Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Production and Perception of Speech Intonation in Pediatric Cochlear Implant Recipients and Individuals with Normal Hearing

Objectives: Current cochlear implant (CI) devices are limited in providing voice pitch information that is critical for listeners' recognition of prosodic contrasts of speech (e.g., intonation and lexical tones). As a result, mastery of the production and perception of such speech contrasts can be very challenging for prelingually deafened individuals who received a CI in their childhood (i.e., pediatric CI recipients). The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) pediatric CI recipients' mastery of the production and perception of speech intonation contrasts, in comparison with their age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH), and (b) the relationships between intonation production and perception in CI and NH individuals. Design: Twenty-six pediatric CI recipients aged from 7.44 to 20.74 yrs and 17 age-matched individuals with NH participated. All CI users were prelingually deafened, and each of them received a CI between 1.48 and 6.34 yrs of age. Each participant performed an intonation production task and an intonation perception task. In the production task, 10 questions and 10 statements that were syntactically matched (e.g., “The girl is on the playground.” versus “The girl is on the playground? ”) were elicited from each participant using interactive discourse involving pictures. These utterances were judged by a panel of eight adult listeners with NH in terms of utterance type accuracy (question versus statement) and contour appropriateness (on a five-point scale). In the perception task, each participant identified the speech intonation contrasts of natural utterances in a two-alternative forced-choice task. Results: The results from the production task indicated that CI participants' scores for both utterance type accuracy and contour appropriateness were significantly lower than the scores of NH participants (both p < 0.001). The results from the perception task indicated that CI participants' identification accuracy was significantly lower than that of their NH peers (CI, 70.13% versus NH, 97.11%, p < 0.001). The Pearson correlation coefficients (r) between CI participants' performance levels in the production and perception tasks were approximately 0.65 (p = 0.001). Conclusion: As a group, pediatric CI recipients do not show mastery of speech intonation in their production or perception to the same extent as their NH peers. Pediatric CI recipients' performance levels in the production and perception of speech intonation contrasts are moderately correlated. Intersubject variability exists in pediatric CI recipients' mastery levels in the production and perception of speech intonation contrasts. These findings suggest the importance of addressing both aspects (production and perception) of speech intonation in the aural rehabilitation and speech intervention programs for prelingually deafened children and young adults who use a CI.
Velocity and the Variability of Money Growth: Evidence from Granger-Causality Tests: A Note

Economists and policy makers were caught off guard by the behavior of the income velocity of money in 1982. The velocity of M1, which had grown at a 3.3 percent average annual rate from 1970-1981, feZl by 4.4 percent in 1982. In the fourth quarter of 1982, the decline was 12.6 percent at an annual rate. The 1982 decline in velocity significantly reduced nominal GNP growth and may have helped cause the fall in real GNP. The 1982 episode has generated quite a bit of controversy. The decline in velocity is important not only for its possible relation to real GNP, but also because it has led some economists to seriously question monetarism. Monetarists believe that there is a predictable link between money growth and nominal GNP growth. When velocity declined in 1982, that link appeared to have weakened, seemingly undermining the monetarist beliefs. In fact, Robert Gordon (1983) has called the 1982 episode "the velocity recession and the demise of monetarism. " Milton Friedman (1984) has stated that the decline in velocity does not undermine monetarism at all. He believes that velocity fell because of the extreme volatility of money growth following the announced change in Federal Reserve operating procedures in October, 1979. Figure 1 shows the income velocity of M1 (V) and the standard deviation of current and seven lags of M1 growth (S). A large increase in the volatility of money growth in 1980 precedes the decline in velocity in 1982. Based on this, Friedman states that the 1982 episode strengthens, not weakens, the case for the monetarist proposition of a constant growth rule of the money supply. This paper uses the Granger-causality method to test Friedman's hypothesis that the volatility of money growth causes velocity to change. We conclude that Friedman is correct, i.e., the volatility of money, measured by the standard deviation of money growth, causes velocity in the Granger sense. In the next section we review some of the recent explanations offered by economists for the 1982 decline in velocity. The concluding section presents our results of the Granger tests of Friedman's hypothesis.
United States Human Rights Policy and Foreign Assistance

This study furthers the inquiry into the relationship between human rights and U.S. bilateral foreign aid. We build the most comprehensive data set to date, extending the time period (1976–1995) and enlarging the number of countries under review (140). Rhetoric aside, human rights considerations did play a role in determining whether or not a state received military aid during the Reagan and Bush administrations, but not for the Carter or Clinton administration. With the exception of the Clinton administration, human rights was a determinant factor in the decision to grant economic aid, albeit of secondary importance. To the question “Does a state's human rights record affect the amount of U.S. bilateral aid it receives? ” we answer yes for economic aid, but no for military aid. Human rights considerations are neither the only nor the primary consideration in aid allocation.
Endoscopic Spine Surgery

Surgical treatment of the degenerative disc disease has evolved from traditional open spine surgery to minimally invasive spine surgery including endoscopic spine surgery. Constant improvement in the imaging modality especially with introduction of the magnetic resonance imaging, it is possible to identify culprit degenerated disc segment and again with the discography it is possible to diagnose the pain generator and pathological degenerated disc very precisely and its treatment with minimally invasive approach. With improvements in the optics, high resolution camera, light source, high speed burr, irrigation pump etc, minimally invasive spine surgeries can be performed with various endoscopic techniques for lumbar, cervical and thoracic regions. Advantages of endoscopic spine surgeries are less tissue dissection and muscle trauma, reduced blood loss, less damage to the epidural blood supply and consequent epidural fibrosis and scarring, reduced hospital stay, early functional recovery and improvement in the quality of life & better cosmesis. With precise indication, proper diagnosis and good training, the endoscopic spine surgery can give equally good result as open spine surgery. Initially, endoscopic technique was restricted to the lumbar region but now it also can be used for cervical and thoracic disc herniations. Previously endoscopy was used for disc herniations which were contained without migration but now days it is used for highly up and down migrated disc herniations as well. Use of endoscopic technique in lumbar region was restricted to disc herniations but gradually it is also used for spinal canal stenosis and endoscopic assisted fusion surgeries. Endoscopic spine surgery can play important role in the treatment of adolescent disc herniations especially for the persons who engage in the competitive sports and the athletes where less tissue trauma, cosmesis and early functional recovery is desirable. From simple chemonucleolysis to current day endoscopic procedures the history of minimally invasive spine surgery is interesting. Appropriate indications, clear imaging prior to surgery and preplanning are keys to successful outcome. In this article basic procedures of percutaneous endoscopic lumbar discectomy through transforaminal and interlaminar routes, percutaneous endoscopic cervical discectomy, percutaneous endoscopic posterior cervical foraminotomy and percutaneous endoscopic thoracic discectomy are discussed.
Soil carbon storage in the root zone of a perennial grass pasture

Carbon sequestration in soils is an issue of international significance, as soils represent a large carbon pool and can be a major sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide. In southern Australia, soil carbon under agricultural land uses has received attention, particularly in relation to the potential for perennial plants to sequester carbon. Although considerable attention has been applied to carbon sequestration associated with reforestation, there has been less work associated with perennial pastures. It can be argued that farmers are more likely to change pasture than undertake reforestation, thus if carbon mitigation via the land sector is to occur over large areas, the dynamics of carbon under perennial pastures needs assessment. Standard soil testing for carbon stocks extends to a depth of 0.3 m whereas perennial pastures have the potential to grow roots much deeper than this, and potentially can have impacts on soil carbon storage to the full depth of the root zone. In this research we measured soil carbon to a depth of 4.0 m under a replicated trial on a deep sandy soil including plots of Gatton panic (Megathyrsus maximus) and plots of a barley/lupin rotation, five years after commencement of the trial. Soil water measurements suggested a maximum rooting depth for the pasture of 3.5 m, and 1.5 m for the annual crops. Despite differences in root depth, there were no significant differences in soil carbon between the two land uses. However, total soil carbon storage was considerably higher (44 t C/ha) when measured to a depth of 4 m compared with the standard 0.3 m depth (23 t C/ha).
Voxel-Based LIDAR Analysis and Applications

One of the greatest recent changes in the field of remote sensing is the addition of high-quality Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) instruments. In particular, the past few decades have been greatly beneficial to these systems because of increases in data collection speed and accuracy, as well as a reduction in the costs of components. These improvements allow modern airborne instruments to resolve sub-meter details, making them ideal for a wide variety of applications. Because LIDAR uses active illumination to capture 3D information, its output is fundamentally different from other modalities. Despite this difference, LIDAR datasets are often processed using methods appropriate for 2D images and that do not take advantage of its primary virtue of 3-dimensional data. It is this problem we explore by using volumetric voxel modeling. Voxel-based analysis has been used in many applications, especially medical imaging, but rarely in traditional remote sensing. In part this is because the memory requirements are substantial when handling large areas, but with modern computing and storage this is no longer a significant impediment. Our reason for using voxels to model scenes from LIDAR data is that there are several advantages over standard triangle-based models, including better handling of overlapping surfaces and complex shapes. We show how incorporating system position information from early in the LIDAR point cloud generation process allows radiometrically-correct transmission and other novel voxel properties to be recovered. This voxelization technique is validated on simulated data using the Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Image Generation (DIRSIG) software, a first-principles based ray-tracer developed at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Phylogenetic classification of the world ' s tropical forests Slik

Slik, J.W.F. ; Franklin, J.; Arroyo-Rodríguez, V. ; Field, R. ; Aguilar, S. ; Aguirre, N. ; Ahumada, J.; Aiba, S. -I. ; Alves, L.F. ; Anitha, K. ; Avella, A. ; Mora, F. ; Aymard C. , G.A. ; Báez, S. ; Balvanera, P.; Bastian, M.L. ; Bastin, J.-F. ; Bellingham, P.J.; van den Berg, E. ; da Conceição Bispo, P.; Boeckx, P.; Boehning-Gaese, K. ; Bongers, F. ; Boyle, B. ; Brambach, F. ; Brearley, F.Q. ; Brown, S. ; Chai, S. -L. ; Chazdon, R.L. ; Chen, S. ; Chhang, P.; Chuyong, G. ; Ewango, C. ; Coronado, I.M. ; Cristóbal-Azkarate, J.; Culmsee, H. ; Damas, K. ; Dattaraja, H.S. ; Davidar, P.; DeWalt, S.J.; Din, H. ; Drake, D.R. ; Duque, A. ; Durigan, G. ; Eichhorn, K. ; Schmidt Eler, E. ; Enoki, T. ; Ensslin, A. ; Fandohan, A.B. ; Farwig, N. ; Feeley, K.J.; Fischer, M. ; Forshed, O. ; Souza Garcia, Q. ; Garkoti, S.C. ; Gillespie, T.W. ; Gillet, J.-F. ; Gonmadje, C. ; Granzow-de la Cerda, I. ; Griffith, D.M. ; Grogan, J.; Hakeem, K.R. ; Harris, D.J.; Harrison, R.D. ; Hector, A. ; Hemp, A. ; Homeier, J.; Hussain, M.S.; Ibarra-Manríquez, G. ; Hanum, I.F. ; Imai, N. ; Jansen, P.A. ; Joly, C.A. ; Joseph, S. ; Kartawinata, K. ; Kearsley, E. ; Kelly, D.L. ; Kessler, M. ; Killeen, T.J.; Kooyman, R.M. ; Laumonier, Y. ; Laurance, S.G. ; Laurance, W.F. ; Lawes, M.J.; Letcher, S.G. ; Lindsell, J.; Lovett, J.; Lozada, J.; Lu, X. ; Lykke, A.M.; Bin Mahmud, K. ; Mahayani, N.P.D. ; Mansor, A. ; Marshall, A.R. ; Martin, E.H. ; Calderado Leal Matos, D. ; Meave, J.A. ; Melo, F.P.L. ; Aguirre Mendoza, Z.H. ; Metali, F. ; Medjibe, V.P.; Metzger, J.P.; Metzker, T. ; Mohandass, D. ; Munguía-Rosas, M.A.; Muñoz, R. ; Nurtjahya, E. ; Lenza de Oliveira, E. ; Onrizal; Parolin, P.; Parren, M. ; Parthasarathy, N. ; Paudel, E. ; Perez, R. ; Pérez-García, E.A. ; Pommer, U. ; Poorter, L. ; Qie, L. ; Piedade, M.T. F. ; Rodrigues Pinto, J.R. ; Dalberg Poulsen, A. ; Poulsen, J.R. ; Powers, J.S. ; Prasad, R.C. ; Puyravaud, J.-P.; Rangel, O. ; Reitsma, J.; Rocha, D.S. B. ; Rolim, S. ; Rovero, F. ; Rozak, A. ; Ruokolainen, K. ; Rutishauser, E. ; Rutten, G. ; Said, M.N. M. ; Saiter, F.Z. ; Saner, P.; Santos, B. ; dos Santos, J.R. ; Sarker, S.K. ; Schmitt, C.B. ; Schoengart, J.; Schulze, M. ; Sheil, D. ; Sist, P.; Souza, A.F. ; Spironello, W.R. ; Sposito, T. ; Steinmetz, R. ; Stevart, T. ; Seiji Suganuma, M. ; Sukri, R. ; Sultana, A. ; Sukumar, R. ; Sunderland, T. ; Supriyadi; Suresh, H.S. ; Suzuki, E. ; Tabarelli, M. ; Tang, J.; Tanner, E.V. J.; Targhetta, N. ; Theilade, I. ; Thomas, D. ; Timberlake, J.; de Morisson Valeriano, M. ; van Valkenburg, J.; Van Do, T. ; Van Sam, H. ; Vandermeer, J.H. ; Verbeeck, H. ; Vetaas, O.R. ; Adekunle, V. ; Vieira, S.A. ; Webb, C.O. ; Webb, E.L. ; Whitfeld, T. ; Wich, S. ; Williams, J.; Wiser, S. ; Wittmann, F. ; Yang, X. ; Adou Yao, C.Y. ; Yap, S.L. ; Zahawi, R.A. ; Zakaria, R. ; Zang, R.
Combination of The MADM Yager Model and k-NN to Group Single Tuition Payments

Tuition payments at State Universities (PTN) in Indonesian use a Single Tuition Fee (UKT) payment system. It has been implemented to make it easier for students to pay their tuition. The UKT system is divided into several groups starting from the UKT group I to VIII. Universitas Sembilanbelas November (USN) Kolaka is a state university and the university should determine the amount of tuition fees for each student according to the UKT system. In determining the UKT group for each student, several variables were used to make it easier to group student into their UKT groups. However, the large number of students, a number of variables and the limited time to determine the amount of UKT for each student become an issue, so a method was needed to help USN Kolaka in grouping UKT for each student. One thing that can be done was to use the MADM Yager model and k-NN in order to make it easier to group UKT students. The results of the study showed that the use of the MADM Yager model and k-NN
Efficient join processing over uncertain data

In many applications data values are inherently uncertain. This includes moving-objects, sensors and biological databases. There has been recent interest in the development of database management systems that can handle uncertain data. Some proposals for such systems include attribute values that are uncertain. In particular, an attribute value can be modeled as a range of possible values, associated with a probability density function. Previous efforts for this type of data have only addressed simple queries such as range and nearest-neighbor queries. Queries that join multiple relations have not been addressed in earlier work despite the significance of joins in databases. In this paper we address join queries over uncertain data. We propose a semantics for the join operation, define probabilistic operators over uncertain data, and propose join algorithms that provide efficient execution of probabilistic joins. The paper focuses on an important class of joins termed probabilistic threshold joins that avoid some of the semantic complexities of dealing with uncertain data. For this class of joins we develop three sets of optimization techniques: item-level, page-level, and index-level pruning. These techniques facilitate pruning with little space and time overhead, and are easily adapted to most join algorithms. We verify the performance of these techniques experimentally.
A review on cloud computing security issues & challanges

The new developments in the field of information technology offered the people enjoyment, comforts and convenience. Cloud computing is one of the latest developments in the IT industry also known as on-demand computing. It provides the full scalability, reliability, high performance and relatively low cost feasible solution as compared to dedicated infrastructures. It is the application provided in the form of service over the internet and system hardware in the data centers that gives these services. This technology has the capacity to admittance a common collection of resources on request. It is proving extremely striking to cash-strapped IT departments that are wanted to deliver better services under pressure. When this cloud is made available for the general customer on pay per use basis, then it is called public cloud. When customer develops their own applications and run their own internal infrastructure then is called private cloud. Integration and consolidation of public and private cloud is called hybrid cloud. But having many advantages for IT organizations cloud has some issues that must be consider during its deployment. The main concern is security privacy and trust. These issues are arises during the deployment of mostly public cloud because in public cloud infrastructure customer is not aware where the data store & how over the internet. In this paper security privacy & trust issues of cloud computing are reviewed. The paper includes some surveys conducted by IDC that show the motivation for the adoption of cloud computing. The paper identifies the issues and the solution to overcome these problems. The paper also contain the security model named security access control services SACS is analyzed through the Hadoop map reduce framework and the experimental results are obtained that compare the system performance with SACS model and without SACS model. Once the attack starts up, the performance which using security model is better than not using one. So the cloud computing with the proposed security model has the more stable performance when facing the attack threat, especially a variety of stacks at the same time.
Mechanosensitive Gq/11 Protein–Coupled Receptors Mediate Myogenic Vasoconstriction

Myogenic vasoconstriction (Bayliss effect) is mediated by vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) of small resistance arteries sensing mechanical forces. During the last three decades, several proteins have been proposed as VSMC mechanosensors. Our previous studies highlighted agonist‐independent mechanical activation of Gq/11 protein‐coupled receptors (Gq/11PCRs) in VSMCs of resistance arteries. In particular, angiotensin II AT1 receptors (AT1Rs) emerged as mechanosensors mediating myogenic tone. Moreover, we found that the AT1B receptor isoform was more mechanosensitive than the AT1A receptor. Interestingly, cysteinyl leukotriene 1 receptors (CysLT1Rs) were up‐regulated in AT1R‐deficient arteries as an essential backup strategy to compensate for the loss of vasoconstrictor receptors. Up‐regulation of CysLT1Rs resulted in increased myogenic tone at low intraluminal pressures resulting in hyperactivity of AT1R‐deficient arteries. Only at high intraluminal pressures myogenic tone was reduced, thus reflecting the loss of AT1Rs. Further, CysLT1Rs were involved in myogenic vasoconstriction of wild‐type arteries. Simultaneous blockade of AT1Rs and CysLT1Rs in wild‐type arteries caused reduction in myogenic tone of more than 60% comparable to the application of the selective Gq/11‐protein inhibitor YM‐254890. Our findings suggest that AT1Rs and CysLT1Rs are crucial mechanosensors in resistance arteries mediating 60% of myogenic vasoconstriction via the Gq/11‐protein pathway without involvement of endogenous agonists.
Exploiting NoSQL Graph Databases and in Memory Architectures for Extracting Graph Structural Data Summaries

NoSQL graph databases have been introduced in recent years for dealing with large collections of graph-based data. Scientific data and social networks are among the best examples of the dramatic increase of the use of such structures. NoSQL repositories allow the management of large amounts of data in order to store and query them. Such data are not structured with a predefined schema as relational databases could be. They are rather composed by nodes and relationships of a certain type. For instance, a node can represent a Person and a relationship Friendship. Retrieving the structure of the graph database is thus of great help to users, for example when they must know how to query the data or to identify relevant data sources for recommender systems. For this reason, this paper introduces methods to retrieve structural summaries. Such structural summaries are extracted at different levels of information from the NoSQL graph database. The expression of the mining queries is facilitated by the use of two frame-works: Fuzzy4S allowing to define fuzzy operators and operations with Scala; Cypherf allowing the use of fuzzy operators and operations in the declarative queries over NoSQL graph databases. We show that extracting such summaries can be impossible with the NoSQL query engines because of the data volume and the complexity of the task of automatic knowledge extraction. A novel method based on in memory architectures is thus introduced. This paper provides the definitions of the summaries with the methods to automatically extract them from NoSQL graph databases only and with the help of in-memory architectures. The benefit of our proposition is demonstrated by experimental results.
Hemispheric specialization: Return to a house divided

Call it the "Martian test" of RH cognition. Suppose a Martian materialized in my lab and allowed me to interrogate him using only those experimental paradigms that are available to me in studying the disconnected RH. Suppose, further, that his responses were indistinguishable from those of an "average" RH. What would I conclude about his intelligence? I think I would be overwhelmed by his humanness and impressed by the familiar scope of his cognition and values, his sense of past and future. I say the human RH is human, and even those most skeptical of RH capacities admit that it is potentially human (viz. following massive LBD), in ways that no ape can ever be. Still, there is an unfamiliar element in the precise operation of the RH, and this suggests that it is that part of myself that I least understand.