Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pro-inflammatory cytokine predicts reduced rejection of unfair financial offers.

OBJECTIVES This study aimed to examine one of biological correlates, pro-inflammatory cytokine, in rejection of unfair financial offers in the Ultimatum Game (UG), where the division of a sum of money is proposed and the player can accept or reject this offer. METHODS Nineteen participants played 20 trials of the UG as responders, and they were proposed unfair offers in a half of the trials. Baseline levels of several pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines, subjective happiness, and depression of them were measured. RESULTS Participants with higher levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine, interleukin (IL)-6 rejected fewer unfair offers. This effect of IL-6 levels on decision-making was independent from other pro-inflammatory cytokines, anti-inflammatory cytokines, subjective happiness, and depression. CONCLUSIONS These results suggested that chronic higher levels of IL-6 might affect functions of neural regions related to decision making, and thus can modulate rejection of unfair offers.
Experimental Evaluation of Euler Sums

In response to a letter from Goldbach, Euler considered sums of the form ∞ � k=1 � 1+ 1 2 m + ··· + 1 k m � (k +1 ) −n for positive integers m and n. Euler was able to give explicit values for certain of these sums in terms of the Riemann zeta function. In a recent companion paper, Euler’s results were extended to a significantly larger class of sums of this type, including sums with alternating signs. This research was facilitated by numerical computations using an algorithm that can determine, with high confidence, whether or not a particular numerical value can be expressed as a rational linear combination of several given constants. The present paper presents the numerical techniques used in these computations and lists many of the experimental results that have been obtained.
Guidance of visual attention by semantic information in real-world scenes

Recent research on attentional guidance in real-world scenes has focused on object recognition within the context of a scene. This approach has been valuable for determining some factors that drive the allocation of visual attention and determine visual selection. This article provides a review of experimental work on how different components of context, especially semantic information, affect attentional deployment. We review work from the areas of object recognition, scene perception, and visual search, highlighting recent studies examining semantic structure in real-world scenes. A better understanding on how humans parse scene representations will not only improve current models of visual attention but also advance next-generation computer vision systems and human-computer interfaces.
Pharmacological reactivation of p53 as a strategy to treat cancer

It has been confirmed through studies using the technique of unbiased sequencing that the TP53 tumour suppressor is the most frequently inactivated gene in cancer. This finding, together with results from earlier studies, provides compelling evidence for the idea that p53 ablation is required for the development and maintenance of tumours. Genetic reconstitution of the function of p53 leads to the suppression of established tumours as shown in mouse models. This strongly supports the notion that p53 reactivation by small molecules could provide an efficient strategy to treat cancer. In this review, we summarize recent advances in the development of small molecules that restore the function of mutant p53 by different mechanisms, including stabilization of its folding by Apr‐246, which is currently being tested in a Phase II clinical trial. We discuss several classes of compounds that reactivate wild‐type p53, such as Mdm2 inhibitors, which are currently undergoing clinical testing, MdmX inhibitors and molecules targeting factors upstream of Mdm2/X or p53 itself. Finally, we consider the clinical applications of compounds targeting p53 and the p53 pathway.
Reading Coach Quality: Findings from Florida Middle Schools

Drawing on a statewide study of Florida middle-school reading coaches, this article examines what constitutes, contributes to, and is associated with high-quality coaches and coaching. Authors find that coaches generally held many of the qualifications recommended by state and national experts and principals and teachers rated their coaches highly on many indicators of quality. However, several common concerns about recruiting, retaining, and supporting high-quality coaches emerged. Estimates from models indicate that a few indicators of coach experience, knowledge, and skills had significant associations with perceived improvements in teaching and higher student achievement, although the magnitude of the latter relationship was quite small. Findings suggest that although possessing strong reading knowledge and instructional expertise may be important for coaching, it may not be sufficient.
The use of bifunctional NOP/mu and NOP receptor selective compounds for the treatment of pain, drug abuse, and psychiatric disorders.

The NOP receptor, the fourth receptor in the opioid receptor family, is found throughout the brain and is involved in a variety of CNS systems and pathways. The endogenous ligand for NOP receptors, nociceptin/orphanin FQ (now called N/OFQ), was originally thought to increase a painful stimulus since intracerebroventricular (i.c.v.) administration of this heptadecapeptide led to a decrease in tail-flick and hot-plate latency in mice. Further studies suggested that N/OFQ blocks opiate analgesia when administered i.c. v. but potentiates opiate analgesia and has antinociceptive activity when administered intrathecally. I.c. v. administration of N/OFQ has other beneficial actions including inhibition of reward induced by several different abused drugs, as well as anti-anxiety activity. Recent work has demonstrated that individual small molecules that activate both NOP and mu receptors possess mu-mediated antinociceptive activity with reduced reward, as determined by conditioned place preference tests. Furthermore, selective NOP receptor agonists appear to be active in certain chronic pain models and reduce both drug craving and anxiety. NOP receptor antagonists may also have therapeutic benefits since both peptide and small molecule antagonists have anti-depressant activity in two different animal models. Therefore, both selective NOP receptor compounds and non-selective compounds, with both NOP receptor and mu opioid receptor activity, appear to have potential for clinical use for several neurological and psychiatric disorders including acute and chronic pain, drug abuse, anxiety and depression.
Frames, Biases, and Rational Decision-Making in the Human Brain

Human choices are remarkably susceptible to the manner in which options are presented. This so-called “framing effect” represents a striking violation of standard economic accounts of human rationality, although its underlying neurobiology is not understood. We found that the framing effect was specifically associated with amygdala activity, suggesting a key role for an emotional system in mediating decision biases. Moreover, across individuals, orbital and medial prefrontal cortex activity predicted a reduced susceptibility to the framing effect. This finding highlights the importance of incorporating emotional processes within models of human choice and suggests how the brain may modulate the effect of these biasing influences to approximate rationality.
Epizootic Spread of Schmallenberg Virus among Wild Cervids, Belgium, Fall 2011

Schmallenberg virus was detected in cattle and sheep in northwestern Europe in 2011. To determine whether wild ruminants are also susceptible, we measured antibody seroprevalence in cervids (roe deer and red deer) in Belgium in 2010 and 2011. Findings indicated rapid spread among these deer since virus emergence ≈250 km away.
Dissociating external power from intramuscular exercise intensity during intermittent bilateral knee‐extension in humans

Continuous high‐intensity constant‐power exercise is unsustainable, with maximal oxygen uptake ( V̇O2 max ) and the limit of tolerance attained after only a few minutes. Performing the same power intermittently reduces the O2 cost of exercise and increases tolerance. The extent to which this dissociation is reflected in the intramuscular bioenergetics is unknown. We used pulmonary gas exchange and 31P magnetic resonance spectroscopy to measure whole‐body V̇O2 , quadriceps phosphate metabolism and pH during continuous and intermittent exercise of different work:recovery durations. Shortening the work:recovery durations (16:32 s vs. 32:64 s vs. 64:128 s vs. continuous) at a work rate estimated to require 110% peak aerobic power reduced V̇O2 , muscle phosphocreatine breakdown and muscle acidification, eliminated the glycolytic‐associated contribution to ATP synthesis, and increased exercise tolerance. Exercise intensity (i.e. magnitude of intramuscular metabolic perturbations) can be dissociated from the external power using intermittent exercise with short work:recovery durations.
Network-aware forward caching

This paper proposes and evaluates a Network Aware Forward Caching approach for determining the optimal deployment strategy of forward caches to a network. A key advantage of this approach is that we can reduce the network costs associated with forward caching to maximize the benefit obtained from their deployment. We show in our simulation that a 37% increase to net benefits could be achieved over the standard method of full cache deployment to cache all POPs traffic. In addition, we show that this maximal point occurs when only 68% of the total traffic is cached. Another contribution of this paper is the analysis we use to motivate and evaluate this problem. We characterize the Internet traffic of 100K subscribers of a US residential broadband provider. We use both layer 4 and layer 7 analysis to investigate the traffic volumes of the flows as well as study the general characteristics of the applications used. We show that HTTP is a dominant protocol and account for 68% of the total downstream traffic and that 34% of that traffic is multimedia. In addition, we show that multimedia content using HTTP exhibits a 83% annualized growth rate and other HTTP traffic has a 53% growth rate versus the 26% over all annual growth rate of broadband traffic. This shows that HTTP traffic will become ever more dominent and increase the potential caching opportunities. Furthermore, we characterize the core backbone traffic of this broadband provider to measure the distance travelled by content and traffic. We find that CDN traffic is much more efficient than P2P content and that there is large skew in the Air Miles between POP in a typical network. Our findings show that there are many opportunties in broadband provider networks to optimize how traffic is delivered and cached.
Size-segregated mass distributions of aerosols over Eastern Mediterranean: seasonal variability and comparison with AERONET columnar size-distributions

This work provides long-term (2004-2006) size segregated measurements of aerosol mass at a remote coastal station in the southern Europe, with the use of size-selective samplings (SDI impactor). Seven distinct modes were iden- tified in the range 0-10 µm and the dominant were the "Ac- cumulation 1" (0.25-0.55µm) and the "Coarse 2" (3-7µm) modes. The seasonal characteristics of each mode were thor- oughly studied and different sources for submicron and su- permicron particles were identified, the first being related to local/regional and transported pollution with maximum in summer and the latter to dust from deserted areas in Northern Africa maximizing in spring. On average, PM2.5 and PM1 accounted for 60% and 40% of PM10 mass, respectively.The representativity of the ground-based measurements for the total column was also investigated by comparing the mea- sured aerosol mass distributions with the AERONET vol- ume size distribution data. Similar seasonal patterns were revealed and AERONET was found adequate for the estima- tion of background levels of both fine and coarse particles near surface, with certain limitations in the case of pollution or dust abrupt episodes due to its low temporal coverage.
ThermalBracelet: Exploring Thermal Haptic Feedback Around the Wrist

Smartwatches enable the wrist to be used as an ideal location to provide always-available haptic notifications as they are constantly worn with direct contact with the skin. With the wrist straps, the haptic feedback can be extended to the full space around the wrist to provide more spatial and enriched feedback. With ThermalBracelet, we investigate thermal feedback as a haptic feedback modality around the wrist. We present three studies that lead to the development of a smartwatch-integratable thermal bracelet that stimulates six locations around the wrist. Our initial evaluation reports on the selection of the thermal module configurations. Secondly, with the selected six-module configuration, we explore its usability in a real-world scenarios such as walking and reading. Thirdly, we investigate its capability of providing spatio temporal feedback while engaged in distracting tasks. Finally we present application scenarios that demonstrates its usability.
BayesOpt: a Bayesian optimization library for nonlinear optimization, experimental design and bandits

BayesOpt is a library with state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization methods to solve nonlinear optimization, stochastic bandits or sequential experimental design problems. Bayesian optimization characterized for being sample efficient as it builds a posterior distribution to capture the evidence and prior knowledge of the target function. Built in standard C++, the library is extremely efficient while being portable and flexible. It includes a common interface for C, C++, Python, Matlab and Octave.
Lightning Return Stroke Speed

The available experimental data on return stroke speed for both negative and positive lightning are reviewed. The often assumed relationship between the return-stroke speed and peak current is shown to be generally not supported by experimental data. Reasons for the return-stroke speed being lower than the speed of light are discussed. Index Terms Lightning return stroke, propagation speed, peak current, corona, ohmic losses
Single-channel speech separation using sparse non-negative matrix factorization

We apply machine learning techniques to the problem of separating multiple speech sources from a single microphone recording. The method of choice is a sparse non-negative matrix factorization algorithm, which in an unsupervised manner can learn sparse representations of the data. This is applied to the learning of personalized dictionaries from a speech corpus, which in turn are used to separate the audio stream into its components. We show that computational savings can be achieved by segmenting the training data on a phoneme level. To split the data, a conventional speech recognizer is used. The performance of the unsupervised and supervised adaptation schemes result in significant improvements in terms of the target-to-masker ratio.
Pulsed operation of InGaZnO TFTs for VOC sensing applications

In this work, the detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) using amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide (a-InGaZnO) thin film transistors (TFTs) is explored. Pulsemode biasing to improve the long-term stability of these TFTs when exposed to the environment and under bias stress is proposed. Coated with a non-conducting polyepichlorohydrin (PECH) film, the TFTs under constant voltage bias exhibit a reversible response to varying ethanol concentrations in the gas phase. Furthermore, by lowering the duty cycle (δ) using bias pulses, the drain current decay under voltage bias can be reduced, thus extending the device's operational lifetime.
Composition and fate of short-period super-Earths: The case of CoRoT-7b

The discovery of CoRoT-7b, a planet of radius 1.68 +/- 0.09 R_E, mass 4.8 +/- 0.8 M_E and orbital period of 0.854 days demonstrates that small planets can orbit extremely close to their star. We use knowledge of hot Jupiters, mass loss estimates and models for the interior structure and evolution of planets to understand its composition, structure and evolution. The inferred mass and radius of CoRoT-7b are consistent with a rocky planet that would be depleted in iron relative to Earth. However, a one sigma increase in mass (5.6 M_E) and decrease in size (1.59 R_E) are compatible with an Earth-like composition (33% iron, 67% silicates). Alternatively, it is possible that CoRoT-7b contains a significant amount of volatiles. An equally good fit to the data is found for a vapor envelope equal to 3% (and up to 10%) by mass above an Earth-like nucleus. Because of its intense irradiation and small size, the planet cannot possess an envelope of H and He of more than 1/10,000 of its total mass. We show that the mass loss is significant (~ 10^11 g/s) and independent of planetary composition. This is because the hydrodynamical escape rate is independent of the atmosphere's mean molecular mass, and owing to the intense irradiation, even a bare rocky planet would possess an equilibrium vapor atmosphere thick enough to capture stellar UV photons. This escape rate rules out the possibility of a H-He envelope as it would escape in only ~1 Ma. A water vapor atmosphere would escape in ~ 1 Ga, and thus it is a plausible scenario. The origin of CoRoT-7b cannot be inferred from present observations: It may have formed rocky; or be the remnant of a Uranus-like ice giant, or a gas giant with a small core that was stripped of its gaseous envelope.
Relationships Between Low-Density Lipoprotein Particle Size, Plasma Lipoproteins, and Progression of Coronary Artery Disease: The Diabetes Atherosclerosis Intervention Study (DAIS)

Background—The Diabetes Atherosclerosis Intervention Study showed that treatment with fenofibrate decreases progression of coronary atherosclerosis in subjects with type 2 diabetes. We determined whether on-treatment plasma lipid concentrations and LDL particle size contribute to the favorable effect of fenofibrate on the progression of coronary artery disease (CAD). Methods and Results—A total of 418 subjects with type 2 diabetes were randomly assigned to 200 mg micronized fenofibrate daily or placebo. The mean follow-up time was 39.6 months. LDL peak particle diameter (LDL size) was determined by polyacrylamide gradient gel electrophoresis from 405 subjects at baseline and at the end of the study. Progression of CAD was measured with quantitative coronary angiography. LDL size increased significantly more in the fenofibrate group than in the placebo group (0.98±1.04 versus 0.32±0.92 nm, P <0.001). In the combined group, small LDL size was significantly associated with progression of CAD measured as the increase of percentage diameter stenosis (r =−0.16, P =0.002) and decreases in minimum (r =−0.11, P =0.030) and mean (r =−0.10, P =0.045) lumen diameter. High on-treatment LDL cholesterol, apolipoprotein B, and triglyceride concentrations were also associated with the progression of CAD. In regression analyses, small LDL size added to the effect of LDL cholesterol and apolipoprotein B on the progression of CAD. Similar associations were observed in the fenofibrate group, whereas in the placebo group, lipoprotein variables were not significantly correlated with the progression of CAD. Conclusions—Changes in LDL size and plasma lipid levels account for part of the antiatherogenic effect of fenofibrate in type 2 diabetes.
Ammonia Emissions of Pullets and Laying Hens as Affected by Stocking Density and Manure Accumulation Time

Data on ammonia (NH3) emissions from pullets (hens <18 weeks of age) are non-existent despite the large differences in nutritional and environmental conditions between raising pullets and laying hens. Different stocking densi- ties (SDs) in housing the birds may be used according to certain industry guidelines on production; however, information concerning the impact of SD on properties of accumulated manure and thus NH3 emissions is limited in the literature. It was hypothesized that bird SD affects the amount of manure per unit of storage or surface area as manure accumulates, and the exposed manure surface area may in turn affect NH3 emission from the accumulated manure. A lab-scale study was conducted that resembled the conditions of manure-belt laying-hen houses with the objectives of (1) determining the magnitude of NH3 emission rate (ER) of pullets (W-36 breed) as a function of age, and (2) assessing the effect of SD on NH3 ER of pullets and laying hens during a 6-day manure accumulation time (MAT). Two SDs at a given bird age (4 to 37 weeks) were evaluated, ranging from 155 and 206 cm 2 to 413 and 620 cm 2 (24 and 32 in. 2 to 64 and 90 in. 2 ) per bird, des- ignated as high density (HD) and low density (LD), respectively. Ammonia ER was expressed on the basis of per bird, per animal unit (AU, 500 kg live body weight), per kg of feed nitrogen (N) use, and per kg of as-is or dry manure. Results showed that daily NH3 ER for pullets and laying hens increased exponentially with bird age and MAT (p < 0.0001). Com- pared to the HD regimen, the LD regimen had 51% lower NH3 ER (in mg bird -1 d -1 ) for 4- to 5-week-old pullets and aver- aged 22% lower for laying hens. Results of this study provide a scientific basis concerning the impact of certain manage- ment practices on NH3 emissions and offer insight into reducing NH3 emissions from egg production operations.
Spatiotemporal Connectionist Networks: A Taxonomy and Review

This article reviews connectionist network architectures and training algorithms that are capable of dealing with patterns distributed across both space and timespatiotemporal patterns. It provides common mathematical, algorithmic, and illustrative frameworks for describing spatiotemporal networks, making it easier to compare and contrast their representational and operational characteristics. Computational power, representational issues, and learning are discussed. In additional references to the relevant source publications are provided. This article can serve as a guide to prospective users of spatiotemporal networks by providing an overview of the operational and representational alternatives available.
A survey of affective brain computer interfaces: principles, state-of-the-art, and challenges

Affective states, moods and emotions, are an integral part of human nature: they shape our thoughts, govern the behavior of the individual, and influence our interpersonal relationships. The last decades have seen a growing interest in the automatic detection of such states from voice, facial expression, and physiological signals, primarily with the goal of enhancing human-computer interaction with an affective component. With the advent of brain-computer interface research, the idea of affective brain-computer interfaces (aBCI), enabling affect detection from brain signals, arose. In this article, we set out to survey the field of neurophysiology-based affect detection. We outline possible applications of aBCI in a general taxonomy of brain-computer interface approaches and introduce the core concepts of affect and their neurophysiological fundamentals. We show that there is a growing body of literature that evidences the capabilities, but also the limitations and challenges of affect detection from neurophysiological activity.