Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A task is a task is a task: putting complex span, n-back, and other working memory indicators in psychometric context

Based on a meta-analysis, Redick and Lindsey (2013) found that complex span and n-back tasks show an average correlation of r = 0.20, and concluded that “complex span and n-back tasks cannot be used interchangeably as working memory measures in research applications” (p. 1102). Here, we comment on this conclusion from a psychometric perspective. In addition to construct variance, performance on a test contains measurement error, task-specific variance, and paradigm-specific variance. Hence, low correlations among dissimilar indicators do not provide strong evidence for the existence, or absence, of a construct common to both indicators. One way to arrive at such evidence is to fit hierarchical latent factors that model task-specific, paradigm-specific, and construct variance. We report analyses for 101 younger and 103 older adults who worked on nine different working memory tasks. The data are consistent with a hierarchical model of working memory, according to which both complex span and n-back tasks are valid indicators of working memory. The working memory factor predicts 71% of the variance in a factor of reasoning among younger adults (83% for among older adults). When the working memory factor was restricted to any possible triplet of working memory tasks, the correlation between working memory and reasoning was inversely related to the average magnitude of the correlations among the indicators, indicating that more highly intercorrelated indicators may provide poorer coverage of the construct space. We stress the need to go beyond specific tasks and paradigms when studying higher-order cognitive constructs, such as working memory.
Habitat Characteristics of Forest Fragments Determine Specialisation of Plant-Frugivore Networks in a Mosaic Forest Landscape

Plant-frugivore networks play a key role in the regeneration of sub-tropical forest ecosystems. However, information about the impact of habitat characteristics on plant-frugivore networks in fragmented forests is scarce. We investigated the importance of fruit abundance, fruiting plant species richness and canopy cover within habitat fragments for the structure and robustness of plant-frugivore networks in a mosaic forest landscape of South Africa. In total, 53 avian species were involved in fruit removal of 31 fleshy-fruiting plant species. Species specialisation was always higher for plants than for frugivores. Both species and network-level specialisation increased with increasing fruit abundance and decreased with increasing fruiting plant species richness and canopy cover within fragments. Interaction diversity was unaffected by fruit abundance and canopy cover, but increased slightly with increasing fruiting plant species richness. These findings suggest that especially the availability of resources is an important determinant of the structure of plant-frugivore networks in a fragmented forest landscape.
The Influence of Competitive Pressures on the Body of Young Wrestlers

ABSTRACT In preparing young wrestlers (16–17 years of age) the design often follows a relatively well-developed system of training for adult masters of sport. This approach does not take into account that the impact of training, as well as the effects, of competitive loadings, are significantly different between young athletes and adults. Young wrestlers possess particular voltage, circulatory and respiratory systems characteristics in relation to their age and their functional and morphological development (2, 3, 8, 9). The volume of the heart of the young athlete reaches adult levels near 20–21 years of age. Systolic ejection and contractile function, which cause the cost to the heart, are much smaller in male youth than adults (2, 7). These features lead to considerable tension in the circulatory system of young athletes during intense stress (8, 9). Keep in mind that the lung capacity, maximum ventilation, tidal volume, the efficiency of respiration and gas exchange in boys is inferior to the performance of adults. In addition, the transfer of oxygen into the blood and its utilization in the muscles of the young men is slower, since the hemoglobin content per kilogram of body weight is less than adult athletes (10). In general, the youthful body is characterized by a high intensity cardio-respiratory and blood systems during physical stress. So far, no data on the impact of intense competitive activity on the dynamics of individual aspects of preparedness of young wrestlers is available. Our objective was to study the impact of competitive activity on the functional training state in young wrestlers.
Effect of feed restriction on plasma dantrolene concentrations in horses.

REASONS FOR PERFORMING STUDY Dantrolene sodium is used to prevent exertional rhabdomyolysis in predisposed horses. Food intake might negatively impact dantrolene bioavailability in horses; however, prolonged feed restriction might be detrimental to performance. OBJECTIVE To determine a minimum duration of feed restriction that would optimise plasma dantrolene concentrations in horses after nasogastric administration. It was hypothesised that feed restriction for 4, 8 or 12 h before dantrolene administration would result in higher plasma dantrolene concentrations than achieved with no feed restriction before treatment. METHODS Five healthy horses were randomly rotated through 4 feed restriction periods of 0, 4, 8 and 12 h duration prior to nasogastric administration of dantrolene sodium (6 mg/kg bwt). Plasma dantrolene concentration was measured by spectrofluorometry at 60, 90, 120, 150, 180 and 210 min after administration. Data were analysed via repeated measures ANOVA. RESULTS Peak plasma dantrolene concentration was highest when horses had 0 and 4 h of feed restriction (0.65 ± 0.10 µg/ml at 120 min; 0.66 ± 0.17 at 180 min, respectively) and was lower when horses were restricted from feed for 8 h (0.45 ± 0.15 at 150 min) and 12 h (0.21 ± 0.09 at 180 min). Mean plasma dantrolene concentration did not differ between 0 and 4 h feed restriction at any sample time, but feed restriction for 8 h resulted in significantly lower plasma dantrolene concentration at 60 and 180 min after treatment than when horses were restricted 0 and 4 h, respectively. Plasma dantrolene concentration was significantly lower at all sample times when horses were restricted from feed 12 h compared to 0 or 4 h. CONCLUSIONS Absorption of nasogastrically administered dantrolene is inhibited by feed restriction before administration. To achieve optimal plasma dantrolene concentrations, feed restriction before oral administration should not exceed 4 h.
Tbx1 controls cardiac neural crest cell migration during arch artery development by regulating Gbx2 expression in the pharyngeal ectoderm

Elucidating the gene regulatory networks that govern pharyngeal arch artery (PAA) development is an important goal, as such knowledge can help to identify new genes involved in cardiovascular disease. The transcription factor Tbx1 plays a vital role in PAA development and is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease associated with DiGeorge syndrome. In this report, we used various genetic approaches to reveal part of a signalling network by which Tbx1 controls PAA development in mice. We investigated the crucial role played by the homeobox-containing transcription factor Gbx2 downstream of Tbx1. We found that PAA formation requires the pharyngeal surface ectoderm as a key signalling centre from which Gbx2, in response to Tbx1, triggers essential directional cues to the adjacent cardiac neural crest cells (cNCCs) en route to the caudal PAAs. Abrogation of this signal generates cNCC patterning defects leading to PAA abnormalities. Finally, we showed that the Slit/Robo signalling pathway is activated during cNCC migration and that components of this pathway are affected in Gbx2 and Tbx1 mutant embryos at the time of PAA development. We propose that the spatiotemporal control of this tightly orchestrated network of genes participates in crucial aspects of PAA development.
The Future of Broadly Neutralizing Antibodies for HIV Eradication

Passive transfer of antibodies has long been considered a potential treatment modality for infectious diseases, including HIV. Early efforts to use antibodies to suppress HIV replication, however, were largely unsuccessful, as the antibodies that were studied neutralized only a relatively narrow spectrum of viral strains and were not very potent. Recent advances have led to the discovery of a large portfolio of human monoclonal antibodies that are broadly neutralizing across many HIV-1 subtypes and are also substantially more potent. These antibodies target multiple different epitopes on the HIV envelope, thus allowing for the development of antibody combinations. In this review, we discuss the application of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) for HIV treatment andHIVeradication strategies.We highlight bNAbs that target key epitopes, such as the CD4 binding site and the V2/V3glycan-dependent sites, and we discuss several bNAbs that are currently in the clinical development pipeline.
BUOYANCY INSTABILITIES IN GALAXY CLUSTERS: CONVECTION DUE TO ADIABATIC COSMIC RAYS AND ANISOTROPIC THERMAL CONDUCTION

Using a linear stability analysis and two- and three-dimensional nonlinear simulations, we study the physics of buoyancy instabilities in a combined thermal and relativistic (cosmic ray) plasma, motivated by the application to clusters of galaxies. We argue that the cosmic-ray diffusion time is likely to be long compared to the buoyancy time on large length scales, so that cosmic rays are effectively adiabatic. If the cosmic-ray pressure pcr is ≳25% of the thermal pressure, and the cosmic-ray “entropy” pcr/ρ4/3 (where ρ is the thermal-plasma density) decreases outward, cosmic rays drive an adiabatic convective instability analogous to Schwarzschild convection in stars. Global simulations of galaxy cluster cores show that this instability saturates by reducing the cosmic-ray entropy gradient and driving efficient convection and turbulent mixing. At larger radii in cluster cores where cosmic-ray pressure is negligible, the thermal plasma is unstable to the heat-flux-driven buoyancy instability (HBI), a convective instability generated by anisotropic thermal conduction and a background conductive heat flux. The HBI saturates by rearranging the magnetic field lines to become largely perpendicular to the local gravitational field; the resulting turbulence also primarily mixes plasma in the perpendicular plane. Cosmic-ray-driven convection and the HBI may contribute to redistributing metals produced by Type Ia supernovae in clusters. Our calculations demonstrate that adiabatic simulations of galaxy clusters can artificially suppress the mixing of thermal plasma. When anisotropic thermal conduction is included, the buoyant response of the thermal plasma is not governed by the stable entropy gradient, and mixing (driven by mergers, cosmic ray buoyancy, etc.) is more effective. Such mixing may contribute to cosmic rays being distributed throughout the cluster volume.
Suppression of Map Kinases Inhibits Microglial Activation and Attenuates Neuronal Cell Death Induced by α-Synuclein Protofibrils

α-Synuclein (α-Syn) accounts, as a major component of Lewy bodies (LB), for the filamentous deposits in many cases of neurodegenerative diseases. Yet, little is known about the molecular mechanisms of neuronal loss in these diseases. The correlation between α-Syn oligomerization/aggregation and pathologies raises the key question of which molecular form of α-Syn (i.e. monomeric α-Syn, protofibrils or mature fibrils) represents the damage-inducing culprit in the scenario of synucleinopathies. We show that human α-Syn protofibrils (PFs) are potent activators of parallel proinflammatory signalling pathways (p38 and ERK1/2 MAP kinases and NF-κB) in microglial cells in vitro. Furthermore, stereotactic injection of α-Syn PFs into the substantia nigra of adult rats leads to a profound activation of microglia and adjacent neuronal cell loss, which can be attenuated by the MAP kinase inhibitor semapimod. We propose that the neurodegenerative process of α-synucleinopathies involves microglial activation through α-Syn released or extruded from cells with pathogenic α-Syn metabolism. Compounds that inhibit the MAPK/NF-κB pathways might be a promising pharmacological strategy for the treatment of the inflammatory component of synucleinopathies including PD.
Are leader stereotypes masculine? A meta-analysis of three research paradigms.

This meta-analysis examined the extent to which stereotypes of leaders are culturally masculine. The primary studies fit into 1 of 3 paradigms: (a) In Schein's (1973) think manager-think male paradigm, 40 studies with 51 effect sizes compared the similarity of male and leader stereotypes and the similarity of female and leader stereotypes; (b) in Powell and Butterfield's (1979) agency-communion paradigm, 22 studies with 47 effect sizes compared stereotypes of leaders' agency and communion; and (c) in Shinar's (1975) masculinity-femininity paradigm, 7 studies with 101 effect sizes represented stereotypes of leadership-related occupations on a single masculinity-femininity dimension. Analyses implemented appropriate random and mixed effects models. All 3 paradigms demonstrated overall masculinity of leader stereotypes: (a) In the think manager-think male paradigm, intraclass correlation = . 25 for the women-leaders similarity and intraclass correlation = . 62 for the men-leaders similarity; (b) in the agency-communion paradigm, g = 1.55, indicating greater agency than communion; and (c) in the masculinity-femininity paradigm, g = 0.92, indicating greater masculinity than the androgynous scale midpoint. Subgroup and meta-regression analyses indicated that this masculine construal of leadership has decreased over time and was greater for male than female research participants. In addition, stereotypes portrayed leaders as less masculine in educational organizations than in other domains and in moderate- than in high-status leader roles. This article considers the relation of these findings to Eagly and Karau's (2002) role congruity theory, which proposed contextual influences on the incongruity between stereotypes of women and leaders. The implications for prejudice against women leaders are also considered.
Dendritic cell-based vaccines in cancer immunotherapy: an update on clinical and immunological results.

The immunogenicity of tumors has been established. Aspecific stimulation of immunity, such as by cytokine therapy, has been shown to induce durable clinical remissions in metastatic disease [1]. The identification and molecular characterization of tumor-associated antigens in the last 10–15 years has allowed the development of tumor-specific immunotherapy. Dendritic cells (DCs) are the professional antigen-presenting cell of the immune system and have been used for several years as a vaccine in cancer patients with the goal of inducing a tumor-specific T-cell response. Here we review the current status of this approach.
Homeostatic maintenance of natural Foxp3 + CD25+ CD4+ regulatory T cells by interleukin (IL)-2 and induction of autoimmune disease by IL-2 neutralization

Interleukin (IL)-2 plays a crucial role in the maintenance of natural immunologic self-tolerance. Neutralization of circulating IL-2 by anti–IL-2 monoclonal antibody for a limited period elicits autoimmune gastritis in BALB/c mice. Similar treatment of diabetes-prone nonobese diabetic mice triggers early onset of diabetes and produces a wide spectrum of T cell–mediated autoimmune diseases, including gastritis, thyroiditis, sialadenitis, and notably, severe neuropathy. Such treatment selectively reduces the number of Foxp3-expressing CD25+ CD4+ T cells, but not CD25− CD4+ T cells, in the thymus and periphery of normal and thymectomized mice. IL-2 neutralization inhibits physiological proliferation of peripheral CD25+ CD4+ T cells that are presumably responding to normal self-antigens, whereas it is unable to inhibit their lymphopenia-induced homeostatic expansion in a T cell–deficient environment. In normal naive mice, CD25low CD4+ nonregulatory T cells actively transcribe the IL-2 gene and secrete IL-2 protein in the physiological state. IL-2 is thus indispensable for the peripheral maintenance of natural CD25+ CD4+ regulatory T cells (T reg cells). The principal physiological source of IL-2 for the maintenance of T reg cells appears to be other T cells, especially CD25low CD4+ activated T cells, which include self-reactive T cells. Furthermore, impairment of this negative feedback loop via IL-2 can be a cause and a predisposing factor for autoimmune disease.
Impaired episodic memory network in subjects at high risk for Alzheimer's disease

Episodic memory dysfunction is one of the hallmark symptoms of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This cognitive impairment may be related to abnormal brain structure and activity. Functional connectivity mapping (FCM) analysis provides a powerful tool for exploring the topology of human brain function using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Thus, it would be advantageous to investigate the changes in functional connectivity within the episodic memory network in a longitudinal MCI dataset, as it may be helpful in identifying a potential marker of disease progress. Accordingly, FCM was performed in 23 normal control (NC) subjects, 26 patients with early MCI (EMCI) and 19 patients with late MCI (LMCI). Our results demonstrated that patients with MCI showed affected functional connectivity within the right fusiform gyrus (rFG) and between the rFG and right precuneus (rPreCU) compared to NCs. The results indicated that deficits in episodic memory would lead to impaired functional connectivity associated with visual information processing in early MCI. FCM may be helpful for exploring a sensitive marker of disease presence.
Are Cloudlets Necessary

We present experimental results from Wi-Fi and 4G LTE networks to validate the intuition that low end-to-end latency of cloud services improves application response time and reduces energy consumption on mobile devices. We focus specifically on computational offloading as a cloud service. Using a wide range of applications, and exploring both pre-partitioned and dynamically partitioned approaches, we demonstrate the importance of low latency for cloud offload services. We show the best performance is achieved by offloading to cloudlets, which are small-scale edge-located data centers. Our results show that cloudlets can improve response times 51% and reduce energy consumption in a mobile device by up to 42% compared to cloud offload. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant numbers IIS-1065336 and CNS-1518865. Additional support was provided by the Intel Corporation, Google, Vodafone, and the Conklin Kistler family fund. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and should not be attributed to their employers or funding sources.
Broadband Lumped-Element Integrated  $N$-Way Power Dividers for Voltage Standards

This paper presents a monolithically integrated broadband lumped-element Wilkinson power divider centered at 20 GHz, which was designed and fabricated to uniformly distribute power to arrays of Josephson junctions (JJs) for superconducting voltage standards. This solution achieves a fourfold decrease in chip area, and a twofold increase in bandwidth (BW) when compared to the previous narrowband distributed circuit. A single Wilkinson divider demonstrates 0.4-dB maximum insertion loss (IL), a 10-dB match BW of 10-24.5 GHz, and a 10-dB isolation BW of 13-30 GHz. A 16-way four-level binary Wilkinson power divider network is characterized in a divider/attenuator/combiner back-to-back measurement configuration with a 10-dB match BW of 10-25 GHz. In the 15-22-GHz band of interest, the maximum IL for the 16-way divider network is 0.5 dB, with an average of 0.2 dB. The amplitude balance of the divider at 15, 19, and 22 GHz is measured to be plusmn1.0 dB utilizing 16 arrays of 15 600 JJs as on-chip power detectors.
The Where and When of Finding New Friends: Analysis of a Location-based Social Discovery Network

With more people accessing Online Social Networks (OSN) using their mobile devices, location-based features have become an important part of the social networking. In this paper, we present the first measurement study of a new category of location-based online social networking services, a location-based social discovery (LBSD) network, that enables users to discover and communicate with nearby people. Unlike popular check-in-based social networks, LBSD allows users to publicly reveal their locations without being associ- ated to a specific “venue” and their usage is not influenced by the incentive mechanisms of the underlying virtual community. By analyzing over 8 million user profiles and around 150 million location updates collected from a popular new LBSD network, we first present the characteristics of spatial- temporal usage patterns of the observed users, showing that 40% of updates are from the user’s primary location and 80% are from their top 10 locations. We identify events that trigger bursts of growth in subscriber numbers, showing the importance of social media marketing. Finally, we investigate how usage patterns may be utilized to re-identify individuals with e.g. different identifiers or from datasets belonging to different online services. We evaluate re-identification by usage, spatial and spatial-temporal patterns and using a number of metrics and show that the best results can be achieved using location data, with a high accuracy: our experiments demonstrate that we can re-identify up-to 85% of users with a precision of 77% using monitored spatial data. Overall, we find that although users exhibit strong periodic behavior in their usage pattern and movements, the success rate of re-identification is highly dependent on the level of activeness and the lifetime of the users in the network.
A Comparison of Fiducial Shapes for Machine Vision Registration

One way to perform registration and alignment for machine assembly is with respect to precisely located landmarks, called fiducials. that are located by machine vision means. For applications such as elearonics assembly, where densities are high and tolerances must be low. the precision by which the fiducials are located affects everything aligned relative to them. Because of s~atial sam~line effects. differenllv shaoed fiducials . " . can be measured with different levels of precision. In past work we have determined and mmpared the minimax precision error for simple geometric shapes, and extended the results to pmpose a cmcentric pattem as having desirable qualities of high location precision and rotational invariance. We reiterate this work, and extend it to examine the performance of the concentric fiducial as a function of diameter, number of rings. noise, and ring spacing.