Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Profiles of executive functioning in preschoolers with autism

The research on executive functioning in adults, adolescents, and older children with autism has demonstrated clear executive function impairments. However, little research has been conducted on preschool-aged children with autism, even though characteristics of the disorder begin to manifest as early as birth. Preschool-aged children are different from older children and adults as they are consistently developing their skills and abilities, which has historically made it difficult to assess executive functioning skills in this age group. Few researchers have attempted to identify executive functioning profiles in preschool-aged children with autism. This study compared the performance of 29 preschool children (4-6 years of age) with Autistic Disorder (n = 10) and Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified (n = 19) to 30 same aged children without autism on global and domain specific elicited measures of executive functioning and an ecologically valid executive functioning behavioral rating scale. Age and intelligence was analyzed to examine executive functioning performance over age and intellect. A comparison of executive functioning performance on the Dimensional Card Sorting Test, Day-Night test, Tower of Hanoi-R, Noisy Book, and Self-Control task to the BRIEF-P was used to examine the correlation between ecologically valid and elicited instrumentation. An age group comparison in both groups was conducted to observe differences in performance among 4, 5, and 6 year olds. Both global and domain specific weaknesses in the children diagnosed with autism were found when compared to the children without autism. Moreover, the children without autism exhibited increased age-based performance on executive functioning tests measuring working memory, selfmonitoring, and planning/organization. The BRIEF-P was correlated strongly with elicited measures across each domain of executive functioning. Executive Functions in Children with Autism 11 Profiles of Executive Functioning in Preschool Children with Autism
The Dark Tetrad: Structural properties and location in the personality space.

Abstract. Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy are personality traits understood to be dispositions toward amoral and antisocial behavior. Recent research has suggested that sadism should also be added to this set of traits. In the present study, we tested a hypothesis proposing that these four traits are expressions of one superordinate construct: The Dark Tetrad. Exploration of the latent space of four “dark” traits suggested that the singular second-order factor which represents the Dark Tetrad can be extracted. Analysis has shown that Dark Tetrad traits can be located in the space of basic personality traits, especially on the negative pole of the Honesty-Humility, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotionality dimensions. We conclude that sadism behaves in a similar manner as the other dark traits, but it cannot be reduced to them. The results support the concept of “Dark Tetrad. ”
Word-list generation deficits in dementia.

To evaluate the specificity of the semantic fluency deficit in Alzheimer's disease (AD), we compared the performances of patients with AD, Huntington's disease (HD), vascular dementia (VD), and healthy control subjects on tasks of category (i.e., semantic) and first-letter (i.e., phonemic/lexical) word list generation. As compared to age-appropriate controls, all three patient groups demonstrated relatively more impaired semantic than phonemic fluency. Dementia severity did not affect this relationship. Thus, the greater vulnerability of semantically guided fluency is not specific to AD but occurs in other dementias as well. Deficits in both the organization of semantic memory and retrieval from long-term storage appear to contribute to the relatively poorer performance on semantic than phonemic fluency tasks observed in patients with AD, VD, and HD.
Effects of pyocyanine, a phenazine dye from Pseudomonas aeruginosa, on oxidative burst and bacterial killing in human neutrophils

The effects of pyocyanine (phenazinium, 1-hydroxy-5-methyl-hydroxide, inner salt) on oxidative burst in human polymorphonuclear leukocytes were studied by several different approaches. In a cell- and enzyme-free system, pyocyanine oxidized NADPH. The reduced pyocyanine could be measured by its reaction with ferricytochrome c. It was shown by this assay that resting as well as phorbol myristate acetate- or zymosan-stimulated granulocytes reduced pyocyanine. The effect was independent of mitochondria, as cytoplasts were similarly active. Measurement of the hexose monophosphate shunt in intact granulocytes in the presence of pyocyanine indicated a concentration-dependent activation of the shunt without the generation of O2-, suggesting that pyocyanine oxidizes NADPH to NADP+ when it enters granulocytes. Intracellular NADPH in granulocytes was indeed lowered by almost 40% after incubation with pyocyanine. It is by this shuttling of reduction equivalents, leading to the partial depletion of NADPH, that pyocyanine affects the observed concentration-dependent partial inhibition of the phorbol myristate acetate- and zymosan-stimulated generation of O2-. A further consequence was that the intracellular killing of Staphylococcus aureus was also partially suppressed, particularly at higher loads of granulocytes with bacteria. Phagocytosis was not inhibited by pyocyanine concentrations as high as 500 microM. Pyocyanine did not affect the intracellular killing of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The possible relevance of these findings to the course of mixed hospital infections in immunocompromised patients is discussed.
Capecitabine-induced hypertriglyceridemia: a report of two cases.

BACKGROUND Capecitabine is a tumor-activated oral fluoropyrimidine with established antitumor activity in breast and colorectal cancer. Hypertriglyceridemia associated with this drug has rarely been reported in the literature. CASE REPORT This is a report of two patients who developed capecitabine-induced severe hypertriglyceridemia, together with an increase in total cholesterol levels. The first patient developed hyperlipidemia during long-term capecitabine treatment in combination with trastuzumab for metastatic breast carcinoma (triglycerides: from 219 mgldl to 1409 mg/dl, 543% increase; cholesterol: from 239 mg/dl to 363 mg/dl, 52% increase). The second patient developed abnormalities in the lipid profile after the second cycle of chemotherapy with capecitabine and oxaliplatin for metastatic colorectal cancer (triglycerides: from 101 mg/dl to 1510 mg/dl, 1395% increase; cholesterol: from 203 mg/dl to 310 mgldl, 52% increase). An analysis of the possible underlying pathogeneic mechanisms is provided. CONCLUSION Physicians should be aware of the possibility of dyslipidemia, particularly hypertriglyceridemia, following treatment with capecitabine.
Dietary vitamin E supplementation shifted weight loss from drip to cooking loss in fresh beef longissimus during display.

Effects of dietary vitamin E supplementation on drip loss, cooking loss, and muscle fiber disruption in fresh beef loin steaks from Holstein and crossbred beef steers were studied. Nine Holstein steers and nine beef steers were fed a control diet and nine Holstein steers and eight beef steers were supplemented daily with 298 IU of vitamin E/kg of diet for 211, 232, or 252 d. Drip loss, cooking loss, cooking yield, and shear value were measured in each longissimus lumborum sample displayed in PVC film for 2, 6, 10, or 14 d. Dietary vitamin E supplementation produced meat that had smaller (P < .001) increases in drip loss during 14 d of display but higher (P < .01) cooking losses. Cooking yield was reduced (P < .05) by vitamin E supplementation. Vitamin E supplementation reduced (P < .01) muscle cell disruption in beef steak displayed for 14 d. These results indicated that dietary vitamin E treatment stabilized cell integrity and enhanced the ability of beef steak to hold sarcoplasmic components during display, although subsequent losses due to cooking were greater.
Capacity Approaching Low-Rate LDGM Codes

We study the ability of low-rate Serially-Concatenated Low Density Generator Matrix (SCLDGM) codes to approach theoretical limits. Although two layer SCLDGM codes approach capacity for medium rates (0.25 <; R <; 0.9), they do not perform adequately for lower rates. In this case, substantial performance improvements are obtained using three layers.
Existence and properties of solutions for neural field equations

The first goal of this work is to study the solvability of the neural field equation (known as ‘Amari equation’) \documentclass{article}\usepackage{amssymb}\usepackage{amsbsy}\usepackage[mathscr]{euscript}\footskip=0pc\pagestyle{empty}\begin{document} \begin{eqnarray*}\mbox{\boldmath{$\tau$}}\frac{\mbox{\boldmath{$\partial$}} u(x,t)}{\mbox{\boldmath{$\partial$}} t} + u(x,t) = \int\nolimits_{{\mathbb{R}}^m} w(x,y) f(u(y,t)) \, {\mathrm{d}} y,\quad x \in {\mathbb{R}}^m,\enspace t > 0\end{eqnarray*}\end{document} which is an integro‐differential equation in m+ 1 dimensions. In particular, we show the existence of global solutions for smooth activation functions f with values in [0, 1] and L1 kernels w via the Banach fixpoint theorem. We note that this setting is much more general than in most related studies, e.g. Ermentrout and McLeod (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1993; 123A:461–478).
Measuring National Well-being - What matters most to Personal Well-being?

This article uses data from the Annual Population Survey collected between April 2011 and March 2012 which includes measures of personal well-being. It describes the results of regression analysis – a statistical technique which analyses variation in well-being outcomes by specific characteristics and circumstances of individuals while holding all other characteristics equal. This allows for a better understanding of what matters most to personal well-being than when different factors are considered separately.
Keeping It Local: Dispersal Limitations of Coral Larvae to the High Latitude Coral Reefs of the Houtman Abrolhos Islands

In 2011 the first recorded bleaching event for the high latitude Houtman Abrolhos Islands (HAI) coral communities was documented. This bleaching event highlighted the question of whether a supply of ‘heat tolerant’ coral recruits from the tropical north would be sufficient to provide a level of resistance for these reefs to future warming events. Using Lagrangian modelling we showed that due to its regional isolation, large-scale larval input from potential tropical northern source populations to the HAI is unlikely, despite the southward flowing Leeuwin current. Successful recruitment to artificial substrates was recorded following the bleaching event. However, this was negligible (0.4 ± 0.1 recruits per tile) compared to 2013 post impact recruitment (128.8 ± 15.8 recruits per tile). Our data therefore provides preliminary evidence suggesting that the connectivity of the HAI with coral communities in the north is limited, and population maintenance and recovery is likely driven primarily by self-recruitment. Given the low thermal tolerance of the HAI coral communities, the dominance of Acropora, and the apparent reliance on self-recruitment, an increased frequency of thermally anomalous conditions at the HAI (such as experienced in 2011) has the potential to reduce the long-term stability of the HAI coral populations and species that depend upon them.
Comprehensive Secondary Structure Elucidation of Four Genera of the Family Pospiviroidae

Viroids are small, circular, single stranded RNA molecules that infect plants. Since they are non-coding, their structures play a critical role in their life cycles. To date, little effort has been spend on elucidating viroid structures in solution due to both the experimental difficulties and the time-consuming nature of the methodologies implicated. Recently, the technique of high-throughput selective 2′-hydroxyl acylation analyzed by primer extension (SHAPE) was adapted for the probing of the members of family Avsunviroidae, all of whom replicate in the chloroplast and demonstrate ribozyme activity. In the present work, twelve viroid species belonging to four different genera of the family Pospiviroidae, whose members are characterized by the presence of a central conserved region (CCR) and who replicate in nucleus of the host, were probed. Given that the structures of five distinct viroid species from the family Pospiviroidae have been previously reported, an overview of the different structural characteristics for all genera and the beginning of a manual classification of the different viroids based on their structural features are presented here.
Occupational factors related to shoulder pain and disability.

OBJECTIVES: To determine, in a population based study, the influence of occupational factors on the occurrence of shoulder pain and disability. METHODS: A random sample of patients was selected from the register of a general practice in the Greater Manchester area of the United Kingdom. Information was collected by a posted questionnaire with specific enquiries about symptoms in the shoulder region and related disability. A lifetime occupational history was obtained including physical exposures, working conditions, and psychosocial aspects of each workplace. Analysis has been conducted as a case-control study, comparing occupational exposures at the time of onset of symptoms in those with shoulder pain and disability with corresponding occupational exposures in those without shoulder pain and disability. RESULTS: An increased risk of shoulder pain and disability in men was associated with carrying weights on one shoulder (relative risk (RR) 5.5, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.8 to 17), whereas those who reported working with hands above shoulder level, using wrists or arms in a repetitive way, or stretching down to reach below knee level had about twice the risk of shoulder pain and disability. Men working frequently in very cold or damp conditions had a fourfold and sixfold risk respectively of shoulder pain and disability. Reporting of shoulder pain and disability was also more common among men and women who reported that their work caused a lot of stress (RR 1.9, 95% CI 0.9 to 4.1) or was very monotonous (RR 2.7, 95% CI 1.3 to 5.4). The relations between physical exposures, working conditions, and psychosocial factors were independent. CONCLUSIONS: This population based study has shown that physical activities carried out at work, the physical conditions under which the work is conducted, psychosocial aspects of work, or the working environment are all independently related to the occurrence of shoulder symptoms and disability, emphasising the multifactorial nature of this condition.
Bringing Together Educational Standards and Social and Emotional Learning: Making the Case for Educators

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has as its goals to strengthen a person’s ability to understand, manage, and express the social and emotional aspects of life. The authors, all of whom have worked in training teachers in the promotion of students’ social and emotional skills, have found that educators often view efforts at building such skills as standing in opposition to the academic focus of their state curriculum standards. This view hinders many well‐intentioned teachers from implementing SEL in their classrooms. Thus, it is a valuable consultative tool to be able to demonstrate the overlap of SEL, academics, and curriculum standards. The authors set out a rationale for this overlap and provide examples of how they incorporate this overlap into their training and consultation.
Age Detection in Chat

This paper presents the results of using statistical analysis and automatic text categorization to identify an author’s age group based on the author's online chat posts. A Naive Bayesian Classifier and Support Vector Machine (SVM) model were used. The SVM model experiments generated an f-score measurement of 0.996 on test data distinguishing teens from adults. We also introduce an alternative method for generating “stop words” that chooses n-grams based on their relative distribution across the classes.
The neuroanatomy of pictorial reasoning in autism

Individuals with autism present with a constellation of social, behavioral, and cognitive symptoms. A striking characteristic is the contrast between their language and visual processing abilities. The work in this thesis combines behavioral, functional MRI, and diffusion tensor imaging methods to examine the neurobiological basis of the discrepancy between linguistic and visuospatial skills in autistic cognition. A pictorial reasoning task, designed to manipulate the degree to which language vs. visuospatial abilities may be differentially engaged in solving picture puzzles, was administered under three conditions: visuospatial, semantic and a hybrid visuospatial-cum-semantic condition. Whereas participants with Asperger's syndrome and typically developing controls (CTRL) were found to exhibit similar performance profiles, high-functioning individuals with autism (HFA) differed from these two groups: they were least efficient on the semantic condition and appeared to benefit from and favor the use of visuospatial mediation in problem solving. Results from functional MRI revealed a pattern of decreased activation in fronto-temporal language areas, and an increased reliance on posterior brain regions in the parietal and ventral temporal lobes in HFA, supporting the earlier behavioral findings. Specifically, the inferior frontal gyrus appeared to play an important role in verbal mediation and semantic integration in CTRL, whereas HFA relied more extensively on inferior and ventral regions of the temporal lobe, in keeping with a cognitive preference for visual strategies. An examination of white matter integrity yielded a similar finding in the relationship between structural neuroanatomy and cognitive profile, such that connectivity patterns were related to the semantic mediation difficulties and visual processing preference in the HFA group: tracts relevant for semantic processing in CTRL were disrupted in HFA along the superior longitudinal fasciculus and in the frontal lobe, whereas parietal and inferior temporal white matter supporting visuospatial processing were intact in HFA The results suggest that performance in high functioning autism may be related to deficits in frontal cortex connectivity, in favor of visualization strategies in higher-level cognition. The findings appear to support the use of visuospatial vs. linguistic tasks to differentiate between potential subtypes on the autism spectrum. Thesis Supervisor: Maria Mody, Ph.D. Title: Assistant Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School -I 'i ~L~r~nr -+-J~1
Bias in Diet Determination: Incorporating Traditional Methods in Bayesian Mixing Models

There are not “universal methods” to determine diet composition of predators. Most traditional methods are biased because of their reliance on differential digestibility and the recovery of hard items. By relying on assimilated food, stable isotope and Bayesian mixing models (SIMMs) resolve many biases of traditional methods. SIMMs can incorporate prior information (i.e. proportional diet composition) that may improve the precision in the estimated dietary composition. However few studies have assessed the performance of traditional methods and SIMMs with and without informative priors to study the predators’ diets. Here we compare the diet compositions of the South American fur seal and sea lions obtained by scats analysis and by SIMMs-UP (uninformative priors) and assess whether informative priors (SIMMs-IP) from the scat analysis improved the estimated diet composition compared to SIMMs-UP. According to the SIMM-UP, while pelagic species dominated the fur seal’s diet the sea lion’s did not have a clear dominance of any prey. In contrast, SIMM-IP’s diets compositions were dominated by the same preys as in scat analyses. When prior information influenced SIMMs’ estimates, incorporating informative priors improved the precision in the estimated diet composition at the risk of inducing biases in the estimates. If preys isotopic data allow discriminating preys’ contributions to diets, informative priors should lead to more precise but unbiased estimated diet composition. Just as estimates of diet composition obtained from traditional methods are critically interpreted because of their biases, care must be exercised when interpreting diet composition obtained by SIMMs-IP. The best approach to obtain a near-complete view of predators’ diet composition should involve the simultaneous consideration of different sources of partial evidence (traditional methods, SIMM-UP and SIMM-IP) in the light of natural history of the predator species so as to reliably ascertain and weight the information yielded by each method.
Die aard van bydraes van Taalfasette en Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Taalkunde, 1965 tot en met Desember 1999 / The nature of contributions in Taalfasette and South African Journal of Linguistics, 1965 to December 1999

The mouthpiece of the Linguistic Society of Southern Africa, the South African Journal of Linguistics, amalgamated with the South African Journal of Applied Language Studies in 2000. The origin of the first mentioned journal can be traced back to 1965 when a linguistic conference was held in Pretoria, and a volume, Taalfasette 1 (language facets), was published. Since then, to the end of 1999, 520 contributions appeared. The nature of these contributions are discussed. Besides some tendencies which are pointed out the significance of the contributions regarding the core sections of linguistics, are treated. In 2000 het die mondstuk van die Linguistevereniging van Suider-Afrika, die Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Taalkunde en die Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Toegepaste Taalstudies saamgesmelt. Die oorsprong van die e.g. tydskrif kan teruggevoer word na 1965 toe 'n linguistekongres in Pretoria gehou is en die referate in 'n bundel Taalfasette 1 gepubliseer is. Sedert daardie beskeie begin tot aan die einde van 1999 het 520 bydraes verskyn. Die aard van hierdie bydraes word bespreek. Behalwe enkele tendense wat uitgelig word, word die belang van bydraes in die kerngebiede van die taalkunde bespreek.
On the assessment of expertise profiles

Expertise retrieval has attracted significant interest in the field of information retrieval. Expert finding has been studied extensively, with less attention going to the complementary task of expert profiling, that is, automatically identifying topics about which a person is knowledgeable. We describe a test collection for expert profiling in which expert users have self-selected their knowledge areas. Motivated by the sparseness of this set of knowledge areas, we report on an assessment experiment in which academic experts judge a profile that has been automatically generated by state-of-the-art expert-profiling algorithms; optionally, experts can indicate a level of expertise for relevant areas. Experts may also give feedback on the quality of the systemgenerated knowledge areas. We report on a content analysis of these comments and gain insights into what aspects of profiles matter to experts. We provide an error analysis of the system-generated profiles, identifying factors that help explain why certain experts may be harder to profile than others. We also analyze the impact on evaluating expert-profiling systems of using selfselected versus judged system-generated knowledge areas as ground truth; they rank systems somewhat differently but detect about the same amount of pairwise significant differences despite the fact that the judged system-generated assessments are more sparse.