Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimizing and validating an approach for identifying glaucomatous change in optic nerve topography.

PURPOSE To determine and validate optimal parameters for analysis in a previously described approach for identifying glaucomatous optic nerve progression by scanning laser tomography. METHODS Thirty-degree sectors of rim area, as defined by an experimental reference plane, were analyzed for change with respect to different statistical limits of variability (80%, 90%, 95%, 98%, 99%, and 99.9%) in the longitudinal image series of 62 eyes from 30 ocular hypertension converters and 32 normal control subjects. A criterion requiring that change is repeatable in two of three consecutive tests (the 2-of-3 criterion) was compared with a single-test strategy not requiring confirmation, and four other plausible criteria. The influence of these various parameters on sensitivity and the false-positive rate was evaluated. The same series were also assessed for change by the known method of computer-generated probability maps. RESULTS More sectors were identified as progressing in converter eyes than in control eyes at every limit of variability. With stricter limits of variability and a requirement of confirmation, fewer sectors were identified as changing, especially in control eyes. The 2-of-3 criterion had the most favorably balanced sensitivity and false-positive rates: these were, for the 90% limit of variability, 90.0% and 6.2%, respectively, and for the 95% limit, 83.3% and 3.1%, respectively. Confirmed rim loss in converter eyes was most frequent in the disc poles and corresponded with the field hemisphere of conversion in 80%. Probability maps detected significant and repeatable change in 26 (86.7%) of 30 converter eyes and 14 (43.8%) of 32 of control eyes. CONCLUSIONS This study was conducted to optimize and validate an approach for identifying progression. The method distinguished eyes with glaucomatous change from unchanging control eyes.
Age-Related Changes in Conventional and Magnetization Transfer MR Imaging in Elderly People: Comparison with Neurocognitive Performance

Objective This study was designed to compare three different measures of the elderly human brain; the magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) histogram, the percentage of brain parenchymal volume, and the volume of T2 hyperintense areas in terms of correlations with the study subjects' neurocognitive performance. Materials and Methods Thirty-five healthy community-dwelling elderly volunteers aged 60-82 years underwent dual fast spin-echo (FSE) imaging and magnetization transfer imaging. A semi-automated technique was used to generate the MTR histogram, the brain parenchymal volume, and the T2 lesion volume. The subjects' neurocognitive performance was assessed by using the Korean-Mini Mental State Examination (K-MMSE) and additional tests. The peak height of the MTR (PHMTR), the percentage of brain parenchymal volume (PBV), and the normalized T2 lesion volume (T2LV) were compared between the normal group (Z score on the K-MMSE ≥ -2, n=23) and the mild cognitive impairment group (Z score on the K-MMSE < -2, n=12), and these parameters were correlated with age and various neurocognitive performance scores. Results The PHMTR was significantly lower in the cognitively impaired subjects than the PHMTR in the normal subjects (p = 0.005). The PBV scores were lower in the cognitively impaired subjects than in the normal subjects (p = 0.02). The T2LV scores were significantly higher in the cognitively impaired subjects (p = 0.01). An inverse correlation was found between the PHMTR and T2LV (r = -0.747, p < 0.001), and also between the PBV and T2LV (r = -0.823, p < 0.001). A positive correlation was observed between the PHMTR and the PBV (r = 0.846, p < 0.001). Scores on the various neurocognitive tests were positively correlated with the PHMTR (6 of 7 items) and the PBV (5 of 7 items), and they were negatively correlated with the T2LV (5 of 7 items). Conclusion Our findings of a correlation among the PBV, the T2LV, and the PHMTR suggest that MTR histograms and the PBV and T2LV can be used as a reliable method and valid statistical tool, respectively, for quantifying the total lesion burden in an aging brain.
Dynamic Consumption and Portfolio Choice with Ambiguity about Stochastic Volatility

We introduce ambiguity about the variance of the risky asset's return in the model of Chacko and Viceira (2005) for dynamic consumption and portfolio choice with stochastic variance. We find that, with investors being able to update their portfolio continuously (as a function of the instantaneous variance), ambiguity has no impact. To shed some light on the case in which continuous portfolio updating is not possible, we also evaluate the effect of ambiguity when investors must use their expectation of future variance for their portfolio decision. In the latter scenario, demand for the risky asset can be decomposed into three components: myopic and intertemporal hedging demands (as in Chacko and Viceira (2005)) and ambiguity demand. Using long-run US data, Chacko and Viceira (2005) found that intertemporal hedging demand is empirically small, suggesting a low impact of stochastic variance on portfolio choice. Using the same calibration, we find that ambiguity demand may be very high, much more than intertemporal hedging demand. Therefore, stochastic variance can be very relevant for portfolio choice, not because of the variance risk, but because of investors' ambiguity about variance.
Sympathectomy or Doxazosin, But Not Propranolol, Blunt Myocardial Interstitial Fibrosis in Pressure-Overload Hypertrophy

The adaptive changes that develop in the pressure-overloaded left ventricular (LV) myocardium include cardiomyocyte hypertrophy and interstitial fibrosis. Although the former is known to depend to a sizeable extent on sympathetic (over)activity, little information exists whether the same applies to the latter, ie, whether excess catecholamine exposure contributes to the imbalance between collagen deposition by fibroblasts and degradation by matrix metalloproteases (MMPs), eventually leading to LV collagen accumulation. Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to abdominal aortic banding (B) or sham operation (S) and treated with &bgr;-blockade (Bb, oral propranolol, 40 mg/kg per day), chemical sympathectomy (Sx, 6-hydroxydopamine, 150 mg/kg intraperitoneal twice per week) or vehicle (Vh). Ten weeks later, systolic blood pressure, LV weight, collagen abundance (computer-aided histology), zymographic matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-2 activity and its specific tissue inhibitor concentration (TIMP-2) were measured. Both sympathectomy and &bgr;-blockade failed to attenuate the banding-induced blood pressure elevation but significantly attenuated the attendant LV hypertrophy. As expected, pressure-overload hypertrophy was associated with interstitial fibrosis (collagen: 4.37±1.23% BVh versus 1.23±0.44% SVh, P<0.05), which was abolished by sympathectomy (2.55±1.31%, P=not significant versus SSx) but left unchanged by &bgr;-blockade (4.11±1.23%, P<0.05 versus both SBb and BSx). &bgr;-blockade, but not sympathectomy, was also associated with an increased TIMP-2/MMP-2 ratio (P<0.05), indicating reduced interstitial collagenolytic activity. In separate groups of banded and sham-operated rats, treatment with the &agr;-receptor blocker doxazosin (10 mg/kg per day) displayed similar antifibrotic and biochemical effects as sympathectomy. Thus in the course of experimental pressure overload, the sympathetic nervous system plays a major pro-fibrotic role, which is mediated via &agr;-adrenergic but not &bgr;-adrenergic receptors.
Characterization of a Granulovirus Isolated from Epinotia aporema Wals. (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae) Larvae

ABSTRACT A granulovirus (GV) isolated from Epinotia aporema(Lepidoptera: Tortricidae)—a major soybean pest—was studied in terms of its main morphological, biochemical, and biological properties. The ovoidal occlusion bodies were 466 by 296 nm in size, and their most prominent protein had an apparent molecular mass of 29 kDa. Its amino-terminal sequence was remarkably homologous to that of the granulins of other GVs. The DNA genome size was estimated to be 120 kbp. The high specificity and pathogenicity of this newly described granulovirus (EpapGV) indicate that it is indeed a good candidate for the biological control of this pest.
BigCloneEval: A Clone Detection Tool Evaluation Framework with BigCloneBench

Many clone detection tools have been proposed in the literature. However, our knowledge of their performance in real software systems is limited, particularly their recall. We previously introduced our BigCloneBench, a big clone benchmark of over 8 million clones within a large inter-project Java repository containing 25,000 open-source Java systems. In this paper we present BigCloneEval, a framework for evaluating clone detection tools with BigCloneBench. BigCloneEval makes it very easy for clone detection researchers to evaluate and compare clone detection tools. It automates the execution and evaluation of clone detection tools against the reference clones of BigCloneBench, and summarizes recall performance from a variety of perspectives, including per clone type, and per syntactical similarity regions.
Neuroinflammation in Alzheimer's Disease and Vascular Cognitive Impairment

OF DISSERTATION NEUROINFLAMMATION IN ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE AND VASCULAR COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT It was once believed that the brain was immunologically privileged with no resident or infiltrating immune cells; however, now it is understood that the cells of the brain are capable of a wide range of inflammatory processes and phenotypes. Inflammation in the brain has been implicated in several disease processes such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and vascular cognitive impairment and dementia (VCID); however, the role of inflammation in these two dementias is poorly understood. When we stimulated a pro-inflammatory phenotype with an adenoassociated viral vector in a transgenic mouse model of AD that develops Aβ plaques, we saw a pro-inflammatory response at 4 months that transitioned to a mixed phenotype by 6 months. This transition also appeared with an increase in Aβ burden suggesting that anti-inflammatory markers contribute to disease progression. Treatment of astrocytes, microglia, endothelial cells and neurons with high levels of homocysteine, a risk factor for VCID, resulted in a wide range of gene expression changes. Astrocytes showed decreased levels of several potassium channels and aquaporin 4 and increased matrix metalloproteinase 9. Microglia showed an initial pro-inflammatory response that transitioned to an antiinflammatory phenotype. Endothelial cells showed a disruption in several tight junction proteins and neurons had changes in kinases and phosphatases known to affect tau phosphorylation. Finally, while AD and VCID are the two most common forms of dementia, they are not mutually exclusive and it is estimated that 60% of AD patients also have cerebrovascular pathology contributing to the clinical syndrome. To determine the effect of co-morbid AD and VCID on the effectiveness of therapies that target AD pathologies, we placed APP/PS1 mice on a diet that induces hyperhomocysteinemia and consequently VCID. These mice were then placed on an anti-Aβ immunotherapy. While the co-morbidity mice had a significant reduction in Aβ, there was no cognitive benefit of the immunotherapy in these mice. Interestingly, these co-morbidity mice also had a reduction in inflammatory markers and microglial staining, suggesting a suppressed inflammatory response. From these studies, it is clear that inflammation plays a complex role in AD, VCID and during treatment when both AD and VCID are present.
Evolution of hypercarnivory: the effect of specialization on morphological and taxonomic diversity

Abstract The effects of specialization on subsequent morphological evolution are poorly understood. Specialization has been implicated in both adaptive radiations that result from key innovations and evolutionary “dead ends,” where specialized characteristics appear to limit subsequent evolutionary options. Despite much theoretical debate, however, empirical studies remain infrequent. In this paper, we use sister-group comparisons to evaluate the effect of morphological specialization to a particular ecological niche, hypercarnivory, on subsequent taxonomic and morphological diversity. Six sets of sister groups are identified in which one clade exhibits hypercarnivorous characteristics and the sister clade does not. Comparison results are summed across the categories “hypercarnivore” and “sister group. ” We also evaluate whether increasing degrees of specialization are correlated with decreasing phenotypic variation. Results presented here indicate that specialization to hypercarnivory has no effect on taxonomic diversity, but a strong effect on subsequent morphological diversity related to the jaws and dentition, and that increasing specialization does not correlate with morphological diversity except in the most specialized saber-toothed taxa, which exhibit higher variance than less specialized morphs, possibly due to selection on other characteristics.
Music Makes the World Go Round: The Impact of Musical Training on Non-musical Cognitive Functions—A Review

Musical training is becoming increasingly popular as a topic for scientific research. Here we review the available studies investigating whether and to which degree musical experience generalizes to cognitive functions unrelated to music abilities in healthy humans. In general, it seems that musical training is associated with enhancing effects, even if sometimes only restricted to the auditory domain, on various cognitive functions spanning from executive control to creativity. We conclude that musical engagement may be a useful cognitive training to promote cognitive enhancement, but more research using longitudinal studies and taking into account individual differences is necessary to determine actual benefits.
The city and its margins

T his themed special feature focuses on urban marginality, interrogating ethnographic practices and dilemmas in themselves rather than relegating methodological questions to the parentheticals of research narratives that privilege the ‘data’. We feel this is timely and important because ethnographic research focused on urban marginality requires problematising and re-imagining both the city itself as a splintered and plural field site (Amin and Thrift 2002; Graham and Marvin 2001), and investigating the complex web of structural and social forces that produce urban marginality at various scales (Wacquant 2008). Four interrelated questions animate each of the papers in this themed special feature:
Position Paper: Embracing Heterogeneity - Improving Energy Efficiency for Interactive Services on Heterogeneous Data Center Hardware

Data centers today are heterogeneous: they have servers from multiple generations and multiple vendors; server machines have multiple cores that are capable of running at difference speeds, and some have general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU). Hardware trends indicate that future processors will have heterogeneous cores with different speeds and capabilities. This environment enables new advances in power saving and application optimization. It also poses new challenges, as current systems software is ill-suited for heterogeneity. In this position paper, we focus on interactive applications and outline some of the techniques to embrace heterogeneity. We show that heterogeneity can be exploited to deliver interactive services in an energy-efficient manner. For example, our initial study suggests that neither high-end nor low-end servers alone are very effective in servicing a realistic workload, which typically has requests with varying service demands. High-end servers achieve good throughput but the energy costs are high. Low-end servers are energy-efficient for short requests, but they may not be able to serve long requests at the desired quality of service. In this work, we show that a heterogeneous system can be a better choice than an equivalent homogeneous system to deliver interactive services in a cost-effective manner, transforming heterogeneity from a resource management nightmare to an asset. We highlight some of the challenges and opportunities and the role of AI and machine learning techniques for hosting large interactive services in data centers.
The Effect of Using English Movie Clips to Enhance the Listening Ability of Thai University Students

The paper presents an experimental study with a pretest-posttest control group design. The study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of using English movie clips to enhance the listening ability of Thai university students and students' attitude toward their English lessons after learning through movie clips instruction. The study employed the English listening test and the attitude questionnaire as the main researh instruments for data collection. The participants involved in the study were sixty first-year students enrolled in English for Everyday Use course at Rajamagala University of Technology Krungthep. Two classes were randomly assigned in the experimental group and learned English through movie clips; while the other class, the control group, learned English with conventional teaching methods. The results clearly revealed that there were significant positive differences in the achievement of listening ability and attitudes toward learning listening through the English movie clips of students before and after the experiment and between those two groups.
The heterogeneity of mild cognitive impairment: A neuropsychological analysis

Abstract A group of 94 nondemented patients self-referred to an outpatient memory clinic for memory difficulties were studied to determine the incidence of single versus multi-domain mild cognitive impairment (MCI) using Petersen criteria. Fifty-five community dwelling normal controls (NC) participants without memory complaints also were recruited. Tests assessing executive control, naming/lexical retrieval, and declarative memory were administered. Thirty-four patients exhibited single-domain MCI, 43 patients presented with multi-domain MCI. When the entire MCI sample (n = 77) was subjected to a cluster analysis, 14 patients were classified with amnesic MCI, 21 patients with dysexecutive MCI, and 42 patients were classified into a mixed/multi-domain MCI group involving low scores on tests of letter fluency, “animal” fluency, and delayed recognition discriminability. Analyses comparing the three cluster-derived MCI groups versus a NC group confirmed the presence of memory and dysexecutive impairment for the amnesic and dysexecutive MCI groups. The mixed MCI group produced lower scores on tests of letter fluency compared with the amnesic MCI and NC groups and lower scores on tests of naming and memory compared with the NC group. In summary, multi-domain MCI is quite common. These data suggest that MCI is a highly nuanced and complex clinical entity. (JINS, 2010, 16, 84–93.)
Electrophysiological Studies on The Dynamics of Luminance Adaptation in the Mouse Retina

To date, most studies involving in vivo electroretinography in mice are performed on steady state adapted animals. In this study, we focused on the dynamics of adaptation to high and low light levels in the mouse retina. Two flash electroretinogram (ERG) protocols and one flicker ERG protocol were employed. In the two flash ERG protocols, the animals were adapted to either 25 or 40 cd/m2 white light and ERGs were recorded for up to 15 min of adaptation. Afterwards, flash ERGs were recorded for up to 45 min of dark adaptation. Amplitudes of the flash ERG increased during light adaptation, while implicit times of the different wave components decreased. During subsequent dark adaptation, the amplitudes further increased. The increase in a-to-b-wave ratio indicated adaptational processes at the photoreceptor synapse. In the flicker ERG protocol, the responses to 12 Hz sinusoidal luminance modulation during the adaptation to 25 cd/m2 and a 1 cd/m2 mean luminances were recorded. The amplitudes of the first harmonic components in the flicker protocol decreased during light adaptation but increased during dark adaptation. This is at odds with the changes in the flash ERG, indicating that adaptation may be different in different retinal pathways.
THE RELATION OF MUSIC PREFERENCE AND PERSONALITY TYPE

The study attempts to examine the relationship between music preferences and personality types. Sample was drawn conveniently from the universities of Karachi (N = 70, respondents were between the ages of 18 to 35 years). Music preferences were assessed through the administration of The Short Test of Music Preferences by Rentfrow & Gosling, (2003) and Big Five Inventory by John & Srivastava, (1999) was used for assessing the personality types. To find out the relation between these two variables Pearson product moment correlation was calculated through SPSS 18.0.
Pittsburgh compound B imaging and cerebrospinal fluid amyloid-β in a multicentre European memory clinic study

PET and CSF biomarkers of amyloid-β are considered interchangeable in defining ‘amyloid positivity’. However, Leuzy et al. report discordance between these measures in a multicentre memory clinic population. This suggests that in a minority of individuals these metrics may not be interchangeable, and may instead reflect distinct but interrelated processes.
Who Benefits from Bond Market Modernization?

We analyze how modernization shapes U.S. corporate bond market transactions. To identify the effects of technological change, we use eligibility cut-offs that allow 'Well-Known Seasoned Issuers' (WKSI) to accelerate issuance and reduce review time. We find this innovation initiated widespread adoption of covenants. We then examine pricing, trading, and holding of these bonds. We find the benefits of modernization go to investors and issuers. This contrasts with theory that suggests intermediaries benefit. This distribution of benefits comes from covenants. Their presence serves a new rationale -- as a substitute for due diligence. Standardized covenants reduce underwriter liability risk, simplify valuation, and enhance liquidity.
Electrical Power Quality of Iron and Steel Industry in Turkey

The iron and steel industry has been growing increasingly in Turkey in the last decade. Today, its electricity demand is nearly one tenth of the installed generation capability of 40 GW in the country. In this paper, power quality (PQ) investigations based on the arc furnace installations of the iron and steel plants using field measurements according to the international standard IEC 61000-4-30 are documented. Interharmonics and voltage flicker problems occurring both at the common-coupling points of those plants and at the arc furnace and static VAr compensator (SVC) systems of the plants themselves are determined with the use of GPS receiver synchronization modules attached to the mobile PQ measurement systems. It has been observed that flicker and interharmonic problems are dominant at the points of common couplings where arc furnace installations are supplied. Based on the field measurements obtained with collaborative work of five arc furnace plants, it is possible to say that contemporary SVC systems cause interharmonic amplification problems around the second harmonic, and novel methods are required to solve this problem.