Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Immunocytochemical localization of the lens main intrinsic polypeptide (MIP26) in communicating junctions

Plasma membranes of vertebrate lens fiber cells contain a major intrinsic polypeptide with an apparent molecular weight of 26,000 (MIP26). These plasma membranes are extremely rich in communicating junctions, and it has been suggested that MIP26 is a component of them. MIP26 was purified from cow lenses using preparative SDS gel electrophoresis followed by hydroxylapatite column chromatography. From gel electrophoresis patterns and aggregational properties it was concluded that the MIP26 preparation was homogeneous. The purified MIP26 was used to produce monospecific antibodies in rabbits as assessed by double immunodiffusion and crossed immunoelectrophoresis of purified MIP26 and solubilized lens plasma membranes against the antiserum. Indirect immunocytochemical studies were performed on open and closed lens plasma membrane vesicles by incubation in anti-MIP antiserum followed by ferritin-conjugated goat antirabbit IgG. The conjugate bound unequivocally to lens communicating junctions, indicating that MIP26 is a component of these structures.
History, gendered space and organizational identity: An archival study of a university building

How do buildings contribute to an organization’s sense of what it is? In this article, we present the findings of a major archival study of an iconic university building to answer this question. Founded in the 19th century as a college for women, the building is analysed as a gendered space that embodies meanings that are selectively deployed and adapted by the present-day, now co-educational, university. By bringing together concepts of space and history so as to examine ‘space in history’ we show how over long periods of time what buildings ‘say’ about an organization change so that the past is both a legacy and a resource for shifting organizational identity.
Defining Privacy for Data Mining

Privacy preserving data mining – getting valid data mining results without learning the underlying data values – has been receiving attention in the research community and beyond. It is unclear what privacy preserving means. This paper provides a framework and metrics for discussing the meaning of privacy preserving data mining, as a foundation for further research in this field.
Income Gains to the Poor from Workfare: Estimates for Argentina's Trabajar Program

The authors use propensity-score matching methods to estimate the income gains to families of workers participating in an Argentinian work-fare program. The methods they propose are feasible for evaluating safety net interventions in settings in which many other methods are not feasible. The average gain is about half the gross wage. Even allowing for forgone income, the distribution of gains is decidedly pro-poor. More than half the beneficiaries are in the poorest decile nationally and 80- percent of them are in the poorest quintile --reflecting the self-targeting feature of the program design. Average gains for men and women are similar, but gains are higher for younger workers. Women's greater participation would not enhance average income gains, and the distribution of gains would worsen. Greater participation by the young would raise average gains but would also worsen the distribution.
A Framework for Sequential Planning in Multi-Agent Settings

This paper extends the framework of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) to multi-agent settings by incorporating the notion of agent models into the state space. Agents maintain beliefs over physical states of the environment and over models of other agents, and they use Bayesian updates to maintain their beliefs over time. The solutions map belief states to actions. Models of other agents may include their belief states and are related to agent types considered in games of incomplete information. We express the agents' autonomy by postulating that their models are not directly manipulable or observable by other agents. We show that important properties of POMDPs, such as convergence of value iteration, the rate of convergence, and piece-wise linearity and convexity of the value functions carry over to our framework. Our approach complements a more traditional approach to interactive settings which uses Nash equilibria as a solution paradigm. We seek to avoid some of the drawbacks of equilibria which may be non-unique and do not capture off-equilibrium behaviors. We do so at the cost of having to represent, process and continuously revise models of other agents. Since the agent's beliefs may be arbitrarily nested, the optimal solutions to decision making problems are only asymptotically computable. However, approximate belief updates and approximately optimal plans are computable. We illustrate our framework using a simple application domain, and we show examples of belief updates and value functions.
Multi-GPU island-based genetic algorithm for solving the knapsack problem

This paper introduces a novel implementation of the genetic algorithm exploiting a multi-GPU cluster. The proposed implementation employs an island-based genetic algorithm where every GPU evolves a single island. The individuals are processed by CUDA warps, which enables the solution of large knapsack instances and eliminates undesirable thread divergence. The MPI interface is used to exchange genetic material among isolated islands and collect statistical data. The characteristics of the proposed GAs are investigated on a two-node cluster composed of 14 Fermi GPUs and 4 six-core Intel Xeon processors. The overall GPU performance of the proposed GA reaches 5.67 TFLOPS.
The Effects of Social Support on the Relationship between Infant Sleep and Postnatal Depression

Abstract To date, research on social support as a factor affecting the relationship between infant sleep and postnatal depression (PND) has not been widely examined. This study aimed to determine the extent to which social support affects this relationship. The sample consisted of 108 caregivers of children between 6-18 months of age. Participants completed an online survey comprised of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, The Social Provisions Scale and The Brief Infant Sleep Questionnaire. Results indicated that parents of children who were sleep disturbed had higher levels of PND and less social support. Correlations between PND and nocturnal sleep (r = -0.231, p =0.016) and nocturnal wakefulness (r = -0.228, p = 0.018) were significant. Social support was also significantly correlated with nocturnal sleep (r = 0.329, p = 0.001) and nocturnal wakefulness (r = 0.199, p = 0.039). A significant negative relationship between social support and PND was found (r = -0.539, p < 0.001). No moderating effect of social support on the relationship between child sleep disturbance and PND was found for either nocturnal sleep duration (b = -0.014, 95% CI [-0.099, 0.071], t = -0.33, p = 0.745) or nocturnal wakefulness (b = 0.065, 95% CI [-0.267, 0.396], t = 0.39, p = 0.700). Overall, the results suggest that social support may have an impact on parental PND and child sleep disturbance. Although a significant moderating effect of social support was not found, the significant correlations support the need for further research in this area.
Positive and negative intergroup contact: Interaction not asymmetry

This research reports a novel investigation into the comparative effects of positive and negative direct and extended intergroup contact on intergroup orientations. It tested the generality of the positive-negative asymmetry effect among majority (N = 357) and minority (N = 101) group members in Iceland. Little evidence of asymmetry was observed: the beneficial effects of positive contact were mostly as strong as the detrimental effects of negative contact, for both direct and extended contact. However, evidence was found for alternative interaction models in which positive contact buffers the negative effects of negative contact, and negative contact enhances the benefits of positive contact. These interaction effects were found only for direct contact and principally in the majority group, but were also found for the minority group, though more weakly. No interaction was observed for extended contact. It appeared that differential group salience elicited by positive and negative contact could partly contribute to the explanation of the observed effects, at least in the majority sample.
Corridors promote fire via connectivity and edge effects.

Landscape corridors, strips of habitat that connect otherwise isolated habitat patches, are commonly employed during management of fragmented landscapes. To date, most reported effects of corridors have been positive; however, there are long-standing concerns that corridors may have unintended consequences. Here, we address concerns over whether corridors promote propagation of disturbances such as fire. We collected data during prescribed fires in the world's largest and best replicated corridor experiment (Savannah River Site, South Carolina, USA), six -50-ha landscapes of open (shrubby/herbaceous) habitat within a pine plantation matrix, to test several mechanisms for how corridors might influence fire. Corridors altered patterns of fire temperature through a direct connectivity effect and an indirect edge effect. The connectivity effect was independent of fuel levels and was consistent with a hypothesized wind-driven "bellows effect. " Edges, a consequence of corridor implementation, elevated leaf litter (fuel) input from matrix pine trees, which in turn increased fire temperatures. We found no evidence for corridors or edges impacting patterns of fire spread: plots across all landscape positions burned with similar probability. Impacts of edges and connectivity on fire temperature led to changes in vegetation: hotter-burning plots supported higher bunch grass cover during the field season after burning, suggesting implications for woody/herbaceous species coexistence. To our knowledge, this represents the first experimental evidence that corridors can modify landscape-scale patterns of fire intensity. Corridor impacts on fire should be carefully considered during landscape management, both in the context of how corridors connect or break distributions of fuels and the desired role of fire as a disturbance, which may range from a management tool to an agent to be suppressed. In our focal ecosystem, longleaf pine woodland, corridors might provide a previously unrecognized benefit during prescribed burning activities, by promoting fire intensity, which may assist in promoting plant biodiversity.
Relaciones humanas de calidad como contexto de salud y libertad

This article, based on the text of the inaugural lecture of the school year 2017-2018, of the Andalusia Loyola University,studies in depth one of the main research lines in psychology and neuroscience at international level: the impact of the human relations on the health and on the social improvement. Under the title Quality human relations as the context of freedom, are shared the main scientific findings centered on how the violent human relations hurt the mental and physical health, included the cerebral development; and how, on the contrary, the outstanding human relations, free of violence, as the friendship, guarantee a development cognitive and emotional that is integral, healthy and positive, not only for oneself, both he and she, but also for the whole of humanity.
Structure of subjective experience of classical music

Previous studies on the subjective experience of music did not give unambiguous results related to the number and content of dimensions underlying the experience that one has in contact with various musical pieces. Furthermore, previous studies have provided no evidence relating to the structure of subjective experience of classical music pieces. The aim of this study was to determine the number of structurally distinct dimensions of the musical experience of classical music pieces and the relations among obtained dimensions. The research was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, 28 participants were asked to produce descriptions of their subjective experience of 44 short segments of music pieces. In the second phase, 44 participants rated the same set of musical pieces using a scale comprised of the most frequent descriptors obtained in the first phase of the study. Results have shown that musical experience descriptors are grouped into five interrelated dimensions of musical experience: the Aesthetic Experience, Affective Tone, Tension, Content-Fullness, and Structure. The paper discusses the nature of these dimensions, their relationship and compares them to those obtained in previous studies both related to the experience of music as well as art in other modalities.
Risk Analysis of Collateralized Debt Obligations

Collateralized debt obligations, which are securities with payoffs that are tied to the cash flows in a portfolio of defaultable assets such as corporate bonds, play a significant role in the financial crisis that has spread throughout the world. Insufficient capital provisioning due to flawed and overly optimistic risk assessments is at the center of the problem. This paper develops stochastic methods to measure the risk of positions in collateralized debt obligations and related instruments tied to an underlying portfolio of defaultable assets. It proposes an adaptive point process model of portfolio default timing, a maximum likelihood method for estimating point process models that is based on an acceptance/rejection resampling scheme, and statistical tests for model validation. To illustrate these tools, they are used to estimate the distribution of the profit or loss generated by positions in multiple tranches of a collateralized debt obligation that references the CDX High Yield portfolio and the risk capital required to support these positions.
Design and Analysis of Compressive Sensing Radar Detectors

We consider the problem of target detection from a set of Compressive Sensing (CS) radar measurements corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise. We propose two novel architectures and compare their performance by means of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves. Using asymptotic arguments and the Complex Approximate Message Passing (CAMP) algorithm, we characterize the statistics of the `1-norm reconstruction error and derive closed form expressions for both the detection and false alarm probabilities of both schemes. Of the two architectures, we demonstrate that the best one consists of a reconstruction stage based on CAMP followed by a detector. This architecture, which outperforms the `1-based detector in the ideal case of known background noise, can also be made fully adaptive by combining it with a conventional Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) processor. Using the state evolution framework of CAMP, we also derive Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) maps that, together with the ROC curves, can be used to design a CS-based CFAR radar detector. Our theoretical findings are confirmed by means of both Monte Carlo simulations and experimental results.
Node-Adapt, Path-Adapt and Tree-Adapt: Model-Transfer Domain Adaptation for Random Forest

Random Forest (RF) is a successful paradigm for learning classifiers due to its ability to learn from large feature spaces and seamlessly integrate multi-class classification, as well as the achieved accuracy and processing efficiency. However, as many other classifiers, RF requires domain adaptation (DA) provided that there is a mismatch between the training (source) and testing (target) domains which provokes classification degradation. Consequently, different RF-DA methods have been proposed, which not only require target-domain samples but revisiting the source-domain ones, too. As novelty, we propose three inherently different methods (Node-Adapt, Path-Adapt and Tree-Adapt) that only require the learned source-domain RF and a relatively few target-domain samples for DA, i.e. source-domain samples do not need to be available. To assess the performance of our proposals we focus on image-based object detection, using the pedestrian detection problem as challenging proof-of-concept. Moreover, we use the RF with expert nodes because it is a competitive patch-based pedestrian model. We test our Node-, Path- and Tree-Adapt methods in standard benchmarks, showing that DA is largely achieved.
Connecting the Dots in Counterterrorism: The Consequences of Communication Setting for Shared Situation Awareness and Team Performance

Valaker, Sigmund; Haerem, Thorvald; Bakken, Bjorn T. Connecting the dots in counterterrorism: The consequences of communication setting for shared situation awareness and team performance. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 2018 ;Volum 26. (4) s. 425-439
Effect of Receptor Density and Size on Signal Reception in Molecular Communication via Diffusion With an Absorbing Receiver

The performance of molecular communication is significantly impacted by the reception process of the messenger molecules. The receptors' size and density, however, have yet to be investigated. In this letter, we analyze the effect of receptor density and size on the signal reception of an absorbing receiver with receptors. The results show that, when the total receptor area is the same, better hitting probability is achieved by using a higher number of relatively small receptors. In addition, deploying receptors, which cover a small percentage of the receiver surface, is able to create an effective communication channel that has a detectable signal level.
Effet de l’entraînement des fonctions exécutives sur l’utilisation appropriée de stratégies de mémoire au cours du vieillissement : étude comportementale et électrophysiologique

L’objectif general de cette these etait de tester l’efficacite d’un entrainement executif ainsi que de tester les transferts des benefices de cet entrainement sur d’autres fonctions cognitives notamment la memoire episodique au niveau comportemental et electrophysiologique chez des adultes âges. Pour cela, des effets test-retest ont ete observes lors de la passation d’un meme test de facon consecutive. Ainsi, la creation de nouveaux tests pour confectionner le programme d’entrainement a ete necessaire pour ne pas avoir ces effets tests re-tests lors de la passation des pre-tests et des post-tests. Les entrainements executifs ont permis l’amelioration du fonctionnement executif mais aussi l’amelioration de la vitesse de traitement, et ces benefices ont permis l’annulation des effets d’âge dans le groupe entraine sur une fonction executive : la mise a jour de la memoire de travail. De plus, des effets de transfert ont ete obtenus sur l’utilisation strategique lors de l’encodage d’information en memoire episodique. Plus precisement, les adultes âges entraines utilisaient plus de strategies d’encodages efficaces (encodage profond de type imagerie mentale ou phrase) apres l’entrainement executif et l’utilisation de ces strategies etait plus efficace. Au niveau cerebral, l’entrainement executif semble engendrer des processus de specialisation cerebrale se traduisant par une diminution de l’activite cerebrale de certaines zones cerebrales. Ce travail de these incite le developpement de programmes d’entrainement des fonctions executives qui semblent permettre des effets de transfert a des tâches non entrainees et ces benefices semblent aussi modifier le fonctionnement cerebral, ce qui suppose un effet plus durable. Ceci confirme l’idee qu’un environnement stimulant cognitivement est en lien avec de bonnes capacites cognitives et contribue a un vieillissement reussi
Virtual Prairie: Going Green with Volunteer Computing

A multi-species prairie composed primarily of clonal plants can achieve different ecological functions. They can be a good source of biofuel, a mean of water purification in agriculture or a biodiversity guardian. The goal of the virtual prairie project is to study the fundamental mechanisms involved in the population dynamic of a prairie and the optimum engineering design of prairies serving these and other functions. Our study is a modelization and a simulation of the growth of such clonal plants in isolation or competing with each other. This study is a very compute intensive enterprise. However, it can be eventually managed as an embarrassingly parallel set of jobs. Therefore, we adapted our simulation project to run on BOINC, a platform for volunteer computing, which compute nodes are reached using the commercial Internet connections. To our knowledge, this is the first ecology project that uses volunteer computing and it is the largest simulation ever done on plant ecology. Our preliminary results show that there is no unique optimum design solution but rather different optimum solutions that can co-exist.
How to Combine Nonmonotonic Logic and Rapid Prototyping to Help Maintain Software

This paper explores the possibility of automated support for detecting inconsistencies in software systems and requirements. The inconsistencies are introduced when the environment of the software system changes. We refer to the software environment as its context. We review the recent research progress on nonmonotonic logics, pointing out the significance of these results to software maintenance. We explain how a practical implementation of such logics can be obtained via a simple extension to logic programming in the form of an answer procedure that realizes the Extended Logic Semantics [7] for nonmonotonic logic programs that have a unique answer set (which is a large and useful class of logic programs). We augment the existing automated capabilities of the Computer-Aided Prototyping System (CAPS) for rapid prototyping via the extension to logic programming to provide an improved automated capability for detecting certain kinds of inconsistencies created by implicit requirements changes. We illustrate the significance of this capability via an example prototype for a problem originally suggested by Lehman.
First-Line Therapy for Human Cutaneous Leishmaniasis in Peru Using the TLR7 Agonist Imiquimod in Combination with Pentavalent Antimony

Background Current therapies for cutaneous leishmaniasis are limited by poor efficacy, long-term course of treatment, and the development of resistance. We evaluated if pentavalent antimony (an anti-parasitic drug) combined with imiquimod (an immunomodulator) was more effective than pentavalent antimony alone in patients who had not previously been treated. Methods A randomized double-blind clinical trial involving 80 cutaneous leishmaniasis patients was conducted in Peru. The study subjects were recruited in Lima and Cusco (20 experimental and 20 control subjects at each site). Experimental arm: Standard dose of pentavalent antimony plus 5% imiquimod cream applied to each lesion three times per week for 20 days. Control arm: Standard dose of pentavalent antimony plus placebo (vehicle cream) applied as above. The primary outcome was cure defined as complete re-epithelization with no inflammation assessed during the 12 months post-treatment period. Results Of the 80 subjects enrolled, 75 completed the study. The overall cure rate at the 12-month follow-up for the intention-to-treat analysis was 75% (30/40) in the experimental arm and 58% (23/40) in the control arm (p = 0.098). Subgroup analyses suggested that combination treatment benefits were most often observed at the Cusco site, where L. braziliensis is the prevalent species. Over the study period, only one adverse event (rash) was recorded, in the experimental arm. Conclusion The combination treatment of imiquimod plus pentavalent antimony performed better than placebo plus pentavalent antimony, but the difference was not statistically significant. Trial Registration Clinical Trials.gov NCT00257530