Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evolution and human motivation: A fundamental motives framework

An evolutionary perspective on human motivation provides a means of identifying conceptually distinct motivational systems (including motives pertaining to self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and parental care), each of which has unique implications for affect, cognition, and behavior. We provide an illustrative summary of some of these empirically documented implications—including those pertaining to individual differences in chronic motivational tendencies, as well as additional implications that follow from temporary activation of these motivational systems. We also summarize a variety of broader implications—both conceptual and practical—that follow from this framework.
Hex homeobox gene-dependent tissue positioning is required for organogenesis of the ventral pancreas

In animal development, digestive tissues emerge from different positions of the endoderm as a result of patterning signals from overlying mesoderm. Although embryonic tissue movement during gastrulation generates an initial positional relationship between the endoderm and mesoderm, the role of subsequent endoderm movement against the mesoderm in patterning is unknown. At embryonic day 8.5 in the mouse, proliferation of cells at the leading edge of ventral-lateral endoderm, where the liver and ventral pancreas emerge, helps close off the foregut. During this time, the endoderm grows adjacent to and beyond the cardiogenic mesoderm, an inducer of the liver program and an inhibitor of the pancreas program. The homeobox gene Hex is expressed in this endoderm cell domain and in the liver and ventral pancreas buds, after organogenesis. We have found that in Hex-/- embryos, there is a complete failure in ventral pancreatic specification, while the liver program is still induced. However, when Hex-null ventral endoderm is isolated prior to its interaction with cardiogenic mesoderm and is cultured in vitro, it activates early pancreas genes. We found that Hex controls the proliferation rate, and thus the positioning, of the leading edge of endoderm cells that grow beyond the cardiogenic mesoderm, during gut tube closure. Thus, Hex-controlled positioning of endoderm cells beyond cardiogenic mesoderm dictates ventral pancreas specification. Other endodermal transcription factors may also function morphogenetically rather than by directly regulating tissue-specific programs.
Examining the Impact of Audio Presentation on Tests of Reading Comprehension

This study examined the impact of a read-aloud accommodation on standardized test scores of reading comprehension at grades 4 and 8. Under a repeated measures design, students with and without reading-based learning disabilities took both a standard administration and a read-aloud administration of a reading comprehension test. Results show that the mean score on the audio version was higher than scores on the standard version for both groups of students at both grade levels. Students with reading-based learning disabilities at both levels benefited differentially more than students with no disability. This finding continues to hold after controlling for reading fluency and ceiling effects at both grades. The results also examined the relationship between test scores and teachers' ratings of reading comprehension to determine which measures are the better predictors of teachers' ratings of reading comprehension by grade and disability classification.
Identity formation in Italian emerging adults: A cluster-analytic approach and associations with psychosocial functioning

The present study examined identity formation in Italian emerging adults using an integrative identity model including commitment making, identification with commitment, exploration in depth, exploration in breadth, and ruminative exploration. Participants were 1,130 university students, aged 18–30 years. In line with previous research, results indicated that, by means of cluster analysis, six identity statuses could be derived: achievement, foreclosure, moratorium, diffused diffusion, carefree diffusion, and undifferentiated. Each of these identity statuses exhibited a distinct profile in terms of self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and need satisfaction. Suggestions for future research and limitations are discussed.
Regular Graphs and the Spectra of Two-Variable Logic with Counting

The {\em spectrum} of a first-order logic sentence is the set of natural numbers that are cardinalities of its finite models. In this paper we show that when restricted to using only two variables, but allowing counting quantifiers, the spectra of first-order logic sentences are semilinear and hence, closed under complement. At the heart of our proof are semilinear characterisations for the existence of regular and biregular graphs, the class of graphs in which there are a priori bounds on the degrees of the vertices. Our proof also provides a simple characterisation of models of two-variable logic with counting -- that is, up to renaming and extending the relation names, they are simply a collection of regular and biregular graphs.
Denser Growing Fiber Connections Induce 3-hinge Gyral Folding

Recent studies have shown that quantitative description of gyral shape patterns offers a novel window to examine the relationship between brain structure and function. Along this research line, this paper examines a unique and interesting type of cortical gyral region where 3 different gyral crests meet, termed 3-hinge gyral region. We extracted 3-hinge gyral regions in macaque/chimpanzee/human brains, quantified and compared the relevant DTI-derived fiber densities in 3-hinge and 2-hinge gyral regions. Our observations consistently showed that DTI-derived fiber densities in 3-hinge regions are much higher than those in 2-hinge regions. Therefore, we hypothesize that besides the cortical expansion, denser fiber connections can induce the formation of 3-hinge gyri. To examine the biomechanical basis of this hypothesis, we constructed a series of 3-dimensional finite element soft tissue models based on continuum growth theory to investigate fundamental biomechanical mechanisms of consistent 3-hinge gyri formation. Our computational simulation results consistently showed that during gyrification gyral regions with higher concentrations of growing axonal fibers tend to form 3-hinge gyri. Our integrative approach combining neuroimaging data analysis and computational modeling appears effective in probing a plausible theory of 3-hinge gyri formation and providing new insights into structural and functional cortical architectures and their relationship.
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia–hand mirror cell variant: A detailed cytological and ultrastructural study with an analysis of the immunologic surface markers

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia was observed in a 22‐year‐old white female patient and was manifested by normal platelet counts, 50–60% hand mirror cells (HMC) in the bone marrow, and prolonged survival without treatment. The characteristic neoplastic cell had a nucleus within the “mirror” portion and a cytoplasmic uropod forming the “handle” portion. The presence of acid phosphatase and B‐glucuronidase activity suggested that the cell was a T cell lymphoblast. However, extensive immunologic surface marker studies indicated the cells were non‐T, non‐B. Terminal transferase activity further supported the lymphoid nature of the cell. The hand mirror cells were considered a real phenomenon since they were demonstrated on phase contrast microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy. The cells did not grow in tissue culture and cytogenetics revealed a normal female karyotype. From the above observations, the HMC is a lymphoblast with morphological, cytochemical, and immunological features which may differentiate it from the usual cell in acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Therefore, cases involving increased numbers of hand mirror cells in the bone marrow and acute lymphoblastic leukemia require further investigation to elucidate the full importance of this cell. This study represents the first attempt to investigate this cell in detail.
A-317491, a novel potent and selective non-nucleotide antagonist of P2X3 and P2X2/3 receptors, reduces chronic inflammatory and neuropathic pain in the rat

P2X3 and P2X2/3 receptors are highly localized on peripheral and central processes of sensory afferent nerves, and activation of these channels contributes to the pronociceptive effects of ATP. A-317491 is a novel non-nucleotide antagonist of P2X3 and P2X2/3 receptor activation. A-317491 potently blocked recombinant human and rat P2X3 and P2X2/3 receptor-mediated calcium flux (Ki = 22–92 nM) and was highly selective (IC50 >10 μM) over other P2 receptors and other neurotransmitter receptors, ion channels, and enzymes. A-317491 also blocked native P2X3 and P2X2/3 receptors in rat dorsal root ganglion neurons. Blockade of P2X3 containing channels was stereospecific because the R-enantiomer (A-317344) of A-317491 was significantly less active at P2X3 and P2X2/3 receptors. A-317491 dose-dependently (ED50 = 30 μmol/kg s.c.) reduced complete Freund's adjuvant-induced thermal hyperalgesia in the rat. A-317491 was most potent (ED50 = 10–15 μmol/kg s.c.) in attenuating both thermal hyperalgesia and mechanical allodynia after chronic nerve constriction injury. The R-enantiomer, A-317344, was inactive in these chronic pain models. Although active in chronic pain models, A-317491 was ineffective (ED50 >100 μmol/kg s.c.) in reducing nociception in animal models of acute pain, postoperative pain, and visceral pain. The present data indicate that a potent and selective antagonist of P2X3 and P2X2/3 receptors effectively reduces both nerve injury and chronic inflammatory nociception, but P2X3 and P2X2/3 receptor activation may not be a major mediator of acute, acute inflammatory, or visceral pain.
Novel Functions of Plant Cyclin-Dependent Kinase Inhibitors, ICK1/KRP1, Can Act Non-Cell-Autonomously and Inhibit Entry into Mitosisw⃞

In animals, cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors (CKIs) are important regulators of cell cycle progression. Recently, putative CKIs were also identified in plants, and in previous studies, Arabidopsis thaliana plants misexpressing CKIs were found to have reduced endoreplication levels and decreased numbers of cells consistent with a function of CKIs in blocking the G1-S cell cycle transition. Here, we demonstrate that at least one inhibitor from Arabidopsis, ICK1/KRP1, can also block entry into mitosis but allows S-phase progression causing endoreplication. Our data suggest that plant CKIs act in a concentration-dependent manner and have an important function in cell proliferation as well as in cell cycle exit and in turning from a mitotic to an endoreplicating cell cycle mode. Endoreplication is usually associated with terminal differentiation; we observed, however, that cell fate specification proceeded independently from ICK1/KRP1-induced endoreplication. Strikingly, we found that endoreplicated cells were able to reenter mitosis, emphasizing the high degree of flexibility of plant cells during development. Moreover, we show that in contrast with animal CDK inhibitors, ICK1/KRP1 can move between cells. On the one hand, this challenges plant cell cycle control with keeping CKIs locally controlled, and on the other hand this provides a possibility of linking cell cycle control in single cells with the supracellular organization of a tissue or an organ.
An Empirical Comparison of Three-and Four-Choice Items and Tests: Susceptibility to Testwiseness and Internal Consistency Reliability

Theoretical and test simulation work reveals that under the knowledge-or-randomguessing assumption, three-option item tests are at least as good as four-option item tests in terms of item discrimination and internal consistency. Of concern, however, is the finding that multiple-choice items may be susceptible to testwiseness, thereby contradicting the random-guessing assumption. Both item-level and test-level characteristics were examined for items included in a high stakes school-leaving mathematics examination. As expected, the influence of testwiseness is lessened when three-option items are used instead of four-option items. Differences and nondifferences between the psychometric characteristics of the three-option and four-option test forms tend to agree with the findings of earlier studies: Tests consisting of three-option items are at least equivalent to tests composed of four options in terms of internal consistency score reliability, difficulty is inversely related to the number of options, and the findings for item discrimination are not conclusive.
Negative-weight percolation

We describe a percolation problem on lattices (graphs, networks), with edge weights drawn from disorder distributions that allow for weights (or distances) of either sign, i.e. including negative weights. We are interested in whether there are spanning paths or loops of total negative weight. This kind of percolation problem is fundamentally different from conventional percolation problems, e.g. it does not exhibit transitivity, hence, no simple definition of clusters, and several spanning paths/loops might coexist in the percolation regime at the same time. Furthermore, to study this percolation problem numerically, one has to perform a non-trivial transformation of the original graph and apply sophisticated matching algorithms. Using this approach, we study the corresponding percolation transitions on large square, hexagonal and cubic lattices for two types of disorder distributions and determine the critical exponents. The results show that negative-weight percolation (NWP) is in a different universality class compared to conventional bond/site percolation. On the other hand, NWP seems to be related to the ferromagnet/spin-glass transition of random-bond Ising systems, at least in two dimensions.
Mutual information and minimum mean-square error in Gaussian channels

This paper deals with arbitrarily distributed finite-power input signals observed through an additive Gaussian noise channel. It shows a new formula that connects the input-output mutual information and the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) achievable by optimal estimation of the input given the output. That is, the derivative of the mutual information (nats) with respect to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is equal to half the MMSE, regardless of the input statistics. This relationship holds for both scalar and vector signals, as well as for discrete-time and continuous-time noncausal MMSE estimation. This fundamental information-theoretic result has an unexpected consequence in continuous-time nonlinear estimation: For any input signal with finite power, the causal filtering MMSE achieved at SNR is equal to the average value of the noncausal smoothing MMSE achieved with a channel whose SNR is chosen uniformly distributed between 0 and SNR.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Self-organization , free energy minimization , and optimal grip on a field of affordances

Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva. nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.
GAPfm: optimal top-n recommendations for graded relevance domains

Recommender systems are frequently used in domains in which users express their preferences in the form of graded judgments, such as ratings. Current ranking techniques are based on one of two sub-optimal approaches: either they optimize for a binary metric such as Average Precision, which discards information on relevance levels, or they optimize for Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), which ignores the dependence of an item's contribution on the relevance of more highly ranked items. We address the shortcomings of existing approaches by proposing GAPfm, the Graded Average Precision factor model, which is a latent factor model for top-N recommendation in domains with graded relevance data. The model optimizes the Graded Average Precision metric that has been proposed recently for assessing the quality of ranked results lists for graded relevance. GAPfm's advantages are twofold: it maintains full information about graded relevance and also addresses the limitations of models that optimize NDCG. Experimental results show that GAPfm achieves substantial improvements on the top-N recommendation task, compared to several state-of-the-art approaches.
Success rate and cannulation time between precut sphincterotomy and double‐guidewire technique in truly difficult biliary cannulation

Background and Aim: Precut sphincterotomy (PS) is usually indicated in failed standard biliary cannulation (BC). PS requires experienced endoscopists, and contains significant risk. Double‐guidewire (DG) cannulation seems to be easier, and might be useful after failed standard BC. We aimed to compare cannulation time, success rate, and complication rates between the two techniques.
Feasibility of transoral robotic‐assisted high‐resolution microendoscopic imaging of oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma

Transoral robotic‐assisted oncologic surgery of the head and neck offers promising functional results. Nonetheless, the efficacy of oncologic surgery remains critically dependent on obtaining negative margins. We aimed to integrate a miniaturized high‐resolution fiber‐optic microendoscope (HRME), which provides real‐time histological assessment, with the da Vinci robotic system (Intuitive Surgical, Sunnyvale, CA).
Discourse constraints on (non)-extraposition from subject in English

This paper analyzes the discourse conditions governing the choice between extraposition and nonextraposition of that clause and infinitival VP subjects. On the basis of a large corpus of naturally occurring data, it is shown that nonextraposition requires that the content of the subject be discourse-old or directly inferrable. If the content is discourse-new, then extraposition is necessary. The choice between extraposition and nonextraposition for discourse-old and inferrable subjects is examined and is shown to depend on the discourse status of the predicate and on whether it is the predicate or the subject which links to the following discourse. The paper ends with a discussion of the syntactic position of nonextraposed sentential subjects and concludes that it cannot be the same as that of fronted sentential complements. This means that the common discourse properties of fronting and nonextraposition must be linked to their common linear ordering properties, rather than to a common syntactic position.
Sensory Systems in Amphioxus: A Window on the Ancestral Chordate Condition

Amphioxus has an assortment of cells and organs for sensing light and mechanical stimuli. Vertebrate counterparts of these structures are not always apparent, and a strong case can be made for homology in only a few instances. For example, amphioxus has anatomically simple but plausible homologs of both the pineal and paired eyes of vertebrates. Placodal and neural crest derivatives are, however, more problematic: the evidence for an olfactory system in amphioxus is only circumstantial and, despite the variety of secondary sensory cell types that occur on the body surface in amphioxus, none are obvious homologs of vertebrate taste buds, neuromasts or acoustic hair cells. A useful perspective can nevertheless be gained by examining differences in amphioxus and vertebrate development, specifically how each specifies and positions sensory precursors, controls their proliferation, and deploys them through the body. The much larger size of vertebrate embryos and the need to cope developmentally with increased scale and cell numbers may account for some key vertebrate innovations, including placodes and neural crest. The presence or absence of specific structural adaptations, like the latter, is therefore less useful for judging homology between amphioxus and vertebrates than shared features of specific cell types. It is also clear that the duration of embryogenesis in vertebrates has been significantly extended in comparison with ancestral chordates so as to incorporate events that would originally have occurred during the post-embryonic growth period, including events of neurogenesis. Consequently, no scenario for the origin of vertebrates can be considered complete unless it deals explicitly with the whole of the life history and changes to it.
Assessing Robustness of Intrinsic Tests of Independence in Two-Way Contingency Tables

For testing nested hypotheses from a Bayesian standpoint, a desirable condition is that the prior for the alternative model concentrates mass around the smaller, or null, model. For testing independence in contingency tables, the intrinsic priors satisfy this requirement. Furthermore, the degree of concentration of the priors is controlled by a discrete parameter, t, the training sample size, which plays an important role in the resulting answer. In this article we report on the robustness of the tests of independence for small or moderate sample sizes in contingency tables with respect to intrinsic priors with different degrees of concentration around the null. We compare these tests to frequentist tests and other robust Bayes tests. For large sample sizes, robustness is achieved because the intrinsic Bayesian tests are consistent. Examples using real and simulated data are given. Supplemental materials (technical details and data sets) are available online.
The structure of ionization showers in air generated by electrons with 1 MeV energy or less

Ionization showers are created in the Earth's atmosphere by cosmic particles or by run-away electrons from pulsed discharges or by the decay of radioactive elements like radon and krypton. These showers provide pre-ionization that can play a role for discharge inception or evolution; radioactive admixtures in plasma technology use the same effect. While the CORSIKA program provides cross sections and models for cosmic particle showers down to the MeV level, we here analyze the shower structure below 1 MeV by using a three-dimensional relativistic Monte Carlo discharge code for the electron dynamics. We provide a few analytical results to speed up the numerical implementation of the scattering processes. We derive and analyze the spatio-temporal structure of ionization and electron energies in the shower for incident electrons with energies of 1 keV to 1 MeV, at air pressures of 10, 100 and 1000 mbar at room temperature in great detail. We calculate the final density of and O− ions and the average input energy per ion. We show that the average input energy per ion increases from 20 eV for initial energies of 1 KeV to 33 eV for 250 MeV. We also derive the electric fields generated by the electrons and residual ions of the particle showers. Finally, we study how the shower evolution and the electron energy at 1 bar is influenced by ambient electric fields of 5 or 8 kV cm−1 and see that for 1 keV the electron number decreases, more slowly than without field, whereas the electron number continuously grows for 1 MeV.
Cleavage of cystatin C is not associated with multiple sclerosis

Recently, Irani and colleagues proposed a C‐terminal cleaved isoform cystatin C (12.5kDa) in cerebrospinal fluid as a marker of multiple sclerosis. In this study, we demonstrate that the 12.5kDa product of cystatin C is formed by degradation of the first eight N‐terminal residues. Moreover, such a degradation is not specific in the cerebrospinal fluid of multiple sclerosis, but rather is given by an inappropriate sample storage at −20°C. We conclude that the use of the 12.5kDa product of cystatin C in cerebrospinal fluid might lead to a fallacious diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Preanalytical validation procedure is mandatory for proteomics investigations. Ann Neurol 2007