Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of attention in cortical and subcortical spatial mapping

Perceiving objects' positions is one of the fundamental purposes of vision and is crucial to day-to-day life. Much work has been devoted to finding and characterizing spatial maps in the brain, but we still know strikingly little about how these maps support perceptual localization. The experiments in this thesis employ a combination of functional brain imaging and visual psychophysics, drawing on a body of behavioral literature on spatial perception and visual attention, to ask how position coding in the brain adapts to support the demands of the task at hand.The experiments in Chapter 2 ask how and where perceived object positions are represented in the brain. Perceived position depends on many factors such as attention, frame of reference, adaptation, and motion. At what stage of visual processing is this information integrated into the brain's retinotopic maps? By measuring variability in perceived position alongside variability in the multivariate pattern of neural responses in a host of visual areas, we identify a percept-centered reference frame in high-level object-, face-, scene-, and motion-selective regions.The experiments in Chapter 3 ask how the visual system achieves improved spatial resolution with focused attention. Attention is known to boost the amplitude of neural responses, but it might also sharpen position tuning at the neural population level, making the activations produced by adjacent objects more distinct within the cortex. Employing a combined imaging and modeling approach, we find that attention narrows the spatial spread of the fMRI BOLD response in early visual cortical areas, including V1. This narrowed population position tuning is an efficient means of achieving visual resolution improvements.The experiments in Chapter 4 ask how the brain suppresses distracting visual input in order to limit its negative impact on performance. During a selective attention task, we measure the BOLD response in the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus, an area whose damage appears to lead to distractor filtering deficits. We find that while attended items are represented with high spatial and featural precision in the pulvinar, ignored items are gated out, leaving no discernable trace in the pattern of response in the pulvinar. These results suggest that the spatial maps in the pulvinar may serve as an interface in which distracting visual input is filtered out.Collectively, the findings presented here speak to a remarkable flexibility in the way the brain represents spatial information. The brain's visual maps adapt on a moment-by-moment basis to support the demands of the task at hand.
Platelet-poor plasma stimulates the proliferation but inhibits the differentiation of rat osteoblastic cells in vitro.

INTRODUCTION Recent studies have shown that the use of platelet preparations in bone and implant surgery might stimulate bone formation. However, the biological mechanisms are not well understood. Moreover, few studies have attempted to evaluate the effect of platelet-poor plasma (PPP), which is a product of the platelet-rich plasma preparation process. OBJECTIVE Thus, this study investigated the behavior of osteoblasts isolated from fetal rat calvaria cultivated in the presence of homologous PPP. MATERIAL AND METHODS PPP was obtained by centrifugation of the rat mother's blood and used in replacement of fetal calf serum, which is classically used in primary culture procedures. Proliferation was measured by an MTT assay at 24, 48, and 72 h. Real-time PCR was performed to study the expression of Runx2, Dlx5, and osteocalcin (OC) on days 0 (4 h), 1, 3, 7, and 12. RESULTS Alkaline phosphatase (ALP) biochemical activity was evaluated on days 0 (4 h), 1, 3, 7, and 12. Observations by phase-contrast microscopy showed that osteoblasts were able to differentiate until the mineralization of the matrix in the presence of PPP. PPP enhanced the proliferation significantly compared with the control group (P< or =0.001). PCR results showed that Runx2, Dlx5, and OC were expressed by cells in the experimental group at lower levels compared with the control group. Biochemical assay of ALP showed a lower activity in the experimental group compared with the control group (P<0.001). CONCLUSION These results suggest that, in the presence of homologous PPP, rat osteoblastic cells are able to maintain their phenotype, with a higher rate of proliferation. However, PPP seems to inhibit osteoblastic differentiation.
Dysregulation of signaling pathways associated with innate antibacterial immunity in patients with pancreatic cancer

Disorders of innate antibacterial response are of fundamental importance in the development of gastrointestinal cancers, including pancreatic cancer. Multi-regulatory properties of the Toll-like receptors (TLRs) (e.g., regulation of proliferation, the activity of NF-κB, gene transcription of apoptosis proteins, regulation of angiogenesis, HIF-1α protein expression) are used in experimental studies to better understand the pathogenesis of pancreatic cancer, for early diagnosis, and for more effective therapeutic intervention. There are known numerous examples of TLR agonists (e.g., TLR2/5 ligands, TLR6, TLR9) of antitumor effect. The direction of these studies is promising, but a small number of them does not allow for an accurate assessment of the impact of TLR expression disorders, proteins of these signaling pathways, or attempts to block or stimulate them, on the results of treatment of pancreatic cancer patients. It is known, however, that the expression disorders of proteins of innate antibacterial response signaling pathways occur not only in tumor tissue but also in peripheral blood leukocytes of pancreatic cancer patients (e.g., increased expression of TLR4, NOD1, TRAF6), which is one of the most important factors facilitating further tumor development. This review mainly focuses on the genetic aspects of signaling pathway disorders associated with innate antibacterial response in the pathogenesis and diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
Pigment Dispersing Factor-Dependent and -Independent Circadian Locomotor Behavioral Rhythms

Circadian pacemaker circuits consist of ensembles of neurons, each expressing molecular oscillations, but how circuit-wide coordination of multiple oscillators regulates rhythmic physiological and behavioral outputs remains an open question. To investigate the relationship between the pattern of oscillator phase throughout the circadian pacemaker circuit and locomotor activity rhythms in Drosophila, we perturbed the electrical activity and pigment dispersing factor (PDF) levels of the lateral ventral neurons (LNv) and assayed their combinatorial effect on molecular oscillations in different parts of the circuit and on locomotor activity behavior. Altered electrical activity of PDF-expressing LNv causes initial behavioral arrhythmicity followed by gradual long-term emergence of two concurrent short- and long-period circadian behavioral activity bouts in ∼60% of flies. Initial desynchrony of circuit-wide molecular oscillations is followed by the emergence of a novel pattern of period (PER) synchrony whereby two subgroups of dorsal neurons (DN1 and DN2) exhibit PER oscillation peaks coinciding with two activity bouts, whereas other neuronal subgroups exhibit a single PER peak coinciding with one of the two activity bouts. The emergence of this novel pattern of circuit-wide oscillator synchrony is not accompanied by concurrent change in the electrical activity of the LNv. In PDF-null flies, altered electrical activity of LNv drives a short-period circadian activity bout only, indicating that PDF-independent factors underlie the short-period circadian activity component and that the long-period circadian component is PDF-dependent. Thus, polyrhythmic behavioral patterns in electrically manipulated flies are regulated by circuit-wide coordination of molecular oscillations and electrical activity of LNv via PDF-dependent and -independent factors.
ON SOME CLASSES OF PERMUTATION POLYNOMIALS

Let p be a prime and q = pm. We investigate permutation properties of polynomials P(x) = xr + xr+s + ⋯ + xr+ks (0 < r < q - 1, 0 < s < q - 1, and k ≥ 0) over a finite field 𝔽q. More specifically, we construct several classes of permutation polynomials of this form over 𝔽q. We also count the number of permutation polynomials in each class.
Feasibility of endoscopic discectomy by inter laminar approach at a high volume tertiary public hospital in a developing country.

BACKGROUND Surgical treatment for lumbar disc herniation consists of discectomy performed either open or minimally invasive techniques. Endoscopic discectomy using the tubular retractor is been increasingly used as it gives advantage of smaller incision, less tissue injury and faster recovery. The aim of this study was to check its feasibility and learning curve at a tertiary public sector hospital with a large volume load (more than 50 spine surgeries per month) with treatment provided free of cost. METHODS Eighty patients underwent endoscopic discectomy using tubular retractor were prospectively followed for a period of 12 months. All patients included were having disc herniation at a single level after appropriate conservative trial of 6 weeks. Patients with segmental instability or previous spine surgery were excluded. All were operated by a single senior orthopaedic surgeon. Duration of surgery, blood loss, and day of mobilization, complications and duration of hospitalisation were noted. VAS for pain, Oswestry Disability Index, SF 12 and modified MacNab criteria were used to assess the functional outcome. RESULTS Mean age of patients was 34.9 years (range 17 to 72 years) with sex ratio of 2.6:1. The mean VAS score improved from 8 to 1.1, Oswestry Disability Index from 52 to 20 and SF 12 scores (MCS/PCS) from 34/43 to 49.2/56. According to modified MacNab criteria there were 77.5% excellent, 13.75% good, 7.5% fair and 1.25% poor cases. Average surgical duration was 48.75 min and blood loss was 32.13 mL. There were 3 dural tears, 1 infection, 2 recurrences and 1 sensory radiculopathy. CONCLUSIONS Endoscopic discectomy using tubular retractor has a potential to become a gold standard in catering this patient groups. It has great feasibility and shows equivalent results to all other techniques with lesser learning curve being an added advantage.
Viral meningitis

Viralmeningitis is commonandoftengoesunreported. In the absence of a lumbar puncture, viral andbacterial meningitis cannot be differentiated with certainty, and all suspected cases should therefore be referred. Lumbar puncture and analysis of cerebrospinal fluid may be done primarily to exclude bacterialmeningitis, but identification of the specific viral cause is itself beneficial. Viral diagnosis informs prognosis, enhances care of the patient, reduces the use of antibiotics, decreases length of stay in hospital, and can help to prevent further spread of infection. Over the past 20 years, vaccination policies, the HIV epidemic, altered sexual behaviour, and increasing travel have altered the spectrum of causative agents. In this review we outline the changing epidemiology, discuss key clinical topics, and illustrate how identification of the specific viral cause is beneficial. Neonatal meningitis may be a component of perinatal infection and is not covered here.
The risk of injury associated with body checking among Pee Wee ice hockey players: an evaluation of Hockey Canada’s national body checking policy change

Background In 2013, Hockey Canada introduced an evidence-informed policy change delaying the earliest age of introduction to body checking in ice hockey until Bantam (ages 13–14) nationwide. Objective To determine if the risk of injury, including concussions, changes for Pee Wee (11–12 years) ice hockey players in the season following a national policy change disallowing body checking. Methods In a historical cohort study, Pee Wee players were recruited from teams in all divisions of play in 2011–2012 prior to the rule change and in 2013–2014 following the change. Baseline information, injury and exposure data for both cohorts were collected using validated injury surveillance. Results Pee Wee players were recruited from 59 teams in Calgary, Alberta (n=883) in 2011–2012 and from 73 teams in 2013–2014 (n=618). There were 163 game-related injuries (incidence rate (IR)=4.37/1000 game-hours) and 104 concussions (IR=2.79/1000 game-hours) in Alberta prior to the rule change, and 48 injuries (IR=2.16/1000 game-hours) and 25 concussions (IR=1.12/1000 game-hours) after the rule change. Based on multivariable Poisson regression with exposure hours as an offset, the adjusted incidence rate ratio associated with the national policy change disallowing body checking was 0.50 for all game-related injuries (95% CI 0.33 to 0.75) and 0.36 for concussion specifically (95% CI 0.22 to 0.58). Conclusions Introduction of the 2013 national body checking policy change disallowing body checking in Pee Wee resulted in a 50% relative reduction in injury rate and a 64% reduction in concussion rate in 11-year-old and 12-year-old hockey players in Alberta.
Interpreting the Evidence on School Effectiveness

The purpose of this article is to examine what has been learned from quantitative studies of school effectiveness and to assess the implications of the research results for public policy. Now is a particularly appropriate time to discuss this research because in these days of declining enrollments, severe budget constraints, and court-mandated school finance reform, the results of studies in this tradition are often cited in public policy debates concerning the role of public schools. These public policy debates frequently center on questions such as:
Investigating Distributed Approaches to Efficiently Extract Textual Evidences for Biomedical Ontologies

Heterogeneous data resources in biomedicine become available both in structured and unstructured formats, such as scientific publications, healthcare guidelines, controlled vocabularies, and formal ontologies. %Increasing researches have been conducted to Bridging the gaps among these heterogeneous data is useful to discovery implicit knowledge. To make this happen, efficient computational approaches are a necessity for applications in such a knowledge- and data-intensive domain. In this paper, we first define a particular task, relation alignment, which is to identify textual evidences for biomedical ontologies. Then, we investigate two parallel approaches for this task over distributed systems and present the details of their implementations. Moreover, we characterize the performance of our methods through extensive experiments, thereby allowing researchers to make a more informed choice in the presence of large-scale biomedical data.
Cervical and High Thoracic Ligamentum Flavum Frequently Fails to Fuse in the Midline

Background Cervical and high thoracic epidural anesthesia and analgesia have gained increasing importance in the treatment of painful conditions and as components of anesthetics for cardiac and breast surgery. In contrast to the hanging-drop technique, the loss-of-resistance technique is thought to rely on the penetration of the ligamentum flavum. However, the exact morphology of the ligamentum flavum at different vertebral levels remains controversial. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the incidence and morphology of cervical and high thoracic ligamentum flavum mid-line gaps in embalmed cadavers. Methods Vertebral column specimens were obtained from 52 human cadavers. On each dissected level, ligamentum flavum mid-line gaps were recorded and evaluated with respect to shape and size. Results The following variations were encountered: complete fusion in the mid-line, mid-line fusion with a gap in the caudal part, mid-line gap, and mid-line gap with widened caudal end. The incidence of mid-line gaps at the following levels was: C3–C4: 66%, C4–C5: 58%, C5–C6: 74%, C6–C7: 64%, C7–T1: 51%, Th1–Th2: 21%, Th2–Th3: 11%, Th3–Th4: 4%, Th4–Th5: 2%, and Th5–Th6: 2%. The mean width of mid-line gaps was 1.0 ± 0.3 mm. Conclusions In conclusion, the present study shows that gaps in the ligamenta flava are frequent at cervical and high thoracic levels but become rare at the T3/T4 level and below, such that one cannot always rely on the ligamentum flavum as a perceptible barrier to epidural needle placement at these levels.
Extraction, characterization and utility of prototypical communication groups in the blogosphere

This article analyzes communication within a set of individuals to extract the representative prototypical groups and provides a novel framework to establish the utility of such groups. Corporations may want to identify representative groups (which are indicative of the overall communication set) because it is easier to track the prototypical groups rather than the entire set. This can be useful for advertising, identifying “hot” spots of resource consumption as well as in mining representative moods or temperature of a community. Our framework has three parts: extraction, characterization, and utility of prototypical groups. First, we extract groups by developing features representing communication dynamics of the individuals. Second, to characterize the overall communication set, we identify a subset of groups within the community as the prototypical groups. Third, we justify the utility of these prototypical groups by using them as predictors of related external phenomena; specifically, stock market movement of technology companies and political polls of Presidential candidates in the 2008 U.S. elections. We have conducted extensive experiments on two popular blogs, Engadget and Huffington Post. We observe that the prototypical groups can predict stock market movement/political polls satisfactorily with mean error rate of 20.32%. Further, our method outperforms baseline methods based on alternative group extraction and prototypical group identification methods. We evaluate the quality of the extracted groups based on their conductance and coverage measures and develop metrics: predictivity and resilience to evaluate their ability to predict a related external time-series variable (stock market movement/political polls). This implies that communication dynamics of individuals are essential in extracting groups in a community, and the prototypical groups extracted by our method are meaningful in characterizing the overall communication sets.
The first compound heterozygosity for HKalpha alpha allele and Southeast Asian deletion allele.

BACKGROUND In one program of newborn screening to detect deletional alpha-thalassemia with microarray, the microarray result of a 10-month-old girl showed that she was positive for the rightward deletion junction fragment, the Southeast Asian deletion junction fragment and alpha2. STUDY DESIGN The girl and her parents were subjected to haematological and molecular analysis. RESULTS The haematological data revealed that the family presented a typical alpha-thalassemic trait. The molecular analysis showed that the girl and her mother were compound heterozygosity for HKalpha alpha allele and Southeast Asian deletion allele, and her father is compound heterozygosity for alpha alpha allele and Southeast Asian deletion allele. CONCLUSIONS We have detected a hitherto unreported compound heterozygosity for HKalpha alpha allele and Southeast Asian deletion allele. This case will provide some clinical implications for PCR-based diagnosis for deletional alpha-thalassemia.
Attentional Capture and Inhibition of Saccades after Irrelevant and Relevant Cues

Attentional capture is usually stronger for task-relevant than irrelevant stimuli, whereas irrelevant stimuli can trigger equal or even stronger amounts of inhibition than relevant stimuli. Capture and inhibition, however, are typically assessed in separate trials, leaving it open whether or not inhibition of irrelevant stimuli is a consequence of preceding attentional capture by the same stimuli or whether inhibition is the only response to these stimuli. Here, we tested the relationship between capture and inhibition in a setup allowing for estimates of the capture and inhibition based on the very same trials. We recorded saccadic inhibition after relevant and irrelevant stimuli. At the same time, we recorded the N2pc, an event-related potential, reflecting initial capture of attention. We found attentional capture not only for, relevant but importantly also for irrelevant stimuli, although the N2pc was stronger for relevant than irrelevant stimuli. In addition, inhibition of saccades was the same for relevant and irrelevant stimuli. We conclude with a discussion of the mechanisms that are responsible for these effects.
Financial Reporting Regulation, Information Asymmetry and Financing Decisions around the World

We study the influence of a major reform in financial reporting regulation - the adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) - on financial decisions around the world. Using IFRS as a setting with exogenous variation in information asymmetry, and relying on a pecking order theory framework, we test whether post-IFRS firms: (i) will be more likely to seek external (as opposed to internal) financing and (ii) conditional on raising external capital, will be relatively more likely to issue equity than debt. Further, we also study changes in financing choices conditional on financial distress. Our findings highlight the importance of disclosure regulation in explaining financing policies around the world.
Syntax-Preserving Belief Change Operators for Logic Programs

Recent methods have adapted the well-established AGM and belief base frameworks for belief change to cover belief revision in logic programs. In this study here, we present two new sets of belief change operators for logic programs. They focus on preserving the explicit relationships expressed in the rules of a program, a feature that is missing in purely semantic approaches that consider programs only in their entirety. In particular, operators of the latter class fail to satisfy preservation and support, two important properties for belief change in logic programs required to ensure intuitive results. We address this shortcoming of existing approaches by introducing partial meet and ensconcement constructions for logic program belief change, which allow us to define syntax-preserving operators for satisfying preservation and support. Our work is novel in that our constructions not only preserve more information from a logic program during a change operation than existing ones, but they also facilitate natural definitions of contraction operators, the first in the field to the best of our knowledge. To evaluate the rationality of our operators, we translate the revision and contraction postulates from the AGM and belief base frameworks to the logic programming setting. We show that our operators fully comply with the belief base framework and formally state the interdefinability between our operators. We further compare our approach to two state-of-the-art logic program revision methods and demonstrate that our operators address the shortcomings of one and generalise the other method.
Microwave properties of nonlinear MIS and Schottky-barrier microstrip

It is shown that metal-insulatior-semiconductor (MIS) and Schottky-barrier microstrip structures having substrate resistivities within a certain range propagate slow waves with phase velocities that are dependent upon the instantaneous voltage at each point along the line. This and other useful properties of these microstrips can be used advantageously in a number of microwave devices. Loss measurements for the MIS microstrip structure confirm the predictred frequency dependence of the attenuation constant. While the levels of measured attenuation presently achieved are fairly high (4.5 dB/cm at 1 GHz), several methods for reducing the attenuation are proposed. A number of devices are discussed, including an electronically variable phase shifter for which attenuation and phase-shift measurements are presented.