Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatial tuning of reaching activity in the medial parieto‐occipital cortex (area V6A) of macaque monkey

We recorded neural activity from the medial parieto‐occipital area V6A while three monkeys performed an instructed‐delay reaching task in the dark. Targets to be reached were in different spatial positions. Neural discharges were recorded during reaching movements directed outward from the body (towards visual objects), during the holding phase (when the hand was on the target) and during inward movements of the hand towards the home button (which was near the body and outside the field of view). Reach‐related activity was observed in the majority of 207 V6A cells, during outward (78%) and inward (65%) movements as well as during the holding phase (62%). Most V6A reaching neurons (84%) were modulated in more than one phase of the task. The reach‐related activity in V6A could depend on somatosensory inputs and/or on corollary discharges from the dorsal premotor cortex. Although visual and oculomotor inputs are known to have a strong influence on V6A activity, we excluded the possibility that the reach‐related activity which we observed was due to visual stimulation and/or oculomotor activity. Reach‐related activity for movements towards different locations was spatially modulated during outward (40%) and inward (47%) reaching movements. The position of the hand/arm in space modulated about 40% of V6A cells. Preferred reach directions and spatial locations were represented uniformly across the workspace. These data suggest that V6A reach‐related neurons are able to code the direction of movement of the arm and the position of the hand/arm in space. We suggest that the V6A reach‐related neurons are involved in the guidance of goal‐directed arm movements, whether these actions are visually guided or not.
The Turkish Phillips Curve Experience and the New Keynesian Phillips Curve: A Conceptualization and Application of a Novel Measure for Marginal Costs

This paper analyzes an application of a novel measure for marginal costs within the framework of the new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) for Turkey. We show that the commonly used labor income share is a weak proxy variable for marginal costs in the Turkish economy and propose a marginal cost index to mitigate these shortcomings. Further, our results indicate that there exists no conventional and expectation-augmented Phillips curve in Turkey and that the output gap Phillips curve only provides an insubstantial depiction of Turkish inflation from 2005 to 2009. On the contrary, the conventional and hybrid NKPC are both found to be valid descriptions of the inflation process in Turkey.
Regional feedbacks among fire, climate, and tropical deforestation

[1] Numerous studies with general circulation models suggest that tropical deforestation can result in regional-scale climate change; namely, increased air temperature and wind speed and reduced precipitation and relative humidity. To quantify how this climate change should affect fire risk, we used the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) CCM3.2 general circulation model and remote sensing to estimate the effect of tropical deforestation on fire risk through the McArthur forest fire danger index (FFDI). Deforestation reduced precipitation and relative humidity and increased wind speed in the Amazon, Congo, and Indonesia/New Guinea. FFDI increased by 41, 56, and 58% in these three regions, respectively, primarily owing to higher wind speeds and reduced precipitation. Actual fire occurrence in the Amazon, as determined from NOAA-12 images, was strongly correlated with the FFDI calculated from meteorological data (P ≪ 0.0001). Using the observed relationship between FFDI and fire occurrence, we estimate increases in fire frequency of 44, 80, and 123%, in the Amazon, Congo, and Indonesia, respectively, with deforestation. In all three regions the largest relative increases in fire risk occurred in the more humid areas with the lowest original fire risk.
Section Ii-exercise Physiology & Sports Medicine Validity of the Ithlete Tm Smart Phone Application for Determining Ultra-short-term Heart Rate Variability Material and Methods

Authors submitted their contribution of the article to the editorial board. The purpose of this investigation was to cross-validate the ithlete TM heart rate variability smart phone application with an electrocardiograph for determining ultra-short-term root mean square of successive R-R intervals. The root mean square of successive R-R intervals was simultaneously determined via electrocardiograph and ithlete TM at rest in twenty five healthy participants. There were no significant differences between the electrocardiograph and ithlete TM derived root mean square of successive R-R interval values (p > 0.05) and the correlation was near perfect (r = 0.99, p < 0.001). In addition, the ithlete TM revealed a Standard Error of the Estimate of 1.47 and Bland Altman plot showed that the limits of agreement ranged from 2.57 below to 2.63 above the constant error of-0.03. In conclusion, the ithlete TM appeared to provide a suitably accurate measure of root mean square of successive R-R intervals when compared to the electrocardiograph measures obtained in the laboratory within the current sample of healthy adult participants. The current study lays groundwork for future research determining the efficacy of ithlete TM for reflecting athletic training status over a chronic conditioning period. Introduction Athletes exposed to high training loads and demanding competition schedules are at risk of experiencing unintentional overreaching, illness and injury when sufficient recovery is unattained. Heart rate variability (HRV), a non-invasive marker of autonomic status extrapolated from successive R peaks obtained by an electrocardiograph (ECG), is emerging as a valuable training status biometric used to objectively measure stress levels in athletes. A growing body of evidence supports the utility of HRV's efficacy in sports training for the purposes of guiding periodization (Hautala et al. Traditional HRV recordings are often performed in specialized laboratories and involve considerable time demand (i.e., at least 5-minute recordings) and a qualified technician for interpretation. These requirements make HRV assessment within athletic field settings difficult. Thus, practical measures capable of providing interpretable HRV data quickly, easily and affordably are desired. At present, there are various HRV field tools commercially available, though few have been validated. For example, several heart rate monitors have been shown to provide accurate R-R interval data, such as the heart rate monitors provide more practicality than traditional HRV measures, they still require manual 86 Validity of the ithlete TM smart phone application for determining ultra-short-term heart rate variability exportation of the raw data to a …
Overconfidence and trading volume

Theoretical models predict that overconfident investors will trade more than rational investors. We directly test this hypothesis by correlating individual overconfidence scores with several measures of trading volume of individual investors. Approximately 3,000 online broker investors were asked to answer an internet questionnaire which was designed to measure various facets of overconfidence (miscalibration, volatility estimates, better than average effect). The measures of trading volume were calculated by the trades of 215 individual investors who answered the questionnaire. We find that investors who think that they are above average in terms of investment skills or past performance (but who did not have above average performance in the past) trade more. Measures of miscalibration are, contrary to theory, unrelated to measures of trading volume. This result is striking as theoretical models that incorporate overconfident investors mainly motivate this assumption by the calibration literature and model overconfidence as underestimation of the variance of signals. In connection with other recent findings, we conclude that the usual way of motivating and modeling overconfidence which is mainly based on the calibration literature has to be treated with caution. Moreover, our way of empirically evaluating behavioral finance models—the correlation of economic and psychological variables and the combination of psychometric measures of judgment biases (such as overconfidence scores) and field data'seems to be a promising way to better understand which psychological phenomena actually drive economic behavior.
Changes in agricultural land ownership in Poland in the period of the market economy.

The article concentrates on the changes of ownership ongoing in Polish agriculture in the period 1989–2004. Since Polish agriculture was above all private in nature throughout the period of communism, the changes in question were actually more limited than in other central and East European countries (cEEc). Those that have taken place have first and foremost involved the privatisation of the old State Farms, whose assets were taken over by individually-owned farms or commercial-law companies, with the intermediation of the Treasury Agricultural Property Agency established for the purpose. A major element of the assets undergoing privatisation was agricultural land. The size of the ownership change has varied from region to region. in the West and north, where more than half of all farmland was in the State Farm hands to 1989, there was a marked increase in the share of land under private ownership. on the other hand, in central and Eastern Poland, the changes were very limited, concerning only the transfer of land between private farms. important reasons accounting for the limited activity on the market for land in this part of Poland include the agrarian overpopulation and the widespread treatment of land as a form of the “insurance policy” against job losses. The ownership changes have further encouraged polarisation where farm size structure is concerned. Farms increased in size in the regions where the large average area has long been a typical feature. in turn, the areas characterised by the excessive agrarian fragmentation have not seen any more major changes in the size structure over the recent period. A detailed analysis of the changes in ownership over the market economy period is preceded by a discussion of the history of land ownership in Polish agriculture, with a particular emphasis being placed on the communist era. The legal and social bases conditioning ownership change are also discussed.
On Hit Inflation Techniques and Detection in Streams of Web Advertising Networks

Click fraud is jeopardizing the industry of Internet advertising. Internet advertising is crucial for the thriving of the entire Internet, since it allows producers to advertise their products, and hence contributes to the well being of e-commerce. Moreover, advertising supports the intellectual value of the Internet by covering the running expenses of the content publishers' sites. Some publishers are dishonest, and use automation to generate traffic to defraud the advertisers. Similarly, some advertisers automate clicks on the advertisements of their competitors to deplete their competitors ' advertising budgets. In this paper, we describe the advertising network model, and discuss the issue of fraud that is an integral problem in such setting. We propose using online algorithms on aggregate data to accurately and proactively detect automated traffic, preserve surfers' privacy, while not altering the industry model. We provide a complete classification of the hit inflation techniques; and devise stream analysis techniques that detect a variety of fraud attacks. We abstract detecting the fraud attacks of some classes as theoretical stream analysis problems that we bring to the data management research community as open problems. A framework is outlined for deploying the proposed detection algorithms on a generic architecture. We conclude by some successful preliminary findings of our attempt to detect fraud on a real network.
A generalized polygamma function

We study the properties of a function ψ(z, q) (the generalized polygamma function), intimately connected with the Hurwitz zeta function and defined for complex values of the variables z and q, which is entire in the variable z and reduces to the usual polygamma function ψ(m)(q) for z a non-negative integer m, and to the balanced negapolygamma function ψ(−m)(q) introduced in Ref. [5] for z a negative integer −m. *E-mail: oliver.espinosa@fis.utfsm. cl
Long Range Regulation of Human FXN Gene Expression

Background Friedreich ataxia (FRDA) is the most common form of hereditary ataxia characterized by the presence of a GAA trinucleotide repeat expansion within the first intron of the FXN gene. The expansion inhibits FXN gene expression resulting in an insufficiency of frataxin protein. Methodology/Principal Finding In this study, computational analyses were performed on the 21.3 kb region upstream of exon 1 of the human FXN gene and orthologs from other species in order to identify conserved non-coding DNA sequences with potential regulatory functions. The conserved non-coding regions identified were individually analyzed in two complementing assay systems, a conventional luciferase reporter system and a novel Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC)-based genomic reporter. The BAC system allows the evaluation of gene expression to be made in the context of its entire genomic locus and preserves the normal location and spacing of many regulatory elements which may be positioned over large distances from the initiation codon of the gene. Conclusions/Significance The two approaches were used to identify a region of 17 bp located approximately 4.9 kb upstream of the first exon of the FXN gene that plays an important role in FXN gene expression. Modulation of FXN gene expression was found to be mediated by the action of the Oct-1 transcription factor at this site. A better understanding of cis-acting regulatory elements that control FXN gene expression has the potential to develop new strategies for the upregulation of the FXN gene as a therapy for FRDA.
Investment Herding by Life Insurers and Its Impact on Bond Prices

One of the main arguments for why life insurers are systemically important is that their investment decisions are highly correlated, i.e., that life insurers herd. We analyze U.S. life insurers’ investment decisions in corporate bonds from 2002 to 2011 to provide evidence on whether investment activities are correlated across companies within the life insurance industry. Based on two herding measures, we find that on average life insurers herd in corporate bonds. Holding other factors constant, sell side herding is greater in smaller bonds, bonds with lower ratings, bonds that have been downgraded, and when insurers with low RBC ratios trade the bond. Buy side herding is greater, all else equal, when insurers that are part of a group that has been designated as a SIFI trade the bond. We also investigate whether insurer herding behavior is likely to be destabilizing to bond markets by examining abnormal returns prior, during, and subsequent to insurer herding. We find evidence that sell side herding is pro-cyclical, i.e., follows negative abnormal returns and that bond returns are abnormally low during the quarter when insurers exhibit high sell side herding. These effects are more pronounced during the financial crisis and when insurers that are part of a group that has been designed as a SIFI trade the bond. However, we do not find that these price effects are subsequently reversed, which is what one would expect if the selling pressure pushed prices away from fundamental values. Acknowledgments: The authors appreciate the helpful comments from Anaa Agapova, Allen Berger, Yongqiang Chu, David Cummins, Marco Eugster, Shingo Goto, Jean Helwege, Ozgur Ince, Liang Ma, Andreas Milidonis, Ashleigh Poindexter, Eric Powers, Herman Saheruddin, Daniel Schwarcz, Mary Weiss, and DH Zhang and seminar participants at the University of South Carolina and Temple University.
Effects of Cognitive Style on Web Search and Navigation

This study examined how users with different cognitive styles locate information on a university Web site, a hypermedia-based information system. A hypermedia system is considered to be capable of accommodating cognitive style differences because of its multimodal attributes. Undergraduate students with different cognitive styles (field-dependence and field-independence) participated in the study. Findings suggest that the level of users’ online search experience influenced effects of cognitive style on the search and navigational behavior. Only the field-dependent users with little or no online experience seemed to have difficulties in retrieving information on the Web.
Understanding and Evaluating WAOB/USDA Corn Yield Forecasts

As the calendar turns to May, the market will begin focusing in earnest on the yield prospects for the 2015 U.S. corn crop (farmdoc daily, April 27, 2015). One of the key early assessments is the projection of the U.S. average corn yield by the USDA’s World Agricultural Outlook Board (WAOB). Since 1993, those projections have been used in the May, June, and July WASDE reports to make supply, ending stocks, and price projections for the upcoming marketing year. The May 2015 WASDE report will be released on May 12. Previous research has shown that the release of these early projections—particularly in May—has a significant impact on prices in the corn futures market (Isengildina-Massa et al., 2008). While it is clear that the WAOB yield forecasts are perceived by market participants as containing important new information, these forecasts appear to be poorly understood by many and often confused with later forecasts released by the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) of the USDA. The purpose of today’s article is to describe the methodology for WAOB corn yield forecasts, demonstrate how the methodology has changed over time, and evaluate the historical accuracy of the forecasts. The analysis of forecast accuracy updates results published in an earlier research report on USDA forecasts and estimates (Irwin, Sanders, and Good, 2014). That evaluation was for the period 1993 through 2012. Here we extend the analysis for corn through the 2014 crop year.
Decoding Actions at Different Levels of Abstraction

Brain regions that mediate action understanding must contain representations that are action specific and at the same time tolerate a wide range of perceptual variance. Whereas progress has been made in understanding such generalization mechanisms in the object domain, the neural mechanisms to conceptualize actions remain unknown. In particular, there is ongoing dissent between motor-centric and cognitive accounts whether premotor cortex or brain regions in closer relation to perceptual systems, i.e., lateral occipitotemporal cortex, contain neural populations with such mapping properties. To date, it is unclear to which degree action-specific representations in these brain regions generalize from concrete action instantiations to abstract action concepts. However, such information would be crucial to differentiate between motor and cognitive theories. Using ROI-based and searchlight-based fMRI multivoxel pattern decoding, we sought brain regions in human cortex that manage the balancing act between specificity and generality. We investigated a concrete level that distinguishes actions based on perceptual features (e.g., opening vs closing a specific bottle), an intermediate level that generalizes across movement kinematics and specific objects involved in the action (e.g., opening different bottles with cork or screw cap), and an abstract level that additionally generalizes across object category (e.g., opening bottles or boxes). We demonstrate that the inferior parietal and occipitotemporal cortex code actions at abstract levels whereas the premotor cortex codes actions at the concrete level only. Hence, occipitotemporal, but not premotor, regions fulfill the necessary criteria for action understanding. This result is compatible with cognitive theories but strongly undermines motor theories of action understanding.
Does suicidal desire moderate the association between frontal delta power and psychological pain?

Psychological pain frequently underlies thoughts of suicide. We investigated if recent suicidal desire moderated the association between potential neurophysiological markers and psychological pain assessed on the Psychache Scale (PS) and the Orbach & Mikulincer Mental Pain Questionnaire (OMMP). The OMMP specifically assesses current psychological pain that may more readily capture emotions present during recent suicidal desire. In contrast, the PS leaves the timeframe undefined. A secondary analysis was conducted of resting-state EEG data and heart rate obtained in adults with a history of depression. In simultaneous multiple regression models, while controlling for depressive symptoms, recent suicidal desire moderated associations with right-frontal EEG delta power (ΔR2 = .07, p < .01) and low-frequency heart rate variability (nonsignificantly) for pain assessed on the PS. No indication for moderation was found for pain on the OMMP. The relationship between the two measures of psychological pain was stronger for individuals with recent suicidal desire (r = .75, p < .01 vs. r = .50, p < .05). The findings suggest that, unless a respondent’s psychological pain is recent and substantial, the PS may not capture the intensity of current psychological pain as effectively as the OMMP.
Skill acquisition of manual wheelchair propulsion: initial motor learning

Changes in propulsion technique due to motor learning might account for a higher mechanical efficiency (ME, the ratio of internal power over external power). The changes in ME and propulsion technique were studied in a learning experiment, three times a week for eight minutes, with nine able-bodied subjects, simulating early rehabilitation. Instrumented wheels measured three-dimensional forces and torques on the handrim. During practice peak torques were reduced, work per cycle increased, while push frequency decreased, at a stable power output and speed of the treadmill. Over the three weeks of practice propulsion technique kept changing in combination with an increase of ME. Results suggest skill acquisition because of motor learning. The rise in ME seems logically related to propulsion technique, but is not yet fully understood. More insight in motor learning and skill acquisition will contribute to understanding and optimizing rehabilitation strategies in the light of wheelchair provision in early rehabilitation.
Teacher Efficacy, Supervision, and the Special Education Resource-Room Teacher

ABSTRACT The Gibson and Dembo Teacher Efficacy Scale was modified for use in the special education resource-room context. A factor analysis of the modified instrument resulted in a factor structure comparable to one based on regular-education teachers, as reported in prior research. The relation between instructional supervision and teacher efficacy among these teachers was also examined. With sex, age, resource-room tenure, and job satisfaction held constant, the perceived utility—but not frequency—of supervision was significantly related to teacher efficacy. The implications of these findings for both research and practice in the special education context are considered.