For branes moving in a compact manifold, the approximate translational (or shift) symmetry is necessary to suppress the inflaton mass, which then allows a slow-roll phase for enough inflation. Following recent works, we discuss how inflation may be achieved in superstring theory. Imposing the shift symmetry, we obtain the condition on the superpotential needed for inflation and suggest how this condition may be naturally satisfied.
THE IMPACT OF FINANCIAL INCLUSION ON UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Financial inclusion has become the focus of economic policymaking worldwide. Increasing the accessibility of the weaker group of the society to formal financial services would not only serve at the individual level but will also benefit at the national level. This study aims to initially construct a new financial inclusion index for 43 developing countries based on a multidimensional approach, using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), using three dimensions; access to, usage of, and quality of financial services. Secondly, a dynamic two-step system, Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), is applied to empirically assess the impact of financial inclusion on the unemployment rate of 35 developing countries for the sample period from 2009 to 2018. The study established that financial inclusion has an impact on decreasing the unemployment rate in developing countries. The empirical findings suggest that an increase in the level of financial inclusion in developing countries decreases their unemployment rate. Moreover, the level of education, inflation rate, and economic growth have a significant negative impact on the unemployment rate. On the other hand, panel Granger Causality test was employed and indicated that there is a bi-directional causality between financial inclusion and unemployment rate.
The Paleoseismic Database of Germany and Adjacent Regions PalSeisDB v1.0

Central Europe is an intraplate domain which is characterized by low to moderate seismicity with records of larger seismic events occurring in historical and recent times. These records of seismicity are restricted to just over one thousand years. This does not reflect the long seismic cycles in Central Europe which are expected to be in the order of tens of thousands of years. Therefore, we have developed a paleoseismic database (PalSeisDB) that documents the records of paleoseismic evidence (trenches, softsediment deformation, mass movements, etc.) and extends the earthquake record to at least one seismic cycle. It is intended to serve as one important basis for future seismic hazard assessments. In the compilation of PalSeisDB, paleoseismic evidence features are documented at 129 different locations in the area of Germany and adjacent regions.
Ulinastatin combined with dexamethasone can alleviate the conditions of septic patients and reduce inflammatory factor levels

Objective: This study aims to investigate the application and efficacy of ulinastatin combined with dexamethasone in sepsis. Methods: 110 patients with sepsis in Zhuji People’s Hospital from April 2017 to July 2018 were enrolled. Among them, Group A included 50 patients who received dexamethasone monotherapy, and Group B included 50 patients who received ulinastatin combined with dexamethasone. The related scores, adverse reactions, and treatment efficacy of the two groups were observed. In addition, ELISA was employed to measure the serum inflammatory factors and related indicators. Results: After the treatment, the related scores of group B decreased vs group A, as did the inflammatory factors and indexes. Group B presented a decreased total adverse reaction rate and an elevated total effective rate compared with group A. Conclusion: Ulinastatin combined with dexamethasone is effective in sepsis.