Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deconfinement in QCD with Dynamical Quarks

We study the phase structure of full QCD within the canonical ensemble (CE) with respect to triality in a lattice formulation. The procedure to calculate the effective potentials (EP) in the CE is given. We calculate the EP for the three-dimensional SU(2) gauge model at finite temperature in the strong coupling region. The potential exhibits a genuine deconfinement phase transition unlike the similar potential obtained in the grand canonical ensemble (GCE). Furthermore, we investigate the EP with the chiral condensate included. Contrary to other recent results we find chiral symmetry restoration in all triality sectors. Dealing with massless staggered fermions we observe chiral symmetry restoration accompanying a deconfinement phase transition of first-order. Above the critical point, besides two Z(2) symmetric "deconfining" vacua there exists a metastable "confining" vacuum in a wide region of the (Nt,γ)-plane. Such a picture could be interpreted as an indication for a mixed state of hadrons and quarks in the vicinity of the critical line.
Only Missense Mutations Affecting the DNA Binding Domain of P53 Influence Outcomes in Patients with Breast Carcinoma

The presence of a TP53 gene mutation can influence tumour response to some treatments, especially in breast cancer. In this study, we analysed p53 mRNA expression, LOH at 17p13 and TP53 mutations from exons 2 to 11 in 206 patients with breast carcinoma and correlated the results with disease-free and overall survival. The observed mutations were classified according to their type and location in the three protein domains (transactivation domain, DNA binding domain, oligomerization domain) and correlated with disease-free and overall survival. In our population, neither p53 mRNA expression nor LOH correlated with outcome. Concerning TP53 mutations, 27% of tumours were mutated (53/197) and the presence of a mutation in the TP53 gene was associated with worse overall survival (p = 0.0026) but not with disease-free survival (p = 0.0697), with median survival of 80 months and 78 months, respectively. When alterations were segregated into mutation categories and locations, and related to survival, tumours harbouring mutations other than missense mutations in the DNA binding domain of P53 had the same survival profiles as wild-type tumours. Concerning missense mutations in the DNA binding domain, median disease-free and overall survival was 23 months and 35 months, respectively (p = 0.0021 and p<0.0001, respectively), compared with 78 and 80 months in mutated tumours overall. This work shows that disease-free and overall survival in patients with a frameshift mutation of TP53 or missense mutation in the oligomerization domain are the same as those in wild-type TP53 patients.
Enhanced user immersive experience with a virtual reality based FPS game interface

The immersive game interfaces which reflect the user's actions to the game in real-time can make the user be immersed in the game. In this paper, we applied the virtual reality (VR) techniques to a first-person shooting (FPS) game, Unreal Tournament 2004, for the enhanced user immersion with making the range of sensible information be widen by using the head-mounted display (HMD) and the 5.1 channel headphone, and also making the interaction between the user and the game system be natural with the head tracker and the data gloves. Additionally, the intelligent game agents are applied to improve the quality of the game contents. The proposed immersive interface was substituted for the traditional interface system represented by a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. To evaluate the proposed system, we performed the usability test with both the physiological and the psychological measures. Through the experiment, we verified that the proposed system provided better immersive experience to users than the traditional system.
Bubbles and Trading in Incomplete Markets

We show that an intrinsic property of a large class of rational bubbles is their capacity to relax the agents’ debt limits. Any bubble that preserves the set of pricing kernels, or equivalently, the asset span, has effectively an identical effect on consumption and real interest rates as an appropriate relaxation of debt limits, proportional to the size of the bubble. Thus the collapse of a bubble amounts to a contraction of agents’ debt limits, and conversely, a bubble can arise to supplement the credit available in the economy.
Does book-to-market equity proxy for distress risk or over-reaction

This paper tests risk and overreaction explanations of the book-to-market equity (BE/ME) premium in returns by focusing on the joint relationship between distress and BE/ME. Within the most distressed firms, the difference in returns between high and low book-to-market securities is more than twice as large as that in non-distressed firms, and is largely driven by extremely low returns on firms with low BE/ME. These large return differentials cannot be explained by risk as captured by the Fama and French three-factor model, nor differences in economic fundamentals, such as profitability or the likelihood of delisting. In contrast, predictions of the overreaction hypothesis are borne out. Distressed firms exhibit the largest return reversals around earnings announcements, and the book-to-market return premium is largest in small firms with low analyst coverage.
Using video simulations and virtual reality to improve decision-making skills in basketball

ABSTRACT A large body of literature supports the effectiveness of using video simulations to improve decision-making skills in invasion sports. However, whether these improvements are transferable (from the laboratory to the court/field) and generalizable (from trained to untrained plays) remains unknown. In addition, it remains to be determined whether presenting the video simulations using virtual reality provides an added-value. To investigate these questions, varsity-level basketball players underwent four training sessions during which they observed video clips of basketball plays presented either on a computer screen (CS group) or using a virtual reality headset (VR group). A third group watched footage from NCAA playoff games on a computer screen (CTRL group). Decision-making was assessed on-court before and after the training sessions using two types of plays: “trained” plays (presented during the CS and VR training sessions) and “untrained” plays (presented only during the on-court tests). When facing the trained plays in the posttest, both VR and CS groups significantly outperformed the CTRL group. In contrast, when facing the untrained plays, the VR group outperformed both the CS and CTRL groups. Our results indicate that CS training leads to transferable but non-generalized decision-making gains while VR training leads to transferable and generalized gains.
Bacteria Are Omnipresent on Phanerochaete chrysosporium Burdsall

Bacteria have been isolated from 10 different strains of Phanerochaete chrysosporium, a white rot fungus which degrades lignocellulosic materials. The investigations showed that one or more bacterial species were always associated with the fungus. Various attempts to eliminate the bacteria on the fungus were unsuccessful. Three different bacterial species were isolated and identified. One of these was Agrobacterium radiobacter, while another may represent a new taxon close to the genus Burkholderia. A third strain remains unidentified but is most probably a member of rRNA superfamily IV or the Woese (alpha) group. Besides P. chrysosporium, 23 other white rot fungi and 9 brown rot fungi were also investigated. None of these was associated with bacteria. The physiological significance of the association between the fungus and the bacteria remains to be elucidated.
Role of the basal ganglia in switching a planned response

The ability to perform an appropriate response in the presence of competing alternatives is a critical facet of human behavioral control. This is especially important if a response is prepared for execution but then has to be changed suddenly. A popular hypothesis of basal ganglia (BG) function suggests that its direct and indirect pathways could provide a neural mechanism to rapidly switch from one planned response to an alternative. However, if one response is more dominant or ‘automatic’ than the other, the BG might have a different role depending on switch direction. We built upon the pro‐ and antisaccade tasks, two models of automatic and voluntary behavior, respectively, and investigated whether the BG are important for switching any planned response in general, or if they are more important for switching from a more automatic response to a response that is more difficult to perform. Subjects prepared either a pro‐ or antisaccade but then had to switch it unexpectedly on a subset of trials. The results revealed increased striatal activation for switching from a pro‐ to an antisaccade but this did not occur for switching from an anti‐ to a prosaccade. This activation pattern depended on the relative difficulty in switching, and it was distinct from frontal eye fields, an area shown to be more active for antisaccade trials than for prosaccade trials. This suggests that the BG are important for compensating for differences in response difficulty, facilitating the rapid switching of one response for another.
Genetic diversity in Prochlorococcus populations flow cytometrically sorted from the Sargasso Sea and Gulf Stream

An investigation into the genetic structure of Prochlorococcus picophytoplankton in depth profiles from the Sargasso Sea and the Gulf Stream revealed a high degree of genetic heterogeneity within local populations. Partial sequencing of cloned polymerase chain reaction products amplified from flow cytometrically sorted cells was used to identify 6–21 different Prochlorococcus perB/D alleles recovered from each of eight sorted samples, with 68 alleles identified among 187 clones in the combined data set. Rarefaction analyses indicated that many additional unsampled alleles were present at each level of sample aggregation. Overlapping sets of alleles were recovered from Prochlorococcus populations in the two water columns, from different depths within each water column, and from flow cytometrically distinguishable subpopulations sorted from the same water sample, suggesting that each of these populations drew their membership from a single gene pool. Consistent with results of autecological studies, members of a high‐light‐adapted Prochlorococcus clade predominated in clone libraries from surface waters. It thus appears that wild Prochlorococcus populations consist of individuals drawn from a variety of evolutionary lineages and that populations at different depths and in two distinct hydrographic rcgimcs recruit their members from the same gene pool. Natural selection favors the predominance of high‐light‐adapted genotypes in near‐surface populations drawn from this gene pool.
Wage Bargaining Institutions – from crisis to crisis

This essay reviews half a century of developments in bargaining coverage, the structure of bargaining, and bargaining coordination respectively in thirty countries, with an emphasis on the last twenty years. Under coverage or the extent of collective bargaining and pay setting, the connection with union density, employer organization, and administrative extension is analysed. In the section on bargaining structure the main issues are decentralisation, multi- or single-employer bargaining, the level at which most bargaining takes place, the organization or articulation of multi-level bargaining, and the existence and use of opening clauses. The discussion of coordination includes an attempt to identify different mechanisms through which wage leadership may be established, varying from state controls to social pacts, and from associational controls to trend- or pattern setting behaviour.
Target-Derived Neurotrophic Factors Regulate the Death of Developing Forebrain Neurons after a Change in their Trophic Requirements

Many neurons die as the normal brain develops. How this is regulated and whether the mechanism involves neurotrophic molecules from target cells are unknown. We found that cultured neurons from a key forebrain structure, the dorsal thalamus, develop a need for survival factors including brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) from their major target, the cerebral cortex, at the age at which they innervate it. Experiments in vivo have shown that rates of dorsal thalamic cell death are reduced by increasing cortical levels of BDNF and are increased in mutant mice lacking functional BDNF receptors or thalamocortical projections; these experiments have also shown that an increase in the rates of dorsal thalamic cell death can be achieved by blocking BDNF in the cortex. We suggest that the onset of a requirement for cortex-derived neurotrophic factors initiates a competitive mechanism regulating programmed cell death among dorsal thalamic neurons.
Hybrid Corporate Performance Prediction Model Considering Technical Capability

Many studies have tried to predict corporate performance and stock prices to enhance investment profitability using qualitative approaches such as the Delphi method. However, developments in data processing technology and machine-learning algorithms have resulted in efforts to develop quantitative prediction models in various managerial subject areas. We propose a quantitative corporate performance prediction model that applies the support vector regression (SVR) algorithm to solve the problem of the overfitting of training data and can be applied to regression problems. The proposed model optimizes the SVR training parameters based on the training data, using the genetic algorithm to achieve sustainable predictability in changeable markets and managerial environments. Technology-intensive companies represent an increasing share of the total economy. The performance and stock prices of these companies are affected by their financial standing and their technological capabilities. Therefore, we apply both financial indicators and technical indicators to establish the proposed prediction model. Here, we use time series data, including financial, patent, and corporate performance information of 44 electronic and IT companies. Then, we predict the performance of these companies as an empirical verification of the prediction performance of the proposed model.
Students Wearing Police Uniforms Exhibit Biased Attention toward Individuals Wearing Hoodies

Police provide an essential public service and they often operate in difficult circumstances, requiring high-speed cognition. Recent incidents involving apparent profiling and aggressive behavior have led to accusations that the police are sometimes biased. Given that previous research has shown a link between clothing and cognition, we investigated the question of whether the police uniform itself might induce a bias in social attention. To address this question, and using a Canadian university student sample, we assessed whether wearing a police uniform biases attention toward black faces compared to white faces, and low-status individuals compared to high-status individuals. In Experiment 1 (n = 28), participants wore either a police-style uniform or mechanic overalls, and performed a shape categorization task in the presence of a distractor that could be either: a black face, a white face, a person wearing a hoodie (whom we propose will be associated with low SES), or a person wearing a suit (whom we propose will be associated with high SES). Participants wearing the police-style uniform exhibited biased attention, indexed by slower reaction times (RTs), in the presence of low-SES images. In Experiment 2 (n = 28), we confirmed this bias using a modified Dot-Probe task – an alternate measure of attentional bias in which we observed faster RTs to a dot probe that was spatially aligned with a low SES image. Experiment 3 (n = 56) demonstrated that attentional bias toward low-SES targets appears only when participants wear the police-style uniform, and not when they are simply exposed to it – by having it placed on the desk in front of them. Our results demonstrate that wearing a police-style uniform biases attention toward low-SES targets. Thus, wearing a police-style uniform may induce a kind of “status-profiling” in which individuals from low-status groups become salient and capture attention. We note that our results are limited to university students and that it will be important to extend them to members of the community and law-enforcement officers. We discuss how uniforms might exert their effects on cognition by virtue of the power and cultural associations they evoke in the wearer.
Interface

This article forms part of a series published as ' Interface: Exclusive countrysides? Rural gentrification, consumer preferences and planning '. In some developed countries such as the UK, in-migration to rural areas is seen as a challenge for community cohesion as affluent newcomers move to accessible rural areas where they displace "locals" from affordable housing. However, in more remote locations, an influx of residents with new skills, entrepreneurial capacity and political capital can represent an opportunity for rural communities. In this paper, we discuss an alternative perspective from the UK experience, by exploring the positive dimensions of in-migration in more remote rural localities.
Modeling regulatory cascades using Artificial Neural Networks: the case of transcriptional regulatory networks shaped during the yeast stress response

Over the last decade, numerous computational methods have been developed in order to infer and model biological networks. Transcriptional networks in particular have attracted significant attention due to their critical role in cell survival. The majority of network inference methods use genome-wide experimental data to search for modules of genes with coherent expression profiles and common regulators, often ignoring the multi-layer structure of transcriptional cascades. Modeling methodologies on the other hand assume a given network structure and vary significantly in their algorithmic approach, ranging from over-simplified representations (e.g., Boolean networks) to detailed -but computationally expensive-network simulations (e.g., with differential equations). In this work we use Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to model transcriptional regulatory cascades that emerge during the stress response in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and extend in three layers. We confine the structure of the ANNs to match the structure of the biological networks as determined by gene expression, DNA-protein interaction and experimental evidence provided in publicly available databases. Trained ANNs are able to predict the expression profile of 11 target genes across multiple experimental conditions with a correlation coefficient >0.7. When time-dependent interactions between upstream transcription factors (TFs) and their indirect targets are also included in the ANNs, accurate predictions are achieved for 30/34 target genes. Moreover, heterodimer formation is taken into account. We show that ANNs can be used to (1) accurately predict the expression of downstream genes in a 3-layer transcriptional cascade based on the expression of their indirect regulators and (2) infer the condition- and time-dependent activity of various TFs as well as during heterodimer formation. We show that a three-layer regulatory cascade whose structure is determined by co-expressed gene modules and their regulators can successfully be modeled using ANNs with a similar configuration.
Torsion anomalous points and families of elliptic curves

We prove that there are at most finitely many complex $\lambda \neq 0,1$ such that two points on the Legendre elliptic curve $Y^2 = X(X-1)(X-\lambda)$ with coordinates $X = 2,3$ both have finite order. This is a very special case of some conjectures on unlikely intersections in semiabelian schemes.
Canonizable Partial Order Generators and Regular Slice Languages

In a previous work we introduced slice graphs as a way to specify both infinite languages of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and infinite languages of partial orders. Therein we focused on the study of Hasse diagram generators, i.e., slice graphs that generate only transitive reduced DAGs, and showed that they could be used to solve several problems related to the partial order behavior of p/t-nets. In the present work we show that both slice graphs and Hasse diagram generators are worth studying on their own. First, we prove that any slice graph SG can be effectively transformed into a Hasse diagram generator HG representing the same set of partial orders. Thus from an algorithmic standpoint we introduce a method of transitive reducing infinite families of DAGs specified by slice graphs. Second, we identify the class of saturated slice graphs. By using our transitive reduction algorithm, we prove that the class of partial order languages representable by saturated slice graphs is closed under union, intersection and even under a suitable notion of complementation (cut-width complementation). Furthermore partial order languages belonging to this class can be tested for inclusion and admit canonical representatives in terms of Hasse diagram generators. As an application of our results, we give stronger forms of some results in our previous work, and establish some unknown connections between the partial order behavior of $p/t$-nets and other well known formalisms for the specification of infinite families of partial orders, such as Mazurkiewicz trace languages and message sequence chart (MSC) languages.
Three-dimensional monitoring of weightlifting for computer assisted training

This paper investigates the use of 3D information in the context of sports training. More specifically, a weightlifting athlete attempt is monitored, helping any coach to train athletes as she/he prefers. Our aim is to detect, collect and extract every useful data which give insight about the body technique during the weightlifting attempt and therefore make all the necessary calculations. A Kinect sensor is used for tracking the weightlifter and collecting depth data during the attempt. Afterwards, data are processed, so that useful information is extracted. In addition, after any attempt, data can be saved and loaded at any time. 2D and 3D graphs are used to illustrate the relevant information. Finally, two attempts can be loaded in parallel for the comparison between two different athletes or between a new and an old registered attempt, giving the ability for matching and correcting different techniques.
Generalized degrees of freedom of the symmetric K-user interference channel with feedback

The symmetric K user interference channel with fully connected topology is considered, in which (a) each receiver suffers interference from all other K - 1 transmitters, and (b) each transmitter has causal and noiseless feedback from its respective receiver. The number of generalized degrees of freedom (GDoF) is characterized in terms of α, where the interference-to-noise ratio (INR) is given by INR = SNRα. It is shown that the number of per-user GDoF of this network is the same as that of the 2-user interference channel with feedback, except for α = 1, for which existence of feedback does not help in terms of GDoF. The coding scheme proposed for this network, termed cooperative interference alignment, is based on two key ingredients, namely, interference alignment and interference decoding.