Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Serotonin transporter gene polymorphism (5‐HTTLPR) influences trait anxiety by modulating the functional connectivity between the amygdala and insula in Han Chinese males

A functional polymorphism (5‐hydroxytryptamine transporter linked polymorphic region [5‐HTTLPR]) in the promoter region of human serotonin transporter gene has been found to be associated with several dimensions of neuroticism and psychopathology, especially anxiety. However, the neural basis underlying the association between 5‐HTTLPR and anxiety is less clear. Here, we explored how 5‐HTTLPR influenced anxiety by modulating the spontaneous brain activities in Han Chinese. First, we found an association between 5‐HTTLPR and anxiety only in the male and not in the female population, where male S/S homozygotes had a significantly higher level of anxiety than male L allele carriers. Then, we examined how 5‐HTTLPR influenced anxiety at both regional and network levels in the brain at rest. At the regional level, we found a significantly higher fractional amplitude of low‐frequency fluctuations in the amygdala in male S/S homozygotes relative to male L allele carriers. At the network level, male S/S homozygotes showed a weaker resting‐state functional connectivity (RSFC) between the amygdala and various regions, including the insula, Heschl's gyrus, lateral occipital cortex, superior temporal gyrus, and hippocampus, and a stronger RSFC between the amygdala and various regions, including the supramariginal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus. However, at both levels, only was the amygdala–insula RSFC correlated with anxiety. Mediation analyses further revealed that the amygdala–insula RSFC mediated the association between 5‐HTTLPR and anxiety. In short, our study provided the first empirical evidence that the amygdala–insula RSFC served as the neural basis underlying the association between 5‐HTTLPR and anxiety, suggesting a potential neurogenetic susceptibility mechanism for anxiety. Hum Brain Mapp 36:2732–2742, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Genre: what teachers think

Over the last decade much of the writing on the concept of genre has been intended for pedagogical contexts. But to what extent, and how successfully, are genre-based approaches used in classrooms? This article reports on a multicultural workshop designed to allow participants to share their expertise in and concerns about the field of genre. The experiences and concerns of the participants indicate that while genre-based teaching approaches are largely viewed positively, there are many concerns to be addressed—through research, practice, and dialogue. Genre, in short, continues to be a controversial topic, though never a dull one.
The effect of fibre content on the thermal and fire performance of polypropylene–glass composites

Thermoplastic composites demand constant improvements in fire retardant and mechanical properties to fulfil their full market potential, especially in demanding sectors such as rail, aerospace and infrastructure, where fire performance is critical. The aim of this work is to understand the effect of reinforcing fibres on the flammability of polypropylene–glass (P‐G) composites and the means of improving their fire performance in a cost‐effective manner. A number of P‐G composites with 0%, 10% and 20% (w/w) glass fibres were prepared using short length glass fibres. The effect of fibre content on the thermal stability, flammability and mechanical performance of the P‐G composites without and in the presence of conventional fire retardants was studied. It was observed that while the presence of glass fibre lowered down the limiting oxygen index value of the composite, the rate of flame spread in a UL‐94 equivalent test was also lowered. The reduction in limiting oxygen index is due to the fact that glass fibre reduces the melt dripping behaviour of polypropylene and does not let the polymer (polypropylene) move away from flame, which then burns. Cone calorimetric study indicated that the presence of glass fibre reduces the overall flammability of the composite laminate. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Sequential Karhunen-Loeve basis extraction and its application to images

The Karhunen-Loeve (KL) transform is an optimal method for approximating a set of vectors, which was used in image processing and computer vision for several tasks. Its computational demands and its batch calculation nature have limited its application. Here we present a new, sequential algorithm for calculating the KL basis, which is faster in typical applications and is especially advantageous for image sequences: the KL basis calculation is done with much lower delay and allows for dynamic updating of object databases for recognition. Systematic tests of the implemented algorithm show that these advantages are indeed obtained with the same accuracy available from batch KL algorithms.
Analysing multimedia traffic in real-time ATM networks

We present a method for providing response-time guarantees for multimedia traffic in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks. The method extends our Response-Time Analysis (RTA) for ATM networks to better capture the behaviour of MPEG-type multimedia traffic. RTA is intended for admission control of hard real time traffic, i.e., it determines if a new connection can be admitted without violating the timing requirements of the new as well as any already admitted connection. We evaluate the extended RTA by comparing it with our original RTA, which does not consider the specific traffic patterns of MPEG-type multimedia traffic. In addition, we show how Weighted Fair Queueing (WFQ) and Calculus for Network Delays (CND) can be adopted to MPEG-type multimedia traffic, and compare the thus obtained analysis with our extended RTA. Evaluations indicate that our new method yields both higher achievable network utilisation and shorter analysis times compared to the original RTA, and higher achievable network utilisation compared to both the adapted WFQ and CND.
A Western-style diet induces benign and malignant neoplasms in the colon of normal C57Bl/6 mice.

Decreased dietary intakes of calcium, vitamin D and folic acid have been suggested as risk factors for human colon cancer. We previously fed a Western-style diet (WD) containing reduced calcium, vitamin D and increased fat content to normal C57/Bl6 mice: hyperproliferation, hyperplasia and whole crypt dysplasias developed in the colon following WD administration. Utilizing the same diet, we now also decreased the levels of several nutrients that are required for biochemical reactions involving methyl group inadequacy, i.e. folic acid, methionine, choline and vitamin B(12). Dietary levels of these nutrients were reduced to nutrient-density levels approximating those consumed by large segments of human Western populations. This further modification of the WD resulted in adenoma and carcinoma development in normal mouse colon (P < 0.04 compared with AIN-76A diet). The results indicate, for the first time, that a semi-purified rodent diet designed to mimic the human Western diet can induce colonic tumors in normal mice without carcinogen exposure.
[Hepatitis C virus infection and arthritis. A clinico-serological investigation of arthritis in patients with or without cryoglobulinemic syndrome].

OBJECTIVE To compare the clinico-serological features of arthritis from two HCV+ patient groups characterized by mixed cryoglobulinemia (MC) or chronic hepatitis (CH). METHODS We retrospectively studied 157 MC patients (119 females, mean age 64.8 yrs, range 36-88) and 155 CH patients (103 females, mean age 58.8 yrs, range 30-81). Patients with HBV and/or HIV co-infections and a follow-up shorter than 1 year were excluded. MC was classified according to standard criteria, while CH classification was based on Desmet's criteria. RESULTS No differences in epidemiology were demonstrated between the two series of patients. Although significantly prevalent in MC patients, extra-hepatic manifestations including nephropathy, neuropathy, pneumopathy, mixed cryoglobulins, RF positivity and hypocomplementemia were detected in both patient groups. Arthritis was present in 23 CH (15%) and 12 MC (8%) patients. A symmetrical polyarthritis was observed in 87% of 23 CH patients, while cryoglobulinemic arthritis was invariably asymmetrical and pauciarticular. Unlike MC patients, who had a constantly non-erosive arthritis, in 7/23 CH patients arthritis was erosive. Steroids and/or hydroxycloroquine or D-penicillamine were safe and useful in controlling the arthritis over the short-medium time, although clinical response was more evident in MC patients. Instead, in 5/23 CH and 3/12 MC patients, interferon-alpha treatment was able to trigger or exacerbate the arthritis despite a good control of liver function. CONCLUSIONS HCV infection seems to be, possibly in genetically predisposed patients, responsible for arthritis at times similar to rheumatoid arthritis. In these patients a careful assessment of the interferon-alpha treatment is mandatory owing to the potential "arthritogenic effect" due to its immunoregulatory properties.
Body image perceptions in men with prostate cancer.

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To describe changes in body image among men with prostate cancer who were either prescribed androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) or were ADT naive and to explore the relationship of age, duration of therapy, and body mass index with body image perception. DESIGN Exploratory and descriptive. SETTING Ambulatory care clinic of a large urban Veterans Affairs medical center. SAMPLE 132 men 60 years of age or older with prostate cancer recruited from the oncology and urology outpatient departments. METHODS Participants completed a demographic survey and the Body Image Scale (BIS), an instrument developed to measure changes in body image. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to explore body image dissatisfaction. MAIN RESEARCH VARIABLES Body image and ADT. FINDINGS A significant difference in body image dissatisfaction existed between men who had received ADT and men who were ADT naive. No relationship was identified between age and body image dissatisfaction or between duration of therapy and body image dissatisfaction. A significant positive relationship was found between body mass index and body image dissatisfaction for the sample overall. CONCLUSIONS A greater degree of body image dissatisfaction existed in the men who received ADT as compared to those who were ADT naive. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING Patients receiving ADT for prostate cancer may be at greater risk of body image dissatisfaction. The psychometric performance of the BIS lends support to its continued use in this population.
Neuronal Synchrony in Complex-Valued Deep Networks

Deep learning has recently led to great successes in tasks such as image recognition (e.g Krizhevsky et al., 2012). However, deep networks are still outmatched by the power and versatility of the brain, perhaps in part due to the richer neuronal computations available to cortical circuits. The challenge is to identify which neuronal mechanisms are relevant, and to find suitable abstractions to model them. Here, we show how aspects of spike timing, long hypothesized to play a crucial role in cortical information processing, could be incorporated into deep networks to build richer, versatile representations. We introduce a neural network formulation based on complex-valued neuronal units that is not only biologically meaningful but also amenable to a variety of deep learning frameworks. Here, units are attributed both a firing rate and a phase, the latter indicating properties of spike timing. We show how this formulation qualitatively captures several aspects thought to be related to neuronal synchrony, including gating of information processing and dynamic binding of distributed object representations. Focusing on the latter, we demonstrate the potential of the approach in several simple experiments. Thus, neuronal synchrony could be a flexible mechanism that fulfills multiple functional roles in deep networks.
THE ENIGMATIC YOUNG, LOW-MASS VARIABLE TWA 30

TWA 30 is a remarkable young (7 ± 3 Myr), low-mass (0.12 ± 0.04 M☉), late-type star (M5 ± 1) residing 42 ± 2 pc away from the Sun in the TW Hydrae Association (TWA). It shows strong outflow spectral signatures such as [S ii], [O i], [O ii], [O iii], and Mg i], while exhibiting weak Hα emission (−6.8 ± 1.2 Å). Emission lines of [S ii] and [O i] are common to T Tauri stars still residing in their natal molecular clouds, while [O iii] and Mg i] emission lines are incredibly rare in this same population; in the case of TWA 30, these latter lines may arise from new outflow material colliding into older outflow fronts. The weak Hα emission and small radial velocity shifts of line emission relative to the stellar frame of rest (generally ≲10 km s−1) suggest that the disk is viewed close to edge-on and that the stellar axis may be inclined to the disk, similar to the AA Tau system, based on its temporal changes in emission/absorption line strengths/profiles and variable reddening (AV = 1.5–9.0). The strong Li absorption (0.61 ± 0.13 Å) and common kinematics with members of the TWA confirm its age and membership to the association. Given the properties of this system such as its proximity, low mass, remarkable outflow signatures, variability, and edge-on configuration, this system is a unique case study at a critical time in disk evolution and planet-building processes.
Activation of olfactory and trigeminal cortical areas following stimulation of the nasal mucosa with low concentrations of S(−)‐nicotine vapor—An fMRI study on chemosensory perception

Applied to the nasal mucosa in low concentrations, nicotine vapor evokes odorous sensations (mediated by the olfactory system) whereas at higher concentrations nicotine vapor additionally produces burning and stinging sensations in the nose (mediated by the trigeminal system). The objective of this study was to determine whether intranasal stimulation with suprathreshold concentrations of S(−)‐nicotine vapor causes brain activation in olfactory cortical areas or if trigeminal cortical areas are also activated. Individual olfactory detection thresholds for S(−)‐nicotine were determined in 19 healthy occasional smokers using a computer‐controlled air‐dilution olfactometer. Functional magnetic resonance images were acquired using a 1.5T MR scanner with applications of nicotine in concentrations at or just above the individual's olfactory detection threshold. Subjects reliably perceived the stimuli as being odorous. Accordingly, activation of brain areas known to be involved in processing of olfactory stimuli was identified. Although most of the subjects never or only rarely observed a burning or painful sensation in the nose, brain areas associated with the processing of painful stimuli were activated in all subjects. This indicates that the olfactory and trigeminal systems are activated during perception of nicotine and it is not possible to completely separate olfactory from trigeminal effects by lowering the concentration of the applied nicotine. In conclusion, even at low concentrations that do not consistently lead to painful sensations, intranasally applied nicotine activates both the olfactory and the trigeminal system. Hum Brain Mapp, 2009. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Autogenous Deformation and Internal Curing of Concrete

High-performance concrete (HPC) is generally characterized by a low water/binder ratio and by silica-fume addition, which guarantee a low porosity and a discontinuous capillary pore structure of the cement paste. Modern concretes possess some highly advantageous properties compared to traditional concrete, such as good workability in the fresh state, high strength, and low permeability. However, they have also shown to be more sensitive to early-age cracking than traditional concrete. Early-age cracking mainly occurs due to the fact that the deformations of the concrete member are restrained by adjoining structures. In addition, internal microcracking may occur, due to restraint offered to the shrinking paste by the non-shrinking aggregates. A main source of early-age deformations in HPC is autogenous deformation. Autogenous deformation is the self-created deformation of a cement paste, mortar or concrete during hardening. In traditional concretes it is negligible compared to drying shrinkage. However, the low water/binder ratio and the addition of silica fume in HPC cause a significant drop of the internal relative humidity (RH) in the cement paste during sealed hydration and the occurrence of autogenous shrinkage. Despite the growing interest in autogenous shrinkage, no consensus has been reached in the scientific community about its mechanisms neither about measuring methods. Moreover, different strategies aimed at limiting the autogenous shrinkage are debated at the moment. In this thesis, autogenous deformation of cement pastes, Normal Weight Concrete (NWC), and Lightweight Aggregate Concrete (LWAC) were measured. Both Portland and Blast Furnace Slag (BFS) cement were studied. A model for calculating self-desiccation shrinkage of cement paste was proposed and validated with experiments. Shrinkage of NWC was derived with a composite model and early-age expansion of LWAC, a puzzling phenomenon up to now, was explained. Finally, transport of water from saturated lightweight aggregates (LWA) to hardening cement paste was measured with x-ray absorption.
Characterization and immunolocalization of an oocyst wall antigen of Cryptosporidium parvum (Protozoa: Apicomplexa)

A monoclonal antibody (OW-IGO) raised against purified excysted oocysts of Cryptosporidium parvum reacted in an immunofluorescence assay with the oocyst wall. The corresponding antigen was localized by immunoelectron microscopy in fibrillous material present in the parasitophorous vacuole of developing macrogametes and in the wall of both single and double layered sporulating oocysts. Gold particles were also detected over electron-lucent vesicles of the macrogametes by immunoelectron microscopy. On Western blotting of C. parvum oocyst extracts, major bands at 250 and 40 kDa and several minor components were recognized by Mab OW-IGO. Almost complete abolition of Western blot reactivity occurred after periodate oxidation of oocyst antigen, suggesting that monoclonal antibody OW-IGO reacts with a carbohydrate epitope. Taken together, our results suggest that a fibrillous glycoproteinic material is released in the parasitophorous vacuole from electron-lucent vesicles during gametogenesis, and later condensed in the oocyst wall.
Learning Determinantal Point Processes

Determinantal point processes (DPPs), which arise in random matrix theory and quantum physics, are natural models for subset selection problems where diversity is preferred. Among many remarkable properties, DPPs offer tractable algorithms for exact inference, including computing marginal probabilities and sampling; however, an important open question has been how to learn a DPP from labeled training data. In this paper we propose a natural feature-based parameterization of conditional DPPs, and show how it leads to a convex and efficient learning formulation. We analyze the relationship between our model and binary Markov random fields with repulsive potentials, which are qualitatively similar but computationally intractable. Finally, we apply our approach to the task of extractive summarization, where the goal is to choose a small subset of sentences conveying the most important information from a set of documents. In this task there is a fundamental tradeoff between sentences that are highly relevant to the collection as a whole, and sentences that are diverse and not repetitive. Our parameterization allows us to naturally balance these two characteristics. We evaluate our system on data from the DUC 2003/04 multi-document summarization task, achieving state-of-the-art results.
Algorithms for Probabilistically-Constrained Models of Risk-Averse Stochastic Optimization with Black-Box Distributions

We consider various stochastic models that incorporate the notion of risk-averseness into the standard 2-stage recourse model, and develop novel techniques for solving the algorithmic problems arising in these models. A key notable feature of our work that distinguishes it from work in some other related models, such as the (standard) budget model and the (demand-) robust model, is that we obtain results in the black-box setting, that is, where one is given only sampling access to the underlying distribution. Our first model, which we call the risk-averse budget model, incorporates the notion of risk-averseness via a probabilistic constraint that restricts the probability (according to the underlying distribution) with which the second-stage cost may exceed a given budget B to at most a given input threshold \rho. We also a consider a closely-related model that we call the risk-averse robust model, where we seek to minimize the first-stage cost and the (1-\rho)-quantile of the second-stage cost. We obtain approximation algorithms for a variety of combinatorial optimization problems including the set cover, vertex cover, multicut on trees, min cut, and facility location problems, in the risk-averse budget and robust models with black-box distributions. We obtain near-optimal solutions that preserve the budget approximately and incur a small blow-up of the probability threshold (both of which are unavoidable). To the best of our knowledge, these are the first approximation results for problems involving probabilistic constraints and black-box distributions. A major component of our results is a fully polynomial approximation scheme for solving the LP-relaxation of the risk-averse problem.
Liquid Accounts as a Store of Value and Excess Capacity ∗

This paper introduces a macroeconomic framework where liquid accounts emerge endogenously as a store of value because of a search friction in the goods market. In particular, the novel microfoundation implies a link between the value of money and the matching between the demand and supply of goods. As a result, monetary equilibria with large amounts of monetary holdings are consistent with the large amounts of credit availabilities observed in modern economies. Furthermore, the model offers an original interpretation of recessions which makes sense of the empirical relationship between the velocity of money and excess production capacity. JEL Classification Codes: E32, E41, E44
Treating rural pediatric obesity through telemedicine: outcomes from a small randomized controlled trial.

OBJECTIVE The objective of the current study was to examine the effectiveness of a multidisciplinary weekly family-based behavioral group delivered via telemedicine to rural areas, compared with a standard physician visit intervention. METHODS A randomized controlled trial was conducted with 58 rural children and their families comparing a family-based behavioral intervention delivered via telemedicine to a structured physician visit condition. Outcome measures included child body mass index z-score (BMIz), 24-hr dietary recalls, accelerometer data, Child Behavior Checklist, Behavioral Pediatrics Feeding Assessment Scale, and feasibility and fidelity. RESULTS Child BMIz outcomes were not statistically different between the 2 groups (F = 0.023, p = .881). Improvements in BMIz, nutrition, and physical activity were seen for both groups. CONCLUSIONS Both telemedicine and structured physician visit may be feasible and acceptable methods of delivering pediatric obesity treatment to rural children.