Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parvalbumin-deficiency facilitates repetitive IPSCs and gamma oscillations in the hippocampus.

In the hippocampus, the calcium-binding protein parvalbumin (PV) is expressed in interneurons that innervate perisomatic regions. PV in GABAergic synaptic terminals was proposed to limit repetitive GABA release by buffering of "residual calcium. " We assessed the role of presynaptic PV in Ca(2+)-dependent GABA release in the hippocampus of PV-deficient (PV-/-) mice and wild-type (PV+/+) littermates. Pharmacologically isolated inhibitory postsynaptic currents (IPSCs) were evoked by low-intensity stimulation of the stratum pyramidale and recorded from voltage-clamped CA1 pyramidal neurons. The amplitude and decay time constant of single IPSCs were similar for both genotypes. Under our experimental conditions of reduced release probability and minimal presynaptic suppression, paired-pulse facilitation of IPSCs occurred at intervals from 2 to 50 ms, irrespective of the presence of PV. The facilitation of IPSCs induced by trains of 10 stimuli at frequencies >20 Hz was enhanced in cells from PV-/- mice, the largest difference between PV-/- and PV+/+ animals (220%) being observed at 33 Hz. The effect of IPSC facilitation at sustained gamma frequencies was assessed on kainate-induced rhythmic IPSC-paced neuronal oscillations at gamma frequencies, recorded with dual field potential recordings in area CA3. The maximum power of the oscillation was 138 microV(2) at 36 Hz in slices from PV+/+ mice and was trebled in slices from PV-/- mice. PV deficiency caused a similar increase in gamma power under conditions used to study IPSC facilitation and can be explained by an increased facilitation of GABA release at sustained high frequencies. The dominant frequency and coherence were not affected by PV deficiency. These observations suggest that PV deficiency, due to an increased short-term facilitation of GABA release, enhances inhibition by high-frequency burst-firing PV-expressing interneurons and may affect the higher cognitive functions associated with gamma oscillations.
Private Information and the Monetary Model of Exchange Rates: Evidence from a Novel Data Set

We propose an exchange rate model which is a hybrid of the conventional specification with monetary fundamentals and the Evans-Lyons microstructure approach. It argues that the failure of the monetary model is principally due to private preference shocks which render the demand for money unstable. These shocks to liquidity preference are revealed through order flow. We estimate a model augmented with order flow variables, using a unique data set: almost 100 monthly observations on inter-dealer order flow on dollar/euro and dollar/yen. The augmented macroeconomic, or “hybrid”, model exhibits out of sample forecasting improvement over the basic macroeconomic and random walk specifications. JEL classification: D82; E41; F31; F47
Door : a dynamic object-oriented data model with roles

Traditional object oriented programming languages do not support the dynamic type change of an object so as to model the behavior of real world entities which change their status over time This is a severe limitation in the context of a database programming language Moreover traditional object oriented languages do not model the fact that the behavior of real world entities may depend on the role that they play This paper describes the data model for DOOR a dynamic object oriented database programming language with role extension which addresses these problems We distinguish object classes from role classes by de ning roles instances of role classes as parts of objects instances of object classes Objects are represented by globally unique and unchangeable identi ers while roles are represented by the names of their role classes as well as their values The data model described in this paper emphasizes the role representation as well as the player quali cation for the role players
Four quadrant and zero speed sensorless control of a switched reluctance motor

A four-quadrant sensorless controller for SRM drives is presented in this paper. The drive system with appropriate turn-on and turn-off angles for each operating quadrant delivers excellent dynamic performance over wide speed range including zero speed. The problems associated with practical implementation especially at low and zero speeds have been addressed and overcome with engineering solutions. Experimental results for a 1 kW switched reluctance motor obtained on a dSPACE-based system are presented along with useful guidelines for practical implementation.
The role of genes domesticated from LTR retrotransposons and retroviruses in mammals

The acquisition of multiple genes from long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons occurred in mammals. Genes belonging to a sushi-ichi-related retrotransposon homologs (SIRH) family emerged around the time of the establishment of two viviparous mammalian groups, marsupials and eutherians. These genes encode proteins that are homologous to a retrotransposon Gag capsid protein and sometimes also have a Pol-like region. We previously demonstrated that PEG10 (SIRH1) and PEG11/RTL1 (SIRH2) play essential but different roles in placental development. PEG10 is conserved in both the marsupials and the eutherians, while PEG11/RTL1 is a eutherian-specific gene, suggesting that these two domesticated genes were deeply involved in the evolution of mammals via the establishment of the viviparous reproduction system. In this review, we introduce the roles of PEG10 and PEG11/RTL1 in mammalian development and evolution, and summarize the other genes domesticated from LTR retrotransposons and endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) in mammals. We also point out the importance of DNA methylation in inactivating and neutralizing the integrated retrotransposons and ERVs in the process of domestication.
Structural Validity of the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency – Second Edition (BOT-2) Subscales and Composite Scales

ABSTRACT The Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency – Second Edition (BOT-2) is a commonly used assessment of children’s skills. It is important that assessments have validity evidence reported about them. The objective of the study was to investigate the structural validity of the BOT-2’s eight subscales and four composite scales. A sample of 117 healthy children (65 males and 52 females; M = 10 years, 2 months, SD = 1 year, 4 months) completed the BOT-2. The Rasch Measurement Model was used to assess the dimensionality, hierarchical ordering, differential item functioning (DIF), and reliability of the eight BOT-2 subscales and four composite scales. The Fine Motor Precision (FMP), Manual Dexterity (MD), Running Speed & Agility (RSA), Upper Limb Coordination (ULC), and Strength (S) subscales exhibited reasonable dimensionality while the Fine Motor Integration (FMI), Bilateral Coordination (BC), and Balance (B) subscales did not. The Motor Coordination Composite (MCC) and Strength & Agility Composite (SAC) composite scales demonstrated good dimensionality while the Fine Motor Manual Control Composite (FMMCC) and Body Coordination (BCC) scales did not. The FMP, MD, BC, and RSA subscales and SAC composite scales did not exhibit adequate hierarchical ordering. The FMI, B, RSA, and ULC subscales and the MCC and BCC composite scales exhibited DIF based on gender. The eight subscales and four composite scales all had excellent item reliability with all coefficients being >. 95. A number of the BOT-2 subscales and composite scales appear problematic with two or more issues in relation to dimensionality, hierarchical ordering, DIF and/or reliability: FMI, BC, B, RSA, and BCC. Therefore, only some of the BOT-2 subscales and composite scales can be used with confidence.
- 3-Are analysts misleading investors ? The case of going-concern opinions 1

This paper addresses the role of security analysts in the short-term market reaction to the publication of a going-concern (GC) modified audit report. We find that the 3-day mean abnormal return associated with the GC announcement is at least -6.9% for firms with analyst coverage in comparison with only -2.9% for non-covered firms (significant at <0.01). Our results show that the significant more adverse reaction in the case of followed firms is driven by the trading behavior of retail investors, who are unable to understand that analysts do not always mean what they say. In particular, retail investors are mislead by the 87% of cases where analyst recommendations exert positive or no “pressure” on these non-sophisticated clientele (i.e., “strong buy”, “buy” or “hold”). These optimistic pre-GC recommendations are likely to keep stock prices artificially high and lead investors to delay the incorporation of going-concern uncertainties into stock prices. We conclude that retail investor clientele of GC firms is misled by its naïve interpretation analyst stock recommendations. As such, investors should not rely solely on analysts’ recommendations in their investment decisions and should follow SEC’s advice to do their homework before investing.
The neurotoxic carboxy-terminal fragment of the Alzheimer amyloid precursor binds specifically to a neuronal cell surface molecule: pH dependence of the neurotoxicity and the binding

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease neurodegeneration is the accumulation of deposits of amyloid in neuritic plaques and in the cerebral vasculature. Recent studies have implicated carboxy-terminal fragments of the Alzheimer amyloid precursor protein (beta APP) in the processes of amyloidogenesis and neurodegeneration. In particular, the carboxy-terminal 104 amino acids of beta APP (beta APP-C104) have been shown to cause amyloid-like fibrils when expressed in non-neuronal cells and to cause the degeneration of neuronal cells. These data suggest that it may play a role in the development of the progressive neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease. We hypothesized that beta APP- C104 may cause the degeneration of neurons by interacting with a cell surface receptor. In the present report, we show that beta APP-C104 synthesized in vitro binds specifically and with high affinity to the surface of NGF-treated PC12 cells. Both the cell surface binding and the neurotoxicity of beta APP-C104 are pH dependent and are not inhibited by tachykinins. Mutational analysis suggests that both the binding and the neurotoxicity are dependent at least in part on the presence of a tyrosine residue that is a potential site of phosphorylation at the carboxy terminus of the fragment.
ESSAYS ON NEWS AND ASSET PRICES

Title of dissertation: ESSAYS ON NEWS AND ASSET PRICES Nitish Ranjan Sinha, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Albert S. Kyle Department of Finance Robert H. Smith School of Business The first essay examines news and the cross section of returns. Using a sentiment score provided by Thomson Reuters to measure the tone of news articles, this paper examines monthly portfolio returns constructed from information about past news articles. The sentiment score is obtained from the kind of words and phrases that are used in the news article. Positive tone in news articles in the past months predicts positive returns. Similarly, negative tone in the past months predicts negative returns. Past sentiment predicts future returns even for large stocks. The predictive ability of past sentiment dominates the predictive ability of past returns. After controlling for past sentiment, the predictive ability of past returns (in predicting future return) disappears. The findings are robust to multiple specifications. The predictive ability of past sentiment can be used profitably. When applied to the largest decile of stocks, a strategy that takes a long position in stocks with past positive sentiment score and a short position in stocks with past negative sentiment score generates a statistically significant alpha of 34 basis points per month. The resulting portfolio is also positively correlated with a long-short momentum portfolio. Within the same time period, a trading strategy using the sentiment scores from the subset of news articles citing analysts is not profitable. The news items that cite analysts have economically significant contemporaneous returns. The findings suggest that (i) the market underreacts to information contained in news articles, (ii) momentum might be related to underreaction to the sentiment information, and (iii) market participants pay attention to sentiment score information in analyst news. The findings are consistent with a model where one trader has private information and others are trading based on past returns and volume information. The paper also shows that after adjusting for firm size, stocks with abnormally high counts of news articles underperform stocks with normal counts of news. Stocks with abnormally low newscounts also underperform. The second essay examines the relationship between news and trading activity. The theory of trading game invariance of Kyle and Obizhaeva (2009) predicts that for every one percent increase in trading activity, the frequency of news articles should increase two-thirds of one percent. Using news data from 2003 to 2008, we show that the cross-sectional variation in news articles across stocks is related to the trading activity in a manner consistent with the trading game invariance. The relationship is robust to various estimation procedures including models of count data. The relationship is also robust to multiple ways of counting news and excluding various type of firm specific news. ESSAYS ON NEWS AND ASSET PRICES
A Kinect-based people-flow counting system

This paper proposed a bi-directional people-flow counting system with Kinect. It can also be applied to multi-flow to correspond with the demand for the practical application. Firstly, we set the Kinect above the doorway to capture the situation of pedestrian flow. Then this system detects people in the covering area using the depth image information from Kinect system. And we do the morphological processing like erosion to the object and find the region of interest (ROI) often performed on using a mapping-based detection approach. After these previous steps, this system set a detected line and let people go through it. Therefore, we can get people number of the experimental result. For the multi-flow case, it will cause the occlusion problem, so we could apply the depth information to distinguish the target on occlusion problem. Final, we compare the experimental results with the manual count results and other research. Under normal circumstances, our system provides not only almost 100% for bi-directional counting but also correspond with the demand for real-time.
Sextic anharmonic oscillators and orthogonal polynomials

Under certain constraints on the parameters a, b and c, it is known that Schrodinger's equation −d2ψ/dx2 + (ax6 + bx4 + cx2)ψ = Eψ, a > 0, with the sextic anharmonic oscillator potential is exactly solvable. In this paper we show that the exact wavefunction ψ is the generating function for a set of orthogonal polynomials {P(t)n(x)} in the energy variable E. Some of the properties of these polynomials are discussed in detail and our analysis reveals scaling and factorization properties that are central to quasi-exact solvability. We also prove that this set of orthogonal polynomials can be reduced, by means of a simple scaling transformation, to a remarkable class of orthogonal polynomials, Pn(E) = P(0)n(E) recently discovered by Bender and Dunne.
Economics and Psychology. The Framing of Decisions

In the Theory of Rational Decision Making the psychological aspects are set aside. This contribution seeks to point out the relevance of psychology into eco- nomic decisions. The essay treats the “framing of decisions”, which is a pillar of Kahneman’s behavioral theory. Framing must be considered a special case of the more general phenomenon of dependency from the representation. The best-known risky choice-framing problem, i.e. the “Asian Disease Problem”, is shown where an essen- tial aspect of rationality: invariance, is violated. In addition, the contribution ex- plains Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory and illustrates their value function. Finally, it discusses the reversals of preference in framing and framing of contingen- cies. The framing manipulation is viewed as a public tool for influencing the decision maker’s private framing of the problem in terms of gains or losses, which determines the decision maker’s evaluation of the options. In conclusion, the psychology of choice is relevant both for the descriptive question of how decisions are made and for the nor- mative question of how decisions ought to be made.
Supervised Machine Learning Applied to Link Prediction in Bipartite Social Networks

This work copes with the problem of link prediction in large-scale two-mode social networks. Two variations of the link prediction tasks are studied: predicting links in a bipartite graph and predicting links in a unimodal graph obtained by the projection of a bipartite graph over one of its node sets. For both tasks, we show in an empirical way, that taking into account the bipartite nature of the graph can enhance substantially the performances of prediction models we learn. This is achieved by introducing new variations of topological atttributes to measure the likelihood of two nodes to be connected. Our approach, for both tasks, consists in expressing the link prediction problem as a two class discrimination problem. Classical supervised machine learning approaches can then be applied in order to learn prediction models. Experimental validation of the proposed approach is carried out on two real data sets: a co-authoring network extracted from the DBLP bibliographical database and bipartite graph history of transactions on an on-line music e-commerce site.
Network traffic characterisation using flow-based statistics

Performing research on live network traffic requires the traffic to be well documented and described. The results of such research are heavily dependent on the particular network. This paper presents a study of network characteristics, which can be used to describe the behaviour of a network. We propose a number of characteristics that can be collected from the networks and evaluate them on five different networks of Masaryk University. The proposed characteristics cover IP, transport and application layers of the network traffic. Moreover, they reflect strong day-night and weekday patterns that are present in most of the networks. Variation in the characteristics between the networks indicates that they can be used for the description and differentiation of the networks. Furthermore, a weak correlation between the chosen characteristics implies their independence and contribution to network description.
Multi-objective decision-making problems for discrete-time stochastic systems with state- and disturbance-dependent noise

In this paper, we consider three types of infinite-horizon multi-objective decision-making problems for a class of discrete-time linear stochastic systems with state- and disturbance-dependent noise. First, the H2/H∞ control problem with multiple decision makers is considered. Second, in order to improve the transient response, the linear quadratic control under the Pareto solution is investigated. Finally, the soft-constrained stochastic Nash games are formulated in which robustness is attained against disturbance input. The decision strategies for the three types of problem are derived. It is found that the conditions for the existences of these strategies are related to the solutions of cross-coupled stochastic algebraic Riccati equations (CSAREs). We develop some new algorithms based on linear matrix inequality (LMI) to solve the CSAREs. Numerical example is provided to verify the efficiency of the proposed decision strategies.
Mechanisms and Mediators of Psychological Stress-Induced Rise in Core Temperature

Objective Despite numerous case reports on “psychogenic fever,” it remains uncertain how psychological stress raises core temperature and whether the rise in core temperature is a real fever or a hyperthermia. This article reviews studies on the psychological stress–induced rise in core temperature (PSRCT) in animals with the aim to facilitate studies on the mechanisms of so-called psychogenic fever in humans. Methods To address this question, we reviewed the mechanisms and mediators of the PSRCT and classic conditioning of the fever response in animals. Results The PSRCT is not due to the increased locomotor activity during stress, and the magnitude of the PSRCT is the same in warm and cold environments, indicating that it is a centrally regulated rise in temperature due to an elevated thermoregulatory “set point. ” The PSRCT caused by conventional psychological stress models, such as open-field stress, is attenuated by cyclooxygenase inhibitors, which block prostaglandin synthesis. On the other hand, the PSRCT elicited by an “anticipatory anxiety stress” is not inhibited by cyclooxygenase inhibitors but by benzodiazepines and serotonin Type 1A receptor agonists. The febrile response can be conditioned to neutral stimuli after paired presentation with unconditioned stimuli such as injection of lipopolysaccharide, a typical pyrogen. Conclusions Most findings indicate that the PSRCT is a fever, a rise in the thermoregulatory set point. The PSRCT may occur through prostaglandin E2–dependent mechanisms and prostaglandin E2–independent, 5-HT–mediated mechanisms. The febrile response can be conditioned. Thus, these mechanisms might be involved in psychogenic fever in humans.
The pallial basal ganglia pathway modulates the behaviorally driven gene expression of the motor pathway

The discrete neural network for songbird vocal communication provides an effective system to study neural mechanisms of learned motor behaviors in vertebrates. This system consists of two pathways − a vocal motor pathway used to produce learned vocalizations and a vocal pallial basal ganglia loop used to learn and modify the vocalizations. However, it is not clear how the loop exerts control over the motor pathway. To study the mechanism, we used expression of the neural activity‐induced gene ZENK (or egr‐1), which shows singing‐regulated expression in a social context‐dependent manner: high levels in both pathways when singing undirected and low levels in the lateral part of the loop and in the robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA) of the motor pathway when singing directed to another animal. Here, we show that there are two parallel interactive parts within the pallial basal ganglia loop, lateral and medial, which modulate singing‐driven ZENK expression of the motor pathway nuclei RA and HVC, respectively. Within the loop, the striatal and pallial nuclei appear to have opposing roles; the striatal vocal nucleus lateral AreaX is required for high ZENK expression in its downstream nuclei, particularly during undirected singing, while the pallial vocal lateral magnocellular nucleus of the anterior nidopallium is required for lower expression, particularly during directed singing. These results suggest a dynamic molecular interaction between the basal ganglia pathway and the motor pathway during production of a learned motor behavior.