Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling of vowel-inherent spectral change in spontaneous and elicited speech

A database of speech samples was collected to examining vowel formant patterns in spontaneous and read speech. Recordings were made from 220 long-time residents of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island in two separate tasks: Participants read a series of sentences in several phonetic contexts and also provided a monologue of at least 10 min duration resulting in approximately 36 h of spontaneous speech. Vowel formant frequencies were measured for all stressed vowels in non-function words surrounded by obstruents. Speakers were divided among eight geographic regions. Consonant contexts were modelled via nonlinear regression based on a model inspired by Broad and Clermont (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 81,155). Spontaneous speech was characterized by retraction of front vowels, fronting of /u/, backing of /ae/, and greater diphthongization of /ɒ/. Older speakers were less likely to show a merger between /ɒ/ and /ɔ/. There was also some evidence of a partial Canadian Shift whereby /ae/ and /ɛ/ are lowered following merge.
The Masses of White Dwarfs in the Praesepe Open Cluster

We present results from an in-depth photometric and spectroscopic study of white dwarfs in the Praesepe open cluster. From high signal-to-noise ratio spectra, we have estimated log g and Teff for six DA white dwarfs using model atmosphere fits to the Balmer lines. Evolutionary models are then used to determine masses, radii, and cooling times. Good agreement is found with masses determined using gravitational redshifts primarily by Reid and with masses determined from the cluster's distance. Included in these comparisons are white dwarfs analyzed in a similar way in the Hyades and Pleiades clusters. The cooling times and cluster ages are then used to determine initial masses (Mi) for each white dwarf. A monotonic initial-final mass relation (Mi-Mf) is determined for these and two other well-studied clusters, although there are indications that more envelope mass is lost in the asymptotic red giant branch thermal pulse phase than current theory predicts. One Praesepe object—LB 5893 (0836+197)—is anomalous in the sense that it has the highest Mf but the highest Teff and the smallest inferred Mi. LB 393 = EG 61 (0837+199) shows Zeeman-split lines indicative of a strong magnetic field, the first such white dwarf found in a star cluster.
Tyrosine phosphorylation controlled poly(A) polymerase I activity regulates general stress response in bacteria

We show a tyrosine phosphorylation–controlled poly(A) polymerase I polyadenylation activity regulated stress response mechanism in bacteria that is distinct and operates downstream of the primary stress regulator RpoS. RNA 3′-end polyadenylation that marks transcripts for degradation is implicated in general stress response in Escherichia coli. Yet, the mechanism and regulation of poly(A) polymerase I (PAPI) in stress response are obscure. We show that pcnB (that encodes PAPI)-null mutation widely stabilises stress response mRNAs and imparts cellular tolerance to multiple stresses, whereas PAPI ectopic expression renders cells stress-sensitive. We demonstrate that there is a substantial loss of PAPI activity on stress exposure that functionally phenocopies pcnB-null mutation stabilising target mRNAs. We identify PAPI tyrosine phosphorylation at the 202 residue (Y202) that is enormously enhanced on stress exposure. This phosphorylation inhibits PAPI polyadenylation activity under stress. Consequentially, PAPI phosphodeficient mutation (tyrosine 202 to phenylalanine, Y202F) fails to stimulate mRNA expression rendering cells stress-sensitive. Bacterial tyrosine kinase Wzc phosphorylates PAPI-Y202 residue, and that wzc-null mutation renders cells stress-sensitive. Accordingly, wzc-null mutation has no effect on stress sensitivity in the presence of pcnB-null or pcnB-Y202F mutation. We also establish that PAPI phosphorylation-dependent stress tolerance mechanism is distinct and operates downstream of the primary stress regulator RpoS.
A New Phased Array Construct: Intra-element Monoliths Printed & Attached to a CircuiT board (IMPACT)

A new realization of broadband phased array is introduced. The structure consists of individual additively manufactured metallic radiating elements excited through coaxial apertures on a conventional printed circuit feed board. Metallic intra-element structures which we refer to as “monoliths”, include well-known broadband features such as a Vivaldi-like flare, tight capacitive coupling to neighboring elements, and built-in shorting posts to provide a balanced feed. The construct includes additional performance-enhancing RF features such as height-variable capacitance as well as RF-benign mechanical features which make the construct light weight, repeatable, and suitable for automated pick-and-place fabrication.
Efficacy of the New Inotropic Agent Istaroxime in Acute Heart Failure

Current therapeutic strategies for acute heart failure (AHF) are based on traditional inotropic agents that are often associated with untoward effects; therefore, finding new effective approaches with a safer profile is dramatically needed. Istaroxime is a novel compound, chemically unrelated to cardiac glycosides, that is currently being studied for the treatment of AHF. Its effects are essentially related to its inotropic and lusitropic positive properties exerted through a dual mechanism of action: activation of the sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ ATPase isoform 2a (SERCA2a) and inhibition of the Na+/K+-ATPase (NKA) activity. The advantages of istaroxime over the available inotropic agents include its lower arrhythmogenic action combined with its capability of increasing systolic blood pressure without augmenting heart rate. However, it has a limited half-life (1 hour) and is associated with adverse effects including pain at the injection site and gastrointestinal issues. Herein, we describe the main mechanism of action of istaroxime and we present a systematic overview of both clinical and preclinical trials testing this drug, underlining the latest insights regarding its adoption in clinical practice for AHF.
Sidescan sonar calibration by bottom arrays of standard targets

Many sidescan sonars are used for imaging rather than quantitative amplitude measurement per se. To improve imaging, the attempt is often made to enhance features by internal signal or image processing. Applied gains often deviate from the quantitative gain functions of range compensation, e.g., time-varied gain for spherical spreading. Affected sonars may still benefit from calibration, although this may not be achieved in the amplitude domain. In the case of sonar operations for which calibration at a special facility or with a special configuration is not practicable, performance measurement in situ may be necessary. If this is done with a standard target, how should the target be marked to distinguish it from other interesting targets? This question is answered for sidescan sonar through use of distinctive geometric arrays of standard targets resting on the seafloor. Two examples of arrays are given for use in calibrating a sidescan sonar, with nominal center frequencies at 550 and 1600 kHz. These are seven-target arrays, one L-shaped, with equal arms and common vertex; the other, centered-hexagonal. The standard target is a 79.375-mm-daimeter solid sphere composed of the aluminum alloy 2024. Results are shown in the form of echo visualizations, measurements, and analyses of standard-target positions.
Genotypic differences in growth behavior and quality parameters of sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) varieties under moisture stress conditions

A field experiment was conducted at CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Regional Research Station, Karnal to investigate the effect of available soil moisture regimes on productivity potential of sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) varieties during 2014-15 and 2015-16. The experiment consists of three moisture regimes based on available soil moisture (ASM), i.e. irrigation at 50% ASM (control), 40% ASM (mild stress) and 30% ASM (severe stress) in main plots and four commercial sugarcane varieties differing in maturity duration, i.e. CoS 767 (Mid late), CoH 128 (Mid late), CoJ 64 (Early) and Co 0238 (Early) in sub plot was laid out in split-plot design with three replications. Soil moisture treatments were initiated after 45 days of planting (DAP). Higher germination was recorded in CoJ 64 (65.5%) and CoS 767 (58.0%) as compared to Co 0238 (49.0%) and CoH 128 (48.5%) at 45 DAP. At 30% ASM levels, higher reduction in stalk height was recorded in CoH 128 (33.6 and 85.96 cm) and CoJ 64 (36.33 and 83.03cm) as compared to CoS 767 (41.83 and 107.06 cm) and Co 0238 (50.6 and 122.76 cm) in June and July, respectively. Total number of tillers was reduced by 12.99, 14.37 and 14.5% at 40% ASM level and 16.97, 24.29 and 20.04% at 30% ASM level as compared to irrigation at 50% ASM level in the month of May, June and July, respectively. Significantly higher values of brix, pol and CCS (%) were recorded in CoJ 64 and Co 0238 as compared to CoS 767 and CoH 128 at 8th, 10th and 12th month at all levels of ASM. Varieties and ASM levels had no effect on the specific activity of sucrose synthase. Sugar yield significantly reduced by 31.11 per cent at 40% ASM level and 40.57 per cent at 30% ASM level, respectively as compared to 50% ASM level. Co 0238 and CoS 767 showed minimum reduction in yield than CoH 128 and CoJ 64. From the present study it is concluded that Co 0238 and CoS 767 are identified relatively more tolerant at 30% and 40% ASM levels than CoH 128 and CoJ 64.
Néel “orange-peel” coupling in magnetic tunneling junction devices

We present measurements of the magnitude of Neel “orange-peel” coupling due to interface roughness in a series of magnetic tunneling junction devices. Results from magnetometry and transport measurements are shown to be in good agreement with the theoretical model of Neel. In addition, we have used transmission electron microscopy to directly probe the sample interface roughness and obtain results consistent with the values obtained by magnetometry and transport methods.
An analysis of errors in craniometry

Twenty-six measurement items taken three times on 35 crania by 10 observers independently were analysed for the influence of careless mistakes and measurement errors. The median number of careless mistakes per trial was 7.5. Nested analysis of variance showed that 8 measurement items had greater than 10% total error variance (Table 1). The influence of careless mistakes and inter-observer error on population comparison was examined by cluster analyses of several distance coefficients. The results indicated that the influence of mistakes could be minimized by eliminating the outlying measurements outside the range of x±3S. D. , and that the measurement items with greater total error variance should be excluded to minimize the influence of inter-observer measurement errrors.
Task-oriented Source Coding for Real-Time Applications: Invited Paper

The emerging real-time applications in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) puts more and more strict requirements on extremely low latency communications. In these real-time applications, the duration of codeword transmission cannot be ignored and may cause significant performance loss. To overcome this, task-oriented source coding which integrates the design of source coding and real-time applications may greatly reduce the latency-induced performance loss. In contrast to the traditional source coding that only focuses on the minimization of average codeword length, task-oriented source coding aims at minimizing the cumulative cost in real-time tasks by jointly optimizing source coding and real-time decision making. In this paper, we propose an optimization framework for task-oriented source coding in extremely low latency communications, in which the codeword lengths of all realizations are optimized for minimization of latency-induced cost. To demonstrate the potential of our proposed framework, two specific scenarios of real-time monitoring and real-time control are induced, respectively. In these scenarios, the closed expression of the optimal codeword lengths is derived. Based on this, the performance analysis on minimization of latency-induced cost is further presented. Finally, the simulation results show that the source codebook derived under our proposed framework achieves a significant performance gain in real-time tasks, compared with traditional Huffman coding.
Belief-Based Refinements in Signalling Games

Abstract There are many economic problems which, when modelled as games of incomplete information, give rise to many sequential equilibria, severely limiting the usefulness of the model. There has recently been a large literature devoted to "refining" the set of equilibria in order to reduce this multiplicity by restricting the set of admissible disequilibrium beliefs. This paper argues that the logical foundations of some refinements and the equilibria they focus on are problematic and, further, proposes an alternative refinement that avoids the difficulties. We also provide an existence theorem covering a broad class of signalling games often studied in economics. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C70, D82.
Generation and Physiology of Hydrogen Sulfide and Reactive Sulfur Species in Bacteria

Sulfur is not only one of the most abundant elements on the Earth, but it is also essential to all living organisms. As life likely began and evolved in a hydrogen sulfide (H2S)-rich environment, sulfur metabolism represents an early form of energy generation via various reactions in prokaryotes and has driven the sulfur biogeochemical cycle since. It has long been known that H2S is toxic to cells at high concentrations, but now this gaseous molecule, at the physiological level, is recognized as a signaling molecule and a regulator of critical biological processes. Recently, many metabolites of H2S, collectively called reactive sulfur species (RSS), have been gradually appreciated as having similar or divergent regulatory roles compared with H2S in living organisms, especially mammals. In prokaryotes, even in bacteria, investigations into generation and physiology of RSS remain preliminary and an understanding of the relevant biological processes is still in its infancy. Despite this, recent and exciting advances in the fields are many. Here, we discuss abiotic and biotic generation of H2S/RSS, sulfur-transforming enzymes and their functioning mechanisms, and their physiological roles as well as the sensing and regulation of H2S/RSS.
Long telomeres at baseline and male sex are main determinants of telomere loss following chemotherapy exposure in lymphoma patients

Although chemotherapy (CHT) exposure is an established cause of telomere attrition, determinants of telomere length (TL) dynamics after chemotherapy are poorly defined. In this study, we analyzed granulocyte telomere dynamics in 34 adult lymphoma patients undergoing first‐line CHT. TL was measured by southern blot at each CHT cycle and after 1 year from CHT completion. Median age was 59 yrs (range 22–77). Median number of CHT cycles was 6 (range 3–6). The majority of patients (79%, n = 27) experienced TL shortening following CHT exposure. Mean telomere loss was 673 base pairs (bp) by cycle 6. Telomere shortening was an early event as 87% of the total telomere loss (mean 586 bp) occurred by the end of cycle 3, with no significant recovery after 1 year. A significant correlation was observed between baseline TL and total or fractional telomere loss (p < 0.001), with telomere shortening by cycle 3 observed predominantly in male patients with long telomeres at pre‐treatment evaluation. Stratifying the analysis by gender and age only young women (<51 years of age) did not show significant telomere shortening following chemotherapy exposure. These findings indicate that gender and baseline TL are major determinants of TL dynamics following chemotherapy exposure in lymphoma patients.
Purlin: A Versatile Toolkit for the Generation and Simulation of On-Chip Networks

Modern heterogeneous multi-processor system-on-chips (SoCs) have diverse needs of area, performance, and scalability for on-chip networks (OCNs). And it remains a challenge to design, evaluate, and explore a suitable OCN for a specific SoC to meet different requirements. Some open-source OCN generators have been developed to generate synthesizable RTL codes, provide fast testing, and enable design space exploration. However, none of them provides the levels of abstraction to trade off the various needs.In this paper, we propose Purlin, a versatile toolkit for the generation and simulation of OCNs. We put forward a uniform network generation and simulation flow across distributed routing, source routing, and circuit-switched OCNs to enable effective trade-offs. Purlin enables network customization through the network basic, flow control, and routing function interfaces and provides some predefined architectures. Among the architectures, the latency-optimized distributed routing OCN reduces 79.3% latency compared to a state-of-the-art OCN generator. With the routing function customization interface, we implement a deadlock-free adaptive routing function in the library, which reduces 16.1% latency. We provide compilation tools with customizable routing algorithms to generate the packet headers in source-routing or the configurations in circuit-switched OCNs from a programmed destination address. A source routing OCN using a customized routing algorithm further reduces 8.4% latency compared to a distributed routing OCN.
Skip-MemGANs: An Ensemble Generative Adversarial Network Based on Skip Connection and Memory Module for Wafer Defect Detection

To realize the automatic detection of wafer surface defects, we propose Skip-MemGANs unsupervised detection network, which is an ensemble generative adversarial network that automatically detects defects by the difference between the target image and the reconstructed image.The network is composed of three generators and three discriminators. Each generator uses encoder-decoder convolutional neural network with two layers of skip connection and memory module to capture multi-scale input image features. These generators are randomly paired with discriminators, and receive feedback from the three discriminators, while the discriminators receive reconstructed samples from the three generators.Compared with a single GAN, the ensemble GAN can better simulate the distribution of normal data in the high-dimensional image space.We evaluate the single GAN model, GAN ensemble model and other basic models. The results show that our proposed Skip-MemGANs network outperforms other models in wafer defect detection task, the AUC value reached 0.956.
On the Security of Python Virtual Machines: An Empirical Study

Python continues to be one of the most popular programming languages and has been used in many safety-critical fields such as medical treatment, autonomous driving systems, and data science. These fields put forward higher security requirements to Python ecosystems. However, existing studies on machine learning systems in Python concentrate on data security, model security and model privacy, and just assume the underlying Python virtual machines (PVMs) are secure and trustworthy. Unfortunately, whether such an assumption really holds is still unknown.This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first and most comprehensive empirical study on the security of CPython, the official and most deployed Python virtual machine. To this end, we first designed and implemented a software prototype dubbed PVMSCAN, then use it to scan the source code of the latest CPython (version 3.10) and other 10 versions (3.0 to 3.9), which consists of 3,838,606 lines of source code. Empirical results give relevant findings and insights towards the security of Python virtual machines, such as: 1) CPython virtual machines are still vulnerable, for example, PVMSCAN detected 239 vulnerabilities in version 3.10, including 55 null dereferences, 86 uninitialized variables and 98 dead stores; Python/C API-related vulnerabilities are very common and have become one of the most severe threats to the security of PVMs: for example, 70 Python/C API-related vulnerabilities are identified in CPython 3.10; 3) the overall quality of the code remained stable during the evolution of Python VMs with vulnerabilities per thousand line (VPTL) to be 0.50; and 4) automatic vulnerability rectification is effective: 166 out of 239 (69.46%) vulnerabilities can be rectified by a simple yet effective syntax-directed heuristics.We have reported our empirical results to the developers of CPython, and they have acknowledged us and already confirmed and fixed 2 bugs (as of this writing) while others are still being analyzed. This study not only demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, but also highlights the need to improve the reliability of infrastructures like Python virtual machines by leveraging state-of-the-art security techniques and tools.
Atmospheric electric fields during the Carrington flare

Karen Aplin and Giles Harrison examine international records of the 1859 Carrington flare and consider what they mean for our understanding of space weather today. Space weather is increasingly recognized as a hazard to modern societies, and one way to assess the extent of its possible impact is through analysis of historic space weather events. One such event was the massive solar storm of late August and early September 1859. This is now widely known as the “Carrington flare” or “Carrington event” after the visual solar emissions on 1 September first reported by the Victorian astronomer Richard Carrington from his observatory in Redhill, Surrey (Carrington 1859). The related aurorae and subsequent effects on telegraph networks are well documented (e.g. Clark 2007, Boteler 2006), but use of modern techniques, such as analysis of nitrates produced by solar protons in ice cores to retrospectively assess the nature of the solar flare, has proved problematic (Wolff et al. 2012). This means that there is still very little quantitative information about the flare beyond magnetic observations (e.g. Viljanen et al. 2014).
Shallow‐water ambient noise from snapping shrimp and dolphins

Snapping shrimp are among the major sources of biological noise in shallow bays, harbors, and inlets, in temperate and tropical waters. Snapping shrimp sounds can severely limit the use of underwater acoustics since their snaps are very broadband with energy from several hundred Hertz to 200 kHz. Snapping shrimp noise is always present having little diurnal and seasonal variations. Peak‐to‐peak source levels can be as high as 189 dB re:1 μPa. Dolphin emissions are another common source of biological noise. Dolphin sound emissions can be categorized as whistles, burst pulses, and echolocation clicks. Whistles usually contain energy in the 5–20‐kHz range, although higher‐order harmonics can extend beyond 100 kHz. Burst pulse signals and echolocation clicks are broadband, short duration signals with frequency components beyond 150 kHz. Peak‐to‐peak source levels of echolocation signals can be as high as 220–225 dB re:1 μPa. Burst pulses are similar in shape to echolocation clicks but with about 6–10‐dB lower.