Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gaze shifts evoked by electrical stimulation of the superior colliculus in the head‐unrestrained cat. I. Effect of the locus and of the parameters of stimulation

Several studies have suggested that the pattern of neuronal activity in the superior colliculus (SC) interacts with the well‐known topographical coding of saccades (motor map). To further describe this interaction, we recorded gaze saccades evoked by electrical microstimulation of SC deeper layers in the head‐unrestrained cat and systematically varied the collicular locus (25 sites) and parameters (intensity, frequency) of the stimulation. Long stimulation trains were used to avoid saccade truncation. We found that the direction and amplitude of evoked gaze shifts were related to the stimulation locus, describing a gaze shift map. For 18 out of 20 sites the amplitude, but not the direction, also strongly depended on stimulation strength. Indeed, gaze amplitude continuously increased when raising current intensity up to several times the threshold value T (the largest intensity tested was 6 × T), whereas varying pulse frequency from 150 to 750 pulses per second (p.p.s.) revealed an optimal frequency range (300 and 500 p.p.s.) eliciting the largest gaze shifts. Moreover, the intensity effect on amplitude increased in an orderly fashion with the rostro‐caudal stimulation locus. Gaze shift amplitude was not related to the number of delivered stimulation pulses. Concerning movement initiation, increasing either intensity or frequency led to an exponential decrease in gaze latency until minimal values near 30 ms were reached, but the number of pulses delivered during the corresponding latency period remained constant within a 300–500 p.p.s. frequency range. These findings indicate that the pattern of collicular discharge evoked by electrical stimulation strongly interacts with the gaze shift map and provide evidence for a summation of collicular activities by downstream premotor neurons.
Boosting for Vote Learning in High-Dimensional kNN Classification

Intrinsically high-dimensional data has recently been shown to exhibit substantial hubness in terms of skewness of the k-nearest neighbor occurrence frequency distribution. While some points arise as centers of influence and dominate most k-nearest neighbor sets, other points occur very rarely and barely affect the inferred models. Hubness has been shown to be highly detrimental to many learning tasks and several hubness-aware learning methods have recently been proposed. This paper extends the existing fuzzy neighbor occurrence models in order to enable cost-sensitive learning. We evaluate the extended implementations within the context of multi-class boosting, which is used to learn the appropriate neighbor votes during the re-weighting iterations. The proposed approach is evaluated on a series of high-dimensional datasets from various domains. The results demonstrate promising improvements of the proposed approach over the baselines.
Neuromelanins Isolated from Different Regions of the Human Brain Exhibit a Common Surface Photoionization Threshold

Neuromelanin isolated from the premotor cortex, cerebellum, putamen, globus pallidus and corpus callosum of the human brain is studied by scanning probe and photoelectron emission microscopies and the results are compared with previously published work on neuromelanin from the substantia nigra. Scanning electron microscopy reveals common structure for all neuromelanins. All exhibit spherical entities of diameters between 200 and 400 nm, composed of smaller spherical substructures, ∼30 nm in diameter. These features are similar to that observed for many melanin systems including Sepia cuttlefish, bovine eye, and human eye and hair melanosomes. Photoelectron microscopy images were collected for all neuromelanins at specific wavelengths of ultraviolet light between 248 and 413 nm, using the spontaneous emission output from the Duke free electron laser. Analysis of the data establishes a common threshold photoionization potential for neuromelanins of 4.7 ± 0.2 eV, corresponding to an oxidation potential of −0.3 ± 0.2 V vs the normal hydrogen electrode (NHE). These results are consistent with previously reported potentials for neuromelanin from the substantia nigra of 4.5 ± 0.2 eV (−0.1 ± 0.2 V vs NHE). All neuromelanins exhibit a common low surface oxidation potential, reflecting their eumelanic component and their inability to trigger redox processes with neurotoxic effect.
Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America: Korean Protestants and Indian Hindus across Generations

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction 1 Theoretical Frameworks 2 Religions in India and South Korea 3 Korean and Indian Immigrants' Religious Affiliations and Participation in Religious Institutions 4 Ethnographic Research on the Shin Kwang Korean Church 5 Ethnographic Research on the Hindu Temple Society of North America 6 Participation in Religious Institutions, Family Rituals, and Identity 7 Younger Generations' Preservation of Ethnicity through Participation in Religious Institutions 8 Younger Generations' Preservation of Ethnicity through Domestic Religious Practices 9 The Importance of Religion to Younger Generations' Identity, Socialization, and Social Relations 10 A Summary of Major Findings and Their Theoretical ImplicationsAppendix 1 Appendix 2 NotesReferences Index About the Author
Learning from Balance Sheet Visualization.

This exploratory study examines alternative visuals and their effect on the level of learning of balance sheet users. Executive and regular classes of graduate students majoring in information technology in business were asked to evaluate the extent of acceptance and enhanced capability of these alternative visuals toward their learning performances. Adapting from the cognitive fit theory, higher level of learning performance will be achieved, if the type of visual representation matches the information processing requirement of the type of task activity. Results from 54% of the response rate of 104 students showed that the majority of respondents had visual-oriented learning style. Regardless of whichever type of task activity was performed, the respondents seemed to accept certain types of balance sheet visual more than the others. Mixture of number and graph was chosen as the most acceptable, then spatial table, and finally traditional graph. No statistical significant relationship was found between visual-task preferences and the respondents’ learning performance.
Absolute humidity modulates influenza survival, transmission, and seasonality

Influenza A incidence peaks during winter in temperate regions. The basis for this pronounced seasonality is not understood, nor is it well documented how influenza A transmission principally occurs. Previous studies indicate that relative humidity (RH) affects both influenza virus transmission (IVT) and influenza virus survival (IVS). Here, we reanalyze these data to explore the effects of absolute humidity on IVT and IVS. We find that absolute humidity (AH) constrains both transmission efficiency and IVS much more significantly than RH. In the studies presented, 50% of IVT variability and 90% of IVS variability are explained by AH, whereas, respectively, only 12% and 36% are explained by RH. In temperate regions, both outdoor and indoor AH possess a strong seasonal cycle that minimizes in winter. This seasonal cycle is consistent with a wintertime increase in IVS and IVT and may explain the seasonality of influenza. Thus, differences in AH provide a single, coherent, more physically sound explanation for the observed variability of IVS, IVT and influenza seasonality in temperate regions. This hypothesis can be further tested through future, additional laboratory, epidemiological and modeling studies.
Enhanced lymphatic delivery of mitomycin C conjugated with dextran.

Absorption and lymphatic transfer of a polymeric prodrug of mitomycin C (MMC), mitomycin C-dextran conjugate (MMC-D), following i.m. injection were studied in rats in order to assess the feasibility of a macromolecular prodrug as a lymphotropic delivery system. Three types of MMC-D, conjugates with dextran with molecular weights of 10,000, 70,000 and 500,000, were synthesized, and the disposition of MMC was determined by bioassay. Following i.m. injection of MMC-D, MMC was retained at the injection site for a long period in a conjugated form while MMC administered as a free form disappeared rapidly. The disappearance was markedly influenced by the size of carrier dextran, because the remaining amount of MMC increased with an increase of molecular size. The lymphatic uptake of the drug was evaluated by determining the concentration in the regional lymph nodes and thoracic lymph fluid. In contrast to a slight lymphatic uptake following i.v. and i.m. injection of free MMC, MMC-D exhibited remarkable accumulation in the regional lymph nodes after i.m. injection which persisted up to 48 hr. MMC-D (Mr 10,000) appeared in the thoracic lymph as both the conjugated and the free form. Larger MMC-D gave a persistent supply of free MMC in thoracic lymph, suggesting that it was accumulated in the lymph node and supplying MMC continuously. These MMC-Ds suppressed the lymph node metastases introduced by a s.c. inoculation of L1210 leukemia cells. The usefulness of MMC-D as a lymphotropic delivery system for preventing lymphatic metastasis of cancer was suggested.
Impediments to Trade in Services : Measurements and Policy Implications

1. Introduction Christopher Findlay and Tony Warren 2. The services sector in output and in international trade Jong-Soon Kang 3. Price impact measures of impediments to services trade Malcolm Bosworth, Christopher Findlay, Ray Trewin and Tony Warren 4. Assessing barriers to services sector investment Leanne Holmes and Alexis Hardin 5. The identification of impediments to trade and investment in telecommunications services Tony Warren 6. The impact on output of impediments to trade and investment in telecommunications services Tony Warren 7. A price-impact measure of impediments to trade in telecommunications services Ray Trewin 8. Modelling the benefits of increasing competition in international air services Martin Johnson, Tendai Gregan, Geraldine Gentle and Paul Belin 9. Regulatory reform in the maritime industry Jong-Soon Kang and Christopher Findlay 10. Restrictiveness of international trade in the maritime industry Greg McGuire, Michael Schuele and Tina Smith 11. Price impact of restrictions on maritime transport services Jong-Soon Kang 12. Restrictiveness of international trade in banking services Greg McGuire and Michael Schuele 13. The price impact of restrictions on banking services Kaleeswaran Kalirajan, Greg McGuire, Duc Nguyen-Hong and Michael Schuele 14. Trade in education services and the impacts of barriers to trade Steven Kemp 15. Measuring barriers to market access for services: a pilot study on accountancy services Allesandra Colecchia 16. Issues in the application of GCE models to services trade liberalisation Philippa Dee, Alexis Hardin and Leanne Holmes 17. A comparison of existing services trade arrangements within APEC Sherry Stephenson 18. Services issues in APEC Christopher Findlay and Tony Warren 19. The WTO agenda: next steps Richard Snape
Agricultural export performance in Africa: Elements of comparison with Asia

This study addresses the strategies and the factors of agricultural export performance in Africa compared with other regions, especially Asia. Regarding the figures of agricultural export performance across these regions, the study finds that agricultural export commodities, either primary or processed, are less diversified in sub-Saharan Africa as compared to Asia, but that diversification evolves more favorably in Africa compared to Asia for primary, as opposed to processed, agricultural exports. The paper also finds sharp sub-regional differences: CFA economies’ agricultural exports are less diversified than those of non-CFA economies. Also, diversification dynamics are found to be less favorable in the CFA zone, but CFA economies appear to shift relatively more rapidly from primary towards processed commodity exports. The study then investigates the extent to which the underlying strategies conform to international commodity price incentives. It confirms such conformity for primary commodities for Latin America and the Caribbean, followed by sub-Saharan Africa. As regards processed commodities, sub-Saharan Africa is found to have the best track record, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean. The study finds that Asian commodities have the most unfavorable structure, but that this structure improves the fastest. The study also analyzes the extent to which different strategies are complementary or substitutable. The findings support the hypothesis of complementariness relatively more so than that of substitutability, as if the line of demarcation separated good and poor performers more clearly than the specific strategies in which they perform, but the most dominating feature is the looseness of the relationship among different strategies. To explain African versus Asian differences, a succinct review of the factors of performance in Asia and a discussion of their relevance for Africa is carried out. Thus, while human and physical capital is generally found to have played a central role in Asian export promotion, this study argues that these factors are not what make the difference with Africa in the first place. Likewise, this paper argues that neither macroeconomic stability, nor international market imperfections a make notable difference. A regression-based exercise shows that the impact of these factors on performance is subject to the quality of governance, thus suggesting that institutions are the decisive factor that determines performance in the first place. To support this view, the paper proposes two contrasted African case studies – Burundi versus Uganda –, which suggest that the interactions between biased distributive politics and export policies are responsible for a large part of the African export counter-performance. Accordingly, the study argues that addressing institutions prior to, or at least along with, other efforts seeking to improve the macroeconomic environment and to liberalize and deregulate the economy is a requirement for African countries to significantly improve their agricultural export performance.
Comparative analysis on evaluation results of Case Base Reasoning Classification and ANN classification on mammogram mass detection

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in the western world and in Malaysia, other than skin cancer. It is the second leading cause of cancer death in women, after lung cancer. Screening mammography is currently the most effective tool for early detection of breast cancer. For every thousand cases analyzed by a radiologist, only 3 to 4 are cancerous and the rest could be overlooked. The challenges basically come from the (1) A large variability in the appearance of abnormalities (masses) within digital mammogram made very difficult in image analysis (2) Presence of high dense breast tissues for fibroglandular tissue predominance such as mammogram of young woman which makes the distinction between normal glandular tissues and malignant disease is difficult, So it is very hard to detect the masses with an opaque uniform background and (3) hard to obtain data in an unstructured knowledge of previous screening history. In this paper, we have proposed an algorithm by CBR (Case Based Reasoning Classification) based computerized mammogram mass detection for improving the accuracy rate of detection; the main aim of the paper is to show the evaluation results of CBR classification and make a comparative analysis with existing ANN classification method.
Modulation of the Intestinal Microbiota Alters Colitis-Associated Colorectal Cancer Susceptibility

It is well established that the intestinal microbiota plays a key role in the pathogenesis of Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) collectively referred to as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Epidemiological studies have provided strong evidence that IBD patients bear increased risk for the development of colorectal cancer (CRC). However, the impact of the microbiota on the development of colitis-associated cancer (CAC) remains largely unknown. In this study, we established a new model of CAC using azoxymethane (AOM)-exposed, conventionalized-Il10−/− mice and have explored the contribution of the host intestinal microbiota and MyD88 signaling to the development of CAC. We show that 8/13 (62%) of AOM-Il10−/− mice developed colon tumors compared to only 3/15 (20%) of AOM- wild-type (WT) mice. Conventionalized AOM-Il10−/− mice developed spontaneous colitis and colorectal carcinomas while AOM-WT mice were colitis-free and developed only rare adenomas. Importantly, tumor multiplicity directly correlated with the presence of colitis. Il10−/− mice mono-associated with the mildly colitogenic bacterium Bacteroides vulgatus displayed significantly reduced colitis and colorectal tumor multiplicity compared to Il10−/− mice. Germ-free AOM-treated Il10−/− mice showed normal colon histology and were devoid of tumors. Il10−/−; Myd88−/− mice treated with AOM displayed reduced expression of Il12p40 and Tnfα mRNA and showed no signs of tumor development. We present the first direct demonstration that manipulation of the intestinal microbiota alters the development of CAC. The TLR/MyD88 pathway is essential for microbiota-induced development of CAC. Unlike findings obtained using the AOM/DSS model, we demonstrate that the severity of chronic colitis directly correlates to colorectal tumor development and that bacterial-induced inflammation drives progression from adenoma to invasive carcinoma.
New Strategies for Image Annotation: Overview of the Photo Annotation Task at ImageCLEF 2010

The ImageCLEF 2010 Photo Annotation Task poses the challenge of automated annotation of 93 visual concepts in Flickr photos. The participants were provided with a training set of 8,000 Flickr im- ages including annotations, EXIF data and Flickr user tags. Testing was performed on 10,000 Flickr images, dierentiated between approaches considering solely visual information, approaches relying on textual in- formation and multi-modal approaches. Half of the ground truth was acquired with a crowdsourcing approach. The evaluation followed two evaluation paradigms: per concept and per example. In total, 17 research teams participated in the multi-label classification challenge with 63 sub- missions. Summarizing the results, the task could be solved with a MAP of 0.455 in the multi-modal configuration, with a MAP of 0.407 in the visual-only configuration and with a MAP of 0.234 in the textual con- figuration. For the evaluation per example, 0.66 F-ex and 0.66 OS-FCS could be achieved for the multi-modal configuration, 0.68 F-ex and 0.65 OS-FCS for the visual configuration and 0.26 F-ex and 0.37 OS-FCS for the textual configuration.
Trigeminocardiac Reflex by Mandibular Extension on Rat Pial Microcirculation: Role of Nitric Oxide

In the present study we have extended our previous findings about the effects of 10 minutes of passive mandibular extension in anesthetized Wistar rats. By prolonging the observation time to 3 hours, we showed that 10 minutes mandibular extension caused a significant reduction of the mean arterial blood pressure and heart rate respect to baseline values, which persisted up to 160 minutes after mandibular extension. These effects were accompanied by a characteristic biphasic response of pial arterioles: during mandibular extension, pial arterioles constricted and after mandibular extension dilated for the whole observation period. Interestingly, the administration of the opioid receptor antagonist naloxone abolished the vasoconstriction observed during mandibular extension, while the administration of Nω-Nitro-L-arginine methyl ester, a nitric oxide synthase inhibitor, abolished the vasodilation observed after mandibular extension. Either drug did not affect the reduction of mean arterial blood pressure and heart rate induced by mandibular extension. By qRT-PCR, we also showed that neuronal nitric oxide synthase gene expression was significantly increased compared with baseline conditions during and after mandibular extension and endothelial nitric oxide synthase gene expression markedly increased at 2 hours after mandibular extension. Finally, western blotting detected a significant increase in neuronal and endothelial nitric oxide synthase protein expression. In conclusion mandibular extension caused complex effects on pial microcirculation involving opioid receptor activation and nitric oxide release by both neurons and endothelial vascular cells at different times.
Realistic assessment of software effort estimation models

Context: It is unclear that current approaches to evaluating or comparing competing software cost or effort models give a realistic picture of how they would perform in actual use. Specifically, we're concerned that the usual practice of using all data with some holdout strategy is at variance with the reality of a data set growing as projects complete. Objective: This study investigates the impact of using unrealistic, though possibly convenient to the researchers, ways to compare models on commercial data sets. Our questions are does this lead to different conclusions in terms of the comparisons and if so, are the results biased e.g., more optimistic than those that might realistically be achieved in practice. Method: We compare a traditional approach based on leave one out cross-validation with growing the data set chronologically using the Finnish and Desharnais data sets. Results: Our realistic, time-based approach to validation is significantly more conservative than leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) for both data sets. Conclusion: If we want our research to lead to actionable findings it's incumbent upon the researchers to evaluate their models in realistic ways. This means a departure from LOOCV techniques, while further investigation is needed for other validation techniques, such as k-fold validation.
Investment Tax Incentives and Frequent Tax Reforms

Despite the frequency of tax changes and their potential importance to investors, almost all of the analysis of tax-based investment incentives assumes investors never anticipate any tax changes. We depart from this approach by analyzing the historical pattern of U.S. corporate investment incentives over the period 1953-86, incorporating the feature of investor awareness that the tax code may change. Our analysis incorporates a predictive equation for future tax variables into a model of optimal investment subject to adjustment costs and uncertainty. We find that expectations of future tax changes significantly affect the incentive to invest only if adjustment costs are low. In this case, the incentive to invest in 1986 was strong, as investors are estimated to have anticipated the coming reduction in investment incentives.