Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Motor Skills in Relation to Cognition and Academic Performance in Children – A Review

Different elements of physical fitness in children have shown a declining trend during the past few decades. Cardiorespiratory fitness and motor skills have been associated with cognition, but the magnitude of this association remains unknown. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of the relationship of cardiorespiratory fitness and motor skills with cognitive functions and academic performance in children up to 13 years of age. Cross-sectional studies suggest that children with higher cardiorespiratory fitness have more efficient cognitive processing at the neuroelectric level, as well as larger hippocampal and basal ganglia volumes, compared to children with lower cardiorespiratory fitness. Higher cardiorespiratory fitness has been associated with better inhibitory control in tasks requiring rigorous attention allocation. Better motor skills have been related to more efficient cognitive functions including inhibitory control and working memory. Higher cardiorespiratory fitness and better motor skills have also been associated with better academic performance. Furthermore, none of the studies on cardiorespiratory fitness have revealed independent associations with cognitive functions by controlling for motor skills. Studies concerning the relationship between motor skills and cognitive functions also did not consider cardiorespiratory fitness in the analyses. The results of this review suggest that high levels of cardiorespiratory fitness and motor skills may be beneficial for cognitive development and academic performance but the evidence relies mainly on cross-sectional studies.
Response: Commentary: Greater Emotional Gain from Giving in Older Adults: Age-Related Positivity Bias in Charitable Giving

Older adults have been shown to avoid negative and prefer positive information to a higher extent than younger adults. This positivity bias influences their information processing as well as decision-making. We investigate age-related positivity bias in charitable giving in two studies. In Study 1 we examine motivational factors in monetary donations, while Study 2 focuses on the emotional effect of actual monetary donations. In Study 1, participants (n = 353, age range 20–74 years) were asked to rate their affect toward a person in need and then state how much money they would be willing to donate to help this person. In Study 2, participants (n = 108, age range 19–89) were asked to rate their affect toward a donation made a few days prior. Regression analysis was used to investigate whether or not the positivity bias influences the relationship between affect and donations. In Study 1, we found that older adults felt more sympathy and compassion and were less motivated by negative affect when compared to younger adults, who were motivated by both negative and positive affect. In Study 2, we found that the level of positive emotional reactions from monetary donations was higher in older participants compared to younger participants. We find support for an age-related positivity bias in charitable giving. This is true for motivation to make a future donation, as well as affective thinking about a previous donation. We conclude that older adults draw more positive affect from both the planning and outcome of monetary donations and hence benefit more from engaging in monetary charity than their younger counterparts.
Comparative Genomic Indexing Reveals the Phylogenomics of Escherichia coli Pathogens

ABSTRACT The Escherichia coli O26 serogroup includes important food-borne pathogens associated with human and animal diarrheal disease. Current typing methods have revealed great genetic heterogeneity within the O26 group; the data are often inconsistent and focus only on verotoxin (VT)-positive O26 isolates. To improve current understanding of diversity within this serogroup, the genomic relatedness of VT-positive and -negative O26 strains was assessed by comparative genomic indexing. Our results clearly demonstrate that irrespective of virulence characteristics and pathotype designation, the O26 strains show greater genomic similarity to each other than to any other strain included in this study. Our data suggest that enteropathogenic and VT-expressing E. coli O26 strains represent the same clonal lineage and that VT-expressing E. coli O26 strains have gained additional virulence characteristics. Using this approach, we established the core genes which are central to the E. coli species and identified regions of variation from the E. coli K-12 chromosomal backbone.
Nearest Neighbor Queries in Metric Spaces

Abstract. Given a set S of n sites (points), and a distance measure d , the nearestneighborsearching problem is to build a data structure so that given a query point q , the site nearest to q can be found quickly. This paper gives data structures for this problem when the sites and queries are in a metric space. One data structure, D(S) , uses a divide-and-conquer recursion. The other data structure, M(S,Q) , is somewhat like a skiplist. Both are simple and implementable. The data structures are analyzed when the metric space obeys a certain sphere-packing bound, and when the sites and query points are random and have distributions with an exchangeability property. This property implies, for example, that query point q is a random element of $ S\cup\{q\} $ . Under these conditions, the preprocessing and space bounds for the algorithms are close to linear in n . They depend also on the sphere-packing bound, and on the logarithm of the distanceratio $ \Upsilon(S) $ of S , the ratio of the distance between the farthest pair of points in S to the distance between the closest pair. The data structure M(S,Q) requires as input data an additional set Q , taken to be representative of the query points. The resource bounds of M(S,Q) have a dependence on the distance ratio of S $\cup$ Q . While M(S,Q) can return wrong answers, its failure probability can be bounded, and is decreasing in a parameter K . Here K≤ |Q|/n is chosen when building M(S,Q) . The expected query time for M(S,Q) is O(Klog n)log $\Upsilon(S\cup Q)$ , and the resource bounds increase linearly in K . The data structure D(S) has expected O( log n)O(1) query time, for fixed distance ratio. The preprocessing algorithm for M(S,Q) can be used to solve the all nearest neighbor problem for S in O(n(log n)2(log ϒ(S))2) expected time.
Functional Connectivity of the Striatum Links Motivation to Action Control in Humans

Motivation improves the efficiency of intentional behavior, but how this performance modulation is instantiated in the human brain remains unclear. We used a reward-cued antisaccade paradigm to investigate how motivational goals (the expectation of a reward for good performance) modulate patterns of neural activation and functional connectivity to improve preparation for antisaccade performance. Behaviorally, subjects performed better (faster and more accurate antisaccades) when they knew they would be rewarded for good performance. Reward anticipation was associated with increased activation in the ventral and dorsal striatum, and cortical oculomotor regions. Functional connectivity between the caudate nucleus and cortical oculomotor control structures predicted individual differences in the behavioral benefit of reward anticipation. We conclude that although both dorsal and ventral striatal circuitry are involved in the anticipation of reward, only the dorsal striatum and its connected cortical network is involved in the direct modulation of oculomotor behavior by motivational incentive.
Using Networks to Visualize and Analyze Process Data for Educational Assessment

New technology enables interactive and adaptive scenario-based tasks (SBTs) to be adopted in educational measurement. At the same time, it is a challenging problem to build appropriate psychometric models to analyze data collected from these tasks, due to the complexity of the data. This study focuses on process data collected from SBTs. We explore the potential of using concepts and methods from social network analysis to represent and analyze process data. Empirical data were collected from the assessment of Technology and Engineering Literacy, conducted as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. For the activity sequences in the process data, we created a transition network using weighted directed networks, with nodes representing actions and directed links connecting two actions only if the first action is followed by the second action in the sequence. This study shows how visualization of the transition networks represents process data and provides insights for item design. This study also explores how network measures are related to existing scoring rubrics and how detailed network measures can be used to make intergroup comparisons.
Summary of Research (1994-2007)

My interest in this area started at the “Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research” (CGRER) of the University of Iowa with which I continue to keep close ties. There I worked in an interdisciplinary team together with Gregory Carmichael from the Chemical Engineering Department and several Ph.D. students in chemical engineering, computer science, and applied mathematics. The goal of this group was to develop a “Third Generation Model” for atmospheric chemistry. The requirements for such a model had been formulated by a panel of scientists (including Gregory Carmichael and myself) assembled by EPA [48]. It involves setting up a parabolic system consisting of about 300 nonlinear PDEs and finding efficient numerical methods for solving it. This is a 3-D reactive transport problem with about 100 chemical species and 200 chemical reactions. Since transport and chemical reactions operate at different time scales, an operator split technique is applied with different integration methods for transport and chemistry. In fact chemistry is solved by integrating at each point of the space grid a (very stiff) initial value ODE problem for a period of time equal to the time step of the transport integrator. Since up to 90% of computer time in atmospheric chemistry simulations is used in integrating chemistry, our group initially focussed its efforts on improving the chemistry integrators. This research effort lead to the reduction of the chemistry integration time by an order of magnitude and contributed to a better theoretical understanding of the behavior of numerical integrators for chemical rate equations. The results of our research are contained in several papers ([23, 24, 25, 27, 35, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86]). In order to easily test different chemistry models and different integration schemes our group developed a symbolic preprocessor for chemical rate equations, kpp, which makes it very easy to build new chemistry models, automatically computes Jacobians, and determines a close to optimal reordering of chemical species in order to improve the sparsity of the LU factors to be used by implicit integrators. kpp is available on the Internet at htpp://people.cs. vt.edu/ ̃asandu and has being used by many research teams around the world. A paper on kpp was published in [26]. At present we are working on extending the capabilities of kpp in several directions and we are actively seeking external funding for this project. Sensitivity analysis is another important aspect in modeling atmospheric chemistry. Estimating the sensitivity of the model with respect to initial conditions and parameters defining the model is crucial for interpreting the results and for model optimization. We proved that automatic differentiation can be a useful tool in computing sensitivities and we proposed a novel way of applying the software package ADIFOR to this effect [23, 80, 81]. At present we are looking at efficient ways of building adjoint models for our problem. The use of automatic differentiation in the numerical solution of stiff ODEs is investigated in [34].
Genome Sequences of Populus tremula Chloroplast and Mitochondrion: Implications for Holistic Poplar Breeding

Complete Populus genome sequences are available for the nucleus (P. trichocarpa; section Tacamahaca) and for chloroplasts (seven species), but not for mitochondria. Here, we provide the complete genome sequences of the chloroplast and the mitochondrion for the clones P. tremula W52 and P. tremula x P. alba 717–1B4 (section Populus). The organization of the chloroplast genomes of both Populus clones is described. A phylogenetic tree constructed from all available complete chloroplast DNA sequences of Populus was not congruent with the assignment of the related species to different Populus sections. In total, 3,024 variable nucleotide positions were identified among all compared Populus chloroplast DNA sequences. The 5-prime part of the LSC from trnH to atpA showed the highest frequency of variations. The variable positions included 163 positions with SNPs allowing for differentiating the two clones with P. tremula chloroplast genomes (W52 717–1B4) from the other seven Populus individuals. These potential P. tremula-specific SNPs were displayed as a whole-plastome barcode on the P. tremula W52 chloroplast DNA sequence. Three of these SNPs and one InDel in the trnH-psbA linker were successfully validated by Sanger sequencing in an extended set of Populus individuals. The complete mitochondrial genome sequence of P. tremula is the first in the family of Salicaceae. The mitochondrial genomes of the two clones are 783,442 bp (W52) and 783,513 bp (717–1B4) in size, structurally very similar and organized as single circles. DNA sequence regions with high similarity to the W52 chloroplast sequence account for about 2% of the W52 mitochondrial genome. The mean SNP frequency was found to be nearly six fold higher in the chloroplast than in the mitochondrial genome when comparing 717–1B4 with W52. The availability of the genomic information of all three DNA-containing cell organelles will allow a holistic approach in poplar molecular breeding in the future.
The Volume of the Giant Component of a Random Graph with Given Expected Degrees

We consider the random graph model $G(\mathbf{w})$ for a given expected degree sequence ${\mathbf w} =(w_1, w_2, \ldots, w_n)$. If the expected average degree is strictly greater than $1$, then almost surely the giant component in $G$ of $G({\mathbf w})$ has volume (i.e., sum of weights of vertices in the giant component) equal to $\lambda_0 {\rm Vol}(G) + O(\sqrt{n}\log^{3.5} n)$, where $\lambda_0$ is the unique nonzero root of the equation \[ \sum_{i=1}^n w_i e^{-w_i\lambda} = (1-\lambda) \sum_{i=1}^n w_i, \] and where ${\rm Vol}(G)=\sum_i w_i. $
Citation for Published Item: Use Policy Abnormal Face Identity Coding in the Middle Fusiform Gyrus of Two Brain-damaged Prosopagnosic Patients

(2009) 'Abnormal face identity coding in the middle fusiform gyrus of two brain-damaged prosopagnosic patients. The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. ABSTRACT We report a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) adaptation study of two well-described patients, DF and PS, who present face identity recognition impairments (prosopagnosia) following brain-damage. Comparing faces to non-face objects elicited activation in all visual areas of the cortical face processing network that were spared subsequent to brain damage. The common brain lesion in the two patients was in the right inferior occipital cortex, in the territory of the right " occipital face area " ('OFA'), which strengthens the critical role of this region in processing faces. Despite the lesion to the right 'OFA', there was normal range of sensitivity to faces in the right " fusiform face area " ('FFA') in both patients, supporting a non-hierarchical model of face processing at the cortical level. At the same time, however, sensitivity to individual face representations, as indicated by release from adaptation to identity, was abnormal in the right 'FFA' of both patients. This suggests that the right 'OFA' is necessary to individualize faces, perhaps through reentrant interactions with other cortical face sensitive areas. The lateral occipital area (LO) is damaged bilaterally in patient DF, who also shows visual object agnosia. However, in patient PS, in whom LO was spared, sensitivity to individual representations of non-face objects was still found in this region, as in the normal brain, consistent with her preserved object recognition abilities. Taken together, these observations, which fruitfully combine functional imaging and neuropsychology, place strong constraints on the possible functional organization of the cortical areas mediating face processing in the human brain.
Robust surface reconstruction via dictionary learning

Surface reconstruction from point cloud is of great practical importance in computer graphics. Existing methods often realize reconstruction via a few phases with respective goals, whose integration may not give an optimal solution. In this paper, to avoid the inherent limitations of multi-phase processing in the prior art, we propose a unified framework that treats geometry and connectivity construction as one joint optimization problem. The framework is based on dictionary learning in which the dictionary consists of the vertices of the reconstructed triangular mesh and the sparse coding matrix encodes the connectivity of the mesh. The dictionary learning is formulated as a constrained ℓ2,q-optimization (0 < q < 1), aiming to find the vertex position and triangulation that minimize an energy function composed of point-to-mesh metric and regularization. Our formulation takes many factors into account within the same framework, including distance metric, noise/outlier resilience, sharp feature preservation, no need to estimate normal, etc., thus providing a global and robust algorithm that is able to efficiently recover a piecewise smooth surface from dense data points with imperfections. Extensive experiments using synthetic models, real world models, and publicly available benchmark show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy, robustness to noise and outliers, geometric feature and detail preservation, and mesh connectivity.
Property Rights , Supply of Formal and Informal Finance and Business Start-up Financing

This paper investigates the determinants of the volume and financial structure of business start-ups in 42 countries. Using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) surveys 2 for 1998-2003, we jointly examine how the business environment and individual characteristics of entrepreneurs affect their financing decisions. Our findings imply that start-up financial choices are affected by individual characteristics of entrepreneurs, their growth opportunities, ownership structure, and entrepreneurs’ advantage of network resources. The supply of the informal finance in a country is shown to be associated with both entrepreneurial entry and the higher share of external finance in business startups finance, whereas the size of the formal financial sector appears to play a more important role for the entrepreneurial choice of self-finance. In addition, a more regulated financial system is likely to produce more start-up finance, but the sign of this effect reverses for a high level of regulatory intervention. More importantly we find that both the total volume of the start-up finance, and the volume of its external component are affected far more by strong property rights than by the financial environment in the country.
The educational model of the system integrity protection scheme

Lifestyle of modern society results in rising need for electric energy. On the other hand, reduction of pollution and increase of energy efficiency leads to integration of renewable energy sources. Dynamic and unpredictable loads make the power system operation a challenging task, which results in lower security margins and large power system blackouts. Therefore, power utilities are collaborating with experts from industry and researchers from academia on development of technical solutions and concepts that should support secure and economical power system operation. Regarding the power system protection, instead of focusing on only the faulted element, the power system is considered as a whole, which brings us to variety of System Integrity Protection Schemes (SIPS). The paper investigates application of the synchronized measurement technology for development of the SIPS. Simulation of the test power system is performed in the Siemens PSS/E. Among further improvement of the proposed solution and development of new schemes, the model has educational value, as it will be used as part of laboratory exercises at The University of Rijeka, Faculty of Engineering, in order to educate future generations of engineers about emerging technologies.
The therapeutic effects of chamomilla tincture mouthwash on oral aphthae: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Introduction: Recurrent aphthous stomatitis (RAS) is a common clinical condition producing painful ulcerations in the oral cavity. However, there has been no optimal therapeutic approach. Topical and systemic steroids commonly prescribed for the condition have local and systemic side-effects. Recently, there is growing tendency toward herbal medication in the modern society. The objective of this study was to assess the efficacy of a chamomilla mouth rinse on reducing the signs and symptoms of aphthous lesions in comparison with a placebo mouth rinse. Material and Methods: A randomized, triple-blind, placebo-controlled trial was performed on 36 patients, from cases diagnosed with RAS, attending the Department of Oral Medicine, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences. They were randomly divided into two groups: the intervention group(A), receiving chamomilla mouth rinse, and the control group (B) receiving a placebo rinse. The ability of the solution to control the pain and burning sensation and the number and size of the ulcers were evaluated. Results: The number of ulcers in the 3rd visit (four days after treatment) showed a significant difference between the groups (P<0.001). The pain and burning sensation (VAS) was reduced significantly in the test group in the 2nd (p=0.001),3rd and 4th visit (P<0.001). Conclusions: Chamomilla mouth rinse was effective in the treatment of RAS, controlling the pain and burning sensation without producing any adverse side effects and can be advised as an alternative RAS treatment. Key words:Recurrent aphthous stomatitis, chamomilla mouth rinse, matricaria chamomilla, aphthous lesion treatment.
Capturing the Structure of a Catalytic RNA Intermediate: The Hammerhead Ribozyme

The crystal structure of an unmodified hammerhead RNA in the absence of divalent metal ions has been solved, and it was shown that this ribozyme can cleave itself in the crystal when divalent metal ions are added. This biologically active RNA fold is the same as that found previously for two modified hammerhead ribozymes. Addition of divalent cations at low pH makes it possible to capture the uncleaved RNA in metal-bound form. A conformational intermediate, having an additional Mg(II) bound to the cleavage-site phosphate, was captured by freeze-trapping the RNA at an active pH prior to cleavage. The most significant conformational changes were limited to the active site of the ribozyme, and the changed conformation requires only small additional movements to reach a proposed transition-state.