Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning an attention model in an artificial visual system

The Human visual perception of the world is of a large fixed image that is highly detailed and sharp. However, receptor density in the retina is not uniform: a small central region called the fovea is very dense and exhibits high resolution, whereas a peripheral region around it has much lower spatial resolution. Thus, contrary to our perception, we are only able to observe a very small region around the line of sight with high resolution. The perception of a complete and stable view is aided by an attention mechanism that directs the eyes to the numerous points of interest within the scene. The eyes move between these targets in quick, unconscious movements, known as "saccades". Once a target is centered at the fovea, the eyes fixate for a fraction of a second while the visual system extracts the necessary information. An artificial visual system was built based on a fully recurrent neural network set within a reinforcement learning protocol, and learned to attend to regions of interest while solving a classification task. The model is consistent with several experimentally observed phenomena, and suggests novel predictions.
Stochastic Linear Optimization under Bandit Feedback

In the classical stochastic k-armed bandit problem, in each of a sequence of T rounds, a decision maker chooses one of k arms and incurs a cost chosen from an unknown distribution associated with that arm. The goal is to minimize regret, defined as the difference between the cost incurred by the algorithm and the optimal cost. In the linear optimization version of this problem (first considered by Auer [2002]), we view the arms as vectors in R, and require that the costs be linear functions of the chosen vector. As before, it is assumed that the cost functions are sampled independently from an unknown distribution. In this setting, the goal is to find algorithms whose running time and regret behave well as functions of the number of rounds T and the dimensionality n (rather than the number of arms, k, which may be exponential in n or even infinite). We give a nearly complete characterization of this problem in terms of both upper and lower bounds for the regret. In certain special cases (such as when the decision region is a polytope), the regret is polylog(T ). In general though, the optimal regret is Θ∗( √ T ) — our lower bounds rule out the possibility of obtaining polylog(T ) rates in general. We present two variants of an algorithm based on the idea of “upper confidence bounds. ” The first, due to Auer [2002], but not fully analyzed, obtains regret whose dependence on n and T are both essentially optimal, but which may be computationally intractable when the decision set is a polytope. The second version can be efficiently implemented when the decision set is a polytope (given as an intersection of half-spaces), but gives up a factor of √ n in the regret bound. Our results also extend to the setting where the set of allowed decisions may change over time. ∗Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago, varsha@cs.uchicago. edu †Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, {hayest,sham}@tti-c.org
Meta-analysis of large randomized controlled trials to evaluate the impact of statins on cardiovascular outcomes.

AIMS Since 2002, there have been five major outcome trials of statins reporting findings from more than 47,000 subjects. As individual trial results differed, we performed a meta-analysis to ascertain the effectiveness and safety of statins overall and in subgroups. The aim of the study was to estimate the effect of statins on major coronary events and strokes, all-cause mortality and noncardiovascular mortality, and in different subgroups. METHODS PubMed was searched for trials published in English. Randomized placebo-controlled statin trials with an average follow up of at least 3 years and at least 100 major coronary events were included. For each trial, the statin used, number and type of subjects, proportion of women, mean age and follow up, baseline and change in lipid profile, cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular outcomes were recorded. RESULTS Ten trials involving 79,494 subjects were included in the meta-analysis. Due to heterogeneity, ALLHAT-LLT was excluded from some analyses. Statin therapy reduced major coronary events by 27% (95%CI 23, 30%), stroke by 18% (95%CI 10, 25%) and all-cause mortality by 15% (95%CI 8, 21%). There was a 4% (95%CI -10, 3%) nonsignificant reduction in noncardiovascular mortality. The reduction in major coronary events is independent of gender and presence of hypertension or diabetes. The risk reduction was greater in smokers (P < 0.05). Coronary events were reduced by 23% (95%CI 18, 29%) in pravastatin trials and 29% (95%CI 25, 33%) in five trials using other statins. Pravastatin reduced strokes by 12% (95%CI 1, 21%) whilst other statins reduced strokes by 24% (95%CI 16, 32%) (P = 0.04). CONCLUSIONS Statins reduce coronary events, strokes and all-cause mortality without increasing noncoronary mortality. The benefits accrue in men and women, hypertensives and normotensives, diabetics and nondiabetics, and particularly in smokers. Pravastatin appears to have less impact on strokes.
Improved Glycemic Control With Intraperitoneal Versus Subcutaneous Insulin in Type 1 Diabetes

OBJECTIVE Continuous intraperitoneal insulin infusion (CIPII) with an implantable pump has been available for the past 25 years. CIPII, with its specific pharmacodynamic properties, may be a viable treatment alternative to improve glycemic control in patients with type 1 diabetes for whom other therapies have failed. There have been few studies in which CIPII was compared with subcutaneous insulin treatment for patients with type 1 diabetes with poor glycemic control. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS In an open-label, prospective, crossover, randomized, 16-month study, the effects of CIPII and subcutaneous insulin were compared in 24 patients. The primary outcome measure was the incidence of hypoglycemia. Secondary outcome measures were A1C, and glucose profile, including time in euglycemia, as measured by continuous glucose monitoring. RESULTS The incidence of grade 1 hypoglycemic events was 4.0 ± 2.6 per week with subcutaneous insulin compared with 3.5 ± 2.3 per week during CIPII (P = 0.13). The absolute mean difference in A1C with CIPII compared with subcutaneous treatment was −0.76% (95% CI −1.41 to −0.11) (P = 0.03). Baseline time spent in euglycemia was 45.2 ± 12.6% and increased 10.9% (4.6–17.3) with CIPII compared with subcutaneous treatment (absolute value; P = 0.003). There were no differences in the occurrence rate for severe hypoglycemic events, daily insulin use, or BMI. No pump or catheter malfunction was observed during the study. CONCLUSIONS Although we did not observe a significant reduction in hypoglycemic events, improved glycemic control was achieved with the use of CIPII. We saw a 0.8% decrease in A1C and an 11% increase in the time spent in euglycemia.
Constructing Latino Consumer-Citizens: An Analysis of Print Advertising in El Clamor Público (1855) and La Opinión (1926)

Advertising directed toward U.S. Latinos can be traced back to 1808 and has been integral to a Spanish-language media industry that has evolved significantly over the past two centuries. In this study, the author investigates how Latinos were discursively constructed as “consumer-citizens” by advertisers in the early Spanish-language press. Thus, advertising is seen as a site of ideological negotiation, hailing Latinos as participants within an evolving marketplace but also as members of a social system that distinguishes ethnic identity from national identity. An analysis of 685 print advertisements from two Los Angeles-based publications: El Clamor Público in 1855 and La Opinión in 1926 reveals that Anglo businesses invested economic resources toward reaching Spanish-speaking consumers as early as the first issue of the region's first Latino newspaper. This finding challenges claims that Latinos were excluded from the formal economy and that the early Spanish-language press was primarily a space for products made by and for Latinos. The author further found that Latino consumer identity evolved in relation to political, technological, and social changes occurring between 1855 and 1926.
Molecular Cancer Differential Effects of Class I Isoform Histone Deacetylase Depletion and Enzymatic Inhibition by Belinostat or Valproic Acid in Hela Cells

Background: Histone acetylation is an epigenetic modification involved in the regulation of gene expression, balanced by histone acetyl transferases and histone deacetylase (HDAC) enzymes. HDAC inhibitors (HDACi) induce growth arrest and cell death in transformed cells, and are currently in many clinical cancer trials. The transcriptional response to HDACi is complex, as is the response to HDAC isoform knockdown (KD). Here, we describe for the first time in a human cancer cell line, a transcriptional comparison of treatment by two structurally unrelated HDACi; belinostat and valproic acid with the KD of HDAC1, 2 and 3 isoforms.
A Study on Classification Methods Applied to Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a new area of research in data mining that concerns the detection of opinions and/or sentiments in texts. This work focuses on the application and the comparison of three classification techniques over a text corpus composed of reviews of commercial products in order to detect opinions about them. The chosen domain is about "perfumes", and user opinions composing the corpus are written in Italian language. The proposed approach is completely data-driven: a Term Frequency / Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) terms selection procedure has been applied in order to make computation more efficient, to improve the classification results and to manage some issues related to the specific classification procedure adopted.
Novel Subband Autoencoder Features for Non-Intrusive Quality Assessment of Noise Suppressed Speech

In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction architecture of Deep Neural Network (DNN), namely, subband autoencoder (SBAE). The proposed architecture is inspired by the Human Auditory System (HAS) and extracts features from speech spectrum in an unsupervised manner. We have used features extracted by this architecture for non-intrusive objective quality assessment of noise suppressed speech signal. The quality assessment problem is posed as a regression problem in which mapping between the acoustic features of speech signal and the corresponding subjective score is found using single layer Artificial Neural Network (ANN). We have shown experimentally that proposed features give more powerful mapping than Mel filerbank energies, which are state-of-the-art acoustic features for various speech technology applications. Moreover, proposed method gives more accurate and correlated objective scores than current standard objective quality assessment metric ITU-T P.563. Experiments performed on NOIZEUS database for different test conditions also suggest that objective scores predicted using proposed method are more robust to different amount and types of noise.
[Inflammatory aneurysms of the abdominal aorta].

The so-called "inflammatory" aneurysm of the aorta of the abdominal wall is a special form of the arteriosclerotic aneurysm of the aorta observed in 5-15% of the abdominal aorta aneurysms. It is characterized by more or less marked periaortal fibrotization. The pathological correlate is represented by lymphocytous and plasmacellular infiltrates that are mainly seen and identified in the region of the adventitia. The etiology has not yet been clarified. Since surgery of the inflammatory aneurysm of the abdominal wall aorta is rendered difficult due to neighbouring organs (e.g. ureters) becoming callous and adhesive, safe preoperative diagnosis is desirable. Suspicion of an aneurysm of the abdominal wall can be fairly safely confirmed by sonography. In case of a partially thrombotic aneurysm a characteristic fourfold stratification can be seen: free lumen/thrombus/calcified wall of aorta/law-echo outer layer. This last-named layer--the "inflammatory" portion--is tapelike, semicircular and more or less strongly developed. The inflammatory aneurysm of the abdominal wall is often symptomatic. Hence, the most important differential diagnosis concerns the covered perforation and the dissecting aortic aneurysm, as well as Ormond's disease, periaortal lymphomas and other retroperitoneal tumours.
Generation from Abstract Meaning Representation using Tree Transducers

Language generation from purely semantic representations is a challenging task. This paper addresses generating English from the Ab-stract Meaning Representation (AMR), consisting of re-entrant graphs whose nodes are concepts and edges are relations. The new method is trained statistically from AMR-annotated English and consists of two major steps: (i) generating an appropriate spanning tree for the AMR, and (ii) applying tree-to-string transducers to generate English. The method relies on discriminative learning and an argument realization model to overcome data sparsity. Initial tests on held-out data show good promise despite the complexity of the task. The system is available open-source as part of JAMR at:
Predicting Intentions to Seek Help from Professional Mental Health Services

Objective: This study investigates the factors related to the intention to seek professional help for psychological problems utilising Ajzen and Fishbein's theory of reasoned action [1,2]. Many of the variables identified in previous studies can be subsumed within this theory, which emphasises the importance of the subjective point of view of the individual. Method: One hundred and forty-two patients waiting for consultations at a community based general practice completed a questionnaire designed to assess the components of this theory as they relate to seeking help from mental health professionals. Results: The results of this study supported the prediction of the intention to seek help from a mental health professional from the variables ‘attitude toward the behaviour’ and ‘subjective norm’. However, personal attitudes toward seeking help were found to be more important than the approval or disapproval of significant others in predicting help-seeking intentions. Conclusions: Overall, the findings indicate that a significant factor influencing people's decisions to utilise professional mental health services in Australia may be the belief that mental health professionals are not actually able to provide a great deal of help or support for people's difficulties.
D1/D5 Modulation of Synaptic NMDA Receptor Currents

Converging evidence suggests that salience-associated modulation of behavior is mediated by the release of monoamines and that monoaminergic activation of D1/D5 receptors is required for normal hippocampal-dependent learning and memory. However, it is not understood how D1/D5 modulation of hippocampal circuits can affect salience-associated learning and memory. We have observed in CA1 pyramidal neurons that D1/D5 receptor activation elicits a bidirectional long-term plasticity of NMDA receptor-mediated synaptic currents with the polarity of plasticity determined by NMDA receptor, NR2A/B subunit composition. This plasticity results in a decrease in the NR2A/NR2B ratio of subunit composition. Synaptic responses mediated by NMDA receptors that include NR2B subunits are potentiated by D1/D5 receptor activation, whereas responses mediated by NMDA receptors that include NR2A subunits are depressed. Furthermore, these bidirectional, subunit-specific effects are mediated by distinctive intracellular signaling mechanisms. Because there is a predominance of NMDA receptors composed of NR2A subunits observed in entorhinal–CA1 inputs and a predominance of NMDA receptors composed of NR2B subunits in CA3–CA1 synapses, potentiation of synaptic NMDA currents predominates in the proximal CA3–CA1 synapses, whereas depression of synaptic NMDA currents predominates in the distal entorhinal–CA1 synapses. Finally, all of these effects are reproduced by the release of endogenous monoamines through activation of D1/D5 receptors. Thus, endogenous D1/D5 activation can (1) decrease the NR2A/NR2B ratio of NMDA receptor subunit composition at glutamatergic synapses, a rejuvenation to a composition similar to developmentally immature synapses, and, (2) in CA1, bias NMDA receptor responsiveness toward the more highly processed trisynaptic CA3–CA1 circuit and away from the direct entorhinal–CA1 input.
The Complex Biogeographic History of a Widespread Tropical Tree Species

Abstract Many tropical forest tree species have broad geographic ranges, and fossil records indicate that population disjunctions in some species were established millions of years ago. Here we relate biogeographic history to patterns of population differentiation, mutational and demographic processes in the widespread rainforest tree Symphonia globulifera using ribosomal (ITS) and chloroplast DNA sequences and nuclear microsatellite (nSSR) loci. Fossil records document sweepstakes dispersal origins of Neotropical S. globulifera populations from Africa during the Miocene. Despite historical long-distance gene flow, nSSR differentiation across 13 populations from Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador (east and west of Andes) and French Guiana was pronounced (FST = 0.14, RST = 0.39, P < 0.001) and allele-size mutations contributed significantly (RST > FST) to the divergences between cis- and trans-Andean populations. Both DNA sequence and nSSR data reflect contrasting demographic histories in lower Mesoamerica and Amazonia. Amazon populations show weak phylogeographic structure and deviation from drift–mutation equilibrium indicating recent population expansion. In Mesoamerica, genetic drift was strong and contributed to marked differentiation among populations. The genetic structure of S. globulifera contains fingerprints of drift-dispersal processes and phylogeographic footprints of geological uplifts and sweepstakes dispersal.
Lexical Profile of Emotional Disclosure in Socially Shared Versus Written Narratives

To disclose emotional experiences, people can either talk or write. Our research was intended to address content differences between social sharing of emotion and expressive writing. In the first study, 92 participants either talked to an experimenter or wrote alone about an emotional experience. In the second study, after watching an emotion-inducing film, 112 participants were asked to disclose their emotions by either writing, talking alone to a recorder, talking with an unknown peer, or talking with someone close to them. Computerised lexical analyses were conducted on all material collected with a central focus on affective and cognitive processes as well as on narrative style indices like personal pronouns. Consistently, results showed a higher proportion of emotion words in writing than in oral conditions. Personal pronoun use, emotional tone, and proportion of cognitive words also appeared to vary depending on disclosure mode and type of narrative target.
Evidence for rapid localist plasticity in the ventral visual stream: the example of words

ABSTRACT Our recent work has shown that the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left occipitotemporal cortex contains an orthographic lexicon based on neuronal representations highly selective for individual written real words (RWs) and that learning novel words selectively increases neural specificity in the VWFA. But, how quickly does this change in neural tuning occur and how much training is required for new words to be codified in the VWFA? Here, we present evidence that plasticity in the VWFA from broad to tight tuning can be obtained in a short time span, with no explicit training, and with comparatively few exposures, further strengthening the case for a highly plastic visual lexicon in the VWFA and for localist representations in the visual processing hierarchy.
Family conditions, parental acceptance, and social competence and aggression in Chinese children

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relations among family ecological factors including parental educational and occupational status, family income and housing conditions, the quality of the marital relationship and social support, parental acceptance and rejection, and social competence in a sample of Chinese children. Four hundred and seventy-six primary school children in Shanghai, P.R. China, and their parents participated in the study. Children were administered a peer assessment measure of social behavior and a measure of their perceptions of parental behavior. Parents completed questionnaires concerning family background, parental acceptance and rejection, perceived social support, and marital conflict and satisfaction. Teachers completed a rating scale concerning children's behaviors in school. Information on children's leadership was collected from the school administrative records. Results indicated that parental educational and occupational status was associated with family psychological conditions which, in turn, were predictive of parental acceptance. Family capital resources were negatively related to parental acceptance. Results also indicated that parental acceptance was associated positively with prosocial-competent behavior in children and negatively with aggressive behavior in children. Parental educational and occupational status was directly associated with children's competent behavior. Finally, it was found that family psychological resources were positively related to competent behavior and negatively related to aggression in children, through the mediation of parental acceptance and rejection. Family capital resources were indirectly and positively associated with child aggression through the mediation of parental acceptance and rejection.
The Cold Land Processes Experiment (CLPX-1): analysis and modelling of LSOS data (IOP3 period)

Microwave brightness temperatures at 18.7, 36.5, and 89 GHz collected at the Local-Scale Observation Site (LSOS) of the NASA Cold-Land Processes Field Experiment in February, 2003 (third Intensive Observation Period) were simulated using a Dense Media Radiative Transfer model (DMRT), based on the Quasi Crystalline Approximation with Coherent Potential (QCA-CP). Inputs to the model were averaged from LSOS snow pit measurements, although different averages were used for the lower frequencies vs. the highest one, due to the different penetration depths and to the stratigraphy of the snowpack. Mean snow particle radius was computed as a best-fit parameter. Results show that the model was able to reproduce satisfactorily brightness temperatures measured by the University of Tokyo's Ground Based Microwave Radiometer system (GBMR-7). The values of the best-fit snow particle radii were found to fall within the range of values obtained by averaging the field-measured mean particle sizes for the three classes of Small, Medium and Large grain sizes measured at the LSOS site
Isolated limb infusion as a model to test new agents to treat metastatic melanoma

The limb model of in‐transit disease can expand our understanding of treating melanoma because of the ease of obtaining tissue biopsies for correlative studies and the availability of preclinical animal models that allow validation of novel therapeutic strategies. This review will focus on regional therapy for in‐transit melanoma as a platform to investigate novel therapeutic approaches to improve regional disease control, and help us develop insights to more rationally design systemic therapy trials. J. Surg. Oncol. 2014 109:357–365. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.