Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reward processing dysfunction in major depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia

Purpose of review This article reviews the recent literature on reward processing dysfunction in major depression (MDD), bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, with a focus on approach motivation, reward learning and reward-based decision-making. Recent findings Emerging evidence indicates the presence of reward processing abnormalities across all three disorders, supporting a transdiagnostic approach. In particular, findings are consistent with a role of abnormal phasic striatal dopamine signaling, which is critical for reinforcement learning, efficient mobilization of effort to obtain reward and allocation of attention to reward-predictive cues. Specifically, reward-related striatal signaling appears blunted in MDD and the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, elevated in bipolar (hypo)mania, and contextually misallocated in the positive symptoms of psychosis. However, whether shared or distinct pathophysiological mechanisms contribute to abnormal striatal signaling across the three disorders remains unknown. Summary New evidence of reward processing abnormalities in MDD, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia has led to a greater understanding of the neural processes associated with symptomatology common across these conditions (e.g., anhedonia). Dissecting various subcomponents of reward processing that map onto partially different neurobiological pathways and investigating their dysregulation in different psychiatric disorders holds promise for developing more targeted, and hopefully efficacious treatment and intervention strategies.
An Investigation into Soft Error Detection Efficiency at Operating System Level

Electronic equipment operating in harsh environments such as space is subjected to a range of threats. The most important of these is radiation that gives rise to permanent and transient errors on microelectronic components. The occurrence rate of transient errors is significantly more than permanent errors. The transient errors, or soft errors, emerge in two formats: control flow errors (CFEs) and data errors. Valuable research results have already appeared in literature at hardware and software levels for their alleviation. However, there is the basic assumption behind these works that the operating system is reliable and the focus is on other system levels. In this paper, we investigate the effects of soft errors on the operating system components and compare their vulnerability with that of application level components. Results show that soft errors in operating system components affect both operating system and application level components. Therefore, by providing endurance to operating system level components against soft errors, both operating system and application level components gain tolerance.
Influence of apolipoprotein E genotype and dietary α-tocopherol on redox status and C-reactive protein levels in apolipoprotein E3 and E4 targeted replacement mice

The molecular basis of the positive association between apoE4 genotype and CVD remains unclear. There is direct in vitro evidence indicating that apoE4 is a poorer antioxidant relative to the apoE3 isoform, with some indirect in vivo evidence also available. Therefore it was hypothesised that apoE4 carriers may benefit from α-tocopherol (α-Toc) supplementation. Targeted replacement mice expressing the human apoE3 and apoE4 were fed with a diet poor (0 mg/kg diet) or rich (200 mg/kg diet) in α-Toc for 12 weeks. Neither apoE genotype nor dietary α-Toc exerted any effects on the antioxidant defence system, including glutathione, catalase, superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase and glutathione reductase activities. In addition, no differences were observed in mitogen-induced lymphocyte proliferation. α-Toc concentrations were modestly higher in plasma and lower in tissues of apoE4 compared with apoE3 mice, with the greatest differences evident in the lung, suggesting that an apoE4 genotype may reduce α-Toc delivery to tissues. A tendency towards increased plasma F2-isoprostanes in apoE4 mice was observed, while liver thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances did not differ between apoE3 and apoE4 mice. In addition, C-reactive protein (CRP) concentrations were reduced in apoE4 mice indicating that this positive effect on CRP may in part negate the increased CVD risk associated with an apoE4 genotype.
Significant Association of Multiple Human Cytomegalovirus Genomic Loci with Glioblastoma Multiforme Samples

ABSTRACT Viruses are appreciated as etiological agents of certain human tumors, but the number of different cancer types induced or exacerbated by viral infections is unknown. Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM)/astrocytoma grade IV is a malignant and lethal brain cancer of unknown origin. Over the past decade, several studies have searched for the presence of a prominent herpesvirus, human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), in GBM samples. While some have detected HCMV DNA, RNA, and proteins in GBM tissues, others have not. Therefore, any purported association of HCMV with GBM remains controversial. In most of the previous studies, only one or a select few viral targets were analyzed. Thus, it remains unclear the extent to which the entire viral genome was present when detected. Here we report the results of a survey of GBM specimens for as many as 20 different regions of the HCMV genome. Our findings indicate that multiple HCMV loci are statistically more likely to be found in GBM samples than in other brain tumors or epileptic brain specimens and that the viral genome was more often detected in frozen samples than in paraffin-embedded archival tissue samples. Finally, our experimental results indicate that cellular genomes substantially outnumber viral genomes in HCMV-positive GBM specimens, likely indicating that only a minority of the cells found in such samples harbor viral DNA. These data argue for the association of HCMV with GBM, defining the virus as oncoaccessory. Furthermore, they imply that, were HCMV to enhance the growth or survival of a tumor (i.e., if it is oncomodulatory), it would likely do so through mechanisms distinct from classic tumor viruses that express transforming viral oncoproteins in the overwhelming majority of tumor cells.
A cross layer MAC with explicit synchronization through intelligent feedback for multiple beam antennas

This paper introduces a novel cross layer medium access control protocol for multiple beam antennas to fully utilize their multiple-beam-forming capability. Our protocol, explicit synchronization via intelligent feedback (ESIF), uses feedback from neighboring nodes to synchronize data communication at multiple beams. ESIF exploits routing information to guarantee long-term fairness and minimize the energy and latency overheads. Unlike previous works on directional antennas that discuss range extension, we focus on optimal spatial reuse. Simulation results demonstrate that ESIF outperforms other on-demand access schemes based on IEEE 802.11 DCF for multiple beam antennas
Systematic Temporal Patterns in the Relationship Between Housing Development and Forest Bird Biodiversity

As people encroach increasingly on natural areas, one question is how this affects avian biodiversity. The answer to this is partly scale‐dependent. At broad scales, human populations and biodiversity concentrate in the same areas and are positively associated, but at local scales people and biodiversity are negatively associated with biodiversity. We investigated whether there is also a systematic temporal trend in the relationship between bird biodiversity and housing development. We used linear regression to examine associations between forest bird species richness and housing growth in the conterminous United States over 30 years. Our data sources were the North American Breeding Bird Survey and the 2000 decennial U.S. Census. In the 9 largest forested ecoregions, housing density increased continually over time. Across the conterminous United States, the association between bird species richness and housing density was positive for virtually all guilds except ground nesting birds. We found a systematic trajectory of declining bird species richness as housing increased through time. In more recently developed ecoregions, where housing density was still low, the association with bird species richness was neutral or positive. In ecoregions that were developed earlier and where housing density was highest, the association of housing density with bird species richness for most guilds was negative and grew stronger with advancing decades. We propose that in general the relationship between human settlement and biodiversity over time unfolds as a 2‐phase process. The first phase is apparently innocuous; associations are positive due to coincidence of low‐density housing with high biodiversity. The second phase is highly detrimental to biodiversity, and increases in housing density are associated with biodiversity losses. The long‐term effect on biodiversity depends on the final housing density. This general pattern can help unify our understanding of the relationship of human encroachment and biodiversity response.
Representations of the covering groups of the symmetric groups and their combinatorics.

The theory of the covering groups S̃n of the symmetric groups Sn has its origins in early papers by Schur [S1,S2,S3] who investigated the projective representations of the groups Sn. While the representation theory of the symmetric groups made continuous progress, with the appropriate combinatorial concepts of partitions and tableaux developed early on by Young, the representation theory of the covering groups saw a long period of stagnation. Only 50 years after Schur’s fundamental paper on the group S̃n, new light into the subject was brought by Morris [Mo1, Mo2]. He introduced the combinatorial notions which turned out to be the right analogues of the notions in the Sn case: shifted tableaux instead of Young tableaux and bars instead of hooks. Using these notions he obtained new results on the Q-functions introduced by Schur, and he found a recursive formula for the irreducible spin characters (i.e. the characters belonging to the proper projective representations) in analogy to the Murnaghan-Nakayama formula, thus opening up a deeper investigation of the characters of S̃n. In the meantime, p-modular representation theory of finite groups had been developed, mainly by Richard Brauer, who had defined the fundamental concept of p-blocks of finite groups. While the p-blocks of the groups Sn had been determined already in the 1940’s by a combinatorial algorithm – still known as the Nakayama conjecture – it was only in 1965 that Morris conjectured how to determine the p-blocks of S̃n for odd primes p, again by a combinatorial procedure. It took more than 20 years before this conjecture was settled by Humphreys [H] and then, using different methods, by Cabanes [C]. In the meantime, there was very little progress on the modular representation theory of the groups S̃n. But in the past decade the area has seen many significant contributions, not only from representation theory, but now also from combinatorialists interested in tableaux (see [St1, St2]). At about the
Relevance of 3D Cholangiography and Transient Elastography to Assess Cystic Fibrosis-Associated Liver Disease?

Background. Cystic fibrosis-associated liver disease (CFLD) is a major cause of death. The objective of our retrospective study was to describe the relevance of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and liver stiffness measurement (LSM) for CFLD evaluation. Methods. All cystic fibrosis adult patients evaluated by MRI and LSM were included. MR signs of portal hypertension (PHT), dysmorphia, or cholangitis were collected and LSM expressed in kPa and Metavir. Results. Of 25 patients, 52% had abnormal MRI. Median LSM was 5.7 kPa (3.4–9.9). Three patients had F2 score and one had F3 score. In patients with PHT, LSM was 7.85 kPa (3.7–9.9) compared to 5 (3.4–7.5) in others, p = 0.02. In patients with abnormal liver function tests, 50% had increased LSM (≥F2), whereas 94% with normal tests had normal LSM (p = 0.04). Seven patients had abnormal MRI despite normal ultrasonography. Conclusions. MRI and LSM provide useful information on CFLD and may help to screen patients with PHT.
A Broad-Coverage Normalization System for Social Media Language

Social media language contains huge amount and wide variety of nonstandard tokens, created both intentionally and unintentionally by the users. It is of crucial importance to normalize the noisy nonstandard tokens before applying other NLP techniques. A major challenge facing this task is the system coverage, i.e., for any user-created nonstandard term, the system should be able to restore the correct word within its top n output candidates. In this paper, we propose a cognitively-driven normalization system that integrates different human perspectives in normalizing the nonstandard tokens, including the enhanced letter transformation, visual priming, and string/phonetic similarity. The system was evaluated on both word- and message-level using four SMS and Twitter data sets. Results show that our system achieves over 90% word-coverage across all data sets (a 10% absolute increase compared to state-of-the-art); the broad word-coverage can also successfully translate into message-level performance gain, yielding 6% absolute increase compared to the best prior approach.
Electronegative LDL circulating in smokers impairs endothelial progenitor cell differentiation by inhibiting Akt phosphorylation via LOX-1 Published, JLR Papers in Press, October 1, 2007.

Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), important for endothelial regeneration and vasculogenesis, are reduced by cigarette smoking. To elucidate the mechanisms, we examined the effects of electronegative LDL, circulating in chronic smokers, on EPC differentiation. Using ion-exchange chromatography, we purified smoker LDL into five subfractions, L1–L5. In matched, nonsmoking healthy subjects, L5, the most electronegative subfraction, was either absent or scanty. Sustained L5 treatment inhibited CD31 and KDR expression and EPC differentiation, whereas L1–L4 had no effect. L5 also inhibited telomerase activity to accelerate EPC senescence in correlation with reduced Akt phosphorylation. Transfection of day 3 EPCs with dominant negative Akt constructs inhibited CD31 and KDR expression, stalled EPC differentiation, and promoted early senescence. In contrast, transfection with constitutively active Akt rendered the EPCs resistant to L5, allowing normal maturation. L5 upregulated the lectin-like oxidized low density lipoprotein receptor 1 (LOX-1), and pretreatment of EPCs with TS20, a LOX-1-neutralizing antibody, blocked internalization of L5 by EPCs and prevented L5-mediated inhibition of EPC differentiation. Mixing L5 with L1 to physiological L5/L1 ratios did not attenuate L5's effects. These findings suggest that cigarette smoking is associated with the formation of L5, which inhibits EPC differentiation by impairing Akt phosphorylation via the LOX-1 receptor.
A semantics for web services authentication

We consider the problem of specifying and verifying cryptographic security protocols for XML web services. The security specification WS-Security describes a range of XML security tokens, such as username tokens, public-key certificates, and digital signature blocks, amounting to a flexible vocabulary for expressing protocols. To describe the syntax of these tokens, we extend the usual XML data model with symbolic representations of cryptographic values. We use predicates on this data model to describe the semantics of security tokens and of sample protocols distributed with the Microsoft WSE implementation of WS-Security. By embedding our data model within Abadi and Fournet's applied pi calculus, we formulate and prove security properties with respect to the standard Dolev-Yao threat model. Moreover, we informally discuss issues not addressed by the formal model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to the specification and verification of security protocols based on a faithful account of the XML wire format.
Economic impact of visual impairment and blindness in the United States.

OBJECTIVES To assess the economic impact of excess medical and informal care and the health utility loss associated with visual impairment and blindness in adults aged 40 years and older in the United States. METHODS Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data from 1996 to 2002 were pooled to estimate the relationship of visual impairment and blindness with total medical expenditures, components of expenditures, days of informal care received, and health utility. Estimates accounting for the complex sampling design were based on regressions including confounders such as comorbidities and demographics. The aggregate economic impact was estimated by projecting average individual effects to the population of individuals with blindness and visual impairment. RESULTS Blindness and visual impairment were significantly associated with higher medical care expenditures, a greater number of informal care days, and a decrease in health utility. The home care component of expenditures was most affected by blindness. The aggregate annual economic impact included $5.5 billion spent for medical care and the value of informal care as well as a loss of more than 209,000 quality-adjusted life years. CONCLUSIONS Visual impairment has a large effect on home care. Any economic analysis of prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation should account for the fraction of the annual monetary cost and loss of quality-adjusted life years that can be averted.
Buffering growth variations against water deficits through timely carbon usage

Water stresses reduce plant growth but there is no consensus on whether carbon metabolism has any role in this reduction. Sugar starvation resulting from stomatal closure is often proposed as a cause of growth impairment under long-term or severe water deficits. However, growth decreases faster than photosynthesis in response to drought, leading to increased carbohydrate stores under short-term or moderate water deficits. Here, we addressed the question of the role of carbon availability on growth under moderate water deficits using two different systems. Firstly, we monitored the day/night pattern of leaf growth in Arabidopsis plants. We show that a moderate soil water deficit promotes leaf growth at night in mutants severely disrupted in their nighttime carbohydrate availability. This suggests that soil water deficit promotes carbon satiation. Secondly, we monitored the sub-hourly growth variations of clementine fruits in response to daily, natural fluctuations in air water deficit, and at contrasting source–sink balances obtained by defoliation. We show that high carbohydrate levels prevent excessive, hydraulic shrinkage of the fruit during days with high evaporative demand, most probably through osmotic adjustment. Together, our results contribute to the view that growing organs under moderate soil or air water deficit are not carbon starved, but use soluble carbohydrate in excess to partly release a hydromechanical limitation of growth.
THE ORAL DELIVERY OF RABIES VACCINES TO DOGS

In most developing countries the dog remains the major transmission vector of rabies to man, despite the widespread use of parenteral vaccination. Parenteral vaccination does not, in general, achieve population immunity levels high enough to inhibit rabies transmission within the dog population. Following the demonstration that oral vaccination induced levels of population immunity sufficient to interrupt the epidemiological cycle of fox rabies in Europe, research has aimed at the development of this approach for dog rabies control. Oral vaccines are likely to be easier to administer and culturally better tolerated, and therefore well adapted to overcome the logistical problems hampering rabies control in developing countries. Among several proposed rabies vaccine candidates, the attenuated rabies vaccine strain SAG-2 has been shown to induce a protective immune response to rabies in dogs when delivered by bait. Oral live vaccines must meet high safety standards due to the risk associated with the dissemination of those replicating antigens in young and/or immunodepressed individuals. SAG-2 has confirmed its safety through the absence of clinical signs, dissemination and excretion in several carnivorous target and an important number of non-target species including non-human primates. Present field research, carried out using a placebo bait specifically designed for the oral delivery of SAG-2 to dogs, is aiming at confirming the hypothesis according to which oral vaccination, alone or as a possible adjunct to injectable rabies vaccines, might increase vaccine coverage by immunising poorly supervised dogs which are both often inaccessible to parenteral vaccination and a high-risk group for rabies transmission to man.
Managing déjà vu: Collection building for the identification of nonidentical duplicate documents

As online document collections continue to expand, both on the Web and in proprietary environments, the need for duplicate detection becomes more critical. Few users wish to retrieve search results consisting of sets of duplicate documents, whether identical duplicates or close variants. The goal of this work is to facilitate (a) investigations into the phenomenon of near duplicates and (b) algorithmic approaches to minimizing its deleterious effect on search results. Harnessing the expertise of both client-users and professional searchers, we establish principled methods to generate a test collection for identifying and handling nonidentical duplicate documents. We subsequently examine a flexible method of characterizing and comparing documents to permit the identification of near duplicates. This method has produced promising results following an extensive evaluation using a production-based test collection created by domain experts.
Sex determination and the evolution of dioecy from monoecy in Sagittaria latifolia (Alismataceae)

The role of mutations of small versus large effect in adaptive evolution is of considerable interest to evolutionary biologists. The major evolutionary pathways for the origin of dioecy in plants (the gynodioecy and monoecy–paradioecy pathways) are often distinguished by the number of mutations involved and the magnitude of their effects. Here, we investigate the genetic and environmental determinants of sex in Sagittaria latifolia, a species with both monoecious and dioecious populations, and evaluate evidence for the evolution of dioecy via gynodioecy or monoecy–paradioecy. We crossed plants of the two sexual systems to generate F1, F2 and backcross progeny, and grew clones from dioecious populations in low– and high–fertilizer conditions to examine sex inconstancy in females and males. Several lines of evidence implicate two–locus control of the sex phenotypes. In dioecious populations sex is determined by Mendelian segregation of alleles, with males heterozygous at both the male– and female–sterility loci. In monoecious populations, plants are homozygous for alleles dominant to male sterility in females and recessive to female sterility in males. Experimental manipulation of resources revealed sex inconstancy in males but not females. These results are consistent with predictions for the evolution of dioecy via gynodioecy, rather than the expected monoecy–paradioecy pathway, given the ancestral monoecious condition.