Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transition to chaos in random neuronal networks

Firing patterns in the central nervous system often exhibit strong temporal irregularity and heterogeneity in their time averaged response properties. Previous studies suggested that these properties are outcome of an intrinsic chaotic dynamics. Indeed, simplified rate-based large neuronal networks with random synaptic connections are known to exhibit sharp transition from fixed point to chaotic dynamics when the synaptic gain is increased. However, the existence of a similar transition in neuronal circuit models with more realistic architectures and firing dynamics has not been established. In this work we investigate rate based dynamics of neuronal circuits composed of several subpopulations and random connectivity. Nonzero connections are either positive-for excitatory neurons, or negative for inhibitory ones, while single neuron output is strictly positive; in line with known constraints in many biological systems. Using Dynamic Mean Field Theory, we find the phase diagram depicting the regimes of stable fixed point, unstable dynamic and chaotic rate fluctuations. We characterize the properties of systems near the chaotic transition and show that dilute excitatory-inhibitory architectures exhibit the same onset to chaos as a network with Gaussian connectivity. Interestingly, the critical properties near transition depend on the shape of the single- neuron input-output transfer function near firing threshold. Finally, we investigate network models with spiking dynamics. When synaptic time constants are slow relative to the mean inverse firing rates, the network undergoes a sharp transition from fast spiking fluctuations and static firing rates to a state with slow chaotic rate fluctuations. When the synaptic time constants are finite, the transition becomes smooth and obeys scaling properties, similar to crossover phenomena in statistical mechanics
Automatic system testing of programs without test oracles

Metamorphic testing has been shown to be a simple yet effective technique in addressing the quality assurance of applications that do not have test oracles, i.e., for which it is difficult or impossible to know what the correct output should be for arbitrary input. In metamorphic testing, existing test case input is modified to produce new test cases in such a manner that, when given the new input, the application should produce an output that can easily be computed based on the original output. That is, if input x produces output f(x), then we create input x' such that we can predict f(x') based on f(x); if the application does not produce the expected output, then a defect must exist, and either f(x), or f(x') (or both) is wrong. In practice, however, metamorphic testing can be a manually intensive technique for all but the simplest cases. The transformation of input data can be laborious for large data sets, or practically impossible for input that is not in human-readable format. Similarly, comparing the outputs can be error-prone for large result sets, especially when slight variations in the results are not actually indicative of errors (i.e., are false positives), for instance when there is non-determinism in the application and multiple outputs can be considered correct. In this paper, we present an approach called Automated Metamorphic System Testing. This involves the automation of metamorphic testing at the system level by checking that the metamorphic properties of the entire application hold after its execution. The tester is able to easily set up and conduct metamorphic tests with little manual intervention, and testing can continue in the field with minimal impact on the user. Additionally, we present an approach called Heuristic Metamorphic Testing which seeks to reduce false positives and address some cases of non-determinism. We also describe an implementation framework called Amsterdam, and present the results of empirical studies in which we demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique on real-world programs without test oracles.
Saliency-Driven Real-Time Video-to-Tactile Translation

Tactile feedback coordinated with visual stimuli has proven its worth in mediating immersive multimodal experiences, yet its authoring has relied on content artists. This article presents a fully automated framework of generating tactile cues from streaming images to provide synchronized visuotactile stimuli in real time. The spatiotemporal features of video images are analyzed on the basis of visual saliency and then mapped into the tactile cues that are rendered on tactors installed on a chair. We also conducted two user experiments for performance evaluation. The first experiment investigated the effects of visuotactile rendering against visual-only rendering, demonstrating that the visuotactile rendering improved the movie watching experience to be more interesting, immersive, and understandable. The second experiment was performed to compare the effectiveness of authoring methods and found that the automated authoring approach, used with care, can produce plausible tactile effects similar in quality to manual authoring.
Responsibility and Effort in an Experimental Labor Market

Previous indirect evidence suggests that impulses towards pro-social behavior are diminished when an external authority is responsible for an outcome. The responsibility-alleviation effect states that a shift of responsibility to an external authority dampens internal impulses toward honesty, loyalty, or generosity. In a gift-exchange experiment, we find that subjects respond with more generosity (higher effort) when wages are determined by a random process than when assigned by a third party, indicating that even a slight shift in perceived responsibility for the final payoffs can change behavior. Responsibility-alleviation can be a factor in economic environments featuring substantial personal interaction.
Sliding-mode control design of a boost-buck switching converter for AC signal generation

This paper presents a sliding-mode control design of a boost-buck switching converter for a voltage step-up dc-ac conversion without the use of any transformer. This approach combines the step-up/step-down conversion ratio capability of the converter with the robustness properties of sliding-mode control. The proposed control strategy is based on the design of two sliding-control laws, one ensuring the control of a full-bridge buck converter for proper dc-ac conversion, and the other one the control a boost converter for guaranteeing a global dc-to-ac voltage step-up ratio. A set of design criteria and a complete design procedure of the sliding-control laws are derived from small-signal analysis and large-signal considerations. The experimental results presented in the paper evidence both the achievement of step-up dc-ac conversion with good accuracy and robustness in front of input voltage and load perturbations, thus validating the proposed approach.
Self-Determination Theory Applied to Health Contexts

Behavior change is more effective and lasting when patients are autonomously motivated. To examine this idea, we identified 184 independent data sets from studies that utilized self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000) in health care and health promotion contexts. A meta-analysis evaluated relations between the SDT-based constructs of practitioner support for patient autonomy and patients’ experience of psychological need satisfaction, as well as relations between these SDT constructs and indices of mental and physical health. Results showed the expected relations among the SDT variables, as well as positive relations of psychological need satisfaction and autonomous motivation to beneficial health outcomes. Several variables (e.g., participants’ age, study design) were tested as potential moderators when effect sizes were heterogeneous. Finally, we used path analyses of the meta-analyzed correlations to test the interrelations among the SDT variables. Results suggested that SDT is a viable conceptual framework to study antecedents and outcomes of motivation for health-related behaviors.
Bifid Condylar Process: Cases Report

El condilo bifido es una anomalia poco comun. La mayoria de los casos que se conocen son hallazgos radiograficos, principalmente en ortopantomografia y resonancia nuclear magnetica. La condicion es usualmente asintomatica, mientras que en algunos casos se asocia con anquilosis de la articulacion temporomandibular. Se reporta que la presencia de proceso condilar bifido no es determinada por edad ni genero, sin embargo los hallazgos figuran entre las edades de 3 a 67 anos, teniendo como promedio de edad los 35 anos. En el presente reporte se presentan dos casos de pacientes con anomalia de forma del proceso condilar detectables a traves de examen radiografico.
Foundations and Public Policy : The Mask of Pluralism

State University of New York Press. Paperback. Book Condition: New. Paperback. 284 pages. Dimensions: 9.1in. x 5.9in. x 0.6in. Documents how even progressive foundations serve to reinforce the political status quo. In this pathbreaking study of foundation influence, author Joan Roelofs produces a comprehensive picture of philanthropys critical role in society. She shows how a vast number of policy innovations have arisen from the most important foundations, lessening the destructive impact of global marketization. Conversely, groups and movements that might challenge the status quo are nudged into line with grants and technical assistance, and foundations also have considerable power to shape such things as public opinion, higher education, and elite ideology. The cumulative effect is that foundations, despite their progressive goals, have a depoliticizing effect, one that preserves the hegemony of neoliberal institutions. This item ships from multiple locations. Your book may arrive from Roseburg,OR, La Vergne,TN. Paperback.
A preliminary fMRI study of a novel self-paced written fluency task: observation of left-hemispheric activation, and increased frontal activation in late vs. early task phases

Neuropsychological tests of verbal fluency are very widely used to characterize impaired cognitive function. For clinical neuroscience studies and potential medical applications, measuring the brain activity that underlies such tests with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is of significant interest—but a challenging proposition because overt speech can cause signal artifacts, which tend to worsen as the duration of speech tasks becomes longer. In a novel approach, we present the group brain activity of 12 subjects who performed a self-paced written version of phonemic fluency using fMRI-compatible tablet technology that recorded responses and provided task-related feedback on a projection screen display, over long-duration task blocks (60 s). As predicted, we observed robust activation in the left anterior inferior and medial frontal gyri, consistent with previously reported results of verbal fluency tasks which established the role of these areas in strategic word retrieval. In addition, the number of words produced in the late phase (last 30 s) of written phonemic fluency was significantly less (p < 0.05) than the number produced in the early phase (first 30 s). Activation during the late phase vs. the early phase was also assessed from the first 20 s and last 20 s of task performance, which eliminated the possibility that the sluggish hemodynamic response from the early phase would affect the activation estimates of the late phase. The last 20 s produced greater activation maps covering extended areas in bilateral precuneus, cuneus, middle temporal gyrus, insula, middle frontal gyrus and cingulate gyrus. Among these areas, greater activation was observed in the bilateral middle frontal gyrus (Brodmann area BA 9) and cingulate gyrus (BA 24, 32) likely as part of the initiation, maintenance, and shifting of attentional resources. Consistent with previous pertinent fMRI literature involving overt and covert verbal responses, these findings highlight the promise and practicality of fMRI of written phonemic fluency.
The Governance and Performance of Research Universities: Evidence from Europe and the U.S

We investigate how university governance affects research output, measured by patenting and international university research rankings. For both European and U.S. universities, we generate several measures of autonomy, governance, and competition for research funding. We show that university autonomy and competition are positively correlated with university output, both among European countries and among U.S. public universities. We then identity a (political) source of exogenous shocks to funding of U.S. universities. We demonstrate that, when a state's universities receive a positive funding shock, they produce more patents if they are more autonomous and face more competition from private research universities. Finally, we show that during periods when merit-based competitions for federal research funding have been most prominent, universities produce more patents when they receive an exogenous funding shock, suggesting that routine participation in such competitions hones research skill.
Ion exchange model for /spl alpha/ phase proton exchange waveguides in LiNbO/sub 3/

An H/sup +//Li/sup +/ exchange model is found to be applicable to describe the diffusion of protons when optical waveguides are formed in LiNbO/sub 3/ by proton exchange methods where the proton doped crystal structure stays in the pure /spl alpha/ phase. The H/sup +/ and Li/sup +/ self-diffusion coefficients in the ion exchange model are determined as a function of the proton exchange temperature both for x-cut and z-cut LiNbO/sub 3/. In this way a very useful tool for predicting the proton concentration profiles and hence the refractive index profiles of /spl alpha/ phase proton exchange LiNbO/sub 3/ waveguides is achieved.
Midterm Outcomes from the TALON Registry: Treating Peripherals with SilverHawk: Outcomes Collection

Purpose: To determine midterm clinical outcomes among patients with lower extremity peripheral arterial disease who underwent revascularization with catheter-based plaque excision (PE). Methods: Between August 2003 and February 2005, 19 institutions participating in the observational, nonrandomized, multicenter TALON registry enrolled 601 consecutive patients (353 men; mean age 70±11, range 36–98) with 1258 symptomatic lower extremity atherosclerotic lesions (748 limbs) treated by plaque excision with the SilverHawk catheter. Approximately 50% of the patients had diabetes, and nearly one third of the procedures were indicated for Rutherford ischemia category ≥4. Mean lesion lengths above and below the knee, respectively, were 62.5±68.5 mm (interquartile range [IQR], 20.0–80.0) and 33.4±42.7 mm (IQR 15.0–37.5). The primary endpoints of the study were target lesion revascularization (TLR) at 6 and 12 months. Results: The device achieved ≤50% residual diameter stenosis in 94.7% of lesions; procedural success was 97.6%. Nearly half (41.9%) of the procedures involved PE of ≥2 lesions. Nearly three quarters (73.3%) of the lesions did not require adjunctive therapy, and stent placement following PE occurred in only 6.3% of lesions. The 6- and 12-month rates of survival free of TLR were 90% and 80%, respectively. Rates of TLR were similar among patients with diabetes (11%) and without diabetes (9%). In the multivariate analysis, significant predictors of TLR at 6 months were a history of MI or coronary revascularization (HR 5.49, 95% CI 1.87 to 16.10, p=0.0008), multiple (≥2) lesions (HR 1.37, 95% CI 1.11 to 1.70, p=0.0019), and increasing Rutherford category (HR 1.84, 95% CI 1.28 to 2.65, p=0.0003). Lesion length >50 mm was associated with a 2.9-fold increased risk for TLR (HR 2.88, 95% CI 1.18 to 7.01, p=0.012); lesion length >100 mm was associated with a 3.3-fold increase in TLR (HR 3.32, 95% CI 1.15 to 9.56, p=0.016). Conclusion: In patients undergoing revascularization for lower extremity atherosclerotic disease, catheter-based PE achieves favorable procedural success and avoids the need for repeat revascularization at midterm follow-up. These findings support PE as a primary endovascular therapy for patients undergoing lower extremity arterial revascularization.
Improved Phrase-based SMT with Syntactic Reordering Patterns Learned from Lattice Scoring

In this paper, we present a novel approach to incorporate source-side syntactic reordering patterns into phrase-based SMT. The main contribution of this work is to use the lattice scoring approach to exploit and utilize reordering information that is favoured by the baseline PBSMT system. By referring to the parse trees of the training corpus, we represent the observed reorderings with source-side syntactic patterns. The extracted patterns are then used to convert the parsed inputs into word lattices, which contain both the original source sentences and their potential reorderings. Weights of the word lattices are estimated from the observations of the syntactic reordering patterns in the training corpus. Finally, the PBSMT system is tuned and tested on the generated word lattices to show the benefits of adding potential source-side reorderings in the inputs. We confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method on a medium-sized corpus for Chinese-English machine translation task. Our method outperformed the baseline system by 1.67% relative on a randomly selected testset and 8.56% relative on the NIST 2008 testset in terms of BLEU score.
Load-Bearing Figure-of-Merit Characterization of a Thermoelectric Module

Thermoelectric behavior in semiconductor materials is investigated for the purpose of converting thermal energy to electrical energy. This paper measures and quantifies the variations in the internal electrical and thermal resistances of a thermoelectric module with respect to the circuit's electrical load in order to better characterize its behavior in a closed circuit. Since open-circuit measurements fail to accurately describe thermoelectric material properties in power generation mode, the load-bearing Seebeck coefficient and the load-bearing figure-of-merit are defined, measured, and discussed. It is shown that the load-bearing Seebeck and the load-bearing figure-of-merit are more accurate parameters in measuring a module's ability to operate in thermoelectric power generation mode. In particular, there exist peak load-bearing characteristics that are not identified using the conventional open-circuit definitions of the Seebeck coefficient and the figure-of-merit. The results show that the peak load-bearing figure-of-merit is compared with the peak power output showing a misalignment between the two quantities, the significance of which is discussed.
SAR Observation of Eddy-Induced Mode-2 Internal Solitary Waves in the South China Sea

Two cases of mode-2 internal solitary waves (ISWs) induced by an anticyclonic eddy (AE) were clearly present in two synthetic aperture radar images acquired in the South China Sea (SCS) in April 2001. Similar ISWs were repeatedly observed in the same area one month later in May, but in that case, the ISW patterns indicated that they were regular mode-1 ISWs. To confirm that those ISWs in April are of mode-2 type, we analyze the in situ and other remote sensing data and propose two possible mode-2 ISW generation processes: 1) an eddy-induced change of the water stratification, which results in favorable hydrographic conditions for internal wave generation, and 2) the resonance between mode-1 internal tides and AE excites mode-2 internal tides, and the mode-2 internal tides disintegrate into mode-2 ISWs. The sea level anomaly and sea surface temperature data in April 2001 show that an AE existed in this area in April. Argo profile data within AEs from 1990 to 2014 in the SCS are used to show how an AE affects the vertical water properties and creates favorable conditions for mode-2 ISWs, and these conditions did exist in the study area in April 2001. The observed mode-2 ISW cases provide the first evidence of the existence of eddy-induced mode-2 ISWs in the SCS.
KLF 15 is a molecular link between endoplasmic reticulum stress and insulin resistance

Obesity places major demands on the protein folding capacity of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), resulting in ER stress, a condition that promotes hepatic insulin resistance and steatosis. Here we identify the transcription factor, Kruppel-like factor 15 (KLF15), as an essential mediator of ER stress-induced insulin resistance in the liver. Mice with a targeted deletion of KLF15 exhibit increased hepatic ER stress, inflammation, and JNK activation compared to WT mice; however, KLF15-/mice are protected against hepatic insulin resistance and fatty liver under high-fat feeding conditions and in response to pharmacological induction of ER stress. The mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1), a key regulator of cellular energy homeostasis, has been shown to cooperate with ER stress signaling pathways to promote hepatic insulin resistance and lipid accumulation. We find that the uncoupling of ER stress and insulin resistance in KLF15-/liver is associated with the maintenance of a low energy state characterized by decreased mTORC1 activity, increased AMPK phosphorylation and PGC-1α expression and activation of autophagy, an intracellular degradation process that enhances hepatic insulin sensitivity. Furthermore, in primary hepatocytes, KLF15 deficiency markedly inhibits activation of mTORC1 by amino acids and insulin, suggesting a mechanism by which KLF15 controls mTORC1-mediated insulin resistance. This study establishes KLF15 as an important molecular link between ER stress and insulin action. Citation: Jung DY, Chalasani U, Pan N, Friedline RH, Prosdocimo DA, et al. (2013) KLF15 Is a Molecular Link between Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress and Insulin Resistance. PLoS ONE 8(10): e77851. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0077851 Editor: Franco Folli, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, United States of America Received June 19, 2013; Accepted September 4, 2013; Published October 22, 2013 Copyright: © 2013 Jung et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grants DK080742 to S.G. , DK080756 and DK090963 to J.K. K. , DK067493, DK016746, P60 DK020579, RR024992, and UL1 TR000448 to F.U. , DK089185 to M.P.C. , HL072952 and HL084154 to M.K. J., T32HL105338 and F32HL110538 to D.A. P. and by JDRF grant (11-2011-40) to F.U. Electron microscopy was performed at the Core Electron Microscopy Facility at UMass Medical School with support from the National Center for Research Resources (Award #S10RR027897). Part of this study was conducted by the UMass Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center (NIH Award #U24-DK093000). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: Susan.Gray@umassmed.edu ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work.