Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Valid Matérn Class of Cross-Covariance Functions for Multivariate Random Fields With Any Number of Components

We introduce a valid parametric family of cross-covariance functions for multivariate spatial random fields where each component has a covariance function from a well-celebrated Matérn class. Unlike previous attempts, our model indeed allows for various smoothnesses and rates of correlation decay for any number of vector components. We present the conditions on the parameter space that result in valid models with varying degrees of complexity. We discuss practical implementations, including reparameterizations to reflect the conditions on the parameter space and an iterative algorithm to increase the computational efficiency. We perform various Monte Carlo simulation experiments to explore the performances of our approach in terms of estimation and cokriging. The application of the proposed multivariate Matérn model is illustrated on two meteorological datasets: temperature/pressure over the Pacific Northwest (bivariate) and wind/temperature/pressure in Oklahoma (trivariate). In the latter case, our flexible trivariate Matérn model is valid and yields better predictive scores compared with a parsimonious model with common scale parameters.
B and T Lymphocyte Attenuator Regulates B Cell Receptor Signaling by Targeting Syk and BLNK

B and T lymphocyte attenuator (BTLA) functions as a negative regulator of T cell activation and proliferation. Although the role of BTLA in regulating T cell responses has been characterized, a thorough investigation into the precise molecular mechanisms involved in BTLA-mediated lymphocyte attenuation and, more specifically, its role in regulating B cell activation has not been presented. In this study, we have begun to elucidate the biochemical mechanisms by which BTLA functions to inhibit B cell activation. We describe the cell surface expression of BTLA on various human B cell subsets and confirm its ability to attenuate B cell proliferation upon associating with its known ligand, herpesvirus entry mediator (HVEM). BTLA associates with the BCR and, upon binding to HVEM, recruits the tyrosine phosphatase Src homology 2 domain-containing phosphatase 1 and reduces activation of signaling molecules downstream of the BCR. This is exemplified by a quantifiable decrease in tyrosine phosphorylation of the protein tyrosine kinase Syk, as measured by absolute quantification mass spectrometry. Furthermore, effector molecules downstream of BCR signaling, including the B cell linker protein, phospholipase Cγ2, and NF-κB, display decreased activation and nuclear translocation, respectively, after BTLA activation by HVEM. These results begin to provide insight into the mechanism by which BTLA negatively regulates B cell activation and indicates that BTLA is an inhibitory coreceptor of the BCR signaling pathway and attenuates B cell activation by targeting the downstream signaling molecules Syk and B cell linker protein.
Searching for novel clustering programs

Novelty search (NS) is an open-ended evolutionary algorithm that eliminates the need for an explicit objective function. Instead, NS focuses selective pressure on the search for novel solutions. NS has produced intriguing results in specialized domains, but has not been applied in most machine learning areas. The key component of NS is that each individual is described by the behavior it exhibits, and this description is used to determine how novel each individual is with respect to what the search has produced thus far. However, describing individuals in behavioral space is not trivial, and care must be taken to properly define a descriptor for a particular domain. This paper applies NS to a mainstream pattern analysis area: data clustering. To do so, a descriptor of clustering performance is proposed and tested on several problems, and compared with two control methods, Fuzzy C-means and K-means. Results show that NS can effectively be applied to data clustering in some circumstances. NS performance is quite poor on simple or easy problems, achieving basically random performance. Conversely, as the problems get harder NS performs better, and outperforming the control methods. It seems that the search space exploration induced by NS is fully exploited only when generating good solutions is more challenging.
Does Literacy Skill Level Predict Performance in Community College Courses: A Replication and Extension

ABSTRACT Previous research has found a positive relationship between students who had completed a sequence of developmental reading and writing courses and success in a reading-intensive college-level course. This study replicates and expands upon the previous research of Goldstein and Perin (2008) by utilizing a differently diverse sample and an additional literacy-demanding course in an attempt to broaden the findings. Binary logistic regression and multiple regression analyses were performed on data gathered from a large urban community college. The purpose was to predict success and performance—from literacy, demographic, and academic variables—in two literacy-demanding courses, psychology and geography. A number of variables, including literacy skill level, positively predicted successful grades in the courses. This study found that students who had originally tested into a developmental reading and/or writing course upon entrance into a community college and had taken the sequence of developmental courses prior to taking a content course were more successful than students who had placed into a developmental course, but had not taken the developmental sequence. These findings also suggest the more literacy skills a student has gained through completion of higher levels of English courses, the more likely the student will successfully complete a content course in which those skills are required.
Discrimination, crime, ethnic identity, and parenting as correlates of depressive symptoms among African American children: A multilevel analysis

This study investigated the correlates of childhood depressive symptoms in an African American sample. We included processes that are likely to operate for all children, regardless of race or ethnicity, as well as events and circumstances that are largely unique to children of color. These various constructs were assessed at both the individual and community level. The analyses consisted of hierarchical linear modeling with a sample of 810 African American families living in Iowa and Georgia. Three individual-level variables were associated with childhood depressive symptoms: uninvolved parenting, racial discrimination, and criminal victimization. At the community level, prevalence of both discrimination and criminal victimization were positively related and community ethnic identification was negatively related to depressive symptoms. Further, there was evidence that community ethnic identification and neighborhood poverty serve to moderate the relationship between criminal victimization and depressive symptoms. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of considering factors unique to the everyday lives of the cultural group that is the focus of study, while demonstrating the dangers of a “one model fits all” approach to studying children of color.
NiFe‐Based (Oxy)hydroxide Catalysts for Oxygen Evolution Reaction in Non‐Acidic Electrolytes

NiFe‐based (oxy)hydroxides are highly active catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction in alkaline electrolyte solutions. These catalysts can be synthesized in different ways leading to nanomaterials and thin films with distinct morphologies, stoichiometries and long‐range order. Notably, their structure evolves under oxygen evolution operating conditions with respect to the as‐synthesized state. Therefore, many researchers have dedicated their efforts on the identification of the catalytic active sites employing in operando experimental methods and theoretical calculations. These investigations are pivotal to rationally design materials with outstanding performances that will constitute the anodes of practical commercial alkaline electrolyzers. The family of NiFe‐based oxyhydroxide catalysts reported in recent years is addressed and the actual state of the research with special focus on the understanding of the oxygen‐evolution‐reaction active sites and phase is described. Finally, an overview on the proposed oxygen‐evolution‐reaction mechanisms occurring on NiFe‐based oxyhydroxide electrocatalysts is provided.
Double tracer PET/CT: what is it and what does it mean?

Double tracer PET/CT: what is it and what does it mean? Mattia Pellicciari, Silvia Ortolani, Elisabetta Grego, Giampaolo Tortora, Sara Cingarlini Department of Clinical Oncology, Comprehensive Cancer Network, G. B. Rossi University Hospital, University of Verona, 37134 Verona, Italy. Corresponding Author: Dr. Sara Cingarlini, Department of Clinical Oncology, Comprehensive Cancer Network, G. B. Rossi University Hospital, University of Verona, Piazzale L. A. Scuro 10, 37134 Verona, Italy. E-mail: sara.cingarlini@ospedaleuniverona.it 68Ga-DOTA-peptide PET/CT is a recommended imaging modality in the workup of neuroendocrine neoplasms (NENs), which shows high diagnostic sensitivity and is a strong predictor of successful somatostatin receptor directed treatments. Although not routinely recommended, reliable evidences show that 18F-FDG PET/CT can provide complementary information in this setting with the ability to discriminate slow-proliferating tumors from aggressive, rapidly-proliferating tumors. Further, it has been proposed as an independent prognostic factor for the prediction of either overall survival or progression free survival. In this review, we provide insight into the biologic significance of 68Ga-DOTA-peptides and 18F-FDG uptake, and of the use of double tracer (68Ga-DOTA-peptides plus 18F-FDG) PET/CT in the clinical evaluation of patients affected by NENs.
Antisocial behaviour in adolescents: exploring and improving emotion processing deficits

Antisocial behaviour in childhood and adolescence is associated with a range of negative outcomes in later life, which are costly to both society and to the antisocial individual themselves. Because the effectiveness of current interventions appears to be limited, it has been argued that treatment efforts should focus more on designing interventions that target neuropsychological correlates of antisocial behaviour. Two important correlates are impaired facial emotion recognition and empathy; these deficits have been proposed to cause antisocial behaviour because they involve an inability to understand and appropriately respond to the distress of others.
Free-breathing intra- and intersubject respiratory motion capturing, modeling, and prediction

Respiration-induced organ motion can limit the accuracy required for many clinical applications working on the thorax or upper abdomen. One approach to reduce the uncertainty of organ location caused by respiration is to use prior knowledge of breathing motion. In this work, we deal with the extraction and modeling of lung motion fields based on free-breathing 4D-CT data sets of 36 patients. Since data was acquired for radiotherapy planning, images of the same patient were available over different weeks of treatment. Motion field extraction is performed using an iterative shape-constrained deformable model approach. From the extracted motion fields, intra- and inter-subject motion models are built and adapted in a leave-one-out test. The created models capture the motion of corresponding landmarks over the breathing cycle. Model adaptation is then performed by examplarily assuming the diaphragm motion to be known. Although, respiratory motion shows a repetitive character, it is known that patients' variability in breathing pattern impedes motion estimation. However, with the created motion models, we obtained a mean error between the phases of maximal distance of 3.4 mm for the intra-patient and 4.2 mm for the inter-patient study when assuming the diaphragm motion to be known.
Dopamine and the Biology of Creativity: Lessons from Parkinson’s Disease

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by reduced flexibility, conceptualization, and visuo-spatial abilities. Although these are essential to creativity, case studies show emergence of creativity during PD. Knowledge about the role of dopamine in creativity so far only stems from a few case reports. We aim at demonstrating that creativity can be induced by dopaminergic treatments in PD, and tends to disappear after withdrawal of dopamine agonists. Methods: Eleven consecutive creative PD patients were selected from candidates for subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN DBS) surgery, and compared to 22 non-creative control PD patients. Motor disability (UPDRS III), cognition (Frontal score, Mattis scale), and behavior (Ardouin scale) were assessed before surgery and 1 year after. Results: Before surgery, whereas cognitive and motor assessments were similar between groups, dopamine agonist (but not levodopa) dosages were higher in creative patients (p = 0.01). The Ardouin scale revealed also a specific psycho-behavioral profile of creative patients which had higher scores for mania (p < 0.001), hobbyism (p = 0.001), nocturnal hyperactivity (p = 0.041), appetitive functioning (p = 0.003), and ON euphoria (p = 0.007) and lower scores for apathy and OFF dysphoria (p = 0.04 for each). Post-operative motor, cognitive, and behavioral scores as dopaminergic treatment dosages were equivalent between groups. Motor improvement allowed for a 68.6% decrease in dopaminergic treatment. Only 1 of the 11 patients remained creative after surgery. Reduction of dopamine agonist was significantly correlated to the decrease in creativity in the whole population of study (Spearman correlation coefficient ρ = 0.47 with confidence index of 95% = 0.16; 0.70, p = 0.0053). Conclusion: Creativity in PD is linked to dopamine agonist therapy, and tends to disappear after STN DBS in parallel to reduction of dopamine agonists, which are relatively selective for the mesolimbic D3 dopamine receptors.
Regularity of Minimizers for Three Elliptic Problems: Minimal Cones, Harmonic Maps, and Semilinear Equations

We discuss regularity issues for minimizers of three nonlinear elliptic problems. They concern minimal cones, minimizing harmonic maps into a hemisphere, and radial local minimizers of semilinear elliptic equations. We describe the strong analogies among the three regularity theories. They all use a method originated in a paper of J. Simons on the area minimizing properties of cones.
The Fossil Record and Evolution of Bovidae: State of the Field

This paper presents a summary of the current state of knowledge on the evolution and fossil record of Bovidae and identifies topics and problems for further study. The earliest records of the different bovid tribes are reviewed, along with their geographic locations. Future work on the fossil bovid record should focus on: the reinvestigation of osteological characters that might distinguish early bovids from stem taxa; the late Miocene fossil record with respect to the evolutionary origins and biogeography of the living bovid tribes; and improved methodologies for reconstructing bovid phylogeny using morphology. This paper reflects the main themes discussed at the meeting of the Revealing Hominid Origins Initiative Bovid Analytical Working Group in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Analysis of the user satisfaction level in a public physical therapy service.

BACKGROUND The concepts of quality management have increasingly been introduced into the health sector. Methods to measure satisfaction and quality are examples of this trend. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to identify the level of customer satisfaction in a physical therapy department involved in the public area and to analyze the key variables that impact the usersâ€(tm) perceived quality. METHOD A cross-sectional observational study was conducted, and 95 patients from the physical therapy department of the Hospital Universitário Gaffrée e Guinle - Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (HUGG/UNIRIO) - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, were evaluated by the SERVQUAL questionnaire. A brief questionnaire to identify the sociocultural profile of the patients was also performed. RESULTS Patients from this health service presented a satisfied status with the treatment, and the population final average value in the questionnaire was 0.057 (a positive value indicates satisfaction). There was an influence of the educational level on the satisfaction status (χ²=17,149; p=0.002). A correlation was found between satisfaction and the dimensions of tangibility (rho=0.56, p=0.05) and empathy (rho=0.46, p=0.01) for the Unsatisfied group. Among the Satisfied group, the dimension that was correlated with the final value of the SERVQUAL was responsiveness (rho=0.44, p=0.01). CONCLUSIONS The final values of the GGUH physical therapy department showed that patients can be satisfied even in a public health service. Satisfaction measures must have a multidimensional approach, and we found that people with more years of study showed lower values of satisfaction.
Right Phrenic Nerve Palsy Post Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting (CABG) without Harvesting Right Internal Mammary Artery (RIMA): A Rare and Unexpected Complication

Mohamed A Alassal1,2,3*, Nouf F Baker1 , Ayman M Shaalan1,2, Sumanth N Raghunayakula3, Eman Elwakeel4 and Hany Elrakhawy5 1King Salman Heart Center, King Fahd Medical City, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 2Cardiothoracic Surgery Department, Benha University, Egypt 3PAAMCC, Arar, Saudi Arabia 4Benha University, Anatomy and Embryology Department, Egypt 5Benha University, Cardiothoracic Surgery Department, Egypt *Corresponding author: Mohamed Abdulwahab Alassal, King Salman Heart Center, King Fahd Medical City, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Tel: +966112889999, +966543178563; Email: dmohamedabdelwahab@gmail.com
School Working Papers Series 2002

EGovernance is fast becoming a focal issue with governments worldwide, enabled by the ICT revolution. Many economies are adopting eGovernance as a medium of reaching out and empowering the average citizen, stretching tax revenues and cutting down transaction costs. In this paper, we have examined Germany and India, two disparate economies in terms of development yet similar in administrative structures against a backdrop of insightful socio-economic fabric. We have taken a positivist approach and used the exploratory research method, supported by the transaction cost economic theory to draw broad conclusions on similarities and differences in eGovernance adoption, within these economies.
Cognitive studies in children with mild mental retardation with externalizing behavioural disorders

This study had an exploratory character. The aim was to gain more insight into the complex behaviour of children with mild mental retardation and externalizing behavioural disorders. This study is one of the first to focus on such a complex target-group. The goals were: making recommendations for future research, discovering tendencies central to behaviour and improving the treatment that such children receive. The children in this study are institutionalized and have a long history of care prior to their admission. Outpatient care proved to be inadequate because of their severe complex behavioural problems, which are difficult to treat. These children have been diagnosed as mildly mentally retarded (MMR) with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Conduct Disorder (CD). As well as the official diagnoses, the children have many comorbid problems. They are limited in their cognitive skills, have attentional deficits and memory problems, are impaired in their social functioning, are aggressive and impulsive, come from stressful family backgrounds and are often abused. There are few studies concerning dual-diagnosis children. The number of MMR children with comorbid problems is increasing and there is a lack of scientific knowledge about this (target-) group. This study will focus on attentional abilities and impulsiveness, which are related to the disorders mentioned above. The many comorbid problems made it difficult to create an ideal design, because it was impossible to deal with all the variables present in the target group. The children in this target group will play a central role in this study and, depending on the research question, will be compared to control groups. Therefore it has been decided to take a broad approach and carry out seven experiments. About half of the children in the target group were receiving medication during the experiments. This was a low dosage of pipamperon, usually not the first choice of drug used to treat ADHD and CD; it is an anti-psychotic drug. In the Netherlands and Belgium it is also prescribed for mentally retarded patients with integration disabilities. It is unusual to combine medicated and non-medicated subjects in the same group. However, a number of statistical analyses revealed that medication had no effect on the experimental tasks, and in addition the nonmedicated group did not perform any differently from the medicated group when compared to the normal control group.
Exploratory font selection using crowdsourced attributes

This paper presents interfaces for exploring large collections of fonts for design tasks. Existing interfaces typically list fonts in a long, alphabetically-sorted menu that can be challenging and frustrating to explore. We instead propose three interfaces for font selection. First, we organize fonts using high-level descriptive attributes, such as "dramatic" or "legible. " Second, we organize fonts in a tree-based hierarchical menu based on perceptual similarity. Third, we display fonts that are most similar to a user's currently-selected font. These tools are complementary; a user may search for "graceful" fonts, select a reasonable one, and then refine the results from a list of fonts similar to the selection. To enable these tools, we use crowdsourcing to gather font attribute data, and then train models to predict attribute values for new fonts. We use attributes to help learn a font similarity metric using crowdsourced comparisons. We evaluate the interfaces against a conventional list interface and find that our interfaces are preferred to the baseline. Our interfaces also produce better results in two real-world tasks: finding the nearest match to a target font, and font selection for graphic designs.
Negativity Bias in Investors’ Reactions to Board of Directors’ Risk Oversight Disclosure

Abstract This study investigates how disclosure of the board of directors’ leadership and role in risk oversight (BODs oversight disclosure) influences investors’ judgments when information on risk exposures is disclosed. The theoretical lens through which we examine this issue involves negativity bias. Sixty-two stock market investors who engage in the evaluation and/or investment of stocks on a regular or professional basis participated in our study. Our results reveal that the addition of BODs oversight disclosure (positive information) does not carry significant weight on investor judgments (i.e., attractiveness and investment) when financial statement disclosures indicate a high level of operational and financial risk exposures (negative information). In contrast, under the condition of a low level of risk exposures, BODs oversight disclosure causes investors to assess higher risk in terms of worry, catastrophic potentials and unfamiliarity about risk information and, in turn, make less favorable investor judgments. Our findings add to the literature on negativity bias and contribute to the debate on the usefulness of disclosures about risk.