Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Single‐trial analysis of oddball event‐related potentials in simultaneous EEG‐fMRI

There has recently been a growing interest in the use of simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG) and functional MRI (fMRI) for evoked activity in cognitive paradigms, thereby obtaining functional datasets with both high spatial and temporal resolution. The simultaneous recording permits obtaining event‐related potentials (ERPs) and MR images in the same environment, conditions of stimulation, and subject state; it also enables tracing the joint fluctuations of EEG and fMRI signals. The goal of this study was to investigate the possibility of tracking the trial‐to‐trial changes in event‐related EEG activity, and of using this information as a parameter in fMRI analysis. We used an auditory oddball paradigm and obtained single‐trial amplitude and latency features from the EEG acquired during fMRI scanning. The single‐trial P300 latency presented significant correlation with parameters external to the EEG (target‐to‐target interval and reaction time). Moreover, we obtained significant fMRI activations for the modulation by P300 amplitude and latency, both at the single‐subject and at the group level. Our results indicate that, in line with other studies, the EEG can bring a new dimension to the field of fMRI analysis by providing fine temporal information on the fluctuations in brain activity. Hum Brain Mapp, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Subsidiaries and Knowledge Networks : The Evolving Influences of the MNC and Host Country on Innovation

This paper views MNC subsidiaries as being embedded in two knowledge networks (a) an internal network comprised of the subsidiaries and headquarters of the MNC and (b) an external network of host country firms. We hypothesize that the position (centrality) of the subsidiary in these networks and the characteristics (richness) of the networks will impact the extent of their influence on subsidiary innovation. The paper also suggests that the relative influences of these two networks change as the subsidiary evolves. The study uses patent citation data pertaining to innovations by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. semiconductor firms to analyze the influences on subsidiary innovation. The paper finds that for the host country network centrality matters, while for the MNC network richness matters to subsidiary innovation. The study also shows that as the subsidiary evolves, the influence of the host country on innovation increases.
Tissue-Specific Transcriptomic Profiling of Sorghum propinquum using a Rice Genome Array

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) is one of the world's most important cereal crops. S. propinquum is a perennial wild relative of S. bicolor with well-developed rhizomes. Functional genomics analysis of S. propinquum, especially with respect to molecular mechanisms related to rhizome growth and development, can contribute to the development of more sustainable grain, forage, and bioenergy cropping systems. In this study, we used a whole rice genome oligonucleotide microarray to obtain tissue-specific gene expression profiles of S. propinquum with special emphasis on rhizome development. A total of 548 tissue-enriched genes were detected, including 31 and 114 unique genes that were expressed predominantly in the rhizome tips (RT) and internodes (RI), respectively. Further GO analysis indicated that the functions of these tissue-enriched genes corresponded to their characteristic biological processes. A few distinct cis-elements, including ABA-responsive RY repeat CATGCA, sugar-repressive TTATCC, and GA-responsive TAACAA, were found to be prevalent in RT-enriched genes, implying an important role in rhizome growth and development. Comprehensive comparative analysis of these rhizome-enriched genes and rhizome-specific genes previously identified in Oryza longistaminata and S. propinquum indicated that phytohormones, including ABA, GA, and SA, are key regulators of gene expression during rhizome development. Co-localization of rhizome-enriched genes with rhizome-related QTLs in rice and sorghum generated functional candidates for future cloning of genes associated with rhizome growth and development.
ICT in the Construction Sector: Computing the Economic Benefits

Any assessment of the extent of the economic benefits for the construction sector from technological change is difficult to determine accurately but in view of the construction sector's contribution to a nation's economy, it is important that the impact of technological change on the industry is properly recognised. One area of technological change in the industry — the increased use of information and communication technology (ICT) is considered in this study, which examines the evidence concerning the crucial role of ICT usage and investment in generating growth and improving technical productivity in the industry and considers the question of how the gains from ICT can be evaluated at the industry level. The U.K. construction sector forms the focal point of this study but comparisons are also made with the construction sectors of other industrially developed countries. The results of the analysis find that the construction industry is now beginning to reap the benefits on productivity from the post ‐ 1995 surge in ICT investment.
Variation in floral sex allocation in Polygonatum odoratum (Liliaceae).

BACKGROUND AND AIMS It is well known that resource allocation to male and female functions can be highly variable in hermaphroditic plants. The purpose of this study was to investigate variations in sexual investment at different levels (flower, plant and population) in Polygonatum odoratum, a plant with sequentially opening flowers. METHODS Pollen and ovule production in base, middle and top flowers of P. odoratum flowering shoots from two natural populations were quantified. Plant measurements of phenotypic and functional gender were calculated in both populations. Total leaf number was used to investigate the relationship between gender assessments and plant size. KEY RESULTS Pollen and ovule production varied depending on flower position, although the precise pattern differed between both studied populations; only investment in female floral function decreased markedly from base to top flowers in both populations. The frequency distribution of phenotypic gender and their relationship with plant size differed between populations. Phenotypic and functional gender were correlated in both populations. CONCLUSIONS Sexual investment in P. odoratum has shown a marked variability within plants, among plants, and between populations, which confirms the importance of analysing sex expression in plants of this type. Differences in relative investment in male and female components (phenotypic gender) are reflected in the functional gender and it would be expected that the evolution of sexual specialization in Polygonatum odoratum would be promoted.
Moderators of the efficacy of a psychosocial group intervention for children with chronic illness and their parents: what works for whom?

OBJECTIVE To investigate psychosocial characteristics of children and parents as predictors and moderators of the effect of a group intervention for children with chronic illness and their parents. METHODS Data from a randomized controlled trial were used, including 194 children (8-18 years) who were assigned to a child-only intervention, a parent-child intervention, or a wait-list control group. Longitudinal multilevel regression analyses were used to test effects on change in parent and child reported internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. RESULTS For children with a more disengaged coping style or lower self-worth and for children who experienced a more secure parent-child relationship, the parent-child intervention was more effective than the child-only intervention in reducing behavior problems. CONCLUSIONS Children who are more "at risk" appear to gain more from participating in an intervention, especially if their parents are involved as well. However, the benefit of parents' involvement may depend on the quality of the parent-child relationship.
Teacher Characteristics and Gains in Student Achievement: Estimation Using Micro Data.

Recent attention to education in the United States represents the merger of concern about efficiency of the educational system and concern about the distribution of educational services, particularly along racial and ethnic lines. However, there is very little guidance on how to satisfy any efficiency or distributional goals through public policy because extremely little is known about the relationship between inputs-particularly inputs available for public policy--and outputs of the educational process. Educational research has been slow in providing definitive answers to public policy questions for several understandable reasons: the subject of the educational process is extremely complex, especially as regards the physiological and psychological aspects; any theoretical development of a learning theory amenable to analysis for policy purposes is absent; and the required data traditionally have not been collected. Previous analyses have yielded some suggestive beginnings, and have provided insights into how the analysis should proceed. This analysis represents a next step of statistical inquiry into the educational process from a public policy point of view. Three fundamental educational policy questions are addressed: (1) do teachers count? (2) are schools operated efficiently now? (3) what characteristics of teachers and classrooms are important? Past studies have given ambiguous answers to these questions, largely due to inadequate data. Specifically, no data set which supplies accurate historical information on educational inputs at an individual level has been available. This study attempts to provide more conclusive answers by remedying the most glaring data problems for a set of students (third graders) in one school district.
Funding South African Higher Education: Steering Mechanisms To Meet National Goals.

AUTHOR Merisotis, Jamie P.; Gilleland, Diane S. TITLE Funding South African Higher Education: Steering Mechanisms To Meet National Goals. INSTITUTION Institute for Higher Education Policy, Washington, DC. SPONS AGENCY Ford Foundation, New York, NY. PUB DATE 2000-05-00 NOTE 48p. ; Produced with the assistance of the Centre for Higher Education Transformation, Pilot Project Consortium on Higher Education, and Department of Education Finance Reference Group. AVAILABLE FROM Institute for Higher Education Policy, 1320 19th Street, N.W. , Suite 400, Washington, DC 20036. Tel: 202-861-8223; Fax: 202-861-9307. For full text: http://www.ihep. com. PUB TYPE Reports Descriptive (141) EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Educational Finance; *Educational Policy; *Financial Support; Foreign Countries; *Higher Education IDENTIFIERS *Funding Formulas; *South Africa
Does the Term Structure Predict Recessions? The International Evidence

Following Estrella and Hardouvelis (1991) and Estrella and Mishkin (1995), we study the ability of the term structure to predict recessions in eight countries. The results are fourfold. First, the yield curve predicts future recessions in all countries. Second, term spreads forecast recessions as much as 2 years ahead. Third, while German and US spreads are frequently significant in the regressions for the other countries, the added information is limited except in Japan and the UK. Fourth, while leading indicators contain information beyond that in term spreads, this information is only useful for forecasting recessions in the immediate future. These findings provide further evidence of the potential usefulness of term spreads as indicators for monetary policy purposes. Copyright @ 1998 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved.
CSR communication in small and medium‐sized enterprises

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how corporate social responsibility (CSR) appears and is communicated in small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on theory and research on CSR communication in general and in SMEs and a qualitative case study of the attitudes and beliefs of Danish SME managers regarding CSR and CSR communication.Findings – The case study demonstrates that CSR is primarily considered to be an ethical and moral issue which is isolated from strategic communication including public relations and reputation management. Rather than being a strategic instrument, CSR seems to be rooted in practice and regulated by the personal values and beliefs of managers. It is argued that in principle, SMEs like the ones in the case study which are based on employee commitment and the use of indirect word‐of‐mouth communication with internal and local stakeholders have a fruitful platform for adopting strategic CSR communication. The problem .
Adaptive Plasticity in the Auditory Thalamus of Juvenile Barn Owls

Little is known about the capacity of the thalamus for experience-dependent plasticity. Here, we demonstrate adaptive changes in the tuning of auditory thalamic neurons to a major category of sound localization cue, interaural time differences (ITDs), in juvenile barn owls that experience chronic abnormal hearing. Abnormal hearing was caused by a passive acoustic filtering device implanted in one ear that altered the timing and level of sound differently at different frequencies. Experience with this device resulted in adaptive, frequency-dependent shifts in the tuning of thalamic neurons to ITD that mimicked the acoustic effects of the device. Abnormal hearing did not alter ITD tuning in the central nucleus of the inferior colliculus, the primary source of input to the auditory thalamus. Therefore, the thalamus is the earliest stage in the forebrain pathway in which this plasticity is expressed. A visual manipulation, chronic prismatic displacement of the visual field, which causes adaptive changes in ITD tuning at higher levels in the forebrain, had no effect on thalamic ITD tuning. The results demonstrate that, during the juvenile period, auditory experience shapes neuronal response properties in the thalamus in a frequency-specific manner and suggest that this thalamic plasticity is driven by self-organizational forces and not by visual instruction.
Science of assessment

Psoriatic arthritis is a multisystem disorder which, from a measurement standpoint, demands consideration of its cutaneous manifestations and both axial and peripheral musculoskeletal involvement. Measurements of various aspects of impairment, ability/disability, and participation/handicap are feasible using existing measurement techniques, which are for the most part valid, reliable, and responsive. Nevertheless, there remain opportunities for the further development of consensus around core set measures and responder criteria, as well as for instrument development and refinement, standardised assessor training, cross-cultural adaptation of health status questionnaires, electronic data capture, and the introduction of standardised quantitative measurement into routine clinical care.
On the induced norms of discrete-time and hybrid time-varying systems

Characterizations for the induced norms of two types of systems are considered. It is first shown that the induced `2 norm of a discrete-time, linear time-varying system may be characterized by the existence requirement on solutions to operator algebraic Riccati equations. A similar result is derived for systems that arise in sampled-data systems, involving a mixture of continuousand discrete-time signals.
Autoencoder-based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Speech Emotion Recognition

With the availability of speech data obtained from different devices and varied acquisition conditions, we are often faced with scenarios, where the intrinsic discrepancy between the training and the test data has an adverse impact on affective speech analysis. To address this issue, this letter introduces an Adaptive Denoising Autoencoder based on an unsupervised domain adaptation method, where prior knowledge learned from a target set is used to regularize the training on a source set. Our goal is to achieve a matched feature space representation for the target and source sets while ensuring target domain knowledge transfer. The method has been successfully evaluated on the 2009 INTERSPEECH Emotion Challenge's FAU Aibo Emotion Corpus as target corpus and two other publicly available speech emotion corpora as sources. The experimental results show that our method significantly improves over the baseline performance and outperforms related feature domain adaptation methods.
The QBO as Potential Amplifier and Conduit to Lower Altitudes of Solar Cycle Influence

Abstract. In several papers, the solar cycle (SC) effect in the lower atmosphere has been linked observationally to the Quasi-biennial Oscillation (QBO) of the zonal circulation. Salby and Callaghan (2000) in particular analyzed the QBO wind measurements, covering more than 40 years, and discovered that they contain a large SC signature at 20 km. We present here the results from a study with our 3-D Numerical Spectral Model (NSM), which relies primarily on parameterized gravity waves (GW) to describe the QBO. In our model, the period of the SC is taken to be 10 years, and the relative amplitude of radiative forcing varies exponentially with height, i.e., 0.2% at the surface, 2% at 50 km, and 20% at 100 km and above. Applying spectral analysis to identify the SC signature, the model generates a relatively large modulation of the QBO, which reproduces the observations qualitatively. The numerical results demonstrate that the QBO modulation, closely tracking the phase of the SC, is robust and persists at least for 70 years. The question is what causes the SC effect, and our analysis shows that four interlocking processes are involved: (1) In the mesosphere at around 60 km, the solar UV variations generate in the zonal winds a SC modulation of the 12-month annual oscillation, which is hemispherically symmetric and confined to equatorial latitudes like the QBO. (2) Although the amplitude of this equatorial annual oscillation (EAO) is relatively small, its SC modulation is large and extends into the lower stratosphere under the influence of, and amplified by, wave forcing. (3) The amplitude modulations of both EAO and QBO are essentially in phase with the imposed SC heating for the entire time span of the model simulation. This indicates that, due to positive feedback in the wave mechanism, the EAO apparently provides the pathway and pacemaker for the SC modulation of the QBO. (4) Our analysis demonstrates that the SC modulations of the QBO and EAO are amplified by tapping the momentum from the upward propagating gravity waves. Influenced and amplified by wave processes, the QBO thus acts as conduit to transfer to lower altitudes the larger SC variations in the UV absorbed in the mesosphere. Our model produces in the temperature variations of the QBO and EAO measurable SC modulations at polar latitudes near the tropopause. The effects are apparently generated by the meridional circulation, and planetary waves presumably, which redistribute the energy from the equatorial region where the waves are very effective in amplifying the SC influence.
Distal, intermediate, and proximal mediators of racial disparities in renal disease mortality in the United States

Background: Kidney failure and associated mortality is one of the major components of racial disparities in the United States. Objectives: The current study aimed to investigate the role of distal (socioeconomic status, SES), intermediate (chronic medical diseases), and proximal (health behaviors) factors that may explain Black-White disparities in mortality due to renal diseases. Patients and Methods: This is a nationally representative prospective cohort with 25 years of follow up. Data came from the Americans’ Changing Lives (ACL) study, 1986 to 2011. The study included 3361 Black (n = 1156) or White (n = 2205) adults who were followed for up to 25 years. Race was the main predictor and death due to renal disease was the outcome. SES, chronic medical disease (diabetes, hypertension, obesity), and health behaviors (smoking, drinking, and exercise) at baseline were potential mediators. We used Cox proportional hazards models for data analysis. Results: In age and gender adjusted models, Blacks had higher risk of death due to renal disease over the follow up period. Separate models suggested that SES, health behaviors and chronic medical disease fully explained the effect of race on renal disease mortality. Conclusions: Black-White disparities in rate of death due to renal diseases in the United States are not genuine but secondary to racial differences in income, health behaviors, hypertension, and diabetes. As distal, intermediate, and proximal factors contribute to racial disparities in renal disease mortality, elimination of such disparities requires a wide range of policies and programs that target income, medical conditions, and health behaviors.
Pure Lymphoepithelioma-Like Carcinoma Originating from the Urinary Bladder

Lymphoepithelioma-like carcinoma of the urinary bladder (LELCB) is a rare variant of infiltrating urothelial carcinoma. We report a case of LELCB in a 43-year-old man. Ultrasonography and cystoscopy revealed two bladder tumors, one on the left side of the trigone and the other on the right side of the trigone. Transurethral resection of the bladder tumors was performed and pathological analysis revealed undifferentiated carcinoma. We therefore performed radical cystectomy and urinary diversion. Immunohistochemically the tumor cells were positive for cytokeratin, but negative for Epstein-Barr virus-encoded small RNA in situ hybridization as found for previous cases of LELCB. The final pathological diagnosis was a lymphoepithelioma-like variant of urothelial carcinoma with perivesical soft tissue invasion. For adjuvant systemic chemotherapy, three courses of cisplatin were administered. The patient subsequently became free of cancer 72 months postoperatively. Based on the literature, pure or predominant LELCB types show favorable prognoses due to their sensitivity to chemotherapy or radiotherapy. An analysis of the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) values of bladder tumors examined in our institution revealed that the ADC value measured for this LELCB was relatively low compared to conventional urothelial carcinomas. This suggests that measuring the ADC value of a lymphoepithelioma-like carcinoma prior to operation may be helpful in predicting LELCB.
A Descriptive Model of Managerial Effectiveness

This study was designed to help understand what effective managers really do. Unlike previous research on managerial effectiveness, a diverse sample (N = 78) of managers was directly observed in natural settings. These data on managerial activities gathered by trained observers were related to a subordinate-report measure of unit effectiveness. Using canonical correlation analysis, a descriptive model of managerial effectiveness was derived. This one-dimensional model consists of a continuum ranging from a quantity-oriented human resource manager (who was observed to exhibit considerable staffing and motivating or reinforcing activities and was perceived to have quantity performance in the unit) to quality- oriented traditional manager (who was observed to exhibit a lot of interaction with outsiders, controlling and planning activities, and was perceived to have quality performance in the unit). This empirically derived descriptive model helps identify needed managerial activities and skills for quantity and quality performance in today's organizations.