Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Dopaminergic Midbrain Participates in Human Episodic Memory Formation: Evidence from Genetic Imaging

Recent data from animal studies raise the possibility that dopaminergic neuromodulation promotes the encoding of novel stimuli. We investigated a possible role for the dopaminergic midbrain in human episodic memory by measuring how polymorphisms in dopamine clearance pathways affect encoding-related brain activity (functional magnetic resonance imaging) in an episodic memory task. In 51 young, healthy adults, successful episodic encoding was associated with activation of the substantia nigra. This midbrain activation was modulated by a functional variable number of tandem repeat (VNTR) polymorphism in the dopamine transporter (DAT1) gene. Despite no differences in memory performance between genotype groups, carriers of the (low expressing) 9-repeat allele of the DAT1 VNTR showed relatively higher midbrain activation when compared with subjects homozygous for the 10-repeat allele, who express DAT1 at higher levels. The catechol-O-methyl transferase (COMT) Val108/158Met polymorphism, which is known to modulate enzyme activity, affected encoding-related activity in the right prefrontal cortex (PFC) and in occipital brain regions but not in the midbrain. Moreover, subjects homozygous for the (low activity) Met allele showed stronger functional coupling between the PFC and the hippocampus during encoding. Our finding that genetic variations in the dopamine clearance pathways affect encoding-related activation patterns in midbrain and PFC provides strong support for a role of dopaminergic neuromodulation in human episodic memory formation. It also supports the hypothesis of anatomically and functionally distinct roles for DAT1 and COMT in dopamine metabolism, with DAT1 modulating rapid, phasic midbrain activity and COMT being particularly involved in prefrontal dopamine clearance.
Continuous-wave Doppler cooling of hydrogen atoms with two-photon transitions

We propose and analyze the possibility of performing two-photon continuous-wave Doppler cooling of hydrogen atoms using the $1S\ensuremath{-}2S$ transition. ``Quenching'' of the $2S$ level (by coupling with the $2P$ state) is used to increase the cycling frequency, and to control the equilibrium temperature. Theoretical and numerical studies of the heating effect due to Doppler-free two-photon transitions evidence an increase of the temperature by a factor of 2. The equilibrium temperature decreases with the effective (quenching-dependent) width of the excited state and can thus be adjusted up to values close to the recoil temperature.
Serial relaying communications over generalized-gamma fading channels

In this paper, a study on the end-to-end performance of multi-hop non-regenerative relaying networks over independent generalized-gamma (GG) fading channels is presented. Using an upper bound for the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), novel closed-form expressions for the probability density function, the moments, and the moments-generating function of the end-to-end SNR are presented. Based on these derived formulas, lower bounds for the outage and the average bit error probability (ABEP) are derived in closed form. Special attention is given to the low- and high-SNR regions having practical interest as well as to the Nakagami fading scenario. Moreover, the performance of the considered system when employing adaptive square-quadrature amplitude modulation is further analyzed in terms of the average spectral efficiency, the bit error outage, and the ABEP. Computer simulation results verify the tightness and the accuracy of the proposed bounds. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Myocilin mutations among primary open angle glaucoma patients of Kanyakumari district, South India

Purpose Glaucoma can be defined as optic neuropathy leading to irreversible blindness if not treated in time. Primary open angle glaucoma (POAG) is the most common form of glaucoma. The myocilin (MYOC) gene has been found to mutate in both sporadic and familial cases of POAG worldwide. About 90% of these mutations have been seen to cluster at exon III of the gene. There are documented reports of mutations in the MYOC gene among POAG patients from different parts of India. The southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent (Kanyakumari district) has remained isolated from all these studies. The aim of this study was to indicate or rule out the disease causative role of the MYOC gene mutations in these patients by screening the MYOC gene for mutations among POAG patients of the Kanyakumari district. Methods One hundred POAG patients from the Kanyakumari District of South India were recruited for the study. The MYOC gene was screened using the PCR-SSCP methodology followed by DNA sequencing. The sequences were analyzed using BLAST. Secondary structures of the amino acid sequences with a variation were predicted. Results Two probable disease-causing variations (mutations), Ser331Thr and Pro370Leu, were each observed in one patient apiece. Two polymorphisms, (Tyr347Tyr and Thr325Thr) were also observed in the patients. Ser331Thr is a novel conservative change while Pro370Leu is a widely reported mutation with an associated severe disease phenotype. Conclusions The presence of the mutations in the patients suggests the causative role of the MYOC gene among POAG patients in the Kanyakumari district of India. The mutation frequency of 2% corresponds well with the other reports from India and other countries. However, the mutation rate reported from a population in the eastern part of India was much higher. Screening of patients from different parts of India is essential to estimate the overall mutation frequency. More functional studies on the MYOC gene are required to elucidate the pathophysiology of POAG.
Heterogeneous Macrolide Resistance and Gene Conversion in the Pneumococcus

ABSTRACT A macrolide-resistant clinical isolate of Streptococcus pneumoniae with 23S rRNA mutations showed a heterogeneous phenotype and genotype. The mutant 23S rRNA genes from this isolate transformed susceptible strain R6 to resistance. Culture of resistant strain R6 in the absence of antibiotic pressure showed gene conversion to occur between the four 23S rRNA alleles, resulting in reversion to susceptibility with the resistant phenotype showing a fitness cost. These data explain the disappearance on subculture of heterogeneous macrolide resistance in the pneumococcus.
Plant response to soils, site preparation, and initial pine planting density.

This study described the effects of soils, site preparation, and initial pine regeneration spacings on tree growth and the associated understory woody and herbaceous plant succession. Although Sawyer soils appeared more productive than Ruston soils before the harvest and regeneration treatments, woody and herbaceous plant differences were not apparent between the soils after regeneration. During the first 3 years after treatment, the mechanical site preparation method (shear-windrow-burn) reduced woody plant heights more than the underplant-release method; however, these height differences disappeared by the 6th year of post-treatment. Woody plant densities decreased initially, increased by the 6th year after treatment, and decreased to pretreatment levels by the 10th year. Herbage yields increased significantly after site preparation and pine regeneration through the 3rd year, decreased by the 6th year, and declined to levels below pretreatment by the 10th year. initial pine planting densities did not significantly influence the understory herbage yields during the first 10 years as a result of the confounding effects of the other woody plant growth.
Abiotic Deposition of Fe Complexes onto Leptothrix Sheaths

Bacteria classified in species of the genus Leptothrix produce extracellular, microtubular, Fe-encrusted sheaths. The encrustation has been previously linked to bacterial Fe oxidases, which oxidize Fe(II) to Fe(III) and/or active groups of bacterial exopolymers within sheaths to attract and bind aqueous-phase inorganics. When L. cholodnii SP-6 cells were cultured in media amended with high Fe(II) concentrations, Fe(III) precipitates visibly formed immediately after addition of Fe(II) to the medium, suggesting prompt abiotic oxidation of Fe(II) to Fe(III). Intriguingly, these precipitates were deposited onto the sheath surface of bacterial cells as the population was actively growing. When Fe(III) was added to the medium, similar precipitates formed in the medium first and were abiotically deposited onto the sheath surfaces. The precipitates in the Fe(II) medium were composed of assemblies of globular, amorphous particles (ca. 50 nm diameter), while those in the Fe(III) medium were composed of large, aggregated particles (≥3 µm diameter) with a similar amorphous structure. These precipitates also adhered to cell-free sheaths. We thus concluded that direct abiotic deposition of Fe complexes onto the sheath surface occurs independently of cellular activity in liquid media containing Fe salts, although it remains unclear how this deposition is associated with the previously proposed mechanisms (oxidation enzyme- and/or active group of organic components-involved) of Fe encrustation of the Leptothrix sheaths.
Interviewers’ approaches to questioning vulnerable child witnesses: The influences of developmental level versus intellectual disability status

Purpose Children with intellectual disabilities (CWIDs) are vulnerable to victimization, but we know little about how to interview them about possible maltreatment. We examined whether interviewers used proportionally more direct and option-posing, and fewer open questions, with CWID than with typically developing (TD) children or with less mature children regardless of disability, taking into account the contribution of the amount of information conveyed by the child. Method One hundred and twelve children (4–12 years) participated in a staged event and were interviewed 1 week later using the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol. We examined the proportions of different interview prompts posed to CWID of either mild (CWID-Mild) or moderate (CWID-Moderate) severity compared with typically developing children matched for chronological (CA) and mental (MA) age. Results Even when controlling for the amount that the child said, the overall number and relative proportions of each question type posed to each group varied. Interviewers asked more cued invitations and fewer direct questions of CA-matched children than younger TD participants or both CWID groups. Option-posing questions comprised a larger proportion of the interviews with both ID groups than with CA matches. The few suggestive questions were posed more to CWID-Moderate. Conclusions Although research has shown that CWID and young TD children can provide reliable information in response to very open prompting, interviewers tend not to ask such questions. Interviewing strategy was influenced by both developmental level and intellectual disability status, in conjunction with children's individual contributions to the interview, emphasizing the importance of interviewers’ understanding the capacities and vulnerabilities of the children they interview from both a developmental and cognitive perspective.
Employer Size or Skill Group Size Effect on Wages?

The authors analyze explanations for firm- or establishment-size effects on wages. One theory is that each firm faces an upward sloping supply curve for labor, implying that the number of any particular type of worker should matter for his or her level of pay, rather than the total number of workers in the firm. To test this hypothesis, the authors add the log of skill group size to the standard log wage equation. Results indicate that the traditional employer-size effect on wages dwindles away once control for the number of workers of the same skill group (educational type) as the observed individual within the establishment is added to the equation. The skill group size effect on wages is substantial. After controlling for both individual- and establishment-specific heterogeneity, a dwindling employer-size effect and a significant group size effect remain.
Oxidation of CO and Methanol on Pd-Ni Catalysts Supported on Different Chemically-Treated Carbon Nanofibers

In this work, palladium-nickel nanoparticles supported on carbon nanofibers were synthesized, with metal contents close to 25 wt % and Pd:Ni atomic ratios near to 1:2. These catalysts were previously studied in order to determine their activity toward the oxygen reduction reaction. Before the deposition of metals, the carbon nanofibers were chemically treated in order to generate oxygen and nitrogen groups on their surface. Transmission electron microscopy analysis (TEM) images revealed particle diameters between 3 and 4 nm, overcoming the sizes observed for the nanoparticles supported on carbon black (catalyst Pd-Ni CB 1:2). From the CO oxidation at different temperatures, the activation energy Eact for this reaction was determined. These values indicated a high tolerance of the catalysts toward the CO poisoning, especially in the case of the catalysts supported on the non-chemically treated carbon nanofibers. On the other hand, apparent activation energy Eap for the methanol oxidation was also determined finding—as a rate determining step—the COads diffusion to the OHads for the catalysts supported on carbon nanofibers. The results here presented showed that the surface functional groups only play a role in the obtaining of lower particle sizes, which is an important factor in the obtaining of low CO oxidation activation energies.
Building resilience in health and social care teams

Structured Abstract: Purpose: This paper presents the results of a United Kingdom (UK) study that draws on the disciplines of Health and Social Care, Management and Organisational Psychology to explore the place of resilience in teams and its potential contribution to demand led Health and Social Care provision in Integrated care. Approach: A general inductive approach (Silverman, 2011) was applied. Five focus groups were facilitated (n=40) each with eight participants all of whom were leaders and managers of teams in Health and Social Care, working in the integrated care context in the United Kingdom. Findings: Findings indicate that taking into account the sustaining of effort in performance, whether the team is interprofessional or multidisciplinary in type and the model of team learning adopted could assist organisational workforce developers to target their education and training strategies so that teams may have more resilience to cope with changes faced. Research Limitations: This research is at an early stage and further examination and testing of the findings and potential solutions is required Practical Implications: Targeting team development and workforce education based on effort in performance, whether the team is interprofessional or multidisciplinary in type and the model of team learning could prove cost effective and impact on the resilience and performance of the integrated team in tough times. Originality/Value: This preliminary research, which capitalises on a distinction in team type and working practices between those of interprofessional and multidisciplinary teams ( Chmiel, McCray and Palmer, 2013) the sustaining of effort and the model of team learning, may have important consequences for team processes involved in resilience in Health and Social Care teams. These findings may be significant for workforce educators seeking to develop and build effective practice tools to sustain team working. Keywords: Teamwork. Resilience. Integrated Care. Interprofessional. Multidisciplinary. Article Classification: Research Paper
Design approaches for mode decision in HEVC encoder exploiting parallelism at CTB level

As CPU technology trend is strongly moving towards multi-core architectures, HEVC tried to embrace the parallel processing trend to possible extent. Hence, HEVC exploits some of the parallel processing capabilities like tiles, slices and WPP at frame level (Sullivan et al., 2012). Although slices, tiles and WPP can be used to achieve parallelism, they might end-up degrading either visual quality or compression efficiency. To address this problem, this paper tries to summarize/exploit the possible parallel processing capabilities of HEVC at Coding Tree Block (CTB) level with insignificant compromise in video quality and compression.
On the distribution of college dropouts: household wealth and uninsurable idiosyncratic risk

This paper presents a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college education in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After students matriculate and start taking exams, they reevaluate their expectations about succeeding in college and may find it optimal to drop out and join the workforce without completing an undergraduate degree. The model shows that, in accordance with the data, poorer students are less likely to graduate and are more apt to drop out earlier than are wealthier students. Our model generates these results without introducing credit constraints. Conditioning on measures of innate ability, in the data we find that poor students are at least 27 percent more likely to drop out of college and they do so sooner than wealthier students.
PDX-1 is required for pancreatic outgrowth and differentiation of the rostral duodenum.

It has been proposed that the Xenopus homeobox gene, XlHbox8, is involved in endodermal differentiation during pancreatic and duodenal development (Wright, C.V.E., Schnegelsberg, P. and De Robertis, E.M. (1988). Development 105, 787-794). To test this hypothesis directly, gene targeting was used to make two different null mutations in the mouse XlHbox8 homolog, pdx-1. In the first, the second pdx-1 exon, including the homeobox, was replaced by a neomycin resistance cassette. In the second, a lacZ reporter was fused in-frame with the N terminus of PDX-1, replacing most of the homeodomain. Neonatal pdx-1 -/- mice are apancreatic, in confirmation of previous reports (Jonsson, J., Carlsson, L., Edlund, T. and Edlund, H. (1994). Nature 371, 606-609). However, the pancreatic buds do form in homozygous mutants, and the dorsal bud undergoes limited proliferation and outgrowth to form a small, irregularly branched, ductular tree. This outgrowth does not contain insulin or amylase-positive cells, but glucagon-expressing cells are found. The rostral duodenum shows a local absence of the normal columnar epithelial lining, villi, and Brunner's glands, which are replaced by a GLUT2-positive cuboidal epithelium resembling the bile duct lining. Just distal of the abnormal epithelium, the numbers of enteroendocrine cells in the villi are greatly reduced. The PDX-1/beta-galactosidase fusion allele is expressed in pancreatic and duodenal cells in the absence of functional PDX-1, with expression continuing into perinatal stages with similar boundaries and expression levels. These results offer additional insight into the role of pdx-1 in the determination and differentiation of the posterior foregut, particularly regarding the proliferation and differentiation of the pancreatic progenitors.
Workaholism among Leaders: Implications for Their Own and Their Followers’ Well-Being

Abstract This chapter examines the role of leader workaholism in relation to their own and their followers’ well-being. We begin with an overview of workaholism, along with a description of how workaholism may relate to typical leader behaviors. We propose a conceptual model linking the various components of workaholism to leaders’ well-being and followers’ well-being. In our model, we propose that leaders’ workaholism can negatively influence their own well-being, and also their followers’ well-being through interindividual crossover of affective, cognitive, and behavioral components of workaholism. Furthermore, the negative well-being outcomes experienced by the workaholic leader can also crossover to the followers through interindividual strain–strain crossover. Several moderating factors of these relationships are discussed, as well as avenues for future research.
Predictive and self triggering for event-based state estimation

Event-based state estimation can achieve estimation quality comparable to traditional time-triggered methods, but with a significantly lower number of samples. In networked estimation problems, this reduction in sampling instants does, however, not necessarily translate into better usage of the shared communication resource. Because typical event-based approaches decide instantaneously whether communication is needed or not, free slots cannot be reallocated immediately, and hence remain unused. In this paper, novel predictive and self triggering protocols are proposed, which give the communication system time to adapt and reallocate freed resources. From a unified Bayesian decision framework, two schemes are developed: self-triggers that predict, at the current triggering instant, the next one; and predictive triggers that indicate, at every time step, whether communication will be needed at a given prediction horizon. The effectiveness of the proposed triggers in trading off estimation quality for communication reduction is compared in numerical simulations.
Keep Project Milestone When Learning Ends : Do Evidence Processing Biases Hinder Consensus-Building ?

Idealizations of democratic and market processes postulate that the widespread exchange of information is a net social benefit. In particular, when evidence about a phenomena is distributed across a community, free-flow exchange of information should be beneficial: information-sharing allows individuals to aggregate evidence that otherwise would be widely distributed and inaccessible. Several agent-based models of information-exchange have been developed. These models envision a strongly connected network of agents that share information and update their beliefs over time. Researchers have focused on identifying whether agents in a given model converge on a single belief about the world in the long-run, and examined which factors impair the formation of long-run consensus. Previous examinations of these models have two shortcomings. First, the researchers almost invariably examine consensus formation in the very long-run, by taking the limit as time goes to infinity of the mathematical models they've developed.1 As [1] notes, the forms of social learning that we're concerned with occurs on finite, and in some cases, relatively short timeframes; what happens in the long-run may not be terribly important. The second shortcoming is that most of the models that have been developed do not account for the foibles of human information processing. I take this to be a weakness since most researchers are interested in claims about human societies (and not, say, autonomous systems). This paper addresses these two unexplored shortcomings. I explore short timeframes by relying on simulations and I examine the impact of biased evidence processing on consensus formation.