Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The early development of thalamocortical and corticothalarnic projections

The early development ofthalamocortical and corticothalarnic projections in hamsters was studied to compare the specificity and maturation of these pathways, and to identify potential sources of information for specification of cortical areas. The cells that constitute these projections are both generated prenatally in hamsters and they make reciprocal connections. Fluorescent dyes (Dil and DiA) were injected into the visual cortex or lateral geniculate nucleus in fixed brains of fetal and postnatal pups. Several issues in axonal development were examined, including timing of axon outgrowth and target invasion, projection specificity, the spatial relationship between the two pathways, and the connections of subplate cells. Thalarnic projections arrive in the visual cortex 2 days before birth and begin to invade the developing cortical plate by the next day. Few processes invade inappropriate cortical regions. By postnatal day 7 their laminar position is similar to mature animals. By contrast, visual cortical axons from subplate and layer 6 cells reach posterior thalamus at l day after birth in small numbers. By 3 days after birth many layer 5 cell projections reach the posterior thalamus. On postnatal day 7, there is a sudden increase in the number of layer 6 projections to the thalamus. Surprisingly, these layer 6 cells are precisely topographically mapped with colabeied thalarnic afferents on their first appearance. Subplate cells constitute'a very small component of the corticothalarnic projection at all ages. Double injections of Dil and DiA show that the corticofugal and thalamocortical pathways are physically separate during development. Corticofugal axons travel deep in the intermediate zone to the thalarnic axons and are separate through much of the internal capsule. Their tangential distribution is also distinct. The early appearance of the thalamocortical pathway is consistent with an organizational role in the specification of some features of cortical cytoarchitecture. The specific initial projection of thalamocortical axons strongly suggests the recognition of particular cortical regions. The physical Separation of these two pathways limits the possibility for exchange of information between these Systems except at their respeetive targets. © 1993 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Releasing the “Terror Genie”: Man Haron Monis and the “Sydney Siege”

Abstract The threat of “Islamic terrorism” has become a feature of the Australian political landscape. This has taken the form of unconfirmed suggestions of promised beheadings by groups, the threat of lone-wolf attacks, and the radicalisation of Islamic youths fighting in Syria and Iraq. This paper argues that the Islamic terror genie has been used to effectively transform the Australian political landscape through a series of plotted suggestions. The excuse for such policy excludes the necessity for evidence in a public forum. Law and order issues that involve Muslim figures who so happen to embrace, erroneously, an Islamic stance, end up being swept up in this current. The Man Haron Monis hostage case (or the “Sydney Siege”) provided a classic example of this problem, illustrating the misunderstandings, deceptions and delusions that have come to characterise the response of Australia’s security and media establishment.
Multimodal Emotion Recognition Using Multimodal Deep Learning

To enhance the performance of affective models and reduce the cost of acquiring physiological signals for real-world applications, we adopt multimodal deep learning approach to construct affective models from multiple physiological signals. For unimodal enhancement task, we indicate that the best recognition accuracy of 82.11% on SEED dataset is achieved with shared representations generated by Deep AutoEncoder (DAE) model. For multimodal facilitation tasks, we demonstrate that the Bimodal Deep AutoEncoder (BDAE) achieves the mean accuracies of 91.01% and 83.25% on SEED and DEAP datasets, respectively, which are much superior to the state-of-the-art approaches. For cross-modal learning task, our experimental results demonstrate that the mean accuracy of 66.34% is achieved on SEED dataset through shared representations generated by EEG-based DAE as training samples and shared representations generated by eye-based DAE as testing sample, and vice versa.
Accelerating kernel clustering for biomedical data analysis

The increasing size and complexity of modern data sets turns modern data mining techniques to indispensable tools when inspecting biomedical data sets. Thereby, dedicated data formats and detailed information often cause the need for problem specific similarities or dissimilarities instead of the standard Euclidean norm. Therefore, a number of clustering techniques which rely on similarities or dissimilarities only have recently been proposed. In this contribution, we review some of the most popular dissimilarity based clustering techniques and we discuss possibilities how to get around the usually squared complexity of the models due to their dependency on the full dissimilarity matrix. We evaluate the techniques on two benchmarks from the biomedical domain.
Authorship Verification Using the Impostors Method Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013

This paper describes the evaluation of the GenIM method, which par- ticipated in the PAN' 13 authorship identification competition. The approach is based on comparing the similarity between the given documents and a number of external (impostor) documents, so that documents can be classified as having been written by the same author, if they are shown to be more similar to each other than to the impostors, in a number of trials. The method showed competi- tive results, achieving the overall 1 st ranking in the competition.
The Last Instance: Are Institutions the Primary Cause of Economic Development?

“That institutions affect the performance of economies is hardly controversial. That the differential performance of economies over time is fundamentally influenced by the way institutions evolve is also not controversial. ” (North 1990, p. 3) Following Douglas North, neo-institutionalists claim that institutions are the “primary” cause of economic development, “deeper” than the supply of factors and methods for their use, which Marxists would call “forces of production”. Yet while the conclusion is different, the historical narratives differ little across these perspectives. How, then, are such conclusions derived? Can anything be said to be “primary”? I conclude that “causal primacy” is an answer to an incorrectly posed question. Institutions and development are mutually endogenous and the most we can hope for is to identify their reciprocal impacts. À la suite de Douglas North, les néo-institutionnalistes proclament que les institutions sont la cause principale du développement économique, plus “profonde” que les facteurs et méthodes désignés par les marxistes sous le terme “forces de production”. Pourtant, si les conclusions divergent, les récits se ressemblent fort. Peut-on parler d'une cause première ? N'est-ce pas une réponse à une question mal posée? On soutiendra ici que les institutions et le développement sont mutuellement endogènes et ce que nous pouvons espérer de mieux est d'identifier leurs effets réciproques. Nach Douglas North haben die Neo-Institutionalisten behauptet, dass hauptsächlich die Institutionen zur wirtschaftliche Entwicklung beitragen, wesentlich mehr als die Faktoren und Methoden, die von den Marxisten als ”Produktionsmittel“ bezeichneten wurden. Und wenn die Schlußfolgerung auch abweicht, die Beschreibungen ähneln sich sehr. Wie kann es zu derartigen Schlussfolgerungen kommen? Gibt es eine ”Ur“-Sache? Ich schliese daraus, dass es sich um eine Antwort auf eine falschgestellte Frage handelt. Institutionen und Entwicklung sind gegenseitig abhängig und wir können allerhöchstens erhoffen, die gegenseitigen Einflüsse zu erkunden.
A Nonparametric Bayesian Approach toward Stacked Convolutional Independent Component Analysis

Unsupervised feature learning algorithms based on convolutional formulations of independent components analysis (ICA) have been demonstrated to yield state-of-the-art results in several action recognition benchmarks. However, existing approaches do not allow for the number of latent components (features) to be automatically inferred from the data in an unsupervised manner. This is a significant disadvantage of the state-of-the-art, as it results in considerable burden imposed on researchers and practitioners, who must resort to tedious cross-validation procedures to obtain the optimal number of latent features. To resolve these issues, in this paper we introduce a convolutional nonparametric Bayesian sparse ICA architecture for overcomplete feature learning from high-dimensional data. Our method utilizes an Indian buffet process prior to facilitate inference of the appropriate number of latent features under a hybrid variational inference algorithm, scalable to massive datasets. As we show, our model can be naturally used to obtain deep unsupervised hierarchical feature extractors, by greedily stacking successive model layers, similar to existing approaches. In addition, inference for this model is completely heuristics-free, thus, it obviates the need of tedious parameter tuning, which is a major challenge most deep learning approaches are faced with. We evaluate our method on several action recognition benchmarks, and exhibit its advantages over the state-of-the-art.
Variational Restoration of Nonflat Image Features: Models and Algorithms

We develop both mathematical models and computational algorithms for variational denoising and restoration of nonflat image features. Nonflat image features are those that live on Riemannian manifolds, instead of on the Euclidean spaces. Familiar examples include the orientation feature (from optical flows or gradient flows) that lives on the unit circle S1 , the alignment feature (from fingerprint waves or certain texture images) that lives on the real projective line $\mathbb{RP}^1$, and the chromaticity feature (from color images) that lives on the unit sphere S2 . In this paper, we apply the variational method to denoise and restore general nonflat image features. Mathematical models for both continuous image domains and discrete domains (or graphs) are constructed. Riemannian objects such as metric, distance and Levi--Civita connection play important roles in the models. Computational algorithms are also developed for the resulting nonlinear equations. The mathematical framework can be applied to res.
A low voltage wide swing level shifted FVF based current mirror

A new low voltage level shifted flipped voltage follower (FVF) current mirror has been proposed. The proposed current mirror has very low input resistance and high output resistance. The proposed current mirror is shown to have wider operating range as compared to FVF based current mirror. The simulations of proposed current mirror are carried out using Mentor Graphics Eldospice based on TSMC 0. 18μm CMOS technology, for input current range of 0-280μA. The proposed current mirror operates with a single supply voltage of 1V and consumes 402. 5μW power at 50μA input current. The simulation results show that it provides input and output resistances of 26Ω and 562KΩ respectively.
A Catalog of Diffuse Interstellar Bands in the Spectrum of HD 204827

Echelle spectra of the double-lined spectroscopic binary HD 204827 were obtained on five nights, at a resolving power R = 38,000 and with a S/N = 750 near 6000 Å in the final, combined spectrum. The stars show E(B − V) = 1.11 and spectral types near O9.5 V and B0.5 III. A catalog is presented of 380 diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) measured between 3900 and 8100 Å in the stars’ spectrum. The central wavelengths, the widths (FWHM), and the equivalent widths of nearly all of the bands are tabulated, along with the minimum uncertainties in the latter. The reliable removal of very weak stellar lines from the catalog, and of some stellar lines from the less severe blends with DIBs, is made generally easy by the highly variable radial velocities of both stars. The principal result of this investigation is that the great majority of the bands in the catalog are very weak and relatively narrow. Typical equivalent widths amount to a few mÅ, and the bandwidths (FWHM) are most often near 0.55 Å. Therefore, most of these DIBs can be detected only in spectra obtained at a resolving power and a S/N at least comparable to those used here. In addition, the anomalous interstellar reddening and the very high value of the ratio N(C2)/E(B − V) seen toward HD 204827 indicate that the physical conditions in one or more of the several interstellar clouds seen in this direction differ significantly from those found toward the prototypical DIB target HD 183143, for example. Probably primarily for these reasons, 113 of the 380 bands (30%) were not detected in four previous modern surveys of the DIBs seen in the spectra of stars other than HD 204827. No preferred wavenumber spacings among the 380 bands are reliably identified which could provide clues to the identities of the large molecules thought to cause the DIBs.
Religion From the Target’s Perspective: A Portrait of Religious Threat and Its Consequences in the United States

Little is known about social identity threat from religion or religiosity. We collected data from a diverse sample of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims across the United States (N = 970) to test whether, and for whom, religion and religiosity, like other social identities, can be consequential sources of identity threat. Results suggest that religious threat is highest among religious minority groups (Muslims and Jews) and highly religious Protestants. Threat predicted (1) lower belonging, (2) a greater propensity to conceal one’s religion, and (3) more intergroup bias, although these patterns varied somewhat by religion. Results illuminate how a broader social climate in which religion and specific religious groups are often the subject of heated rhetoric may trigger identity threat and exacerbate intergroup hostilities.
Assessment of the quality of revegetated soil near an active goldmine in southwestern Ghana

This study presents an assessment of soil quality of revegetated locations within the catchment of a goldmine, using the index of geo-accumulation, enrichment factor and multivariate statistics. Fourteen composite soil samples were analysed for the following parameters: Mn, Cd, Pb, Fe As, pH, organic C, organic matter, available K and P, total N, total exchangeable base, exchangeable acidity, effective cation exchange capacity and base saturation. The results indicate that all locations except one were practically uncontaminated with Fe. Three locations were practically uncontaminated with Mn, whereas all other locations were uncontaminated to moderately-contaminated. Principal component and cluster analyses indicate that most members form one cluster suggesting uniformity in the degree of impacts on the soils with regard to the parameters analyzed; and further signifying that the impacts possibly originate from a common source. 93% of the locations recorded low to very low levels of N (0.04–0.14mg/kg). 15% of the soils show medium levels of available P (8.459.81mg/kg) while the other locations (85%) show very low levels (0.01–1.59mg/kg), an indication that most of the soils are phosphorous deficient. The mean ECEC was 8.5meq/100g and ranged from 3.66meq/100g to 17.12meq/100g. 28% of locations recorded less than 5meq/100g CEC, which is the minimum level for adequate exchange capacity according to the Ghana Soil Fertility Capacity Classification. Though the heavy metal concentrations in the soil do not pose any significant risks to agronomic activities, the nutrient/fertility status is low to medium. There will therefore be the need to fertilize to correct the various nutrient deficiencies prior to the commencement of agronomic activities.
The Antecedents and Consequences of Market Orientation in Australia by Sue Pulendran † Richard Speed †

The subject of market orientation has been of interest to both researchers and practitioners for several years. The work of Jaworski and Kohli (1993) inspired a substantial body of literature that empirically examined the antecedents and consequences of a market orientation. This article contributes to that body of literature by investigating the antecedents and consequences of market orientation in Australia. The results successfully replicate the Jaworski and Kohli findings, within an Australian environment. Results illustrate that understanding the culture, activities and processes associated with market-oriented activity have significant implications for organisations in Australia.
Long-Acting Injectable Antipsychotics in First-Episode Schizophrenia

Long-acting injectable antipsychotics (LAIAs) may improve adherence to treatment and reduce the rate of relapse and rehospitalization in first-episode or recent-onset schizophrenia (e.g., less than 2 years of illness duration). However, despite their potential advantages, LAIAs are underutilised in clinical practice and the place of LAIAs in the early phases of schizophrenia is still a controversial clinical issue. For example, negative attitudes toward LAIAs in first-episode schizophrenia among psychiatrists are common, and the place of LAIAs for first-episode psychoses (FEPs) remains uncertain in the current clinical guidelines for the pharmacological treatment of schizophrenia. Moreover, a recent paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Rosenheck et al. [1] reported negative results of LAI risperidone (RLAI) on relapse prevention, although this was in a multiepisode sample. The recent and forthcoming availability of additional second-generation LAIAs (SG-LAIAs), namely, olanzapine pamoate, paliperidone palmitate, aripiprazole, and iloperidone depot, will add interest to this clinical debate for practicing clinicians and researchers interested in this timely topic.
A Wheat WRKY Transcription Factor TaWRKY10 Confers Tolerance to Multiple Abiotic Stresses in Transgenic Tobacco

WRKY transcription factors are reported to be involved in defense regulation, stress response and plant growth and development. However, the precise role of WRKY transcription factors in abiotic stress tolerance is not completely understood, especially in crops. In this study, we identified and cloned 10 WRKY genes from genome of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). TaWRKY10, a gene induced by multiple stresses, was selected for further investigation. TaWRKY10 was upregulated by treatment with polyethylene glycol, NaCl, cold and H2O2. Result of Southern blot indicates that the wheat genome contains three copies of TaWRKY10. The TaWRKY10 protein is localized in the nucleus and functions as a transcriptional activator. Overexpression of TaWRKY10 in tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) resulted in enhanced drought and salt stress tolerance, mainly demonstrated by the transgenic plants exhibiting of increased germination rate, root length, survival rate, and relative water content under these stress conditions. Further investigation showed that transgenic plants also retained higher proline and soluble sugar contents, and lower reactive oxygen species and malonaldehyde contents. Moreover, overexpression of the TaWRKY10 regulated the expression of a series of stress related genes. Taken together, our results indicate that TaWRKY10 functions as a positive factor under drought and salt stresses by regulating the osmotic balance, ROS scavenging and transcription of stress related genes.
Organizational Commitment and Rewards in Thailand, with Comparison between University Graduates and Others

This study investigates the relationship between extrinsic, intrinsic and social rewards, and the organizational commitment of 6,911 employees who work for 13 Japanese companies in Thailand. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that variables included to measure extrinsic, social and intrinsic rewards were strongly related to organizational commitment. These findings suggest that the antecedents of organizational commitment in the Japanese companies in Thailand are different from those in the other kind of corporations in the West. The comparison between University graduates and others showed that benefit satisfaction and fatigue had stronger and supervisor support and role clarity had weaker influence on organizational commitment in university graduates than in others. Discussions and implications concerning human resource management of Japanese companies in Thailand are offered.
The Financial Markets and Wealth Effects on Consumption: an Experimental Analysis

The paper investigates the effects exerted by the ownership of quoted equities on intertemporal wealth allocation. To this end, it reports an experiment conducted with human subjects. The fact that an increasing share of household balances is allocated to equities raises numerous questions on the nature and magnitude of so-called ‘wealth effects’. The traditional theories are based on the assumption of perfect rational agents and do not consider wealth effects in detail. The empirical literature on the topic is heterogeneous and does not give a uniform description of such effects. The decision to work with experimental tools was prompted by the idea that this approach would shed light on the behaviour of subjects asked to decide on simulated consumption/saving decisions. The neutral position taken up with respect to the traditional theory when designing the experiment enabled us to compare the outcomes of the laboratory experiment against the theoretical findings of Hall's (1978) model, which describes a Random Walk in consumption. This analysis yielded a much more complex picture than would have been obtained in the perfect rationality framework which supports the traditional theories of life cycle-permanent income. In trying to understand and give a theoretical framework to the behaviour observed in the laboratory, we consider models taken from both the economic and the psychological literature. The analysis furnishes interesting insights, which are described and considered as future directions for research.
News consumption through SNS platforms:Extended motivational model

The emergence of new media technologies has redefined how people, particularly the youth, are exposed to the news. Social networking sites (SNS), in particular, have widely changed the manner in which news is consumed. SNS platforms have emerged as news sources where people engage in several activities such as sharing, commenting and discussing news with peers, acquaintances and family members. Thus, drawing on the extended version of the motivational model, this study attempts to determine contributing factors. Using a stratified random sampling procedure, this study compiles a sample from leading higher education institutions in a Sub-Saharan African country. The data are then analysed using a structural equation modelling technique with SmartPLS software and the both the validity and reliability indexes are reported. The findings suggest that students' attitude towards news consumption (ATT) via SNS platforms is influenced directly by perceived usefulness (PU), perceived enjoyment (PE) and subjective norms (SN) and indirectly by PE and SN factors. In addition, PU and PE are positively predicted by SN. Furthermore, ATT directly predicts SNS news consumption (SNC), while PU, PE and SN indirectly contribute to SNC.