Variation and change in the use of hesitation markers in Germanic languages

In this study, we investigate crosslinguistic patterns in the alternation between UM, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel followed by a final labial nasal, and UH, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel in an open syllable. Based on a quantitative analysis of a range of spoken and written corpora, we identify clear and consistent patterns of change in the use of these forms in various Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese) and dialects (American English, British English), with the use of UM increasing over time relative to the use of UH. We also find that this pattern of change is generally led by women and more educated speakers. Finally, we propose a series of possible explanations for this surprising change in hesitation marker usage that is currently taking place across Germanic languages

Wave attenuation in mangrove forests; field data obtained in Trang, Thailand

Mangroves thrive in sheltered intertidal areas in the tropics and sub-tropics. Due to this position at the interface between land and sea, mangroves play an important role in the attenuation of waves. Dissipation of wave energy in mangrove forests is an interesting feature from the viewpoint of coastal protection. Nevertheless, field data are sparse and modeling attempts reveal the need for additional data. This paper presents the results of an extensive field campaign, lasting 6 months, in mangroves along the Andaman coast of Trang Province in southern Thailand. Wave attenuation has been studied along two contrasting transects with different elevation and vegetation characteristics and different orientations towards the Andaman Sea. Along the Kantang transect, which is mostly exposed to swell waves, vegetation densities increased from 4.5 to 9.3 volume-‰ along the transect and on average 63% of the incident wave energy was attenuated over a distance of 246 m. Along the Palian transect, mostly exposed to sea waves instead, vegetation increased from 4.3 to 19 volume-‰ and 72% of the incident wave energy was attenuated over this 98 m transect. It was found that standardized wave attenuation correlates well with incident wave energy, when attenuation is analyzed per vegetation zone. Energy reduction rates of these zones, defined by the gradient of the correlations between the standardized wave attenuation and incident wave energy, are found to increase significantly with vegetation density. Consistently, wave reduction rates, expressing the gradient of the correlation between wave height reduction and incident wave heights, are found to be 0.001-0.014 for the study sites and also show a significant and increasing trend with vegetation densities

Growth forms and life-history strategies predict the occurrence of aquatic macrophytes in relation to environmental factors in a shallow peat lake complex

Aquatic ecosystems provide vital services, and macrophytes play a critical role in their functioning. Conceptual models indicate that in shallow lakes, plants with different growth strategies are expected to inhabit contrasting habitats. For shallow peat lakes, characterized by incohesive sediments, roles of growth forms, life-history strategies and environmental factors in determining the occurrence of aquatic vegetation remain unknown. In a field survey, we sampled 64 points in a peat lake complex and related macrophyte occurrence to growth forms (floating-leaved rooted and submerged), life-history strategies for overwintering (turions, seeds, rhizomes) and environmental factors (water depth, fetch, and porewater nutrients). Our survey showed that macrophyte occurrence relates to water depth, wind-fetch, and nutrients, and depends on growth form and life-history strategies. Specifically, rooted floating-leaved macrophytes occur at lower wind-fetch/shallower waters. Submerged macrophytes occur from low to greater wind-fetch/water depth, depending on life-history strategies; macrophytes with rhizomes occur at greater wind-fetch/depth relative to species that overwinter with seeds or turions. We conclude that growth form and life-history strategies for overwintering predict macrophytes occurrence regarding environmental factors in peat lakes. Therefore, we propose an adapted model for macrophyte occurrence for such lakes. Altogether, these results may aid in species-selection to revegetate peat lakes depending on its environment

Neuroendocrine tumours and their microenvironment

Tumours can escape the immune system by expressing programmed death-ligand-1 (PD-L1), which allows them to bind to PD-1 on T-cells and avoid recognition by the immune system. Regulatory T-cells (Tregs), indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) and tryptophan 2,3-dioxygenase (TDO) also play a role in immune suppression. Knowledge about the interaction of neuroendocrine tumours (NETs) with their immune microenvironment and the role of immunotherapy in patients with NET is scarce. Here, we investigated the immune microenvironment of serotonin-producing (SP) and non-serotonin-producing NETs (NSP-NETs). Tumours of 33 patients with SP-NET and 18 patients with NSP-NET were studied. Immunohistochemical analyses were performed for PD-L1, T-cells, IDO, TDO, mismatch repair proteins (MMRp) and activated fibroblasts. PD-L1 expression was seen in <1% of tumour and T-cells. T-cells were present in 33% of NETs, varying between 1 and 10% T-cells per high power field. IDO was expressed in tumour cells in 55% of SP-NETs and 22% of NSP-NETs (p = 0.039). TDO was expressed in stromal cells in 64% of SP-NETs and 13% of NSP-NETs (p = 0.001). No tumours had loss of MMRp. TDO-expressing stromal cells also strongly expressed alpha-SMA and were identified as cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs). Factors that are associated with a response to checkpoint inhibitor treatment were absent or only present to a limited extent in the tumour microenvironment of NETs. The expression of IDO and TDO in a substantial part of NETs and the presence of CAFs suggest two mechanisms that could be responsible for the cold immune microenvironment, which should be explored to enhance anti-tumour immunity and clinical responses

Use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors is associated with very low plasma free serotonin concentrations in humans

Background: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) block the serotonin transporter on neurons, but also on platelets, thus decreasing platelet serotonin concentrations in users of SSRIs. Data on plasma free serotonin concentrations in SSRI users is lacking, while plasma free serotonin is available for receptor binding and plays a role in several pathophysiological processes We therefore measured the plasma free and platelet serotonin concentrations in users of SSRIs and age-matched healthy controls, and we analyzed plasma concentrations of the serotonin precursor tryptophan and serotonin metabolite 5-hydroxyindoleamineacetic acid (5-HIAA). Methods: For this cross-sectional single center case control study, participants were recruited at the departments of Psychiatry and General Medicine. High performance liquid chromatography combined with tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) was used to measure plasma free and platelet serotonin, plasma tryptophan and 5-HIAA concentrations. Pre-analytical conditions were optimized by careful blood collection, rapid sample handling, high speed centrifugation, drug and diet restrictions, and age-matched controls. Results: In 64 SSRI users, median concentrations of plasma free and platelet serotonin were 10-fold and 14-fold lower, respectively, than in 64 matched controls. Patients using higher dose SSRIs or those with higher affinity for the serotonin transporter had lower plasma free and platelet serotonin concentrations. Compared to controls, SSRI users had similar median plasma tryptophan concentrations, but slightly higher plasma 5-HIAA concentrations. Conclusion: SSRI users have low platelet serotonin and low plasma free serotonin. This could not be explained by lower concentrations of its precursor tryptophan, and only partially by increased breakdown to 5-HIAA

Interactive detection of incrementally learned concepts in images with ranking and semantic query interpretation

This research was performed in the GOOSE project, which is jointly funded by the MIST research program of the Dutch Ministry of Defense and the AMSN enabling technology program.The number of networked cameras is growing exponentially. Multiple applications in different domains result in an increasing need to search semantically over video sensor data. In this paper, we present the GOOSE demonstrator, which is a real-time general-purpose search engine that allows users to pose natural language queries to retrieve corresponding images. Top-down, this demonstrator interprets queries, which are presented as an intuitive graph to collect user feedback. Bottomup, the system automatically recognizes and localizes concepts in images and it can incrementally learn novel concepts. A smart ranking combines both and allows effective retrieval of relevant images.peer-reviewe

TNO at TRECVID 2013 : multimedia event detection and instance search

We describe the TNO system and the evaluation results for TRECVID 2013 Multimedia Event Detection (MED) and instance search (INS) tasks. The MED system consists of a bag-of-word (BOW) approach with spatial tiling that uses low-level static and dynamic visual features, an audio feature and high-level concepts. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and optical character recognition (OCR) are not used in the system. In the MED case with 100 example training videos, support-vector machines (SVM) are trained and fused to detect an event in the test set. In the case with 0 example videos, positive and negative concepts are extracted as keywords from the textual event description and events are detected with the high-level concepts. The MED results show that the SIFT keypoint descriptor is the one which contributes best to the results, fusion of multiple low-level features helps to improve the performance, and the textual event-description chain currently performs poorly. The TNO INS system presents a baseline open-source approach using standard SIFT keypoint detection and exhaustive matching. In order to speed up search times for queries a basic map-reduce scheme is presented to be used on a multi-node cluster. Our INS results show above-median results with acceptable search times.This research for the MED submission was performed in the GOOSE project, which is jointly funded by the enabling technology program Adaptive Multi Sensor Networks (AMSN) and the MIST research program of the Dutch Ministry of Defense. The INS submission was partly supported by the MIME project of the creative industries knowledge and innovation network CLICKNL.peer-reviewe

Recognition and localization of relevant human behavior in videos, SPIE,

ABSTRACT Ground surveillance is normally performed by human assets, since it requires visual intelligence. However, especially for military operations, this can be dangerous and is very resource intensive. Therefore, unmanned autonomous visualintelligence systems are desired. In this paper, we present an improved system that can recognize actions of a human and interactions between multiple humans. Central to the new system is our agent-based architecture. The system is trained on thousands of videos and evaluated on realistic persistent surveillance data in the DARPA Mind&apos;s Eye program, with hours of videos of challenging scenes. The results show that our system is able to track the people, detect and localize events, and discriminate between different behaviors, and it performs 3.4 times better than our previous system