Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neural Correlates of Subjective Familiarity and Choice Bias during Episodic Memory Judgments

Successful recognition memory decisions depend on mnemonic and decision making processes that are computed by multiple, distributed brain areas. However, little is known about what computations these areas perform or how these areas are connected. Here, I collected behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging data from humans during the performance of an old-new recognition memory task with retrospective confidence judgments. Across runs, choice bias was successfully manipulated by providing rewards for correct responses that were either symmetric (equal reward for hits and correct rejections) or asymmetric (one response worth more than the other). Successful recognition memory was associated with activation in anterior prefrontal, parahippocampal, posterior cingulate, and parietal cortex. Resting state functional connectivity demonstrated that these brain areas are organized into two distinct networks. The first network includes parahippocampal cortex and angular gyrus. The second network includes lateral prefrontal cortex and intraparietal sulcus. The hippocampalcortical network was most active during old vs. new decisions, did not differentiate hits from false alarms, and was differentially active during low confidence old and new judgments. In contrast, while the frontoparietal network was robustly activated by hits, it was not activated during either false alarms or low confidence old judgments. Thus, these two distinct networks
Markitup: crowdsourced collaborative reading

People enjoy the sensual and physiological properties of physical books as well as the ease of creating bookmarks and annotations. However, an abundance of annotations can be distracting from the reading experience. With the introduction of e-books, sharing annotations has enabled reading to have a social context, which research has shown to benefit learning and understanding. Using a research through design approach we developed Markitup: a crowdsourced reading tool that enables individuals to read and annotate in a collaborative environment and benefit from the knowledge of the crowd. We found that participants appreciated the combined advantages of the physical artefact, the flexible digital annotations and the social learning context. \
Assessment centers and subordinate appraisals of managers: A seven-year examination of predictive validity.

Assessment center ratings of 52 state law enforcement agency managers predicted both a contaminated promotions criterion and two uncontaminated ratings criteria, but they did significantly better in predicting the former. Criteria data were gathered two, four, and seven years after the assessment center, and a modest upward trend in validity coefficients was observed. Ratings by subordinates demonstrated promise as a near term predictor, outperforming the assessment center on uncontaminated criteria in the two- and four-year time frames. Last, regression analyses using Year 7 criteria revealed unique predictive power for both ratings by subordinates and assessment centers above and beyond that provided by supervisor ratings. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Academy of Management meeting, Anaheim, California, August 7-10, 1988.
Biochip Synthesis and Dynamic Error Recovery for Sample Preparation Using Digital Microfluidics

Recent advances in digital microfluidic biochips have led to a promising future for miniaturized laboratories, with the associated advantages of high sensitivity and reconfigurability. Since sample preparation plays an important front-end role in assays and laboratories in biochemical applications, and most of the analysis time is associated with sample collection, transportation, and preparation, it is important to minimize the time required for this key step in bioassays. Moreover, it is also critical to ensure the correctness of intermediate steps and recover from errors efficiently during sample preparation. We describe an optimization algorithm and the associated chip design method for sample preparation, including architectural synthesis and layout synthesis. We also present the first dynamic error recovery procedure for use during sample preparation. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on both real-life biochemical applications and synthetic test cases to demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency. Compared to prior work, the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 50% reduction in sample preparation time, and the optimized chip layout can achieve over 40% reduction in sample preparation time.
Sequential Histochemical Staining for Resident and Recruited Macrophages

A new histochemical technique is described that permits differentiation of resident from recruited macrophages by staining of paraffin sections of tissues from rats and mice. Resident macrophages are identified by their ability to phagocytose and retain intravenously injected colloidal Prussian blue. New macrophages that emigrate into tissue are identified by phagocytosis of a second colloid, iron dextran. Paraffin sections of formalin‐fixed tissues are sequentially stained for the presence of the two colloids with different chromogens, the endogenous pseudo‐peroxidase activity of colloidal Prussian blue used to catalyze the polymerization of diaminobenzidine and after conversion of iron dextran to Prussian blue, the second colloid used to catalyze the polymerization of tetramethylbenzidine. The staining results in resident macrophages staining brown while newly recruited macrophages stain blue. The studies have shown that colloidal Prussian blue is stable in vivo and neither loses its catalytic activity nor undergoes extensive redistribution. They also show that the technique can be used to measure Kupffer cell recruitment stimulated by complete Freund's adjuvant in rats and tumor‐associated macrophage recruitment in subcutaneous and spontaneous liver metastases in mice.
Peer ecology of male adolescent drug use

Abstract This report represents the perspective that adolescent substance use is best understood as an adaptation to an ecology defined jointly by families and peers. Hypotheses were tested on a sample of 206 boys in the Oregon Youth Study. The analyses proceeded in four steps. First, it was found that the transition from middle to high school was a period of rapid growth in smoking for boys with a prior history of low sociometric status. Second, a structural equation model was tested showing that deviant peer association in early adolescence mediated the relation between peer and family experiences in middle childhood and later substance use. Third, an observational study of the boys with their best friends revealed that active support for rule breaking and substance use was associated with immediate escalation in substance use during the transition to high school. Finally, it was found that ineffective parental monitoring practices were highly associated with the boy's involvement in a deviant peer network. In fact, a high degree of similarity was found between boys and their best friends for substance use when parental monitoring was low. These analyses show that substance use in adolescence is embedded within the proximal peer environment, which in turn, emerges and is amplified within a context of low adult involvement and monitoring.
First Integrals of Extended Hamiltonians in n + 1 Dimensions Generated by Powers of an Operator ?

We describe a procedure to construct polynomial in the momenta first integrals of arbitrarily high degree for natural HamiltoniansH obtained as one-dimensional extensions of natural (geodesic) n-dimensional Hamiltonians L. The Liouville integrability of L implies the (minimal) superintegrability of H. We prove that, as a consequence of natural integra- bility conditions, it is necessary for the construction that the curvature of the metric tensor associated with L is constant. As examples, the procedure is applied to one-dimensional L, including and improving earlier results, and to two and three-dimensional L, providing new superintegrable systems.
Statistical Modelling and Analysis of Pacific Sea Surface Temperatures

Sea surface temperature (SST) in the Pacific Ocean is a key component of many global climate models and of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon. We analyse SST for the period November 1981 – December 2014. To study the temporal variability of the ENSO phenomenon, we have selected a subregion of the tropical Pacific Ocean, namely the Niño 3.4 region, as it is thought to be the area where SST anomalies indicate most clearly ENSO’s influence on the global atmosphere. SST anomalies, obtained by subtracting the appropriate monthly averages from the data, are the focus of the majority of previous analyses of the Pacific and other oceans’ SSTs. Preliminary data analysis showed that not only Niño 3.4 spatial means but also Niño 3.4 spatial variances varied with month of the year. In this thesis, we conduct an analysis of the raw SST data and introduce diagnostic plots (here, plots of variability versus central tendency). These plots show strong negative dependence between the spatial standard deviation and the spatial mean. Outliers are present, so we use robust regression to obtain intercept and slope estimates for the twelve individual months and for all-months-combined. Based on this meanstandard deviation relationship, we define a variance-stabilising transformation. The transformation we derive is logarithmic, monotonic, nonlinear, and it respects the variability seen in SSTs from month to-month during the year. On the raw SST and transformed scales, we describe the Niño 3.4 SST time series with statistical models that are linear, heteroskedastic, and dynamical. We also derive a back-transform to take our forecasts on the transformed scale back to degrees Celsius. We compare the two forecasting methods via in-sample forecasting the data the model was trained on, November 1981 – December 2014, and then out-of-sample forecasting from January 2015 – December 2017. Our results indicate that the forecasts on the transformed scale perform better when predicting up to and into boreal spring, while the forecasts on the original scale perform better when predicting across and from boreal spring into summer. We also provide visualisations of the forecast error bias and variance which can be used to better identify and understand the (boreal) spring barrier. iv
Secret Key Generation by Virtual Link Estimation

In recent years, researchers have explored using unique radio propagation characteristics between two devices for extracting symmetric keys. However, the state-of-the-art has the following limitations: (i) paying more attention to only when the two devices are in communication range, and (ii) generating keys only when the devices are in motion. Secret key generation for devices which are not in communication range and for stationary nodes is quite a challenging task. In this paper, we study the feasibility of generating secret keys between two devices which do not possess any direct link with the help of a trusted relay. We propose and implement our protocol using off-the-shelf commercially available resource constrained devices suitable for health-care applications which are a vital part of pervasive networks. We conduct an extensive set of experiments in an indoor environment for various scenarios involving stationary and mobile nodes. Our results show that the key generation rate increases by 20 times compared to the existing mechanisms using the same sampling frequency. We analyse the mutual information shared between the legitimate devices and eavesdroppers and our results reveal that, when at least any two of the three legitimate devices are mobile, an eavesdropper cannot obtain sufficient useful information to guess the shared keys.
Oral contraceptives and thromboembolism: a further report.

Further findings based upon a case-control study of thromboembolism and oral contraceptive use are presented in this article. The study in question was performed by the Advisory Committee on Obstetrics and Gynecology for the Food and Drug Administration. Reanalysis of the data showed a borderline significance in the association between smoking and oral contraceptive use but no evidence that smoking acting either independently or in conjunction with oral contraceptives is a factor in idiopathic thromboembolism. No evidence was found that other drugs such as sedatives or tranquilizers enhance the risk of incurring thromboembolism. Methods of defining the control cases may have been too strict as may the matching process leading to subtle biases. It was demonstrated that the matching process can produce a spurious decrease in relative risk when the data are pooled.
Presenting the Self, the Social Body, and the Olfactory: Managing Smells in Everyday Life Experiences

This article considers smell as a social intermediary with regard to the body, presentation of self, and social/moral order. Employing the trajectory of a sociology of everyday life, the data presented here are collected from narrative interviews conducted with twelve respondents. The study looks at how respondents react to bodily odors and how they go about maintaining acceptable bodily scents to facilitate social interaction. The discussion is framed within Goffmanian sociology on the interaction order and corporeal scholarship. The findings show that respondents equate foul odors with social and moral defilement, and this affects how they view social others, adopting attitudes and behaviors of social inclusion and exclusion. Managing bodily odors also points to the idea that instead of approaching the body as an object of analysis, the body should also be analyzed as an active and acting subject, located and influenced by sociocul-tural conditions. This article thus contributes to discussions on a sociology of the body by linking them with olfactory analyses and also aims to supplement the dearth of olfactory research in the Southeast Asian region by using Singapore as an empirical case study.
Fundamental limits of the switching abruptness of tunneling transistors

The tunneling field-effect transistor (TFET) is one of the most promising candidates for future low-power electronics because of its potential to achieve a subthreshold swing less than the 60 mV/decade thermal limit at room temperature. It can surpass this limit because the turn-on of tunneling does not sample the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of carriers that gives rise to the 60 mV/decade limit in conventional devices. However, theoretical predictions and experimental measurements of TFET device characteristics have differed by a wide margin-experimental subthreshold characteristics have not achieved the switching steepness (i.e., the change in drain current with applied gate voltage) of theoretical simulations. Non-ideal effects, such as non-abrupt band edges, phonon-assisted tunneling, and trap states, are discussed as mechanisms that may degrade theoretical predications. A strained-Si/strained-Ge bilayer TFET is used as a test-bed device to better understand the discrepancy between simulation and experiment. The bilayer TFET studied in this work eliminates channel doping and uses the strained-Si/strained-Ge heterostructure. Band-to-band tunneling occurs perpendicular to the gate, in-line with the gate electric field. Multiple gates are used so that the impact of the directionality of tunneling on switching abruptness can be studied. The band alignment of the strained-Si/strained-Ge heterostructure is extracted from a MOS-capacitor structure though an experimental quasistatic CV technique. The extracted effective band gap (related to the tunneling barrier) is shown to be only -200 meV for the heterostructure, and the valence band offset is shown to be -100 meV larger than predicted by density-functional theory. New deformation potentials are suggested for the Si-Ge material system based on the experimentally extracted band alignments. The impact of quantization on the turn-on voltage and gate-leakage current in a thin-body bilayer TFET structure is studied, and large confinement energy is shown to be especially problematic at body thicknesses less than 10 nm. An InAs structure with a body thickness less than 7 nm is shown to require a larger turn-on voltage than either Si or Ge homostructures due to the very light electron mass in InAs that leads to a large confinement energy. The strained- Si/strained-Ge heterostructure is shown to dramatically reduce the turn-on voltage due to its small effective band gap. Quantization is shown to limit the gate efficiency since increasing the body voltage, in order to align the electron and hole eigenstates in energy, increases the electric field across the structure, which in turn increases quantization. Gate leakage current increases exponentially as the body thickness decreases because the body voltage (and hence, the electric field) at turn-on increases with decreasing body thickness and gate leakage is exponentially dependent on the electric field. Non-ideal two-dimensional effects are investigated as mechanisms that degrade the switching characteristics of perpendicular…
Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Reading Disability: A Review of the Efficacy of Medication Treatments

Reading is a multifaceted skillset that has the potential to profoundly impact a child’s academic performance and achievement. Mastery of reading skills is often an area of difficulty for children during their academic journey, particularly for children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Specific Learning Disorder with Impairment in Reading (SLD-R), or children with a comorbid diagnosis of both ADHD and SLD-R. ADHD is characterized by executive functioning and impulse control deficits, as well as inattention and impulsivity. Among the academic struggles experienced by children with ADHD are challenges with word reading, decoding, or reading comprehension. Similarly, children with SLD-R frequently encounter difficulties in the development of appropriate reading skills. SLD-R incorporates dysfunctions in basic visual and auditory processes that result in difficulties with decoding and spelling words. There have been limited empirical studies investigating the efficacy of interventions to improve the reading ability of children with both ADHD and SLD-R. Research studies that have focused on reading interventions for children from this population have predominantly included the use of medication treatments with stimulants (e.g., methylphenidate) and non-stimulants (e.g., atomoxetine). This review paper will present and integrate findings from empirical studies on successful medication treatments for children with comorbid ADHD and SLD-R. Furthermore, this paper will extend findings from empirically successful medication treatments to provide directions for future research.
Functional Organization of MIR2, a Novel Viral Regulator of Selective Endocytosis*

Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus encodes two related proteins, MIR1 and MIR2, that lead to reduction of the cell surface levels of major histocompatibility complex class I and other polypeptides involved in immune recognition. MIR1 and MIR2 do not affect the assembly or transport of their target proteins through the secretory pathway; rather, they act to enhance the selective endocytosis of target chains from the cell surface. Sequence inspection reveals that the modulator of immune recognition (MIR) proteins contain an NH2-terminal zinc finger of the plant homeodomain (PHD) subfamily, two transmembrane (TM) domains, and a C-terminal conserved region (CR). Here we examine the transmembrane topology and functional organization of MIR2. Both the PHD domain and the CR are disposed cytosolically and are essential for MIR-mediated endocytosis. MIR proteins form homo-oligomers; this activity is independent of the PHD and CR elements and maps instead to the TM regions. Analysis of chimeras between MIR1 and MIR2 reveals that the TM regions also mediate target selectivity. Mutations that ablate the PHD or CR regions generate dominant negative phenotypes for major histocompatibility complex class I endocytosis. These findings suggest a domain organization for the MIR proteins, with the TM regions involved in target selection and the cytosolic PHD and CR domains involved in the possible recruitment of cellular machinery that directly or indirectly regulates internalization of target molecules.
Treatment precision of image-guided liver SBRT using implanted fiducial markers depends on marker–tumour distance

The purpose of this study is to assess the accuracy of day-to-day predictions of liver tumour position using implanted gold markers as surrogates and to compare the method with alternative set-up strategies, i.e. no correction, vertebrae and 3D diaphragm-based set-up. Twenty patients undergoing stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) with abdominal compression for primary or metastatic liver cancer were analysed. We determined the day-to-day correlation between gold marker and tumour positions in contrast-enhanced CT scans acquired at treatment preparation and before each treatment session. The influence of marker–tumour distance on the accuracy of prediction was estimated by introducing a method extension of the set-up error paradigm. The distance between gold markers and the centre of the tumour varied between 5 and 96 mm. Marker-guidance was superior to guiding treatment using other surrogates, although both the random and systematic components of the prediction error SD depended on the tumour–marker distance. For a marker–tumour distance of 4 cm, we observed σ = 1.3 mm and Σ = 1.6 mm. The 3D position of the diaphragm dome was the second best predictor. In conclusion, the tumour position can be predicted accurately using implanted markers, but marker-guided set-up accuracy decreases with increasing distance between implanted markers and the tumour.
Effects of Context on Visuomotor Interference Depends on the Perspective of Observed Actions

Visuomotor interference occurs when the execution of an action is facilitated by the concurrent observation of the same action and hindered by the concurrent observation of a different action. There is evidence that visuomotor interference can be modulated top-down by higher cognitive functions, depending on whether own performed actions or observed actions are selectively attended. Here, we studied whether these effects of cognitive context on visuomotor interference are also dependent on the point-of-view of the observed action. We employed a delayed go/no-go task known to induce visuomotor interference. Static images of hand gestures in either egocentric or allocentric perspective were presented as “go” stimuli after participants were pre-cued to prepare either a matching (congruent) or non-matching (incongruent) action. Participants performed this task in two different cognitive contexts: In one, they focused on the visual image of the hand gesture shown as the go stimulus (image context), whereas in the other they focused on the hand gesture they performed (action context). We analyzed reaction times to initiate the prepared action upon presentation of the gesture image and found evidence of visuomotor interference in both contexts and for both perspectives. Strikingly, results show that the effect of cognitive context on visuomotor interference also depends on the perspective of observed actions. When focusing on own-actions, visuomotor interference was significantly less for gesture images in allocentric perspective than in egocentric perspective; when focusing on observed actions, visuomotor interference was present regardless of the perspective of the gesture image. Overall these data suggest that visuomotor interference may be modulated by higher cognitive processes, so that when we are specifically attending to our own actions, images depicting others’ actions (allocentric perspective) have much less interference on our own actions.