Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The False Enforcement of Unpopular Norms1

Prevailing theory assumes that people enforce norms in order to pressure others to act in ways that they approve. Yet there are numerous examples of “unpopular norms” in which people compel each other to do things that they privately disapprove. While peer sanctioning suggests a ready explanation for why people conform to unpopular norms, it is harder to understand why they would enforce a norm they privately oppose. The authors argue that people enforce unpopular norms to show that they have complied out of genuine conviction and not because of social pressure. They use laboratory experiments to demonstrate this “false enforcement” in the context of a wine tasting and an academic text evaluation. Both studies find that participants who conformed to a norm due to social pressure then falsely enforced the norm by publicly criticizing a lone deviant. A third study shows that enforcement of a norm effectively signals the enforcer’s genuine support for the norm. These results demonstrate the potential for a vicious cycle in which perceived pressures to conform to and falsely enforce an unpopular norm reinforce one another.
Preconditioning of Low-Frequency Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation with Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation: Evidence for Homeostatic Plasticity in the Human Motor Cortex

Recent experimental work in animals has emphasized the importance of homeostatic plasticity as a means of stabilizing the properties of neuronal circuits. Here, we report a phenomenon that indicates a homeostatic pattern of cortical plasticity in healthy human subjects. The experiments combined two techniques that can produce long-term effects on the excitability of corticospinal output neurons: transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the left primary motor cortex. “Facilitatory preconditioning” with anodal TDCS caused a subsequent period of 1 Hz rTMS to reduce corticospinal excitability to below baseline levels for >20 min. Conversely, “inhibitory preconditioning” with cathodal TDCS resulted in 1 Hz rTMS increasing corticospinal excitability for at least 20 min. No changes in excitability occurred when 1 Hz rTMS was preceded by sham TDCS. Thus, changing the initial state of the motor cortex by a period of DC polarization reversed the conditioning effects of 1 Hz rTMS. These preconditioning effects of TDCS suggest the existence of a homeostatic mechanism in the human motor cortex that stabilizes corticospinal excitability within a physiologically useful range.
Induction of Spermatogenesis by Bone Marrow-derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Busulfan-induced Azoospermia in Hamster

Background Bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs) have potential of differentiation and they secrete anti-inflammatory cytokines and growth factors which make them appropriate for cell therapy. Aim of the Work Were to evaluate the healing effect of BM-MSCs transplantation on germinal cells of busulfan-induced azoospermic hamsters. Material and Methods In the present experimental case control study, BM-MSCs were isolated from bone marrow of donor albino hamsters. Five mature male recipient hamsters received two doses of 10 mg/kg of busulfan with 21 days interval to stop endogenous spermatogenesis. After induction of azoospermia, right testis of hamsters was injected with 106 BM-MSCs via efferent duct and the left one remained as azoospermia control testis. Five normal mature hamsters were selected as normal intact control. After 35 days, testes and epididymis of three groups were removed for histological evaluation. Results Histomorphological analyses of BM-MSCs treated testes and epididymis showed the epithelial tissue of seminiferous tubules had normal morphology and spermatozoa were present in epididymis tubes. Spermatogenesis was observed in most cell-treated seminiferous tubules. The untreated seminiferous tubules were empty. Conclusion Transplanted BM-MSCs could successfully induce spermatogenesis in seminiferous tubules of azoospermic hamster. Therefore, BM-MSCs can be an attractive candidate in cell transplantation of azoospermia.
Comparison of muscle synergies for running between different foot strike patterns

It is well known that humans run with a fore-foot strike (FFS), a mid-foot strike (MFS) or a rear-foot strike (RFS). A modular neural control mechanism of human walking and running has been discussed in terms of muscle synergies. However, the neural control mechanisms for different foot strike patterns during running have been overlooked even though kinetic and kinematic differences between different foot strike patterns have been reported. Thus, we examined the differences in the neural control mechanisms of human running between FFS and RFS by comparing the muscle synergies extracted from each foot strike pattern during running. Muscle synergies were extracted using non-negative matrix factorization with electromyogram activity recorded bilaterally from 12 limb and trunk muscles in ten male subjects during FFS and RFS running at different speeds (5–15 km/h). Six muscle synergies were extracted from all conditions, and each synergy had a specific function and a single main peak of activity in a cycle. The six muscle synergies were similar between FFS and RFS as well as across subjects and speeds. However, some muscle weightings showed significant differences between FFS and RFS, especially the weightings of the tibialis anterior of the landing leg in synergies activated just before touchdown. The activation patterns of the synergies were also different for each foot strike pattern in terms of the timing, duration, and magnitude of the main peak of activity. These results suggest that the central nervous system controls running by sending a sequence of signals to six muscle synergies. Furthermore, a change in the foot strike pattern is accomplished by modulating the timing, duration and magnitude of the muscle synergy activity and by selectively activating other muscle synergies or subsets of the muscle synergies.
StoryKit : Designing a Mobile Application for Story Creation By Children And Older Adults

As the capabilities of smartphones and similar mobile devices advance, opportunities increase to use them for meaningful creative tasks. Incorporating text, images, and sounds in documents is commonplace when using desktop office or graphics software. However, multimedia authoring interfaces for mobile devices remain undeveloped. Working with a participatory design group composed of children, older adults, and researchers, we developed StoryKit, an iPhone application for creating and sharing audio-visual stories on an iPhone. Our initial goal was to support children making stories together with older adults as a form of informal learning. To that end, it lets users create books on the touchscreen device by arranging their text, photos, drawings, and sounds on pages, and then sharing them via e-mail and the web. The design of StoryKit uncovered solutions to several general interface challenges that affect a wide range of mobile authoring applications. Thus, we think elements of the StoryKit interaction design may serve as a starting point for developers of mobile document authoring applications.
Passivity and Passification of Memristor-Based Recurrent Neural Networks With Time-Varying Delays

This paper presents new theoretical results on the passivity and passification of a class of memristor-based recurrent neural networks (MRNNs) with time-varying delays. The casual assumptions on the boundedness and Lipschitz continuity of neuronal activation functions are relaxed. By constructing appropriate Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals and using the characteristic function technique, passivity conditions are cast in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be checked numerically using an LMI toolbox. Based on these conditions, two procedures for designing passification controllers are proposed, which guarantee that MRNNs with time-varying delays are passive. Finally, two illustrative examples are presented to show the characteristics of the main results in detail.
Paternal and Maternal Genetic Analysis of a Desert Keriyan Population: Keriyans Are Not the Descendants of Guge Tibetans

The Keriyan people live in an isolated village in the Taklimakan Desert in Xinjiang, Western China. The origin and migration of the Keriyans remains unclear. We studied paternal and maternal genetic variance through typing Y-STR loci and sequencing the complete control region of the mtDNA and compared them with other adjacent populations. Data show that the Keriyan have relatively low genetic diversity on both the paternal and maternal lineages and possess both European and Asian specific haplogroups, indicating Keriyan is an admixture population of West and East. There is a gender-bias in the extent of contribution from Europe vs. Asia to the Keriyan gene pool. Keriyans have more genetic affinity to Uyghurs than to Tibetans. The Keriyan are not the descendants of the Guge Tibetans.
Rota: a research project on algorithms for workforce scheduling and shift design optimization

The typical process of planning and scheduling a rotating workforce in an organization consists in designing shifts and then assigning employees to these shifts and to periods of rest (daysdoff). Successfully solving these problems has high practical relevance: Results from ergonomics indicate that shift schedules have a profound impact on the health and satisfaction of employees as well as on their performance at work. The solutions must also satisfy legal requirements and should meet the objectives of the employing organization. In the research project Rota, undertaken by the Database and Artificial Intelligence Group at the Vienna University of Technology in cooperation with Ximes Corp., systems for the design of shifts and assignment of employees to shifts and daysdoff were developed. We give an overview of these systems.
Blind channel equalization using chirp modulating signals

This paper addresses the problem of blind channel equalization in the context of digital communications. Recent results have shown that certain operations applied to the source signal at the transmitter help in the blind identification and equalization of the channel at the receiver. In this paper, the baseband data signal is multiplied with a chirp sequence. Exploiting certain structural properties arising from this operation, a batch-type algorithm is obtained for calculating the equalizer's coefficients. Conditions on the chirp sequence parameters are obtained that guarantee an equalization solution. A low-complexity adaptive algorithm is also proposed. Finally, extensive simulations, and comparisons with other well-known blind techniques, illustrate the excellent performance of this algorithm.
THE ACQUISITION OF NOMINAL ELLIPSIS IN GREEK

This paper investigates the relation between the acquisition of nominal ellipsis and the acquisition of the agreement system in the nominal domain of Greek. Lobeck (1995) and Kester (1996) have assumed that nominal ellipsis involves a pro element that is licensed by the rich morphological agreement between the nominal head and its modifiers. This predicts that N-drop should occur at approximately the same stage of L1 acquisition as the acquisition of agreement between the nominal head and its modifiers but not before. Investigating Greek acquisition data (CHILDES database, MacWhinney & Snow 1985), we show that morphological agreement in the nominal domain is not fully achieved at the age of 1;9-1;11. In fact, children have not yet acquired the full nominal paradigm of the language at this stage (Marinis 1994, Christofidou & Stephany 1997). We show that children show agreement in prenominal modifiers in the majority of unmarked cases but incorrect agreement is still present in children’s utterances especially in marked cases. On the other hand, nominal ellipsis constructions are used productively at this stage and, more importantly, some appear in cases where prenominal modifiers have the wrong agreement with the elided noun. We take this as an indication that morphological agreement in the nominal domain is not a licenser of nominal ellipsis but a prerequisite for the identification of the elided nominal head. However, we do not make any strong assumptions as to what exactly is the connection between rich morphology and the syntactic process of nominal ellipsis as more data from earlier stages of acquisition is needed.
Relationship between Depression and Laryngopharyngeal Reflux

This study investigated the relationship between depression, somatization, anxiety, personality, and laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR). We prospectively analyzed 231 patients with symptoms with LPR using the laryngopharyngeal reflux symptom index and the reflux finding score. Seventy nine (34.2%) patients were diagnosed with LPR. A significant correlation was detected between the presence of LPR and total scores on the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (5.6±5.3 vs. 4.0±4.6, p=0.017) and the 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (4.3±4.9 vs. 3.0±4.5, p=0.041). LPR was significantly more frequent in those with depression than in those without (45.6% vs. 27.0%, p=0.004). A multivariate analysis confirmed a significant association between the presence of LPR and depression (odds ratio, 1.068; 95% confidence interval, 1.011–1.128; p=0.019). Our preliminary results suggest that patients with LPR may need to be carefully evaluated for depression.
"I'm eating a sandwich in Glasgow": modeling locations with tweets

Social media such as Twitter generate large quantities of data about what a person is thinking and doing in a particular location. We leverage this data to build models of locations to improve our understanding of a user's geographic context. Understanding the user's geographic context can in turn enable a variety of services that allow us to present information, recommend businesses and services, and place advertisements that are relevant at a hyper-local level. In this paper we create language models of locations using coordinates extracted from geotagged Twitter data. We model locations at varying levels of granularity, from the zip code to the country level. We measure the accuracy of these models by the degree to which we can predict the location of an individual tweet, and further by the accuracy with which we can predict the location of a user. We find that we can meet the performance of the industry standard tool for predicting both the tweet and the user at the country, state and city levels, and far exceed its performance at the hyper-local level, achieving a three- to ten-fold increase in accuracy at the zip code level.
Accelerated SLID bonding using thin multi-layer copper-solder stack for fine-pitch interconnections

Emerging 2.5D and 3D package-integration technologies for mobile and high-performance applications are primarily limited by advances in ultra-short and fine-pitch off-chip interconnections. A range of technologies are being pursued to advance interconnections, most notably with direct Cu-Cu interconnections or Cu pillars with solder caps. While manufacturability is still a major concern for the Cu-Cu interconnections technologies, the copper-solder approaches face limitations due to solder-bridging at fine-pitch, electromigration, and reliability issues. Thus, novel low-temperature, low-pressure, high-throughput, cost-effective and manufacturable technologies are needed to enable interconnections with pitches finer than 15 microns. This paper focuses on an innovative multi-layered copper-solder stack approach to achieve fine-pitch off-chip interconnections with no residual solders after assembly. Interconnections using this new technology enable higher current-handling because of the stable intermetallics, high-throughput assembly, and high yield even at low stand-off heights. The elimination of solder-intermetallic (IMC) interfaces is also expected to enhance the joint strength. This paper describes the design, fabrication, assembly and characterization of such stacked copper-solder interconnections. A detailed study of the effect of bonding parameters such as temperature and time on the rate of formation of stable Cu-IMC-Cu structures is presented. Test-vehicles were designed and fabricated as the first demonstration of this technology.
Principal Perceptions of the Relationship Between Professional Development Designs and the Qualities, Proficiencies, and Leadership Skills Required of West Virginia Principals

Principal Perceptions of the Relationship between Professional Development Designs and the Qualities, Proficiencies, and Leadership Skills Required of West Virginia Principals The purpose of this study was to determine if principals perceive a relationship between six job-required abilities and ten designs of professional development. The Larry Survey: A Web-based Questionnaire was used to gather demographics of participating principals, designs of professional development in which principals participate and those in which they would participate if given a choice, and the value principals believe specific designs have for their use/knowledge of job-required abilities. The study’s population was West Virginia’s 720 principals; 470 principals participated in the study. A quantitative, nonexperimental, correlational research design was used. Mean scores, a multiple regression test, and the Pearson Product Moment Correlation were used for data analysis. An alpha level of . 05 served as the level of significance. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences software was used for entering and manipulating data. Results of the study indicated the professional development design in which most principals have participated is the traditional “one-shot” workshop or session with journal writing being the design of least participation. If given the choice, the design in which most would participate is that of school visitations. Journal writing is the one of least choice. Principals reported team training for school improvement as the design of most value for all six job-required abilities. In addition, principals reported the design of support networks was of equal value for the abilities of professional and systems. For all six job-required abilities, principals reported the traditional “oneshot” workshop or session as the design having the least value. Results of the study found a significant relationship between the principals’ demographic characteristics of programmatic level and age and the design of support networks, between the demographic characteristic of sex and the design of team training for school improvement, and between the demographic characteristic of sex and the design of a “series of related workshops or sessions. ” Principals perceived a moderate relationship between vision, management and environment, and community and the designs of school visitations and coaching and a moderate relationship between systems and the designs of peer study groups and support networks.
Political Internalization of Economic Externalities. The Case of Environmental Policy in a Politico-Economic Model with Lobby Groups

This paper shows how competition between interests can internalize economic externalities groups. The key feature is that some lobby groups give political voice to environmental demands. We illustrate the basic ideas in a common agency model of politics, into which we introduce a negative output externality. We show that the politically optimal structure of environmental taxes incorporates the full Pigouvian adjustment. However, since lobby groups care about the distribution of income as well as about efficiency, the equilibrium structure of taxes differs considerably from the set of Pigouvian taxes. In particular, organized sectors get a tax discount, while unorganized sectors are taxed at an inefficiently high rate. Hence, environmental lobbying has a huge beggar-thy- neighbour element.
PolyU at TREC 2016 Real-Time Summarization

This paper presents the participation of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) to the TREC 2016 Real-Time Summarization track. The two tasks related to Scenario A and Scenario B both focuses on information real-time processing. During the evaluation period, the system monitors the Twitter sample stream with respect to a number of “interest profiles”. We submitted three runs for both scenarios. We describe the system overview and the implementation details in this paper.
Suppression of FOXM1 Sensitizes Human Cancer Cells to Cell Death Induced by DNA-Damage

Irradiation and DNA-damaging chemotherapeutic agents are commonly used in anticancer treatments. Following DNA damage FOXM1 protein levels are often elevated. In this study, we sought to investigate the potential role of FOXM1 in programmed cell death induced by DNA-damage. Human cancer cells after FOXM1 suppression were subjected to doxorubicin or γ-irradiation treatment. Our findings indicate that FOXM1 downregulation by stable or transient knockdown using RNAi or by treatment with proteasome inhibitors that target FOXM1 strongly sensitized human cancer cells of different origin to DNA-damage-induced apoptosis. We showed that FOXM1 suppresses the activation of pro-apoptotic JNK and positively regulates anti-apoptotic Bcl-2, suggesting that JNK activation and Bcl-2 down-regulation could mediate sensitivity to DNA-damaging agent-induced apoptosis after targeting FOXM1. Since FOXM1 is widely expressed in human cancers, our data further support the fact that it is a valid target for combinatorial anticancer therapy.
The Impact of Transcriptomics on the Fight against Tuberculosis: Focus on Biomarkers, BCG Vaccination, and Immunotherapy

In 1882 Robert Koch identified Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB), a disease as ancient as humanity. Although there has been more than 125 years of scientific effort aimed at understanding the disease, serious problems in TB persist that contribute to the estimated 1/3 of the world population infected with this pathogen. Nonetheless, during the first decade of the 21st century, there were new advances in the fight against TB. The development of high-throughput technologies is one of the major contributors to this advance, because it allows for a global vision of the biological phenomenon. This paper analyzes how transcriptomics are supporting the translation of basic research into therapies by resolving three key issues in the fight against TB: (a) the discovery of biomarkers, (b) the explanation of the variability of protection conferred by BCG vaccination, and (c) the development of new immunotherapeutic strategies to treat TB.
Nucleic acids of mammalian origin can act as endogenous ligands for Toll-like receptors and may promote systemic lupus erythematosus

Raised serum levels of interferon (IFN)-α have been observed in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients, and these levels are correlated with both disease activity and severity. The origin of this IFN-α is still unclear, but increasing evidence suggests the critical involvement of activated plasmacytoid predendritic cells (PDCs). In SLE patients, DNA and RNA viruses, as well as immune complexes (ICs), that consist of autoantibodies specific to self-DNA and RNA protein particles can stimulate production of IFN-α. We have developed three series of oligonucleotide (ODN)-based inhibitors of Toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling. These ODNs include inhibitors of TLR9, inhibitors of TLR7 but not TLR9, and sequences that inhibit both TLR7 and TLR9. Specificity of these inhibitors is confirmed by inhibition of IFN-α production by PDCs in response to DNA or RNA viruses. We show that mammalian DNA and RNA, in the form of ICs, are potent self-antigens for TLR9 and TLR7, respectively, and induce IFN-α production by PDCs. This work suggests that TLRs may have a critical role in the promotion of lupus through the induction of IFN-α by PDCs. These inhibitors of TLR signaling thus represent novel therapeutic agents with potential for the treatment of lupus.