Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Practical issues in the use of a frequency‐domain delay estimator for microphone‐array applications

A frequency‐domain delay estimator has been used as the basis of a microphone‐array talker location and beamforming system [M. S. Brandstein and H. F. Silverman, Techn. Rep. LEMS‐116 (1993)]. While the estimator has advantages over previously employed correlation‐based delay estimation methods [H. F. Silverman and S. E. Kirtman, Comput. Speech Lang. 6, 129–152 (1990)], including a shorter analysis window and greater accuracy at lower computational cost, it has the disadvantage that since delays between microphone pairs are estimated independently of one another, there is nothing to ensure that a set of estimated delays corresponds to a single location. This not only introduces errors in talker location but degrades the performance of the beamformer. A method for delay estimation and talker location with a microphone array is described that preserves the low computational complexity and rapid tracking ability of the frequency‐domain delay estimator, while improving the coherence and stability of the estimated delays and derived source locations. Experimental results using data from a real 16‐element array are presented to demonstrate the performance of the algorithms. [Early work principally funded by DARPA/NSF Grant IRI‐8901882, and current work by NSF Grant No. 9314625. ]
Payoffs from Panels in Low-Income Countries: Economic Development and Economic Mobility

Economic development is a dynamic process with a time scale of more than a few years. The scarcity of household-survey data covering long periods of time has meant that most empirical evidence on hypotheses about growth and development has come from cross-country aggregate time-series data. One important limitation of such data is that they cannot provide information on economic mobility. Thus, little is known about which households and individuals are the beneficiaries of economic growth or about the degree of persistence of poverty over sustained time periods or generations as development proceeds. Disaggregated, within-country panels covering different time dimensions have been used to shed light on a number of important development topics that go beyond what can be learned from the cross-country database, carefully planned social experiments, or intensive areaspecific fieldwork, including the differentiated effects on households of macroeconomic shocks (Paul Glewwe and Gillette Hall, 1998; Elizabeth Frankenberg et al., 2003), the effects of longer-term processes such as population growth and technological change on forestation (Andrew D. Foster and Rosenzweig, 2003), and the consequences of institutional change, such as local democratization (Foster and Rosenzweig, 2002b). However, household-level panel surveys that cover time periods of a decade or more and thus have the potential for studying economic mobility are not only scarce but have design limitations that may bar unbiased inferences about economic mobility. For example, the Indian Village Level Studies of the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), which followed households in six villages starting in 1975 for ten years (Thomas Walker and James Ryan, 1984), dropped the 14 percent of households that divided. Similarly, the 1982 Rural Economic Development Survey (REDS) of Indian households (Prem S. Vashishtha, 1989) excluded the one-third of 1971 baseline households that had split by 1982. Indeed, the design of the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Surveys (LSMS) includes in the panel component of each survey only those members of sampled residences who do not leave (Glewwe and M. Grosh, 1999). Although there is evidence suggesting that panel-survey rules that condition on residence provide nonrandom subsamples of the baseline households (Duncan Thomas et al., 2001; Foster and Rosenzweig, 2002a), little is known about how these selection rules affect inferences about economic mobility or poverty persistence. In this article I use data from a new 18-year panel survey from Bangladesh to assess whether and how residence-based sampling rules affect estimates of economic mobility in the presence of nonrandom household division. The results suggest that the biases are substantial.
Nonparametric tests of treatment effect based on combined endpoints for mortality and recurrent events.

Terminal events are commonly combined with other outcomes to improve the power for detecting treatment effects in clinical studies. This manuscript explores novel ways to combine information on terminal and recurrent events in constructing two-sample tests. Existing approaches follow either a time-to-first event analysis approach or a recurrent event modeling approach. Nonparametric recurrent event analyses are often restricted by independence assumptions on gap times between events. Although time-to-first event analyses are not subject to this restriction, they discard information that occurs beyond the initial event and are much less powerful for detecting treatment differences. We develop two new approaches for determining treatment effects, motivated by less restrictive assumptions of time-to-first event analyses that combine information from multiple follow-up intervals. The first testing procedure pools (correlated) short-term τ -restricted outcomes from prespecified intervals starting at times t(k), k = 1, . , b, and compares estimated τ -restricted mean survival across treatment groups from this combined dataset. The second procedure calculates conditional τ-restricted means from those at risk at times t(k), k = 1, . , b, and compares the area under a function of these by treatment. Variances calculations, taking into account correlation of short-term outcomes within individuals, linearize random components of the test statistics following Woodruff (1971. A simple method for approximating the variance of a complicated estimate. Journal of the American Statistical Association 66, 411-414) and more recently Williams (1995. Product-limit survival functions with correlated survival times. Lifetime Data Analysis 1, 171-186). Simulations compare the finite sample performance of our tests to the robust proportional rates model proposed by Lin and others (2000. Semiparametric regression for the mean and rate functions of recurrent events. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) 62(4), 711-730) and the Ghosh and Lin (2000. Non-parametric analysis of recurrent events and death. Biometrics 56(2), 554-562) combined test for recurrent events and death. For different treatment effect patterns the proposed methods perform favorably when compared with existing methods. These new analysis approaches also produce correct type I error rates with correlated gap times between events. New methods are applied to data from a trial of azithromycin in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Chromium(VI) Reducing Native Microorganisms for Remediation of Chromium Eco-toxicity in Environment of Bangladesh

Feeds and fertilizer production from tanned skin-cut wastes is the most direct phenomenon of chromium eco-toxicity leading to food chain contamination in Bangladesh. Tanning industries of Hazaribagh at Dhaka process some 220 t of hide per day with release of 600-1000 Kg tanned skin-cut waste (SCW) per ton processed hide. The SCW is protein-rich and unscientifically used to produce poultry and fish feeds, and organic fertilizer. A huge migration of chromium can happen into poultry products, fish and vegetables, and further bio-magnify into food chain. The target population is also huge. It is reported that feed ingredients produced from SCW contained chromium at levels as high as 2.49%. As Cr(VI) is the most toxic species of chromium, reduction of Cr(VI) to Cr(III) prior to be used as feed ingredients and fertilizers can ensure safer input of chromium in toxicological point of view. Samples have been collected to isolate microorganisms from effluent sites of Hazaribagh tanning area using Lauria-Bertani medium with added Cr(VI) as K 2 Cr 2 O 7 . The successful as well as apparently differing colonies (isolates IF-10 to IF-12, IF-16, and IF-19 to IF-23) have been studied for growth characterization under differing Cr(VI) concentrations up to 1500 mg/L. Cultural and biochemical tests of the isolates have narrowed the range into 3 strains. These strains have been identified by 16s rRNA gene sequence analysis. The isolates are found to be Escherichia sp. (Isolate IF-10 to IF-12, Strain IFR-I), Staphylococcus aureus (Isolate IF-16, Strain IFR-II), and Pediococcus pentosaceus (Isolate IF-19 to IF-23, Strain IFRIII). The organisms have been studied for Cr (VI) reduction-ability in growth dependent manner which are found successful up to 82.88 % for Staphylococcus aureus , and 100 % for Escherichia sp . and Pediococcus pentosaceus within 24 h. Key words: Bacteriology, Enzymatic reduction, Bioremediation, Chromium eco-toxicity Â doi: 10.3329/bjsir.v43i4. 2236 Bangladesh J. Sci. Ind. Res. 43(4) , 455-466, 2008
Psychopathological Correlates of Lifetime Anxiety Comorbidity in Bipolar I Patients: Findings from a French National Cohort

Background: Despite numerous studies on the comorbidity of bipolar and anxiety disorders, there is no satisfactory psychopathological model for their overlap. Method: 1,090 hospitalized patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for a manic episode of bipolar I disorder were subtyped according to the presence or not of lifetime anxiety comorbidity and assessed for demographic, illness course, clinical, associated condition, temperament, and treatment characteristics. Results: Lifetime anxiety comorbidity, defined as presence of at least one anxiety disorder in lifetime, was found in 27.2% (n = 297) of the sample. Compared to patients without such a comorbidity (n = 793), those who had it experienced a higher number of mood episodes and suicide attempts in the previous year, more stressors, organic disorders and less free intervals; furthermore, they showed more temperaments with depressive features and complex treatment. At study entry, they also experienced manic episodes with higher levels of depression, psychosis and hostility. The following independent variables were associated with lifetime anxiety comorbidity: higher scores on the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale, depressive temperament, irritable temperament, higher scores on the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms, episodes without free intervals and at least one stressor before the index episode. Conclusions: Factors associated with lifetime anxiety comorbidity in bipolar I patients may be integrated into a comprehensive diathesis-stress model emphasizing the role of irritable temperament as a source of mood instability and stress, and interacting with other temperamental characteristics to trigger the outbreak of both anxiety and bipolar symptoms.
Efficient and Deterministic Scheduling for Parallel State Machine Replication

Many services used in large scale web applications should be able to tolerate faults without impacting their performance. State machine replication is a well-known approach to implementing fault-tolerant services, providing high availability and strong consistency. To boost the performance of state machine replication, recent proposals have introduced parallel execution of commands. In parallel state machine replication, incoming commands may or may not depend on other commands that are waiting for execution. Although dependent commands must be processed in the same relative order at every replica to avoid inconsistencies, independent commands can be executed in parallel and benefit from multi-core architectures. Since many application workloads are mostly composed of independent commands, these parallel models promise high throughput without sacrificing strong consistency. The efficient execution of commands in such environments, however, requires effective scheduling strategies. Existing approaches rely on dependency tracking based on pairwise comparison between commands, which introduces scheduling contention. In this paper, we propose a new and highly efficient scheduler for parallel state machine replication. Our scheduler considers batches of commands, instead of commands individually. Moreover, each batch of commands is augmented with a compact data structure that encodes commands information needed to the dependency analysis. We show, by means of experimental evaluation, that our technique outperforms schedulers for parallel state machine replication by a fairly large margin.
Influence of Entrepreneurial Orientation on Kenya’s Manufacturing Firms Operating under East African Regional Integration

Entrepreneurial Orientation is a significant influencer of firm performance more so for manufacturing firms operating under globalization, internationalization and regional integration regimes. Regionalization is the coming together by nations as a means of attaining socio-economic and political goals by nations, which cannot be achieved in isolation. Regionalization results in expanded markets, characterized by increased number of competition, and increased market size. This therefore, exerts greater pressure on manufacturing firms to regionalize; this is a challenge to firms accustomed to operating under a domestic market set-up. To overcome the challenges associated with regionalization, eminent scholars in other parts of the world have recommended, that, manufacturing firms adopt Entrepreneurial Orientation as a solution to the challenges brought about by regionalization. It is on this basis that the study sought to determine the influence of entrepreneurial orientation on the performance of manufacturing firms in Kenya operating under the East African Community regional integration. The study findings revealed that performance of Kenya’s manufacturing firms operating under the East African Community regional integration, are significantly influenced by entrepreneurial orientation, in terms of Sales, Profits and Employment as measures of firm performance. The significance influence is more pronounced in terms of Sales for manufacturing firms which are integrated or operate within the regional integration. The study concluded that Kenya’s manufacturing firms intent on enhancing their performance urgently need to adopt entrepreneurial orientation and recommends that further study be undertaken in other areas besides entrepreneurial orientation as an influencer of manufacturing firm performance. Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Orientation, Competitiveness, Firm Performance, Regional Integration.
A Collective Action Perspective on a Healthcare Service Platform Development Project

The population of elderly people and their need for wellbeing and healthcare services is rapidly growing. At the same time, the supply for these services is not increasing at the same pace due to increasing costs and shortage of trained personnel. Therefore, many organizations are developing modern wellbeing ICT-enabled devices to assist the elderly people to live at their homes independently as long as possible and enabling the care providers to work more effectively. However, isolated attempts have led to emergence of countless devices and services with proprietary service platforms which have made this domain more complex. While collective action between actors for developing common service platforms may solve the complexity and foster adoption of these services, the challenges of cooperation hinder many actors from joint attempts. In this paper, we study how and why inter-organizational cooperation emerges in the home-care domain. Specifically, we study the impact of heterogeneity of interests and resources on the likelihood of collective action among participants in the healthcare domain. We do so by conducting a single case study on a unique collaborative elderlycare platform development project in Finland. The case was critical as it had all the required conditions (i.e. collective action for a common platform development project in the healthcare domain) to test our propositions. The results present the importance of resource heterogeneity for the emergence of collective action, especially in a business ecosystem of small companies with limited capitals and technical resources. We also found that heterogeneity of interests is not really problematic when the project is in the development phase (R&D) and especially in the presence of selective incentives that motivate participation of companies.
Contextual information influences diagnosis accuracy and decision making in simulated emergency medicine emergencies

Background It is well documented that adaptations in cognitive processes with increasing skill levels support decision making in multiple domains. We examined skill-based differences in cognitive processes in emergency medicine physicians, and whether performance was significantly influenced by the removal of contextual information related to a patient's medical history. Method Skilled (n=9) and less skilled (n=9) emergency medicine physicians responded to high-fidelity simulated scenarios under high- and low-context information conditions. Results Skilled physicians demonstrated higher diagnostic accuracy irrespective of condition, and were less affected by the removal of context-specific information compared with less skilled physicians. The skilled physicians generated more options, and selected better quality options during diagnostic reasoning compared with less skilled counterparts. These cognitive processes were active irrespective of the level of context-specific information presented, although high-context information enhanced understanding of the patients’ symptoms resulting in higher diagnostic accuracy. Conclusions Our findings have implications for scenario design and the manipulation of contextual information during simulation training.
Delayed Cord Clamping in Preterm Infants

During the 1960s and 1970s, there were multiple studies of the effects on the neonate of varying the time of umbilical cord clamping. Interest in this area of investigation lay dormant for ∼15 years, but in the past decade there has been renewed investigation of this topic, particularly in the preterm infant. In a recent article, Dr Saroj Saigal and I reviewed the history and implications of early and late umbilical cord clamping in both term and preterm infants,1 noting that definitions have varied widely over the years. More than a century ago, “early” was sometimes considered to be within 1 minute, whereas “late” may have been after 5 minutes. Currently, “early” is generally defined as “immediate,” which may take up to 15 seconds, and “late” as 45 to 60 seconds after delivery of the body, by which time the majority of available blood in the placenta will have been transferred to the infant in the form of a “placental transfusion. ” In our article we suggested that lack of interest in the timing of umbilical cord clamping in preterm infants might have been a result of the introduction of surfactant as therapy for respiratory distress syndrome (RDS). 1 A recent Cochrane review also evaluated the effects of different times of umbilical cord clamping in preterm infants.2 In an earlier era, the possibility that RDS (also … Address correspondence to Alistair G.S. Philip, MD, FRCPE, Department of Pediatrics, Division of Neonatal and Developmental Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, 750 Welch Rd, Palo Alto, CA 94304. E-mail: aphilip{at}stanford.edu
Essential Maps Exist From BU to coker J

We show that [BU, coker J] :$ 0 but that there are no infinite loop maps from BU to coker J. The proofs involve the Segal conjecture. It is known that [coker J, BU] = 0 [HS]. A conjecture dating from the early 70's is that [BU, coker J] = 0 also. This conjecture is attributed by some people to Sullivan. It seems quite reasonable since BU and coker J should have little to do with each other. The purpose of this note is to show that despite this intuition, [BU, coker J] $& 0. Indeed it is uncountable. However, there are no infinite loop maps from BU to coker J. So the conjecture is true on the level of infinite loop maps. Both these statements follow from the Segal conjecture, in particular from the compact Lie group version of the Segal conjecture proven by this author. We give a proof which does not use the main theorem in [F], the compact Lie group version; the full power of this generalization is not needed. Although this result is interesting in its own right, what is particularly striking is how inaccessible such a calculation seemed just a few years ago. The author wishes to thank Ib Madsen for bringing this conjecture to his attention and for his encouragement. Conversations with S. Priddy were also helpful. LEMMA 1. [BU, QoSO] is torsion free. Hence [BU, Im J] is torsion free. PROOF. The second statement follows from the first, since QoS? Im J x coker J [MM, p. 110]. We show that 7r? (BU) is detected on finite subgroups; the result follows by the Segal conjecture. [BU, QoSO] = 7r0BU, the reduced stable cohomotopy in dimension 0 of BU. Since BU equals limBU(n), there is a Milnor short exact sequence 0 -O lim' 7ri BU(n) -i7rBU -lim7r? BU(n) -1. 7r8 'BU(n) is compact for all n by the Atiyah-Hirzebruch spectral sequence for finite skeleta. Hence, 7r? BU lim 7r? BU(n). 7r? BU(n) is detected on finite subgroups of U(n) by Corollary 2.14 [F]. Since the stable cohomotopy in dimension 0 of a finite group is torsion free by the Segal conjecture for finite groups [C], it follows that 7r? BU is torsion free. LEMMA 2. [BU, Im J] = 0. Hence [BU, coker J] = [BU, QoS? ]. Received by the editors February 28, 1985. 1980 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 55N20; Secondary 55P42, 55Q55.
Investigation of 3G radio network topologies considering performance and exposure aspects

Abstract. Five different radio network topologies, in the following referred to as "scenario", have been analyzed with regard to their capability to cover a medium size city with 3G mobile services. T-Mobile launched this study to assess different radio network topologies in terms of exposure. Thus, the main focus is to examine if, for exposure reasons, a medium size city can be covered with outer-city located sites. The radio network topologies discussed in this paper can generally be divided into two categories: In category one, the sites are located in the city, and in the other, the sites are located outside of the built-up area. In both cases the number of sites per scenario varies, and additionally the antenna height and site distance to the built-up area vary for the second category. The investigations are performed with a ray optical propagation model based on 3-D building data and a dynamic 3G network simulator. A mix of four services and a realistic spatial traffic distribution based on land usage is assumed. The performance of the scenarios, assessed by the evaluation of coverage and capacity, is examined together with the exposure. It is shown that network topologies with sites located only outside the city are not an adequate solution due to capacity constraints and coverage problems with high data services. A promising network topology is a reduced set of inner-city sites with higher order sectorization.