Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A hybrid method for the estimation of ground motion in sedimentary basins: Quantitative modeling for Mexico city

To estimate the ground motion in two-dimensional (2D), laterally heterogeneous, anelastic media, a hybrid technique has been developed that combines modal summation and the finite-difference method. In the calculation of the local wave field owing to a seismic event, both for small and large epicentral distances, it is possible to take into account the source, path, and local soil effects. As a practical application, we have simulated the ground motion in Mexico City caused by the Michoacan earthquake of September 19, 1985. By studying the one-dimensional (1D) response of the two sedimentary layers present in Mexico City, it is possible to explain the difference in amplitudes observed between records for receivers inside and outside the lake-bed zone. These simple models show that the sedimentary cover produces the concentration of high-frequency waves (0.2 to 0.5 Hz) on the horizontal components of motion. The large amplitude coda of ground motion observed inside the lake-bed zone and the spectral ratios between signals observed inside and outside the lake-bed zone can only be explained by 2D models of the sedimentary basin. In such models, the ground motion is mainly controlled by the response of the uppermost clay layer. The synthetic signals explain the major characteristics (relative amplitudes, spectral ratios, and frequency content) of the observed ground motion. The large amplitude coda of the ground motion observed in the lake-bed zone can be explained as resonance effects and the excitation of local surface waves in the laterally heterogeneous clay layer. Also, for the 1985 Michoacan event, the energy contributions of the three subevents are important to explain the observed durations.
Cognition and anatomy in three variants of primary progressive aphasia

We performed a comprehensive cognitive, neuroimaging, and genetic study of 31 patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a decline in language functions that remains isolated for at least 2 years. Detailed speech and language evaluation was used to identify three different clinical variants: nonfluent progressive aphasia (NFPA; n = 11), semantic dementia (SD; n = 10), and a third variant termed logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA; n = 10). Voxel‐based morphometry (VBM) on MRIs showed that, when all 31 PPA patients were analyzed together, the left perisylvian region and the anterior temporal lobes were atrophied. However, when each clinical variant was considered separately, distinctive patterns emerged: (1) NFPA, characterized by apraxia of speech and deficits in processing complex syntax, was associated with left inferior frontal and insular atrophy; (2) SD, characterized by fluent speech and semantic memory deficits, was associated with anterior temporal damage; and (3) LPA, characterized by slow speech and impaired syntactic comprehension and naming, showed atrophy in the left posterior temporal cortex and inferior parietal lobule. Apolipoprotein E ε4 haplotype frequency was 20% in NFPA, 0% in SD, and 67% in LPA. Cognitive, genetic, and anatomical features indicate that different PPA clinical variants may correspond to different underlying pathological processes.
RcsB and RcsC: a two-component regulator of capsule synthesis in Escherichia coli

Colanic acid capsule synthesis in Escherichia coli K-12 is regulated by RcsB and RcsC. The amino acid sequences of these two proteins, deduced from the nucleotide sequence reported here, demonstrate their homology to environmentally responsive two-component regulators that have been reported in both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. In our model, RcsC acts as the sensor and RcsB acts as the receiver or effector to stimulate capsule synthesis from cps genes. In addition, RcsC shows limited homology to the other effectors in its C terminus. Fusions of rcsC to phoA that resulted in PhoA+ strains demonstrated that RcsC is a transmembrane protein with a periplasmic N-terminal domain and cytoplasmic C-terminal domain. Additional control of this regulatory network is provided by the dependence on the alternate sigma factor, RpoN, for the synthesis of RcsB. The rcsB and rcsC genes, which are oriented convergently with their stop codons 196 base pairs apart, are separated by a long direct repeat including two repetitive extragenic palindromic sequences.
Influence of task and strategy on the neural and behavioral correlates of the focus of attention

Working memory (WM) is oft described as a mental workspace where information can be maintained and manipulated in the service of ongoing cognition. Theoretical accounts describe the focus of attention as a state within working memory where a limited number of items can be briefly maintained in a heightened status of awareness. Ongoing debate and conflicting empirical evidence surrounds the capacity and characteristics of the focus of attention. Substantial recency effects are reported in a group of WM studies, and these recency effects are interpreted as a marker of the focus of attention (e.g., Nee & Jonides, 2008; Oztekin, Davachi, & McElree, 2010). The present work considers whether these findings are specific to parameters of these particular studies or whether they generalize across a broader range of tasks. An initial behavioral experiment tested performance across two tasks (judgment of recency and judgment of primacy), two information types (verbal and spatial), and two selfreported strategies (maintenance-based and retrieval-based). Central analyses averaged trials by the serial position of the correct item, and compared the accuracy and speed of retrieval of trials in different serial positions. Results showed evidence of both recency effects and primacy effects in all four types of task (verbal judgment of recency, verbal judgment of primacy, spatial judgment of recency, and spatial judgment of primacy). Moreover, a significant task by effecttype interaction showed that the size of recency and primacy effects shifted with the demands of the task (e.g., larger recency effects in judgment of recency than in judgment of primacy). Some similarities and some differences were found between verbal and spatial domains, while no differences were found across self-reported strategy. A subsequent fMRI experiment examined the neural correlates of verbal judgment of recency and primacy. Again, behavioral results showed a task by effect-type interaction where
Education in crisis

Las reformas educativas unesconianas fracasaron. Las pedagogias constructivistas no generaron aprendizajes de mejor calidad al no romper la contradiccion sujeto-objeto y no superaron las limitaciones del conductismo positivista. Para asumir el desafio del cambio epistemologico sin caer en el “nada cambia” del constructivismo, es necesario superar las limitaciones de la civilizacion antropocentrica: solo renunciando al antropocentrismo el individuo podra sentirse humano al mismo tiempo que arbol, estrella, rio o luciernaga, y aprendera de ellos lo que tengan que decirle. Para escucharlos y sentirlos, abrira mucho mas que sus sentidos y su mente; despertara las potencias finitas e infinitas que duermen en sus genes desde que el ser humano integral originario fue domesticado por la racionalidad educativa y comunicacional del sistema de la no unidad.
Latent transforming growth factor-beta 1 associates to fibroblast extracellular matrix via latent TGF-beta binding protein

The role of latent transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta) binding protein (LTBP) in the association of TGF-beta 1 to the extracellular matrix of cultured fibroblasts and HT-1080 fibrosarcoma cells was studied by immunochemical methods. The matrices were isolated from the cells, and the levels of LTBP and TGF-beta 1 were estimated by immunoblotting and immunoprecipitation. LTBP, TGF-beta 1, and its propeptide (latency-associated peptide, LAP) were found to associate to the extracellular matrix. Immunoblotting analysis indicated that treatment of the cells with plasmin resulted in a concomitant time and dose dependent release of both LTBP and TGF-beta 1 from the extracellular matrix to the supernatant. Comparison of molecular weights suggested that plasmin treatment resulted in the cleavage of LTBP from the high molecular weight fibroblast form to a form resembling the low molecular weight LTBP found in platelets. Pulse- chase and immunoprecipitation analysis indicated that both the free form of LTBP and LTBP complexed to latent TGF-beta were efficiently incorporated in the extracellular matrix, from where both complexes were slowly released to the culture medium. Addition of plasmin to the chase solution resulted, however, in a rapid release of LTBP from the matrix. Fibroblast derived LTBP was found to associate to the matrix of HT-1080 cells in a plasmin sensitive manner as shown by immunoprecipitation analysis. These results suggest that the latent form of TGF-beta 1 associates with the extracellular matrix via LTBP, and that the release of latent TGF-beta 1 from the matrix is a consequence of proteolytic cleavage(s) of LTBP.
Effectiveness of systematic treatment selection for psychodynamic and cognitive–behavioural therapy: randomised controlled trial in routine mental healthcare

Background Although cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT) and psychodynamic therapy (PDT) are both effective treatments for mental disorders, they show clear dissimilarities concerning their therapeutic models and treatment rationales. Aims To determine the effectiveness of systematic treatment selection (STS) to CBT or PDT in a mental healthcare setting compared with a control procedure of random treatment selection (RTS). Method A randomised controlled trial in a consecutive sample of 291 in-patients with at least one ICD–10 mental disorder was performed. The primary outcome was symptom severity (General Severity Index of the Symptom Checklist–14) at 6-month follow-up. Health-related quality of life was the secondary outcome, determined using the Short Form–8. Results Analyses revealed no general effect for systematic treatment selection. However, there was a differential effect: systematic selection resulted in a better longer-term outcome for PDT, but not for CBT; STS–PDT patients showed a significantly larger reduction in symptom severity than RTS–PDT patients. This difference was not observed in CBT. Conclusions Since systematic treatment selection seems to be able to optimise treatment outcome, at least for PDT, pursuing systematic treatment assignment strategies in mental healthcare settings is a worthwhile endeavour.
Characterizing sensory re-weighting for human postural control

Title of Dissertation: CHARACTERIZING SENSORY RE-WEIGHTING FOR HUMAN POSTURAL CONTROL Kelvin Shigeyuki Oie, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor John J. Jeka, Program for Neuroscience and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Kinesiology In order to survive in the wide range of sensory contexts that comprise our physical world, the nervous system employs adaptive mechanisms that optimize functional behaviors within a given sensory environment. Human bipedal stance control requires that the nervous system obtain relevant information about the environment and the body's relationship with it from multiple sensory systems. How does the nervous system accomplish this when the sensory environment compromises the information available from a given sensory system? In previous theoretical and empirical work, we have provided evidence of nonlinearities that are consistent with an hypothesis of sensory re-weighting: The nervous system adapts to changing sensory contexts by decreasing its dependence, or weighting, on the compromised system and increases its weighting of other inputs. This thesis presents empirical findings that further support the sensory re-weighting hypothesis and further efforts towards characterizing sensory re-weighting by providing empirical results that provide important constraints on any proposed sensory re-weighting scheme. First, postural responses to complex visual motion consisting of the sum of 10 different sinusoidal components, were measured at two different amplitudes. Changes in the gain of body sway to visual motion were consistent with the nonlinearities previously interpreted as evidence for sensory re-weighting. Further, the observed changes in gain did not vary significantly as a function of stimulus frequency. Second, we found evidence indicating a temporal asymmetry in the sensory re-weighting process dependent upon the direction of the change in stimulus motion amplitude: the change in postural response is faster to a rapid increase versus decrease in stimulus amplitude. This temporal asymmetry was interpreted functionally: an increase in visual environmental motion may threaten balance, requiring a rapid down-weighting of vision if a strong dependence upon visual information would increase postural response beyond the stability boundaries of stance. Conversely, if stance is already stable in the face of large visual motion amplitude, a decrease in motion amplitude does not threaten balance and adapting rapidly to the new sensory conditions is not critical to avoid falling. CHARACTERIZING SENSORY RE-WEIGHTING FOR HUMAN POSTURAL CONTROL
Stationary Cell Cultures as a Tool for Gerontological Studies

Studies of cellular and molecular mechanisms of aging are currently often carried o u t on cells senescing not only in vivo but also in vitro (Hayflick’s model), that is, altering with increasing of population doubling level in culture. However, some data suggest that in some cases the results obtained with this model are not in accord with those of in vivo aging studies. Furthermore, such experiments, as a rule, are comparable in labor-consuming character with routine studies in laboratory animals. In fact, Hayflick himself suggests that cells in vivo never realize their proliferative potential and never reach phase 111. In other words, an organism never ages because of a cell’s limitation, called “Hayflick’s limit. ” It ages, we believe,’ because of an accumulation of various kinds of damage in cells due to restriction of cell proliferation during the formation (the differentiation process) of populations of specialized resting cells or very slowly dividing cells. The rate of any type of damage accumulation in the cell population (not in a single cell! ) has to depend on the ratio of the rates of three processes: (1) cell proliferation, ( 2 ) spontaneous appearance of damage, and (3) damage repair. Thus, during cell proliferation a “dilution” of the damage occurs. Our data2 demonstrating a direct relation between the average proliferative activity of a cell line or strain and the average DNA molecular weight support this hypothesis. With all this in mind we suppose that it is more advisable to study cellular aging mechanisms using the “stationary phase aging” model. ‘ The model is based on the assumption that in cells of stationary cultures various changes similar to those in cells of aging organisms have to appear. Last year we and other investigators obtained many experimental results confirming this assumption. “Age” changes at different levels (accumulation of DNA breaks and DNA protein cross-links, DNA demethylation, changes in spontaneous sister chromatid exchange level, plasma membrane changes, nuclear structure modulations, and decreased rate of mitogenstimulated cell cycling and of cell colony-forming ability a.0.) were shown to occur in stationary cell cultures. These experiments can be carried out in nearly any type of cell including normal and transformed human and animal cells, plant cells, bacteria, mycoplasmas, yeasts, and the like. In particular, we now study the phenomenon of stationary phase aging and the possibility of modulating this kind of cell aging by geroprotectors (physical or chemical factors that retard aging) and geropromoters (factors that accelerate aging) in cyanobacteria cultures. ‘Thus, an evolutionary approach to analysis of the data is provided. Moreover, changes in stationary cell cultures become detectable very soon, as a rule in 2-3 weeks after beginning the experiment. All of these data suggest that the stationary phase aging model is a good alternative to the Hayflick model.
PECS-an efficient solution for simulating switched networks with nonlinear elements

PECS (Power Electronics Circuit Simulator) enables the time-domain simulation of switched networks that may contain nonlinear elements. Focus has been placed not only on obtaining high speed, but also on achieving a very high degree of accuracy. A set of optimized computer algorithms that have been incorporated into PECS to achieve these objectives are explained. Examples run, which include a power-factor correction circuit containing a multiplier/divider element, have shown over an order of magnitude speed advantage over other leading approaches.
Power production of the lower limbs in flutter-kick swimming

This study aimed to compare the power produced by the flutter-kick action at different swimming velocities. Eighteen high-level male swimmers completed a maximal 15-m flutter-kicking sprint and underwent two tests (one passive and one with maximal flutter-kicking) in which they were towed at six velocities ranging from 1.0 to 2.0 m/s. Power values were computed for each velocity, and selected kinematic indices were evaluated at 1.2 and 2.0 m/s. The highest power (54 ± 8 W) was observed at the velocity at which the drag equaled the propulsive force (1.27 ± 0.08 m/s), which was similar to that recorded in the flutter-kicking sprint (1.26 ± 0.09 m/s). Thereafter, power decreased significantly with increasing velocity, up to 17 ± 10 W (at 2.0 m/s). The angle between the horizontal and the line connecting the highest and lowest points of the malleolus trajectory was significantly wider at 1.2 m/s than at 2.0 m/s (75 ± 4° vs. 63 ± 6°). This could explain the change of power with velocity because all the other kinematic indices considered were similar at the two velocities. These results suggest that the propulsive role of the flutter-kick increases as the swimming velocity decreases.
Satellite cells are essential for skeletal muscle regeneration: the cell on the edge returns centre stage

Following their discovery in 1961, it was speculated that satellite cells were dormant myoblasts, held in reserve until required for skeletal muscle repair. Evidence for this accumulated over the years, until the link between satellite cells and the myoblasts that appear during muscle regeneration was finally established. Subsequently, it was demonstrated that, when grafted, satellite cells could also self-renew, conferring on them the coveted status of ‘stem cell’. The emergence of other cell types with myogenic potential, however, questioned the precise role of satellite cells. Here, we review recent recombination-based studies that have furthered our understanding of satellite cell biology. The clear consensus is that skeletal muscle does not regenerate without satellite cells, confirming their pivotal and non-redundant role.
Distributed spectral cluster management: a method for building dynamic publish/subscribe systems

In recent years peer-to-peer (P2P) networking has gained high popularity for large-scale content distribution. Prominent systems expect a large user base with rather diversified demands. Yet it is highly challenging to achieve scalability without sacrificing the expressiveness of queries in such systems. This paper proposes distributed spectral cluster management, an approach which adapts the techniques from spectral graph theory to work in distributed settings. The proposed approach is applied to content-based publish/subscribe to i) significantly reduce the cost for event dissemination by clustering subscribers exploiting the similarity of events, ii) preserve the expressiveness of the subscription language, and iii) perform robustly in the presence of workload variations. The evaluations analyze the accuracy of the proposed distributed spectral mechanisms and show their effectiveness to significantly reduce the efforts to disseminate events under many practical workloads.
Coping with Externalities in Tourism - A Dynamic Optimal Taxation Approach

A switching mode power supply which controls power source supplied to electronic equipment, which is designed to protect a circuit against an overvoltage through a power line of coil or overcurrent on the occurrence of short-circuit of power line. The switching mode power supply of the present invention comprises a switching transformer for receiving DC voltage to a primary coil from a rectifier, and inducing respective different predetermined voltages into a plurality of coils on the secondary and third side of respective different turns ratio, an error detection and feedback for inputting the voltage VA of a coil with the highest turns ratio of a plurality of the coils and detecting voltage errors, a switching output for outputting a control signal so as to switch a switching transformer, a current sensor for sensing a current signal transmitted from the switching output, a pulse width modulation controller for inputting a voltage error fed back from the error detection and feedback and an output current from the current sensor and a voltage of the third coil, and outputting pulse width modulation signal which duty cycle is modulated in accordance with these input signals to the switching output, and an overvoltage and overcurrent protection circuit for detecting whether an overvoltage from a plurality of the coils occur, whether an undervoltage from a plurality of the coils occur or not, and continuously stopping an operation of pulse width modulation controller when detecting the overvoltage or the undervoltage.
Exploring the Spam Arms Race to Characterize Spam Evolution

Current studies on spam evolution usually extract evolution patterns and trends by analyzing historical spam message corpora. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology that incorporates spam filters to the spam trend analysis, as they are the agents that may force spammers to change their tactics. Moreover, filters also evolve over time and different filter releases present different characteristics, providing different views of the spams. We considered both outdated and recent releases of the Open Source SpamAssassin filter and applied their criteria on spams collected from the Spam Archive dataset, a dataset that contains spams collected from 1998 to 2010. When we compare the effectiveness of old and recent filters over old and recent spams, spam trends naturally emerge. Our results give a general picture of the dynamic nature of spam over the last 12 years and indicate that, on any given year, spams from different generations are observed. Moreover, we investigated how the popularity of spam construction techniques changes when filters start to detect them. We also determined automatically techniques that seemed more resistant than others and thus subsidize studies on improving anti-spam mechanisms.
Institute for Mathematical Physics Totally Nonfree Actions and the Infinite Symmetric Group Totally Nonfree Actions and the Infinite Symmetric Group

To the memory of my beloved Lyotya ABSTRACT We consider the totally nonfree (TNF) action of a groups and the corresponding adjoint invariant (AD) measures on the lattices of the subgroups of the given group. The main result is the description of all adjoint-invariant and TNF-measures on the lattice of subgroups of the infinite symmetric group S N. The problem is closely related to the theory of characters and factor representations of groups.