Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatial selectivity and theta phase precession in CA1 interneurons

Traditionally, most of the information processing of neural networks is thought to be carried out by excitatory cells. Likewise, recent evidence for temporal coding comes from the study of the detailed firing patterns of excitatory neurons. In the CA1 region of the rat hippocampus, pyramidal cells discharge selectively when the animal is in specific locations in its environment, and exhibit a precise relationship with the ongoing rhythmic activity of the network (phase precession). We demonstrate that during a spatial exploratory behavior on a linear track, inhibitory interneurons also show spatial selectivity and phase precession dynamics. We found that the firing rate of interneurons is modulated reliably up and down around an ongoing baseline activity level for specific locations in the environment, producing robust place‐specific increases or decreases in discharge. On some sections of the track, the range of theta phases shifts progressively to earlier parts of the theta cycle as the rat advances, so that a negative correlation between phase and position could be demonstrated. Unlike pyramidal cells, phase and rate were not strongly correlated. We discuss the influence of the intrinsic firing properties of interneurons on a model of phase precession, as well as the influence of the detailed shape of the inhibitory oscillation. These results indicate that spatial selectivity and phase precession in CA1 are not properties restricted to pyramidal cells. Rather, they may be a more general expression of a common interaction between the different inputs impinging on both excitatory and inhibitory cells in CA1 and the intrinsic characteristics of those cells. Furthermore, they suggest that the role of interneurons may extend beyond a global damping of the network by participating in a finely‐tuned local processing with the pyramidal cells. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Primary Motor and Sensory Cortex Activation during Motor Performance and Motor Imagery: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

The intensity and spatial distribution of functional activation in the left precentral and postcentral gyri during actual motor performance (MP) and mental representation [motor imagery (MI)] of self-paced finger-to-thumb opposition movements of the dominant hand were investigated in fourteen right-handed volunteers by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques. Significant increases in mean normalized fMRI signal intensities over values obtained during the control (visual imagery) tasks were found in a region including the anterior bank and crown of the central sulcus, the presumed site of the primary motor cortex, during both MP (mean percentage increase, 2.1%) and MI (0.8%). In the anterior portion of the precentral gyrus and the postcentral gyrus, mean functional activity levels were also increased during both conditions (MP, 1.7 and 1.2%; MI, 0.6 and 0.4%, respectively). To locate activated foci during MI, MP, or both conditions, the time course of the signal intensities of pixels lying in the precentral or postcentral gyrus was plotted against single-step or double-step waveforms, where the steps of the waveform corresponded to different tasks. Pixels significantly (r > 0.7) activated during both MP and MI were identified in each region in the majority of subjects; percentage increases in signal intensity during MI were on average 30% as great as increases during MP. The pixels activated during both MP and MI appear to represent a large fraction of the whole population activated during MP. These results support the hypothesis that MI and MP involve overlapping neural networks in perirolandic cortical areas.
Hierarchical Performance Modeling With MACS: A Case Study Of The Convex C-240

The MACS performance model introduced here can be applied to a Machine and Application of interest, the Compiler-generated workload, and the Scheduling of the workload by the compiler. The Ma, MAC, and MACS bounds each fix the named subset of M, A, C, and S while freeing the bound from the constraints imposed by the others. A/X performance measurement is used to measure access-only and execute-only code performance. Such hierarchical performance modeling exposes the gaps between the various bounds, the A/X measurements, and the actual performance, thereby focusing performance optimization at the appropriate levels in a systematic and goal-directed manner. A simple, but detailed, case study of the Convex C-240 vector mini-supercomputer illustrates the method.
Confiding in and Listening to Virtual Agents: The Effect of Personality

We present an intelligent virtual interviewer that engages with a user in a text-based conversation and automatically infers the user's psychological traits, such as personality. We investigate how the personality of a virtual interviewer influences a user's behavior from two perspectives: the user's willingness to confide in, and listen to, a virtual interviewer. We have developed two virtual interviewers with distinct personalities and deployed them in a real-world recruiting event. We present findings from completed interviews with 316 actual job applicants. Notably, users are more willing to confide in and listen to a virtual interviewer with a serious, assertive personality. Moreover, users' personality traits, inferred from their chat text, influence their perception of a virtual interviewer, and their willingness to confide in and listen to a virtual interviewer. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work on building hyper- personalized, intelligent agents based on user traits.
The Income- and Expenditure-Side Estimates of U.S. Output Growth

The two official measures of U.S. economic output, gross domestic product (GDP) and gross domestic income (GDI), have shown markedly different business cycle fluctuations over the past 25 years, with GDI showing a more pronounced cycle than GDP. This paper reports a broad range of results that indicate that GDI better reflects the business cycle fluctuations in true output growth. Results on revisions to the estimates, and correlations with numerous other cyclically sensitive variables, are particularly favorable to GDI. The most recent GDI data show the 2007-09 downturn to have been considerably worse than is reflected in GDP.
Social learning and bayesian games in multiagent signal processing: how do local and global decision makers interact?

How do local agents and global decision makers interact in statistical signal processing problems where autonomous decisions need to be made? When individual agents possess limited sensing, computation, and communication capabilities, can a network of agents achieve sophisticated global behavior? Social learning and Bayesian games are natural settings for addressing these questions. This article presents an overview, novel insights, and a discussion of social learning and Bayesian games in adaptive sensing problems when agents communicate over a network. Two highly stylized examples that demonstrate to the reader the ubiquitous nature of the models, algorithms, and analysis in statistical signal processing are discussed in tutorial fashion.
Picking them up and Figuring them out: Verb-Particle Constructions, Noise and Idiomaticity

This paper investigates, in a first stage, some methods for the automatic acquisition of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) taking into account their statistical properties and some regular patterns found in productive combinations of verbs and particles. Given the limited coverage provided by lexical resources, such as dictionaries, and the constantly growing number of VPCs, possible ways of automatically identifying them are crucial for any NLP task that requires some degree of semantic interpretation. In a second stage we also study whether the combination of statistical and linguistic properties can provide some indication of the degree of idiomaticity of a given VPC. The results obtained show that such combination can successfully be used to detect VPCs and distinguish idiomatic from compositional cases.
Electroencephalographic signatures of attentional and cognitive default modes in spontaneous brain activity fluctuations at rest

We assessed the relation between hemodynamic and electrical indices of brain function by performing simultaneous functional MRI (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) in awake subjects at rest with eyes closed. Spontaneous power fluctuations of electrical rhythms were determined for multiple discrete frequency bands, and associated fMRI signal modulations were mapped on a voxel-by-voxel basis. There was little positive correlation of localized brain activity with alpha power (8–12 Hz), but strong and widespread negative correlation in lateral frontal and parietal cortices that are known to support attentional processes. Power in a 17–23 Hz range of beta activity was positively correlated with activity in retrosplenial, temporo-parietal, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices. This set of areas has previously been characterized by high but coupled metabolism and blood flow at rest that decrease whenever subjects engage in explicit perception or action. The distributed patterns of fMRI activity that were correlated with power in different EEG bands overlapped strongly with those of functional connectivity, i.e., intrinsic covariations of regional activity at rest. This result indicates that, during resting wakefulness, and hence the absence of a task, these areas constitute separable and dynamic functional networks, and that activity in these networks is associated with distinct EEG signatures. Taken together with studies that have explicitly characterized the response properties of these distributed cortical systems, our findings may suggest that alpha oscillations signal a neural baseline with “inattention” whereas beta rhythms index spontaneous cognitive operations during conscious rest.
Introducing RISC: A New Video Inventory for Testing Social Perception

Indirect forms of speech, such as sarcasm, jocularity (joking), and ‘white lies’ told to spare another’s feelings, occur frequently in daily life and are a problem for many clinical populations. During social interactions, information about the literal or nonliteral meaning of a speaker unfolds simultaneously in several communication channels (e.g., linguistic, facial, vocal, and body cues); however, to date many studies have employed uni-modal stimuli, for example focusing only on the visual modality, limiting the generalizability of these results to everyday communication. Much of this research also neglects key factors for interpreting speaker intentions, such as verbal context and the relationship of social partners. Relational Inference in Social Communication (RISC) is a newly developed (English-language) database composed of short video vignettes depicting sincere, jocular, sarcastic, and white lie social exchanges between two people. Stimuli carefully manipulated the social relationship between communication partners (e.g., boss/employee, couple) and the availability of contextual cues (e.g. preceding conversations, physical objects) while controlling for major differences in the linguistic content of matched items. Here, we present initial perceptual validation data (N = 31) on a corpus of 920 items. Overall accuracy for identifying speaker intentions was above 80 % correct and our results show that both relationship type and verbal context influence the categorization of literal and nonliteral interactions, underscoring the importance of these factors in research on speaker intentions. We believe that RISC will prove highly constructive as a tool in future research on social cognition, inter-personal communication, and the interpretation of speaker intentions in both healthy adults and clinical populations.
Generating viral metagenomes from the coral holobiont

Reef-building corals comprise multipartite symbioses where the cnidarian animal is host to an array of eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms, and the viruses that infect them. These viruses are critical elements of the coral holobiont, serving not only as agents of mortality, but also as potential vectors for lateral gene flow, and as elements encoding a variety of auxiliary metabolic functions. Consequently, understanding the functioning and health of the coral holobiont requires detailed knowledge of the associated viral assemblage and its function. Currently, the most tractable way of uncovering viral diversity and function is through metagenomic approaches, which is inherently difficult in corals because of the complex holobiont community, an extracellular mucus layer that all corals secrete, and the variety of sizes and structures of nucleic acids found in viruses. Here we present the first protocol for isolating, purifying and amplifying viral nucleic acids from corals based on mechanical disruption of cells. This method produces at least 50% higher yields of viral nucleic acids, has very low levels of cellular sequence contamination and captures wider viral diversity than previously used chemical-based extraction methods. We demonstrate that our mechanical-based method profiles a greater diversity of DNA and RNA genomes, including virus groups such as Retro-transcribing and ssRNA viruses, which are absent from metagenomes generated via chemical-based methods. In addition, we briefly present (and make publically available) the first paired DNA and RNA viral metagenomes from the coral Acropora tenuis.
Combating Burnout by Increasing Job Relational Characteristics

The current study developed and tested the indirect effect of the relational job characteristics (i.e., perceived prosocial impact and perceived social value) on the burnout syndrome through the autonomous motivation. The cross-sectional survey data analysis of 1,538 Portuguese contact center workers was analyzed using the software package Mplus to conduct structural equation models. Autonomous motivation partially explains the negative relation between the relational job characteristics and burnout. However, the direct relationship between perceived prosocial impact and burnout was not significant. To promote awareness about the perceived value and impact of work and to invest in the interactions between workers and customers are the major practical implications of this study.
Stimulating Erythropoiesis: Future Perspectives

The introduction of recombinant human erythropoietin (rHuEpo) nearly 20 years ago has revolutionised the management of patients with CKD, providing the opportunity for safe long-term anaemia correction without the attendant risks identified with blood products. Based on our expanding knowledge in this area, there are many exciting and innovative new approaches to anaemia correction that stand on, or are close to, the threshold of yielding products ready for clinical use. Recently, an Epo-related molecule called continuous Epo receptor activator has been licensed in Europe, and other molecules are in various processes of development, including Epo mimetic peptide. The search goes on for orally active antianaemic therapies, and several strategies are being investigated. Furthermore, it is now clear that in addition to the anaemia-correction properties of erythropoiesis-stimulating agents, there is the potential for cytoprotection by prevention of cellular apoptosis. This effect could be used in the prevention of ischaemia-reperfusion injury as well as other conditions associated with acute kidney injury and other disease processes. The aim of this article is to discuss these possible future strategies, focusing in particular on those with a reasonable likelihood of a pharmaceutical product that is likely to be used clinically.
Accurate prediction of enzyme mutant activity based on a multibody statistical potential

MOTIVATION An important area of research in biochemistry and molecular biology focuses on characterization of enzyme mutants. However, synthesis and analysis of experimental mutants is time consuming and expensive. We describe a machine-learning approach for inferring the activity levels of all unexplored single point mutants of an enzyme, based on a training set of such mutants with experimentally measured activity. RESULTS Based on a Delaunay tessellation-derived four-body statistical potential function, a perturbation vector measuring environmental changes relative to wild type (wt) at every residue position uniquely characterizes each enzyme mutant for model development and prediction. First, a measure of model performance utilizing area (AUC) under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve surpasses 0.83 and 0.77 for data sets of experimental HIV-1 protease and T4 lysozyme mutants, respectively. Additionally, a novel method is introduced for evaluating statistical significance associated with the number of correct test set predictions obtained from a trained model. Third, 100 stratified random splits of the protease and T4 lysozyme mutant data sets into training and test sets achieve 77.0% and 80.8% mean accuracy, respectively. Next, protease and T4 lysozyme models trained with experimental mutants are used to predict activity levels for all remaining mutants; a subsequent search for publications reporting on dozens of these test mutants reveals that experimental results are matched by 79% and 86% of predictions, respectively. Finally, learning curves for each mutant enzyme system indicate the influence of training set size on model performance. AVAILABILITY Prediction databases at http://proteins.gmu. edu/automute/
Metabolomic Profiling of Submaximal Exercise at a Standardised Relative Intensity in Healthy Adults

Ten physically active subjects underwent two cycling exercise trials. In the first, aerobic capacity (VO2max) was determined and the second was a 45 min submaximal exercise test. Urine samples were collected separately the day before (day 1) , the day of (day 2), and the day after (day 3) the submaximal exercise test (12 samples per subject). Metabolomic profiling of the samples was carried out using hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) coupled to an Orbitrap Exactive mass spectrometer. Data were extracted, database searched and then subjected to principle components (PCA) and orthogonal partial least squares (OPLSDA) modelling. The best results were obtained from pre-treating the data by normalising the metabolites to their mean output on days 1 and 2 of the trial. This allowed PCA to separate the day 2 first void samples (D2S1) from the day 2 post-exercise samples (D2S3) PCA also separated the equivalent samples obtained on day 1 (D1S1 and D1S3). OPLSDA modelling separated both the D2S1 and D2S3 samples and D1S1 and D1S3 samples. The metabolites affected by the exercise samples included a range of purine metabolites and several acyl carnitines. Some metabolites were subject to diurnal variation these included bile acids and several amino acids, the variation of these metabolites was similar on day 1 and day 2 despite the exercise intervention on day 2. Using OPLS modelling it proved possible to identify a single abundant urinary metabolite provisionally identified as oxo-aminohexanoic acid (OHA) as being strongly correlated with VO2max when the levels in the D2S3 samples were considered.
Environmental Enrichment Effects on Development of Retinal Ganglion Cell Dendritic Stratification Require Retinal BDNF

A well-known developmental event of retinal maturation is the progressive segregation of retinal ganglion cell (RGC) dendrites into a and b sublaminae of the inner plexiform layer (IPL), a morphological rearrangement crucial for the emergence of the ON and OFF pathways. The factors regulating this process are not known, although electrical activity has been demonstrated to play a role. Here we report that Environmental Enrichment (EE) accelerates the developmental segregation of RGC dendrites and prevents the effects exerted on it by dark rearing (DR). Development of RGC stratification was analyzed in a line of transgenic mice expressing plasma-membrane marker green fluorescent protein (GFP) under the control of Thy-1 promoter; we visualized the a and b sublaminae of the IPL by using an antibody selectively directed against a specific marker of cholinergic neurons. EE precociously increases Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) in the retina, in parallel with the precocious segregation of RGC dendrites; in addition, EE counteracts retinal BDNF reduction in DR retinas and promotes a normal segregation of RGC dendrites. Blocking retinal BDNF by means of antisense oligos blocks EE effects on the maturation of RGC dendritic stratification. Thus, EE affects the development of RGC dendritic segregation and retinal BDNF is required for this effect to take place, suggesting that BDNF could play an important role in the emergence of the ON and OFF pathways.
Implications of 21-cm observations for damped Ly α systems

We present Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope H i 21-cm absorption observations, of candidate and confirmed damped Lyα systems. The derived spin temperatures Tspin are high, in all cases, ∼1000 K or higher. We have also collated from the published literature a list of damped absorbers for which 21-cm observations exist, and discuss the implications of the observations for the nature of these systems. A cross-comparison of the H i 21-cm profiles (which trace the cold gas) with the low ionization metal profiles (which trace all the neutral H i, both cold and warm) shows that in all cases for which both spectra are available, the 21-cm absorption coincides in velocity with the deepest metal line feature. This is consistent with models in which the deep metal line features arise from discrete clouds but not with models where the deepest features are the result of velocity crowding. We also find that the typical derived spin temperatures of damped Lyα systems are considerably higher than those in the Milky Way or nearby spiral galaxies. The only exceptions are systems that are known to be associated with the discs of spirals; these do, in fact, show low spin temperature. In a multi-phase medium the derived spin temperature is a weighted average of the temperatures of the individual phases. High apparent Tspin values are hence to be expected from small, low metallicity objects since these objects should (as per existing theoretical models of the formation of a multi-phase interstellar medium (ISM) in the Milky Way and high-redshift proto-galaxies) have a lower fraction of the cold phase in their ISM as compared with large galaxies. The high Tspin is hence consistent with the observed low metallicities of damped Lyα absorbers as well as with recent findings that damped absorption is associated with a variety of galaxy types (as opposed to being confined to the discs of large spirals). Finally, although the number of systems for which observations are available is small, we suggest that the following trend may be identified: at low redshift, damped Lyα absorption arises from a range of systems, including spiral galaxy discs, while, at high redshift, absorption occurs predominantly in smaller systems.