Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The spatiotemporal organization of cerebellar network activity resolved by two-photon imaging of multiple single neurons

In order to investigate the spatiotemporal organization of neuronal activity in local microcircuits, techniques allowing the simultaneous recording from multiple single neurons are required. To this end, we implemented an advanced spatial-light modulator two-photon microscope (SLM-2PM). A critical issue for cerebellar theory is the organization of granular layer activity in the cerebellum, which has been predicted by single-cell recordings and computational models. With SLM-2PM, calcium signals could be recorded from different network elements in acute cerebellar slices including granule cells (GrCs), Purkinje cells (PCs) and molecular layer interneurons. By combining WCRs with SLM-2PM, the spike/calcium relationship in GrCs and PCs could be extrapolated toward the detection of single spikes. The SLM-2PM technique made it possible to monitor activity of over tens to hundreds neurons simultaneously. GrC activity depended on the number of spikes in the input mossy fiber bursts. PC and molecular layer interneuron activity paralleled that in the underlying GrC population revealing the spread of activity through the cerebellar cortical network. Moreover, circuit activity was increased by the GABA-A receptor blocker, gabazine, and reduced by the AMPA and NMDA receptor blockers, NBQX and APV. The SLM-2PM analysis of spatiotemporal patterns lent experimental support to the time-window and center-surround organizing principles of the granular layer.
The impact of lost therapeutic benefit (LTB) in high-risk hypertensive patients: 2-year follow-up data from the Australian REACH registry.

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study is to determine the extent of lost therapeutic benefit (LTB) in the hypertensive patients, and to determine the relationship between the presence of LTB and clinical outcomes. METHODS Prospective-cohort study of n = 2856 patients with or at high risk of atherothrombosis. LTB was calculated as the proportion of patients receiving blood pressure medication who were not attaining guideline blood pressure (BP) control targets (<140/90 mmHg). Logistic regression analysis was performed to identify predictors of LTB at baseline, and propensity score matching (PSM) was undertaken to estimate the treatment effects by matching case LTB and control non-LTB cohorts based on the nearest neighbor matching. RESULTS Of the total sample of 2856, 45.6% had uncontrolled BP, and LTB was present in 46.7% patients. The likelihood of LTB was less in males (OR = 0.78 [95% CI; 0.64-0.97]), and those with a previous myocardial infarction (OR = 0.66 [0.53-0.81]) or heart failure (OR = 0.58 [0.42-0.82]). LTB was more common in those with diabetes (OR = 1.44 [1.16-1.79]), aged >65 years (OR = 1.36 [1.06-1.75]) and having an ABI < 0.09 in either leg at rest (OR = 1.30 [1.02-1.75]). Following PSM, the combination of ischemic events (55-64 age category) was more likely to occur in the LTB compared with non-LTB group (4.38% and 0.68%, respectively [P = 0.046]). CONCLUSION Presence of HF, previous MI and being male decreased the likelihood of LTB, while presence of diabetes, age > 65 and ABI < 0.09 increased the risk of LTB. Patients with LTB in age category 55-64 had higher incidence of vascular events compared with those with non-LTB.
Political Intervention in Debt Contracts

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model of an agricultural economy in which poor farmers borrow from rich farmers. Because output is stochastic (we allow for idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks), there may be default ex post. We compare equilibria with and without political intervention. Intervention takes the form of a moratorium and is decided by voting. When bad economic shocks are highly likely, state‐contingent debt moratoria always improve ex post efficiency and may also improve ex ante efficiency. Moreover, the threat of moratoria enhances efficiency. When adverse macro shocks are unlikely, state‐contingent moratoria always improve ex ante welfare by completing incomplete debt contracts.
Front Bifurcations in an Excitatory Neural Network

We show how a one-dimensional excitatory neural network can exhibit a symmetry breaking front bifurcation analogous to that found in reaction diffusion systems. This occurs in a homogeneous network when a stationary front undergoes a pitchfork bifurcation leading to bidirectional wave propagation. We analyze the dynamics in a neighborhood of the front bifurcation using perturbation methods, and we establish that a weak input inhomogeneity can induce a Hopf instability of the stationary front, leading to the formation of an oscillatory front or breather. We then carry out a stability analysis of stationary fronts in an exactly solvable model and use this to derive conditions for oscillatory fronts beyond the weak input regime. In particular, we show how wave propagation failure occurs in the presence of a large stationary input due to the pinning of a stationary front; a subsequent reductionin the strength of the input then generates a breather via a Hopf instability of the front. Finally, we derive condit.
Anxiety and academic performance: A meta-analysis of findings

Abstract The strength of the relationship between anxiety and performance varies from study to study with correlations from extreme negative to positive values. In order to reveal the sources of this inconsistency, a series of meta-analyses was conducted using the Schmidt-Hunter algorithm for effect sizes r. One hundred and twenty-six studies published from 1975 to 1988, based on a total sample of 36,626 subjects, were located after a comprehensive literature search. They include 156 independent samples. An overall analysis with the 156 effect sizes yielded a population effect size of r = −. 21. Further analyses aimed at exploring moderator variables that would account for the residual variance, but tests of gender, culture (USA, West Germany and others), and anxiety stability (state/trait) failed to unveil the expected moderator impact. However, analyses with the anxiety components worry and emotionality, kinds of anxiety such as general and test anxiety, and the anxiety measurement point in time yielded .
An in Vitro Evaluation of the Victim and Perpetrator Potential of the Anticancer Agent Laromustine (VNP40101M), Based on Reaction Phenotyping and Inhibition and Induction of Cytochrome P450 Enzymes

Laromustine (VNP40101M, also known as Cloretazine) is a novel sulfonylhydrazine alkylating (anticancer) agent. Laromustine generates two types of reactive intermediates: 90CE and methylisocyanate. When incubated with rat, dog, monkey, and human liver microsomes, [14C]laromustine was converted to 90CE (C-8) and seven other radioactive components (C-1–C-7). There was little difference in the metabolite profile among the species examined, in part because the formation of most components (C-1–C-6 and 90CE) did not require NADPH but involved decomposition and/or hydrolysis. The exception was C-7, a hydroxylated metabolite, largely formed by CYP2B6 and CYP3A4/5. Laromustine caused direct inhibition of CYP2B6 and CYP3A4/5 (the two enzymes involved in C-7 formation) as well as of CYP2C19. Ki values were 125 μM for CYP2B6, 297 μM for CYP3A4/5, and 349 μM for CYP2C19 and were greater than the average clinical plasma Cmax of laromustine (25 μM). There was evidence of time-dependent inhibition of CYP1A2, CYP2B6, and CYP3A4/5. Treatment of primary cultures of human hepatocytes with up to 100 μM laromustine did not induce CYP1A2, CYP2B6, CYP2C8, CYP2C9, CYP2C19, or CYP3A4/5, but the highest concentration of laromustine decreased the activity and levels of immunoreactive CYP3A4. The results of this study suggest the laromustine has 1) negligible victim potential with respect to metabolism by cytochrome P450 enzymes, 2) negligible enzyme-inducing potential, and 3) the potential in some cases to cause inhibition of CYP2B6, CYP3A4, and possibly CYP2C19 during and shortly after the duration of intravenous administration of this anticancer drug, but the clinical effects of such interactions are likely to be insignificant.
A Comparison of Academic Dishonesty Among Business Students in a Public and Private Catholic University

A questionnaire on academic dishonesty was administered to junior and senior business administration majors at a public and a private Catholic university. Students were asked their extent of participation in 16 dishonest academic practices; their ratings of the ethical levels of the practices; their ratings of the likelihood of reasons for participation in the practices; and their sex, grade point average (GPA), and class rank. Though the catalog of the Catholic university indicated a greater emphasis on ethics and values education than did the catalog of the public school, the two groups of students reported very similar levels of academic dishonesty. Possible reasons for the disconnect between the emphasis on values and morals at the Catholic university and the students' academic behavior are discussed.
Detecting Duplicate Pull-requests in GitHub

The widespread use of pull-requests boosts the development and evolution for many open source software projects. However, due to the parallel and uncoordinated nature of development process in GitHub, duplicate pull-requests may be submitted by different contributors to solve the same problem. Duplicate pull-requests increase the maintenance cost of GitHub, result in the waste of time spent on the redundant effort of code review, and even frustrate developers' willing to offer continuous contribution. In this paper, we investigate using text information to automatically detect duplicate pull-requests in GitHub. For a new-arriving pull-request, we compare the textual similarity between it and other existing pull-requests, and then return a candidate list of the most similar ones. We evaluate our approach on three popular projects hosted in GitHub, namely Rails, Elasticsearch and Angular.JS. The evaluation shows that about 55.3% -- 71.0% of the duplicates can be found when we use the combination of title similarity and description similarity.
Changes in Organization and Axonal Transport of Cytoskeletal Proteins During Regeneration

Abstract: Changes in solubility and transport rate of cyto‐skeletal proteins during regeneration were studied in the motor fibers of the rat sciatic nerve. Nerves were injured by freezing at the midthigh level either 1–2 weeks before (experiment I) or 1 week after radioactive labeling of the spinal cord with l‐[35S]methionine (experiment II). Labeled proteins in 6‐mm consecutive segments of the nerve 2 weeks after labeling were analyzed following fractionation into soluble and insoluble populations with 1° Triton at 4°C. When ax‐onal transport of newly synthesized cytoskeleton was examined in the regenerating nerve in experiment I, a new faster component enriched in soluble tubulin and actin was observed that was not present in the control nerve. The rate of the slower main component containing most of the insoluble tubulin and actin together with neurofilament proteins was not affected. A smaller but significant peak of radioactivity enriched in soluble tubulin and actin was also detected ahead of the main peak when the response of the preexisting cytoskeleton was examined in experiment II. It is thus concluded that during regeneration changes in the organization take place in both the newly synthesized and the preexisting axonal cytoskeleton, resulting in a selective acceleration in rate of transport of soluble tubulin and actin.
Motivating computer science students by facilitating inderdisciplinary educational activities [Exploitation of a 3D Educational Game for Marketing]

This study investigates the integration of a 3D Collaborative Game into the learning process of a Marketing lesson. The research conducted in the context of a collaboration between two universities. Students from one university facilitated the game activity whereas the others played the game. The evaluation methodology was focused on users’ satisfaction, intension - purpose and attitude towards the game activity as well as on the motivational impact of the activity to the students who supported it. The preliminary results of the evaluation were promising and revealed that there is a great interest from the side of the learners towards the use of games in the learning process.
Expression of Erythropoietin and Its Receptor in Human Renal Cell Carcinoma

Objective: To investigate the prognostic impact of erythropoietin (EPO) and EPO-receptor (EPO-R) expression in tumour as well as serum EPO in patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Methods: Using immunohistochemistry, EPO and EPO-R were assessed in tissue microarrays from 195 RCCs. RCC type, TNM stage, nuclear grade, survival, EPO and haemoglobin (Hb) levels in blood were registered. Results: Strong expression of EPO and EPO-R in tumour tissue was found in 83 and 56%, respectively. EPO and EPO-R expression differed between RCC types. Serum EPO and blood Hb did not correlate to the expression of EPO or EPO-R. A positive correlation was found between the expression of EPO and EPO-R (p = 0.028). Survival was not related to tumour EPO, whereas strong EPO-R expression indicated a non-significantly worse prognosis. Serum EPO correlated positively to TNM stage and nuclear grade and negatively to survival. A multivariate analysis showed that TNM stage and nuclear grade were independent prognostic factors. Tumour EPO and EPO-R expression as well as serum EPO added no independent prognostic information. Conclusion: No correlation between EPO or EPO-R in tumour tissue and serum EPO or blood Hb was found. Neither EPO, EPO-R in tumour tissue nor serum EPO are independent prognostic factors.
Comparative cognition, hippocampal function, and recollection

Aristotle (350BC) contended that “. other animals (as well as man) have memory, but, of all that we are acquainted with, none, we venture to say, except man, shares in the faculty of recollection. ” Here Aristotle distinguishes “memory,” as an elementary matching of current sensations to impressions from prior experience, from the capacity for reminiscence, as the ability to mentally reconstruct past experiences. Jumping to current times, Tulving (1983, 2002) characterized animals as having the capacity for acquiring semantic knowledge, but claimed that episodic recollection “. has evolved only once, and in only one species, although other species would benefit from it as much as do humans. ” Neither Aristotle nor Tulving employed experimental evidence in support of their claims, but several other contemporary researchers have, with indecisive results, such that there is currently no consensus on whether animals have the capacity for recollection (reviewed in Clayton, Bussey, & Dickinson, 2003; Clayton, Bussey, Emery, & Dickinson, 2003; Hampson & Schwartz, 2004; see also Roberts, 2005). This literature will not be critiqued again here. Instead, I will What is conscious recollection? Is it special to humans or do animals have this capacity as well? What brain circuitry supports the kinds of information processing that constitute recollection? This review will outline recent evidence from studies on rodents, monkeys and humans bearing on these questions. This review focuses on a comparative approach that identified features of recollection that can be studied across species, explores these elements of recollection in animals, and examines in animals the role of the medial temporal areas that are critically involved in conscious recollection in humans. Substantial evidence indicates that animals exhibit all the fundamental features of recollection, that these abilities depend on the hippocampus in animals as well as humans, and that neuronal representations in the hippocampus reflect information processing fundamental to the features of recollection. In addition, the functional circuitry of the hippocampal system is largely conserved across species, and its organization suggests information processing mechanisms that support the features of recollection are common across species.
Sensationalism Versus News of the Moral Life: Making the Distinction

This study argues that there is a moral dimension to sensational news. The study assumes that citizens have a moral interest in the community because moral standards play a role in governing social behavior. Some news, labeled as sensational, reflects news of the moral life of the community and is related to the community's moral well-being. This study addresses the problem of making the distinction between such news and news that is sensational for its own sake. This study also suggests a method that journalists can use to responsibly cover stories traditionally associated with press sensationalism.
Differences and similarities in religious and paranormal beliefs: a typology of distinct faith signatures

We applied latent class analysis (LCA) to derive a statistically reliable typology of religious and paranormal beliefs in a large, diverse sample of New Zealanders (N=4422). We identified five patterns of belief, which we call faith signatures, reflecting distinct combinations of high or low belief in different religious teachings and paranormal phenomena. Although conventional wisdom pits agnostics against religious believers, we found that undifferentiated skeptics (41%) and religious exclusives (12%) expressed similarly high levels of disbelief for most types of paranormal phenomena, with religious exclusives showing traditional religious beliefs only. Also, we found striking similarities between undifferentiated believers (9%), New Age spiritualists (13%), and moderate agnostics (25%), all of whom accorded belief to supernatural realities across a number of religious and paranormal phenomena. However, only undifferentiated believers committed to the truth of superstitions. Importantly, we also found that faith signatures are reliably associated with demographic variables and core psychological traits (anomie, trust, and happiness). Thus, LCA reveals that the classifications “religious” and “secular” obscure subtleties in distinct categories of supernatural orientations. Furthermore, by scratching the surface of what appears to be a highly secular society, our results challenge conventional distinctions between religious and secular orientations. The key distinction is not between belief and disbelief but rather between levels of discrimination in different types of belief.
Spamming botnets: signatures and characteristics

In this paper, we focus on characterizing spamming botnets by leveraging both spam payload and spam server traffic properties. Towards this goal, we developed a spam signature generation framework called AutoRE to detect botnet-based spam emails and botnet membership. AutoRE does not require pre-classified training data or white lists. Moreover, it outputs high quality regular expression signatures that can detect botnet spam with a low false positive rate. Using a three-month sample of emails from Hotmail, AutoRE successfully identified 7,721 botnet-based spam campaigns together with 340,050 unique botnet host IP addresses. Our in-depth analysis of the identified botnets revealed several interesting findings regarding the degree of email obfuscation, properties of botnet IP addresses, sending patterns, and their correlation with network scanning traffic. We believe these observations are useful information in the design of botnet detection schemes.
Moderated Online Social Therapy: A Model for Reducing Stress in Carers of Young People Diagnosed with Mental Health Disorders

Family members caring for a young person diagnosed with the onset of mental health problems face heightened stress, depression, and social isolation. Despite evidence for the effectiveness of family based interventions, sustaining access to specialist family interventions is a major challenge. The availability of the Internet provides possibilities to expand and sustain access to evidence-based psychoeducation and personal support for family members. In this paper we describe the therapeutic model and the components of our purpose-built moderated online social therapy (MOST) program for families. We outline the background to its development, beginning with our face-to-face EPISODE II family intervention, which informed our selection of therapeutic content, and the integration of recent developments in positive psychology. Our online interventions for carers integrate online therapy, online social networking, peer and expert support, and online social problem solving which has been designed to reduce stress in carers. The initial version of our application entitled Meridian was shown to be safe, acceptable, and feasible in a feasibility study of carers of youth diagnosed with depression and anxiety. There was a significant reduction in self-reported levels of stress in caregivers and change in stress was significantly correlated with use of the system. We have subsequently launched a cluster RCT for caregivers with a relative diagnosed with first-episode psychosis. Our intervention has the potential to improve access to effective specialist support for families facing the onset of serious mental health problems in their young relative.
Comparison of Bilateral Isokinetic Knee Extension/Flexion and Cycle Ergometry Tests of Power

This investigation examined the relationship between bilateral isokinetic knee extension/flexion and cycle ergometry tests of power. Twenty active trained volunteers (10 M, 10 F) performed 30 set of maximal bilateral isokinetic knee concentric reciprocal extension/flexion work at 180° sec. They also completed a Wingate power test of 30 set maximal cycling on a Monark cycle ergometer with an opposing resistance of 0.88 N per kg body weight. There were significant correlations between the two tests for peak power (PP), mean power (MP), and fatigue slope per second (FSS), but not for fatigue percentage (FP). Wingate, PP, MP, and FSS were significantly greater than isokinetic values whereas FP was not statistically different between tests. Males exhibited significantly greater values across all variables except for Wingate FP. It was concluded that the bilateral isokinetic test of power revealed a significant power profile with the cycle ergometry test.
Phytochemical analysis and antibacterial evaluation of the ethyl acetate extract of the stem bark of Bridelia micrantha

Background Plant cells fundamentally are chemical factories containing a rich supply of therapeutically useful phytocompounds that have the potential of being developed into potent antimicrobial agents. Aim of the Study: To investigate the antibacterial activity of fractionated extracts of the ethyl acetate extract of the stem bark of Bridelia micrantha (Hochst., Baill., Euphorbiaceae). Materials and Methods: Thin-layer chromatography and column chromatography were used to purify the extracts and antimicrobial activity performed on reference and clinical strains of Staphylococcus aureus, Shigella sonnei, Salmonella Typhimurium, and Helicobacter pylori using direct and indirect bioautographic methods respectively. Furthermore, the eluted compound fractions were then assayed for minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC50) using the 96-well micro dilution technique. Results: Better separation of phytocompounds was obtained from the non-polar Benzene/Ethanol/Ammonia (BEA) and intermediate-polar Chloroform/Ethyl acetate/Formic acid (CEF) eluents compared to the polar Ethanol/Methanol/Water (EMW). Bioautography revealed the presence of three bioactive compounds (Rf values; 0.12, 0.20, and 0.42) on the BEA plates, designated fractions 3, 7, and 8 with MIC50 values; 0.0048mg/mL to 1.25mg/mL (fraction 3), 0.0024mg/mL to 5 mg/mL (fraction 7), and 0.0024mg/mL to 2.5mg/mL (fraction 8). Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate that ethyl acetate extract of the stem-bark of B. micrantha possess potent bioactive phytocompounds that may be developed into new antimicrobials.