Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Face and object processing : what changes with experience?

At the most general level, this thesis examines the ways in which face and object processing change with experience, and the ways in which they do not. Two theoretical topics are of particular interest. The first is the origin of holistic/configural processing: under normal circumstances, this is limited to faces, seen upright; here I explore whether it can develop with experience for inverted faces or for objects-of-expertise (thus testing the expertise hypothesis). The second is related to understanding facespace, and the norm-based coding of individual face identity. Timescales of experience considered range from 2 mins of adaptation to a distorted face, to 20 years at judging show-dogs. Empirical chapters are organised as four more-or-less independent papers, each addressing somewhat distinct theoretical questions. The first empirical chapter tests whether extensive training with inverted faces is sufficient to change processing style to that used for upright faces (i.e. holistic). The second empirical chapter examines which tests are best for showing differences between faces and objects, in subjects with no particular expertise with the target object class (i.e., dog novices). The third empirical chapter tests whether dog-show judges (i.e., dog experts) process dogs in the same way as they do faces. The fourth empirical chapter tests whether adaptation to a distorted face changes perception in relation to a norm, whether any such changes are based on previous experience with faces, and whether adaptation transfers between upright and inverted faces when a relational (spacing) distortion is used. Taken together, results suggest that upright-face-like processing does not occur for inverted faces or dogs after hours to years of practice; that previous experience has a strong effect on adaptation; that adaptation for both upright and inverted faces occurs with respect to a norm, but that the adaptation for upright and inverted faces occurs in different populations of neurons. In terms of methodology, results suggest that some tasks are better than others for asking questions about the domain-specificity of faces, and that adaptation to simple face-shape distortions is a good way to investigate the structure of “face-space”. Overall, the thesis concludes that there is little or no evidence to support the idea that practice changes processing of non-face objects or inverted faces in such a way that it becomes like that for upright faces. Possible origins of domain specificity (based on previous literature) are also discussed.
Methods and perceptual thresholds for short-term electrical stimulation of human retina with microelectrode arrays.

PURPOSE To report methods for performing epiretinal electrical stimulation with microfabricated electrode arrays and determining perceptual thresholds on awake human volunteers during acute surgical trials. METHODS Four hypotheses were tested: (1) epiretinal stimulation can be performed during acute experiments without obviously damaging the retina or degrading vision or the health of the eye; (2) perception can be obtained 50% of the time in blind patients with charge densities below published safety limits; (3) the minimal charge needed to induce perception would be higher in patients with more severe retinal degeneration; and (4) threshold charge would be lower at shorter stimulus durations. Five subjects with severe blindness from retinitis pigmentosa and one with normal vision (who underwent enucleation of the eye because of orbital cancer) were studied. Electrical stimulation of the retina was performed on awake volunteers by placing a single 250-microm diameter handheld needle electrode or a 10-microm thick microfabricated array of iridium oxide electrodes (400-, 100-, or 50-microm diameter) on the retina. Current sources outside the eye delivered charge to the electrodes. Assessment of damage was made by observing the clinical appearance of the eyes, comparing pre- and postoperative visual acuity, obtaining retinal histology in one case, and comparing perceptual thresholds with published safety limits. RESULTS No clinically visible damage to the eye or loss of vision occurred. Even at sites removed from stimulation, histology revealed swollen photoreceptor inner and outer segments, which were believed to be nonspecific findings. Percepts could not be reliably elicited with 50-microm diameter electrodes using safe charges in one blind patient. With the two larger electrodes, only the normal-sighted patient had thresholds at charge densities below 0.25 and 1.0 millicoulombs (mC)/cm(2) for 400- and 100-microm diameter electrodes, respectively, which is one seemingly reasonable estimate of safety derived from the product of charge per phase and charge density per phase. In blind patients, thresholds always exceeded these levels, although most were close to these limits in patient 6. The range of charge density thresholds with the 400- microm electrode in blind patients was 0.28 to 2.8 mC/cm(2). The normal-sighted patient had a threshold of 0.08 mC/cm(2) with a 400-microm electrode, roughly one quarter of the lowest threshold in the blind patients. Strength-duration curves obtained in two blind patients revealed the lowest threshold charge at the 0.25- or 1.0-ms stimulus duration. CONCLUSIONS Threshold charge densities in severely blind patients were substantially higher than that in a normal-sighted patient. Charge densities in blind patients always exceeded one seemingly reasonable estimate of safe stimulation. The potential adversity of long-term stimulation of the retina by a prosthesis has yet to be determined.
Children's Exposure to Violence and the Intersection Between Delinquency and Victimization

The Attorney General launched Defending Childhood in September 2010 to unify the Department of Justice’s efforts to address children’s exposure to violence under one initiative. Through Defending Childhood, the Department is raising public awareness about the issue and supporting practitioners, researchers, and policymakers as they seek solutions to address it. A component of Defending Childhood, OJJDP’s Safe Start initiative continues efforts begun in 1999 to enhance practice, research, training and technical assistance, and public education about children and violence.
High Trans-ethnic Replicability of GWAS Results Implies Common Causal Variants

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have detected many disease associations. However, the reported variants tend to explain small fractions of risk, and there are doubts about issues such as the portability of findings over different ethnic groups or the relative roles of rare versus common variants in the genetic architecture of complex disease. Studying the degree of sharing of disease-associated variants across populations can help in solving these issues. We present a comprehensive survey of GWAS replicability across 28 diseases. Most loci and SNPs discovered in Europeans for these conditions have been extensively replicated using peoples of European and East Asian ancestry, while the replication with individuals of African ancestry is much less common. We found a strong and significant correlation of Odds Ratios across Europeans and East Asians, indicating that underlying causal variants are common and shared between the two ancestries. Moreover, SNPs that failed to replicate in East Asians map into genomic regions where Linkage Disequilibrium patterns differ significantly between populations. Finally, we observed that GWAS with larger sample sizes have detected variants with weaker effects rather than with lower frequencies. Our results indicate that most GWAS results are due to common variants. In addition, the sharing of disease alleles and the high correlation in their effect sizes suggest that most of the underlying causal variants are shared between Europeans and East Asians and that they tend to map close to the associated marker SNPs.
Pest Clustering With Self Organizing Map for Rice Productivity

Rice, Oryza sativa, also known as paddy rice is produced by at least 95 countries around the globe with China and India are the largest producers of rice in the world; while Thailand, Vietnam and America are the largest world rice exporters. To sustain rice productivity, advance agriculture technologies have always been deployed to increase the productivity of this food grain. This is due to the pressure for high productivity and plant pests’ attacks. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) have been used for variable rate application of pesticides, herbicide and fertilizers in Precision Agriculture applications. However, due to the weather uncertainties that affect the rice growth, intelligent solutions have been integrated in current pest management practices. Therefore, this study presents intelligent solutions by implementing spatial analysis and Kohonen Self Organizing Map (SOM) to cluster types of pests for better agricultural rice pest management in Malaysia.
Bayesian DeNet: Monocular Depth Prediction and Frame-Wise Fusion With Synchronized Uncertainty

Using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to predict the depth from a single image has received considerable attention in recent years due to its impressive performance. However, existing methods process each single image independently without leveraging the multiview information of video sequences in practical scenarios. Properly taking into account multiview information in video sequences beyond individual frames could offer considerable benefits in terms of depth prediction accuracy and robustness. In addition, a meaningful measure of prediction uncertainty is essential for decision making, which is not provided in existing methods. This paper presents a novel video-based depth prediction system based on a monocular camera, named Bayesian DeNet. Specifically, Bayesian DeNet consists of a 59-layer CNN that can concurrently output a depth map and an uncertainty map for each video frame. Each pixel in an uncertainty map indicates the error variance of the corresponding depth estimate. Depth estimates and uncertainties of previous frames are propagated to the current frame based on the tracked camera pose, yielding multiple depth/uncertainty hypotheses for the current frame which are then fused in a Bayesian inference framework for greater accuracy and robustness. Extensive exper-iments on three public datasets demonstrate that our Bayesian DeNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for monocular depth prediction. A demo video and code are publicly available.1
Multiple presents: how search engines rewrite the past

Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting webpages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information on the internet for specific periods of time. However, these ‘date stamps’ are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added and the search engine’s crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. This article examines the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of results and the structure of retrieved information erodes over time.
Flavophospholipol: effect on multi-drug resistant Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium in swine.

Materials and methods: Fifty-six pigs (60 days old) that tested negative by culture for Salmonella were allocated into four treatment groups and challenged with either Salmonella serovar Typhimurium DT104 or Salmonella Typhimurium DT193. After challenge, each treatment group was fed one of four feed rations: a ration containing no antimicrobials (Control) or the same ration containing either flavophospholipol (F), penicillin and chlortetracycline (PCt), or penicillin, chlortetracycline, and flavophospholipol (PCtF). Fecal samples were obtained weekly for 20 weeks (three samples pre-challenge and 17 post challenge) and processed for Salmonella isolation and antimicrobial-resistance testing.
Online Determination of Value-Function Structure and Action-value Estimates for Reinforcement Learning in a Cognitive Architecture

We describe how an agent can dynamically and incrementally determine the structure of a value function from background knowledge as a side effect of problem solving. The agent determines the value function as it performs the task, using background knowledge in novel situations to compute an expected value for decision making. That expected value becomes the initial estimate of the value function, and the features tested by the background knowledge form the structure of the value function. This approach is implemented in Soar, using its existing mechanisms, relying on its preference-based decision-making, impasse-driven subgoaling, explanation-based rulelearning (chunking), and reinforcement learning. We evaluate this approach on a multiplayer dice game in which three different types of background knowledge are used.
Frequent ATRX, CIC, FUBP1 and IDH1 mutations refine the classification of malignant gliomas

Mutations in the critical chromatin modifier ATRX and mutations in CIC and FUBP1, which are potent regulators of cell growth, have been discovered in specific subtypes of gliomas, the most common type of primary malignant brain tumors. However, the frequency of these mutations in many subtypes of gliomas, and their association with clinical features of the patients, is poorly understood. Here we analyzed these loci in 363 brain tumors. ATRX is frequently mutated in grade II-III astrocytomas (71%), oligoastrocytomas (68%), and secondary glioblastomas (57%), and ATRX mutations are associated with IDH1 mutations and with an alternative lengthening of telomeres phenotype. CIC and FUBP1 mutations occurred frequently in oligodendrogliomas (46% and 24%, respectively) but rarely in astrocytomas or oligoastrocytomas (<10%). This analysis allowed us to define two highly recurrent genetic signatures in gliomas: IDH1/ATRX (I-A) and IDH1/CIC/FUBP1 (I-CF). Patients with I-CF gliomas had a significantly longer median overall survival (96 months) than patients with I-A gliomas (51 months) and patients with gliomas that did not harbor either signature (13 months). The genetic signatures distinguished clinically distinct groups of oligoastrocytoma patients, which usually present a diagnostic challenge, and were associated with differences in clinical outcome even among individual tumor types. In addition to providing new clues about the genetic alterations underlying gliomas, the results have immediate clinical implications, providing a tripartite genetic signature that can serve as a useful adjunct to conventional glioma classification that may aid in prognosis, treatment selection, and therapeutic trial design.
Comparing Journalistic Cultures Across Nations

Comparative studies of journalism have become immensely popular in recent times, yet a range of methodological and logistical challenges persist in existing work. This introduction to the special issue on “Comparing Journalistic Cultures” provides a brief overview of these challenges, before providing an overview of the genesis of the Worlds of Journalism Study, an unprecedented, global and collaborative undertaking to examine journalistic culture in 66 countries. In particular, we reflect on how the study approached and aimed to solve methodological challenges, providing some ideas that may aid future studies in this field.
Spine Controller for a Sprawling Posture Robot

More and more biologically inspired robots present spines with multiples degrees of freedom to resemble their biological counterparts. The function of the spine on both animal and robot can play an important role in locomotion. If it has enough degrees of freedom to allow independent control of both shoulder and pelvic girdle (i.e., the points of attachment of body and limb), it can be used to extend the reach of the legs or to increase turning capabilities. In this letter, we present the spine controller for a sprawling quadrupedal robot. The controller achieves a synchronization between spine and legs and allows a precise control of the girdle positions by solving the inverse kinematics of the spine. The controller is validated in simulation and experiments with the real robot showing an ease in the control of the locomotion and achieving a very good tracking between the girdle trajectories with a very small, noncumulative error (less than 6% of the inter-girdle distance). This controller enables both the human operation and the implementation of autonomous path planning and navigation algorithms for these type of amphibious robots, making them more suitable for scenarios with limited maneuverability such as inside pipes or in collapsed buildings.
Carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus budgets for a shallow subtropical coastal embayment (Moreton Bay, Australia)

Average annual carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus budgets were constructed for Moreton Bay. Primary production was the dominant source of carbon (by two orders of magnitude), N fixation was the dominant source of nitrogen, and point sources were the dominant source of phosphorus to the bay. About 41% of the nitrogen and 70% of the phosphorus entering Moreton Bay was exported to the ocean, and about 56% of the nitrogen was lost to denitrification. The high percentage loss of phosphorus to the ocean was directly related to the short residence time of the bay (46 d), which was consistent with other shallow coastal ecosystems. In contrast, the percentage loss of nitrogen to the ocean was low compared to other coastal systems due to the high percentage loss through denitrification associated with autotrophic sediments in the bay that enhance denitrification. Because most denitrification studies have been carried out using only dark incubations, the importance of denitrification to the nitrogen budgets of coastal systems in general may be underestimated. Carbon loss from Moreton Bay was dominated (by two orders of magnitude) by atmospheric exchange of CO2 associated with benthic and pelagic respiration. The distinct difference between Moreton Bay (subtropical) and temperate systems was the dominance of biological (microbial: N fixation and denitrification) over physical inputs and losses of nitrogen. High N fixation in turn fuels a positive annual mean net ecosystem metabolism (NEM) of 21 g C m-2 yr-1 and suggests that primary production in the bay is phosphorus limited at the whole ecosystem scale.
European Journal of Physical Education and Sport Science-2501-1235

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between amateur basketball players' 2D:4D finger lengths and their basketball performance. The study was conducted with the participation of 56 voluntary healthy male athletes who played basketball as amateurs in Amasya and whose average age is 16.0 years. Body length, body weight, vertical jump, 10-meter sprint, twisted leg push-up, 20-m shuttle running data were collected and evaluated for right-handed 2D, 4D finger lengths and ratios. The mean, standard deviation, maximum and minimum values for all findings were obtained in the evaluation of the data. Pearson Correlation Analysis Test was used to determine the relationship between finger lengths and ratio and basketball performance. There was a significant positive correlation between 2D finger length and vertical jump of amateur basketball players, anaerobic power (P <0.01), push-up and 10 m sprint (P <0.05); There was a significant positive correlation between 4D finger length and vertical jump, anaerobic power, push-up and 10 m sprint (P <0.01), and a significant negative correlation between 2D: 4D finger ratio and 10-meter sprint run (P <0.05) determined. As a result, it can be said that amateur basketball players' 2D, 4D finger lengths and speed and speed characteristics are positive, and 2D: 4D finger ratio and speed characteristics are negatively related.
The design of phone-based interfaces for consumers

This paper identifies guidelines for designing human-computer interfaces using telephones as terminals. Although they are ubiquitous and convenient to use, phones differ from screen terminals in two important ways: the information display is auditory and serial, and users do not have a pointer. The differences result in limitations for the interface designer. The guidelines focus on developing an effective interface within the limitations. Ongoing analysis, design, development, and testing work at IBM Poughkeepsie and literature are synthesized into guidelines. They present design options for user input, system output, and the system and user roles in a phone-based dialogue.
Effects of 1,2-dimethylhydrazine treatment and feeding regimen on rat colonic epithelial cell proliferation.

The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that 1,2-dimethylhydrazine dihydrochloride (DMH) induces preneoplasia in rat colonic epithelium and that this DMH-altered epithelium will respond differently to various nutritional challenges in comparison to normal colonic epithelium. Preneoplasia was arbitrarily defined as an altered and irreversible state of colonic epithelial cell proliferation induced by a carcinogen (DMH). In summary, DMH was found to be specific for the enhancement of rat colonic epithelial cell proliferation compared to other rapidly renewing cell populations, i.e., ileal epithelium and ear epidermis. DMH-induced changes in rat colonic epithelial cell proliferation and crypt cellularity were found to be irreversible following a 2- to 8-week recovery period. The p.o. administration of the solid and liquid diets, regardless of chemical constituents, supported a DMH-induced increase in colonic epithelial cell proliferation; however, a DMH-induced increase in epithelial cell proliferation was not observed in rats maintained on total parenteral nutrition. Thus, the route of administration has a significant influence on epithelial cell proliferation in colonic epithelium of DMH-treated rats. The importance of these results, along with previous studies, is the establishment and initial characterization of an exploitable preneoplastic system in rat colonic epithelium. Particularly revealing was the finding that significant changes in crypt kinetic parameters induced by DMH treatment did not revert to control values following a 2- to 8-week recovery period. Based on an altered and irreversible state of colonic epithelial cell proliferation induced by DMH, it is concluded that: (a) the preneoplastic state is a committed state and is not dependent upon the continued presence of the carcinogen; and (b) all cryptal epithelium is preneoplastic, although not all cells progress to the overtly transformed state. In addition, total parenteral nutrition prevented the expression of a DMH-induced preneoplastic state of altered epithelial cell proliferation.