Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mechanisms of Seizure Propagation in 2-Dimensional Centre-Surround Recurrent Networks

Understanding how seizures spread throughout the brain is an important problem in the treatment of epilepsy, especially for implantable devices that aim to avert focal seizures before they spread to, and overwhelm, the rest of the brain. This paper presents an analysis of the speed of propagation in a computational model of seizure-like activity in a 2-dimensional recurrent network of integrate-and-fire neurons containing both excitatory and inhibitory populations and having a difference of Gaussians connectivity structure, an approximation to that observed in cerebral cortex. In the same computational model network, alternative mechanisms are explored in order to simulate the range of seizure-like activity propagation speeds (0.1–100 mm/s) observed in two animal-slice-based models of epilepsy: (1) low extracellular , which creates excess excitation and (2) introduction of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) antagonists, which reduce inhibition. Moreover, two alternative connection topologies are considered: excitation broader than inhibition, and inhibition broader than excitation. It was found that the empirically observed range of propagation velocities can be obtained for both connection topologies. For the case of the GABA antagonist model simulation, consistent with other studies, it was found that there is an effective threshold in the degree of inhibition below which waves begin to propagate. For the case of the low extracellular model simulation, it was found that activity-dependent reductions in inhibition provide a potential explanation for the emergence of slowly propagating waves. This was simulated as a depression of inhibitory synapses, but it may also be achieved by other mechanisms. This work provides a localised network understanding of the propagation of seizures in 2-dimensional centre-surround networks that can be tested empirically.
CARESS: The Canadian Registry of Palivizumab

Background: Palivizumab is indicated for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) prophylaxis in high-risk children. However, relatively little is known about the current use, compliance, and outcomes associated with this medication. Methods: A prospective, observational, registry based on 27 sites, with monthly follow-up of infants at high risk for RSV who received at least 1 dose of palivizumab during the 2005–2009 RSV seasons. Results: A total of 5286 children were enrolled (56.6% male; 71.7% white; average gestational age, 32.1 ± 5.5 weeks). Of them, 3741 patients (70.8%) were prophylaxed for prematurity only, 449 (8.5%) for bronchopulmonary dysplasia/chronic lung disease, 508 (9.6%) for congenital heart disease, and 588 (11.1%) for other reasons. Overall, 19,485 doses were given. On average, infants received 86.0% ± 28.4% of their expected number of injections; 71.2% of infants received their injections in the recommended time periods. Of the 5286 participants enrolled, 308 patients were hospitalized for respiratory tract illness (hospitalization rate, 5.8%). The RSV-hospitalization rate was calculated as 1.38%. Having siblings increased likelihood of hospitalization (66.9% vs. 55.7%, P < 0.005), and was significantly correlated with time to hospitalization in this cohort (P = 0.050). Conclusions: The overall RSV-hospitalization rate in our study was within the range found in previous reports (1.3%–5.3%), although it did not mimic the declining rates of the US Palivizumab Outcomes Registry. This could be due to increased testing for RSV when hospitalized and increasing rates of prophylaxis of infants with underlying medical disorders.
A Microbial Association with Autism

ABSTRACT Autism is a heterogeneous group of complex developmental disabilities that result from a number of possible etiologies. There are a well-known number of comorbidities associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), including, commonly, gastrointestinal (GI) pathology, which can include variable combinations of constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, gastroesophageal reflux, and vomiting. An American Academy of Pediatrics consensus panel has recommended that prospective studies be carried out to determine the prevalence of GI disorders in ASD and their pathophysiologic basis. In a recent article, Williams et al. [B. L. Williams, M. Hornig, T. Parekh, and W. I. Lipkin, mBio 3(1):e00261-11, 2012] have provided one such study of autism with GI comorbidities by presenting evidence of Sutterella species in ileal mucosal biopsy specimens from patients diagnosed with ASD but not in control children with GI symptoms, suggesting a specific role for Sutterella in ASD. Sutterella sequences represented ~1 to 7% of the total bacterial sequences, and this is a very large effect size on the ileal mucosal composition of the autism phenotype, rivaling or perhaps exceeding the effect size of the ileal Crohn’s disease phenotype. This study opens a new field of investigation to study the etiology or consequences of GI comorbidities in ASD.
Examining the Relationships among Job Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment, and Turnover Intention: An Empirical Study

This study’s aim is to examine the relationship among job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnoverintention of employees. A model of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intention isdeveloped and tested in one field study. In this study, using a 250 employees of a Turkish manufacturingcompany, were given questionnaires to complete during regular working hours; 188 completed questionnaireswere returned. Job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intention are popular topics in thestudy of work related attitudes. The main objective of this article is to test the relationships among jobsatisfaction, organizational commitment and turnover intention. Structural equation modeling to test researchhypotheses is used and the model that has high reliability and validity is developed. The results indicate that jobsatisfaction is one of the most antecedents of organizational commitment and turnover intention and suggest thathigh levels of job satisfaction results in higher commitment and lower turnover intention so job satisfactionpositively influences on affective commitment, continuance commitment, and normative commitment while it isnegatively impact on turnover intention. The results emphasize the need to consider the factors can be havingeffects on the relationship by highlighting to studies conducted on job satisfaction, organizational commitment,and turnover intention.
Actin Bound to the Heterogeneous Nuclear Ribonucleoprotein Hrp36 Is Associated with Balbiani Ring mRNA from the Gene to Polysomes

In the salivary glands of the dipteran Chironomus tentans, a specific messenger ribonucleoprotein (mRNP) particle, the Balbiani ring (BR) granule, can be visualized during its assembly on the gene and during its nucleocytoplasmic transport. We now show with immunoelectron microscopy that actin becomes associated with the BR particle concomitantly with transcription and is present in the particle in the nucleoplasm. DNase I affinity chromatography experiments with extracts from tissue culture cells indicate that both nuclear and cytoplasmic actin are bound to the heterogeneous RNP (hnRNP) protein hrp36, but not to the hnRNP proteins hrp23 and hrp45. The interaction is likely to be direct as purified actin binds to recombinant hrp36 in vitro. Furthermore, it is demonstrated by cross linking that nuclear as well as cytoplasmic actin are bound to hrp36 in vivo. It is known that hrp36 is added cotranscriptionally along the BR mRNA molecule and accompanies the RNA through the nuclear pores and into polysomes. We conclude that actin is likely to be bound to the BR transcript via hrp36 during the transfer of the mRNA from the gene all the way into polysomes.
Speech Perception and Spoken Word Recognition: Past and Present

Objective The scientific study of the perception of spoken language has been an exciting, prolific, and productive area of research for more than 50 yr. We have learned much about infants’ and adults’ remarkable capacities for perceiving and understanding the sounds of their language, as evidenced by our increasingly sophisticated theories of acquisition, process, and representation. We present a selective, but we hope, representative review of the past half century of research on speech perception, paying particular attention to the historical and theoretical contexts within which this research was conducted. Our foci in this review fall on three principle topics: early work on the discrimination and categorization of speech sounds, more recent efforts to understand the processes and representations that subserve spoken word recognition, and research on how infants acquire the capacity to perceive their native language. Our intent is to provide the reader a sense of the progress our field has experienced over the last half century in understanding the human’s extraordinary capacity for the perception of spoken language.
The Effects of Single-Gender Classes on Students' Physical Fitness Test Performances and Attitudes

The purpose of this pretest-posttest control group study was to test the Social Cognitive Theory by comparing the effects of class type, coeducational or single-gender, on physical fitness test performance and attitudes, controlling for previous fitness levels, among sixth-grade male and female physical education students at a Northwest Georgia Middle School. A total of 277 students participated in the newly state-mandated FitnessGram physical fitness test as part of their regular physical education class. The groups then participated in standard physical education lessons for four weeks. Then, in each of the two sixth-grade physical education periods, students were divided among the teachers according to gender, resulting in a female-only group, a male-only group, and a typical coeducational group. Students again participated in the FitnessGram with their newly formed groups. Afterwards, students were given the Physical Fitness Attitudinal Scale to determine their attitudes about physical education and fitness. The data collected were then analyzed by ANCOVA and MANOVA to determine the effect of gendergrouped classes on physical fitness test performance and student attitudes. The data revealed statistically significant differences between participant groups’ performances on some but not all parts of the FitnessGram physical fitness assessment. The data did not show a statistically significant difference between student attitudes toward physical fitness with and without single-gender grouping on the Physical Fitness Attitudinal Scale.
A validation of the pseudo self-similar traffic model

Since the early 1990s, a variety of studies has shown that network traffic, both for local- and wide-area networks, has self-similarity properties. This has led to new approaches in network traffic modelling. Instead of developing completely new traffic models, a number of researchers have proposed to adapt traditional traffic modelling approaches to incorporate aspects of self-similarity. The motivation for doing so is the hope to be able to reuse techniques and tools that have been developed in the past and with which experience has been gained. One such an approach for a traffic model that incorporates aspects of self-similarity is the so-called pseudo self-similar traffic model. This model is appealing, as it is easy, to understand and easily embedded in Markovian performance evaluation studies. In applying this model in a number of cases, we have perceived various problems which we initially, thought were particular to these specific cases. We briefly review the pseudo self-similar traffic model and discuss its fundamental shortcomings.
A fault injection methodology and infrastructure for fast single event upsets emulation on Xilinx SRAM-based FPGAs

Modern SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are increasingly employed in safety- and mission-critical applications. However, the aggressive technology scaling is highlighting the increasing sensitivity of such devices to Single Event Upsets (SEUs) caused by external radiation events. Assessing the reliability of FPGA-based systems in the early design stages is of upmost importance, allowing design exploration of different protection alternatives. This paper presents a Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration-based fault injection methodology implemented by an integrated infrastructure for SEUs emulation in the configuration memory of Xilinx SRAM-based FPGAs. The proposed methodology exploits the Xilinx Essential Bits technology to extremely speed-up fault injection, ensuring correct operations of the fault injection infrastructure during the whole injection process.
Towards developmental universals

Book synopsis: This book critically examines the effects of language specificity on phonological acquisition and disorder through a collection of empirical studies of children learning typologically very different languages. The studies address many theoretical, clinical and methodological issues, such as: What role do developmental universals and the ambient language play in language acquisition? How should one account for the similarities and differences in the phonological development between normally and atypically developing children, between monolingual and bilingual children, and between bilingual children sharing one language? What implications do these similarities and differences have for clinical assessment and diagnosis? The book provides much-needed baseline information for clinical assessment and diagnosis.
Scalable Gaussian Process Regression Using Deep Neural Networks

We propose a scalable Gaussian process model for regression by applying a deep neural network as the feature-mapping function. We first pretrain the deep neural network with a stacked denoising auto-encoder in an unsupervised way. Then, we perform a Bayesian linear regression on the top layer of the pre-trained deep network. The resulting model, Deep-Neural-Network-based Gaussian Process (DNN-GP), can learn much more meaningful representation of the data by the finite-dimensional but deep-layered feature-mapping function. Unlike standard Gaussian processes, our model scales well with the size of the training set due to the avoidance of kernel matrix inversion. Moreover, we present a mixture of DNN-GPs to further improve the regression performance. For the experiments on three representative large datasets, our proposed models significantly outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms of Gaussian process regression.
The influence of crystal orientation on surface passivation in multi-crystalline silicon

We present an approach to study the variation of the surface recombination velocity in multi-crystalline silicon wafers through photoluminescence imaging for thin, passivated and mirror polished wafers. The influence of crystal orientation on surface passivation is investigated for various passivating films, including silicon nitride and aluminum oxide. Our results show that the influence of surface orientation is negligible in well passivated multi-crystalline silicon wafers due to the detrimental effects of crystal defects. Our study on hydrogenated samples suggests that aluminum oxide passivation exhibits a similar surface dependence as native oxide passivation. A slight and different surface dependence is observed in one of the silicon nitride films used in the study.
Radical Deinstitutionalization: The Italian Experience

Broadly speaking, deinstitutionalization has taken two very distinct forms: rapid and gradual. In the United States the process was rapid, especially in the post -Medicare -Medicaid era (from 1966 on). In contrast, Europe's deinstitutionalization has generally been much more gradual, principally because there was no strong fiscal or other incentive to ITdeinstitutionalizetT patients. As a result, most European countries have experienced gradual, modest reductions in mental hospital censuses over the past two decades or so. The Italian system is an exception to the Western European rule. Its mental hospital population declined very little before 1968; in fact, the changes in hospital censuses in Italy between 1968 and 1978 took place mostly in northern and central Italy, where there was support for the radical ideology of deinstitutionalization. In May 1978, the Italian Parliament passed Italy Ts first new law dealing with nmental illnessTT since 1904. The 1904 law was explicitly one reflecting an attitude of "out of sight, out of mind" (or perhaps "out of mind, out of sight"). The 1978 law was a dramatic departure indeed. It mandated closing large mental hospitals, made involuntary commitment more difficult, and required that community -based services be developed to replace the functions previously served by the mental hospital. To my knowledge, this is the only nationwide attempt to phase out and close large "state" hospitals. The story of how this law came into being is complex. I have detailed the process in Italy and explained the radical ideology of Italian
Soft Skills and Software Development: A Reflection from the Software Industry

We review the literature relating to soft skills and the software engineering and information systems domain before describing a study based on 650 job advertisements posted on well-known recruitment sites from a range of geographical locations including, North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The study makes use of nine defined soft skills to assess the level of demand for each of these skills related to individual job roles within the software industry. This work reports some of the vital statistics from industry about the requirements of soft skills in various roles of software development phases. The work also highlights the variation in the types of skills required for each of the roles. We found that currently although the software industry is paying attention to soft skills up to some extent while hiring but there is a need to further acknowledge the role of these skills in software development. The objective of this paper is to analyze the software industry soft skills requirements for various software development positions, such as system analyst, designer, programmer, and tester. We pose two research questions, namely, (1) What soft skills are appropriate to different software development lifecycle roles, and (2) Up to what extend does the software industry consider soft skills when hiring an employee. The study suggests that there is a further need of acknowledgment of the significance of soft skills from employers in software industry.
Incremental Gradient, Subgradient, and Proximal Methods for Convex Optimization: A Survey

We survey incremental methods for minimizing a sum P m=1 fi(x) consisting of a large number of convex component functions fi. Our methods consist of iterations applied to single components, and have proved very effective in practice. We introduce a unified algorithmic framework for a variety of such methods, some involving gradient and subgradient iterations, which are known, and some involving combinations of subgradient and proximal methods, which are new and offer greater flexibility in exploiting the special structure of fi. We provide an analysis of the convergence and rate of convergence properties of these methods, including the advantages offered by randomization in the selection of components. We also survey applications in inference/machine learning, signal processing, and large-scale and distributed optimization.
Retention of compounding skills among pharmacy students.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the competency of second-year pharmacy students to compound capsules from a prescription 12 months after completing a compounding course. METHODS Students who completed the compounding course were given the same prescription they had been given 12 months earlier to compound metoprolol capsules. No warning of the second exercise was given and they were expected to prepare capsules and package and label the finished product. Performance was evaluated in an identical manner for both exercises based on the level of professional competency of a score of 80% or above. RESULTS Eighty-seven percent fewer students achieved a score of 90% or more on the second exercise and 81% fewer students demonstrated the required competency. CONCLUSIONS Differences in scores on the first and second exercises indicate that pharmacy students' level of competency and retention of knowledge with respect to compounding capsules is not adequately retained after a 12-month hiatus.
Early Cross-Modal Interactions in Auditory and Visual Cortex Underlie a Sound-Induced Visual Illusion

When a single flash of light is presented interposed between two brief auditory stimuli separated by 60–100 ms, subjects typically report perceiving two flashes (Shams et al., 2000, 2002). We investigated the timing and localization of the cortical processes that underlie this illusory flash effect in 34 subjects by means of 64-channel recordings of event-related potentials (ERPs). A difference ERP calculated to isolate neural activity associated with the illusory second flash revealed an early modulation of visual cortex activity at 30–60 ms after the second sound, which was larger in amplitude in subjects who saw the illusory flash more frequently. These subjects also showed this early modulation in response to other combinations of auditory and visual stimuli, thus pointing to consistent individual differences in the neural connectivity that underlies cross-modal integration. The overall pattern of cortical activity associated with the cross-modally induced illusory flash, however, differed markedly from that evoked by a real second flash. A trial-by-trial analysis showed that short-latency ERP activity localized to auditory cortex and polymodal cortex of the temporal lobe, concurrent with gamma bursts in visual cortex, were associated with perception of the double-flash illusion. These results provide evidence that perception of the illusory second flash is based on a very rapid dynamic interplay between auditory and visual cortical areas that is triggered by the second sound.
PATTERNS AND CONSEQUENCES OF GENDER INTERACTIONS IN INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC LESSONS

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Spontaneous tumorigenesis in hypophysectomized Syrian (golden) hamsters.

Summary Hormonal influences on spontaneous tumorigenesis have been studied in 90 hypophysectomized male Syrian (golden) hamsters which survived a mean of 12.3 months after operation. The incidence and types of spontaneous tumors were comparable in hypophysectomized and sham-operated animals, with the exception of tumors of endocrine glands and accessory reproductive organs. Of particular interest was the occurrence of melanomas, intestinal polyps and adenocarcinomas, and lymphosarcoma in hamsters following hypophysectomy. There was no apparent effect on the propensity of various tumors to metastasize. The restriction of spontaneous tumors to certain sites in hypophysectomized hamsters may correlate with the extent to which pituitary hormones contribute to normal tissue integrity.